Wanting happiness and knowing how to be happy are two different things.
I want to play the guitar like Eric Clapton. I don’t know how to. But if I want it enough, I’ll learn how. It may take me a lifetime and I will probably need lots of help.
Happiness is no different. If we want it enough, we must learn how to be happy. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that we must learn how to not be unhappy since happiness is our natural state/predisposition. But more of this in a minute.
Meanwhile, rather unfortunately, there’s a bit of postmodern nonsense about happiness that makes some people afraid and embarrassed to admit that they want to be happy. So these people have learned to pooh pooh this very natural desire, claiming instead that they want peace or comfort. If that isn’t the silliest thing. I mean, how would they feel when they’re peaceful or comfortable? Miserable? Unhappy?
Oh, I want to feel miserable, they say.
And lately I heard someone say,
I want to experience heartbreak.
If that isn’t a clear instance of lunacy, I don’t know what is. I mean, if this was said as a genuine curiosity about misery or heartbreak, it could be taken a bit more seriously. But to assert it as a better alternative to happiness, that quite frankly is just self-delusion. However, I rather think that it’s said as a bit of a pre-emptive measure, to try and prepare themselves for what they believe is inevitable. And let’s face it, chances are most of us will experience heartbreak whether we particularly desire it or not. That’s an almost guaranteed human experience.
Let’s be awake here.
No one genuinely wants to be miserable. But given that pain and various forms of suffering are guaranteed human experiences, many of us can appreciate the benefit of learning how to deal with these experiences so that they don’t disable us to the point where we lose our interest in, and enthusiasm for life, so that we talk ourselves out of new experiences and possibilities, so that, quite plainly and simply, we feel more happy than unhappy, more peaceful than troubled, more comfortable than uncomfortable. Is this really so weird? So please don’t confuse wanting to handle adversity and suffering effectively instead of denying it or running away from it or being undone by it with actually wanting adversity and suffering. No one in their right mind seriously wants the latter.
Being happy does not mean that we avoid our not so happy feelings or states. Not at all. Indeed, running away or denying anything is a guarantee for unhappiness. But not avoiding or denying something is not the same as indulging it and becoming it’s victim.
So, how do we experience happiness?
By having a peaceful attitude towards anything and everything, including our experiences of unhappiness, of sadness, of unworthiness, of failure…
We remain happy because we don’t indulge these states, we don’t wallow in them, we don’t identify with them. Instead of fearfully running away from them, we simply acknowledge them. In other words, we don’t feed them with either our attachment to them or our resistance to them. We simply acknowledge them as an experience we’re having without giving it any more significance. This is something we can do. It is entirely possible.
We have thoughts and feelings, experiences and imaginings but we are not our thoughts, experiences or imaginings.
Note also that we acknowledge them as an experience we’re having NOT as something that we are. This is a key point as it signifies a key difference in our response to adversity and suffering. This chronic habit of mistaken identity can be corrected and one way we can help ourselves to do this is by learning to think and speak differently.
Instead of saying
I am sad (identifying as sadness)
I am a failure (identifying as failure)
I could learn to say and think
I am aware of the feeling of sadness. (noticing the experience of sadness)
I am aware of the feeling of failure. (noticing the experience of failing)
Thinking and speaking in this way makes all the difference.
You have millions of experiences throughout your life. Are you any or all of these? If so, why do you seem to only give significance to some of them and not others? Why do you identify (more) with some than with others?
You are none of your experiences. But, have you noticed, there’s something in you that is aware of your experiences? It is a silent witness, neither judging nor attaching nor rejecting nor identifying with any of these experiences? It is the one constant in your life, from the moment of your birth to where you are right now. Always there.
That is what you can legitimately call ‘I’. That is who you truly are. Everything else that you identify with is NOT who you are.
This is key to happiness.
And while we’re at it, to those who claim that they’d be insanely bored if they were only ever happy, I say that they are in no position to make such a claim since they have never been in a constant state of happiness, have they?
And just in case you’re thinking that happiness has only one expression – a big goofy smile – let me assure you that when I use the word, I am referring to a whole spectrum of expressions and states including the times when I am deeply absorbed in solving a problem or learning a particular riff on my guitar or sweating through some aikido training or noticing the anger arising in me without getting swept away by it. Yes, all of these as well as experiences such as being with people I love or in the presence of great beauty are ways in which I experience happiness. They do not CAUSE my happiness but they offer no resistance to what is natural to us all. Which brings me to my final point:
Happiness is not something that you can seek and attain. It is your natural state. It is your natural environment if you like, rather like the water in which a fish finds itself. It would be bizarre for the fish to ask What is water? Or Where is the water?
Yet, this is what we do with happiness. We look for it as if we are outside it. As humans, we’ve evolved for survival, at least up to this point in our evolutionary trajectory. Our conditioned/learned thought system, brain and behaviour are not wired for happiness since survival has demanded our attention and resources with its far more urgent and persistent voice.
However, we are by nature happy, peaceful beings (a state we can naturally and effortlessly experience when we allow our thinking mind to settle by simply noticing everything that arises in our stream of consciousness). And we are constantly seeking to return to this state. In fact, this is the only reason why we ever experience unhappiness or suffering – because we are not in our natural/unconditioned state.
MENTORING
Let Life express itself intoxicatingly, uniquely, powerfully and limitlessly in, as and through you. Don’t settle, whatever your age. Know your true Self. Follow your Bliss. Live the Life that you know you want to! Contact me here.
MINDFULNESS ONLINE
Join me every week to sit in the presence of your true Self and experience the greatness of Life flowing naturally, effortlessly and powerfully in, as and through you!