Pair #67 Anyone seen my happiness lying around?

Recently I attended Robert Holden's Coaching Happiness training and I really experienced the power of asking yourself deep questions about happiness ... and then listening for the answer.

What Robert brought home to me was the power of asking questions like, "What is Happiness for me?"  and treating Happiness, not as a destination, but as an inquiry.  

Here are some of my fave quotes from Robert that week

"When we forget who we are, we forget what happiness is"

"Happiness is a non-deserving issue"

"Happiness is the experience of your true nature"

"Will your choices help you be happy Now... or Eventually?"

Where am I with my inquiry?  For me, today, happiness is relaxing into me exactly as I am and exactly as I am not.   Self-love and self-acceptance may sound pretty dumb when rolled up into pat utterances like "love yourself" or "I'm OK, You're OK" but when you ask what that looks like and what it means for you, it can become meaningful. 

What is happiness?

when I stop trying to 'become'
when I'm kind and loving
when I'm not believing all my small thoughts about myself
the space when I'm not trying to rid myself of anything

Happiness is when I look and really see that I'm always just one thought away from happiness. 

How encouraging.

I can understand that we want stuff.  I want stuff.  I want to have things, I want to feel things, I want experiences as well as stuff.  

Stuff is great and it’s fun. You can eat it, play with it, climb it, build with it and talk it for a drive.  It’s just a really crap way to find happiness when we feel empty.  

Our human paradox or curse or whatever you want to call it is that, having no experience of a sense of happiness arising from the inside, we look outside and  unfortunately 'finding' happiness outside of ourselves isn't possible.

That's just a fact. It's simply impossible. I don't know about you, but I looked!  

Most of us will look outside, sometimes for a long time, before we become ready to turn inward. Sometimes it is only the disappointment that arises out of great, great avarice that may finally teach someone that no amount of things (money, love, sex or Anything) will ever be the key to happiness. In that sense avarice and greed may be bizarrely good things that accelerate a normally slow process of discovering the emptiness of things.  When we don't understand that happiness already lies within us, I believe this is what we do.    

Excess is the same.  Some of us need to go to excess in something, or many things, in order to  find the boundaries of it. But if we go to excess in the acquisition of things, it simply has the same ending point:  to teach us there is no satisfaction here.

We all learn that lesson in our own ways.  Who can say who has the best way?

But you don’t win the game if you are the one with the most toys when you die.

Things happen every day that we do not like.

Maybe something small, like getting a paper cut or breaking a nail.  Annoying, but no big deal.  And then there are the bigger things: plummeting stocks, an unexpected vet bill, something major goes wrong with your car... on and on.

We can't rid ourselves of annoyances.  Things happen that we cannot control, no matter how much we try to.

If my plane is late or cancelled, I understand that I can't fix or change as I stand at the ticket desk.  But as I stand there, who will I be?   I could have any number of experiences, from fury to friendliness, from annoyance to understanding.  I can just as well say to myself, "These things happen," as"This is always happening to me!"

No matter what our 'personality type' we are still choosing our focus.

Focus on certain things will leave us feeling relaxed.  Focus on other things will leave us tense. We know this because we can use devices like visualizing petting the cat or to breathing as we envision the tension flow out our feet and into the ground. We can just touch base with something we appreciate like having great friends (or reminding myself how lucky I am that just spent an entire week with my Dad). Feeling grateful and annoyed at the same time is actually impossible. Or we can empathize with others, looking around to find those who are having a worse time than we are or imagining what it's like to be the ticket agents who have to be the brunt of people's frustrations every day.

These techniques that bring us back to the moment, calm us down, and restore our sanity, won't wipe out stock losses, get planes off the ground or stop time.  But they do feel better.

And I'll tell you what else feels better to me: to know that I have a choice.

And yunno, if I want to feel bad,  I know just how to do that too.

As someone who spent quite a bit of time supporting causes of all kinds, I can say I paid my dues to the "We're Pissed And We Are Not Going To Take It Any More!" Club.  If there had been an award points program for righteous indignation, I'd be a Life-Long Platinum Club card holder.

So this last week when the theme for the radio show was "Hot Pursuit of Happiness", it really hit me... I always assumed I needed to be unhappy about something in order to change it.  In fact, the more angry I was, the better an activist I felt.

I was wrong. 

It has not escaped me that we have not essentially changed much in any of the causes I campaigned for using my fists. That doesn't mean things haven't changed at all.  Women have more rights. In some places Gay people have more rights. In some places you can live without 'being disappeared' one day. And it doesn't mean that a picture of a starving child plastered on the news won't mobilize the sympathies and pocket books of millions of people for the right cause.

But we can do all of that, anytime we like without the anger.  We can change anything we want without being sad, depressed or upset about it.  We can do it because we want to. That’s enough.

As my friend Jacob Glass was talking about in his lecture this week: to teach happiness, we need to be happy teachers.  I think to teach peace we need to be peaceful people.  Jacob is right when he says that somewhere in the midst of devastation somewhere in the world, people are most probably not wishing and hoping that "that angry, depressed guy comes back to help us out.’"

Now I know that I can be part of the solution to any problem, anytime if I want to and decide to.

I think we can change the world. One mind at a time. Starting with our own.