As humans we all want to be happy. The 'spiritual' journey is often that special search for happiness and wellbeing that we undertake when all the other searches have failed.

But if you are seated in the last resort spiritual life raft, what do you do if that journey is just as bumpy as all the rest?

Here you are working hard at improving yourself, doing the best you know and then... you wake up down in the dumps, you yell at your kid, one way or another the halo slips off and with it goes your equilibrium.  And your faith.

Now what?

A client recently sheepishly admitted to me he was going through a very dark time and was wondering how it's possible to know so much, be striving every day to put this knowledge to work, be immersed spiritual teachings and guidance, books, audios, inspirational messages and workshops and still have a bad day. Several actually.  Well, OK, a couple of months. 

He ended up thinking: if this spiritual stuff is all about living from a persistent and reliable state of wellbeing and contentment, how come I'm doing such a bad job of it?

Who wouldn't draw a similar conclusion?  And yet what's happening when we ask 'what's wrong with me?' is not just that we are looking in the wrong place for an answer, we are looking from the wrong place.

Like my client, every one of us who is trying very hard to be better and do better, eventually find themselves in the middle of a down day.

And everything looks bad from there.

In fact it is from the middle of the poo pile that the answer is always going to be the same: get me the heck out of here.  That's they only thing you could conclude from the center of your own bad feelings.

So give yourself a break.

If I'm depressed and feeling low, that is when I have the least amount of access to my way out.  I am looking at my problem from inside the problem.  From the middle of my poor thinking, of course it is going to look like my spiritual understanding is of no use to me.  I could conclude all kinds of things about me as a person, a mother, or a friend.

However, when I am looking at any problem from the larger picture of my life, the bigger truth is that it is not that imperative that this moment be different. The moment just is. There is nothing permanent about now.

It is as if I'm measuring the each moment as I go and asking, like a kid from the backseat, "Are we THERE yet?!"

I've already set it up as a 'someday' proposition.  I'm measuring my progress to destination based on whether I am problem free, always happy, never disappointed, never angry and so on. 

What my client and I reflected on together is that perhaps peace of mind is not so much that we always feel peaceful (as somewhere to get to) but rather that when we are not peaceful it's actually OK. The only thing about it worth seeing really is that it's just not the best place from which to see my problem or my solution clearly.

So we thought it might be true that...

Peacefulness includes 'not peaceful'. Sometimes.

Peacefulness isn't a good measure of how far we are along our way on the journey to bliss.  Peacefulness is the measure of the extent to which we understand how human functioning operates in the big picture.

How it really operates is that we all came here already knowing how to love, how to feel joy, and having an intelligence to use in life.  Nothing can ever take that away. No bad moment or bad feeling, no matter how bad, can ever change that.

I personally don't feel peaceful and in my well-being in every single moment - and my single biggest spiritual learning so far is: this is fine.

We do a lot of striving in order to feel good 24/7, when in fact feeling good might just include feeling fine about not always feeling good.

Might as well relax, then. 

Billy Connelly, a UK comedian said, "there is no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes."

Hm. I notice this is true.  I only dislike the rain when I think it should not be raining.

And here's the interesting part...no matter what I think about things, especially how "I'll never make it!" or "This is it; I can't survive this" ... I'm always making it.  
 
Standing right where I am now, I see that I have made it through everything up until this moment.

You're here.

I'm here.

Nice to know.

My Dad told me this story about him when he was a boy. 

He was getting the usual lecture you get as a kid that's meant to keep you from burning yourself on the stove.  You know, the "Don't touch! That's hot" admonition.

So later he was sitting next to fireplace and his mom, my grandmother, (who was a bit fierce I thought) is giving him very serious instructions to NOT go near the fire.  Because, that's hot.

No sooner did she finish her last words, my father stuck his hand right into the flames.

"Why did you do that?" my grandmother asked.

"Because I wanted to see what 'hot' felt like," he said.

We think that the more we understand or know, the easier life will become.  But what we mean by 'easy' is that no more bad stuff will happen.

We soon find that no matter how much you know, how enlightened you are or how spiritual your life, bad shit still happens to you and all around you.

In fact, one of the questions I get most when I'm coaching people is "I know so much, how come this is still happening?"

But the point of living is not to never experience hot. 

In fact, as my Dad said, you really have to have your own experiences of hot, cold and everything in between - because no one, no matter how knowledgeable, can ever give you the experience of your life.

You can only get that by living it.

Here's is my favorite explanation for how this works:

Becoming more balanced and aware does not mean that bad things never happen, it's that when they do, you know you will be OK.

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If you liked this you might like my other posts on Thinking or Learning

I have wanted to write a book for a long time.  About 40 years actually.  Now that I'm finally in the process of writing it, I'm fascinated by what has changed in me that flipped my switch from "later" to "right now". 

What happens in any of us that makes the difference between doing something and not doing it?

I'm not talking about getting in the groceries or finally changing the battery in the smoke alarm, I am talking about why we procrastinate on anything that is really important to the heart and soul.

After all, that's what we save our best procrastination for, Right?  For me, that was writing a book. 

What flipped my switch from 'talker' to 'doer'?

• Why is it that now I have a accountability group? 
• Why is it that now I have goals I'm setting and exceeding?
  
• Why is it that I'm not struggling to keep promises?
  

Here is what I notice that is different.

One, I really do like (enjoy, want, genuinely desire) both the end product the process of doing it.  Just because I do.

Two, I enjoy being engaged in something in my life that is meaningful to me.  I've worked out that the other way is not all that great.

Three, I know that I am able to feel good whether or not I ever write the book.  No matter what.

Of all these things, here is what I notice. One and Two are not new. Number 3 is.

I never knew how to feel good about my life without a condition of some sort. I'd agreed with myself I'd feel good when I was successful. I'd feel good if in a great relationship... etc. As for writing,  I spent years making myself unhappy because I wasn't doing it.  I thought I'd be happy when I did.

I can't pinpoint the day or hour of the flip, but in the last few years I've learned that my own wellbeing isn't dependent on some thing happening (or not happening). I've learned how to stop measuring my inner state of being by the things or people outside of me. I know, how self-evident is that!  

So if you have ever said to yourself or someone else "well, you can't buy happiness" or "happiness isn't 'out there'" - let's get wise to ourselves. We said the words without ever having had the experience. Period.

That experience is new, it's totally unfamiliar, and life changes almost immediately when you feel it because it is a living force. That force says to me "So, Elese, we're cool, what would we like to do next?" 

It's as if I unhitched the old 'happiness-when trailer' that was towing  all my self-love and self-approval and success strategies and just left it on the side of the road. 

There is no 'happiness when'  attached to my writing anymore. There is just writing.

Don't let anyone tell you that when you start feeling good inside you will just want to sit around in some meditative state chanting till you die. Don't let them tell you that if you can't feel the stress, you won't find the motivation. Don't let them tell you you'll just feel happy and then life will somehow get boring because you feel so good.  It doesn't work like that.

What really happens is without all the noise about what you need to do to be happy, you actually begin to feel good a lot of the time and from there you see for the first time what's really important to you. Up until then, it's just guessing, hoping and stabbing in the dark.

Learning to feel good for no apparent reason is essentially the best thing you can do for yourself.  For me it meant finally getting off my duff, and writing without caring how it turns out. 

And if I hadn't decided to write, I guess the downside is I'd simply feel good regardless.

Radio show with Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art, on the psychology of creation and Overcoming Blocks January 28 

(free workshops in January if you are interested in what I learned and how to do it yourself
or
enroll in my program Foundations of Wellbeing