The Source of Happiness is Within (Short-Cuts part III)

Before my weekly trek out to teach at We Care Spa in Desert Hot Springs this morning, I was reading an article my friend and mentor David Elliott sent me from Buddhist Monk, Matthieu Ricard.  In it, he distinguishes a fundamental difference between pleasure and happiness.  He references pleasure as something that mostly comes from contact between the senses and objects and situations of desire.  Pleasures have to be repeated, he notes.  

Happiness, on the other hand, is an inside job.  It's a quality of our True Nature.  Not the nature of the ego, or the mind, or the emotions (which are all very related as one large mechanism known in Sanskrit as antahkarana).  

So as I'm getting closer to Desert Hot Springs, I'm thinking about short-cuts in reference to Ricard's article. It seems so obvious in the moment -- short-cuts are nearly always about seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, with some seen or unseen urgency around making it happen NOW.  

Without having cultivated habits around looking within for happiness, or even knowing it could be there, it's incredibly natural to look outside for something to do, a person to connect with, a object to buy, or something along those lines to experience the energy spike that comes with pleasure.  One of the challenges with this is that once is rarely ever enough.  If it feels good, the ego wants it again, and likely with stronger intensity to the experience.  If the experience costs money, and there isn't any, the ego feels justified in using credit to buy the experience.  

At some point the emotional, financial, and spiritual debt reaches a peak and starts moving in to collect on the debt.  

In my own case, as I've been paying off the financial part of accrued debt (just recently passed the half-way mark and can feel the light at the end of the tunnel), I've been amazed at the impact on my intuition, emotions, and physical stamina.  In my experience, the states of emotion and mind I were in at the time of delaying payment by using credit were also put on a delay.  In taking the short-cut through using credit, I wasn't aware of the ways I was suppressing my own confidence and happiness and cultivating a stronger habit of looking outside for happiness.  

I'm not suggesting that credit is bad.  It can be a very positive thing when used consciously and positively.  Good and bad are human ego judgments that don't have much relativity outside the human realm (ie; in nature -- find me a good tree and a bad tree...no such thing!).

Short-Cuts.  The seduction to take short-cuts is everywhere.  Whole industries are predicated on making life experiences faster, cheaper, and more readily available.  Again, that's not good or bad.  However, there are costs to it all (see http://thestoryofstuff.com).

This afternoon, I felt some pretty strong pulls on my energy and they're connected to some unpleasant feelings.  My knee-jerk impulse was to want to call someone who I could talk about it all with and be done with the feelings.  If I feel better after the call, but haven't myself digested the emotions, what happened?  The other person psychically begins carrying them through empathy if he or she doesn't have the priceless discipline to remain neutral.  It's a short-cut.  But at some point, someone somewhere down the line has to do the spade work of sitting down and fully digesting the emotions (and/or sending them back to their source if picked up empathically).  

Yep, I did try to reach a couple of friends.  And I'm happy to say I didn't reach either of them.  I sensed what was happening with me, and chose to slow my attention down, slow my breathing, and tune into what I was feeling.  In the slowing down, it's easier for me to recognize self-love within.  As soon as I can detect the feeling of self-love, I can focus on it.  At that point, I have to stay focused.  My thoughts seductively attempt to draw me back into the sped-up familiarity of the negative emotions.  As I bring my attention to feeling my feet and deepening my breath, a smile cuts loose across my face.  

How strange, I think, to be feeling happiness and discomfort at the same time.  And yet here it is.  I don't need to get anyone to carry my discomfort in order to find freedom.  All I need to do is slow down enough to be present with myself and just observe what I'm feeling as pure sensations.  When I look at them in this way, they disperse fairly quickly.  My next task is to continue staying present, rather than get involved in thoughts about the past.  My thoughts about the past only have an impact on the present when I'm entertaining them in the present.  And I've noticed that when any negative emotion is up, it seems to color the memories of the past in such a way as to convince me to feel worse. 

Happiness, while already existing within, is a discipline for me.  It takes conscious, continuous discipline to choose happiness and stay present (which I'm experiencing more an more as being intimately related; presence and happiness).  

In chatting to one friend who's a gifted professional dancer on the way back from the desert this morning about some of these themes, I mentioned my hesitation about having a conversation like this with some folks as some would say I'm over-thinking things, over-analyzing.  Yet, we discussed, there's often a profound difference between the skill and awareness level of Michael Jackson's dancing and someone in a video dance jam class at their local gym.  There's a difference at the level of interest in and passion for precision that comes from countless hours of cultivated discipline.  

When it comes to the journey of Awakening and all the indwelling happiness, joy, and love to be recognized in the process, it seems to me that cultivating interest and skill in precise Awareness is my part in what allows for these highly sought-after qualities to be recognized and consistently experienced.

Connecting The Dots Around Short-Cuts

It's been a fascinating ride for a long time now, and an especially focused ride with a lot of surprises and twists and turns in the last several weeks as I've been preparing for this morning's Global Healer Group with David Elliott on "Psychic Boundaries", with my home as one of the locations for it.

I set a very strong intention after reading David's focus for the group:  To have clear, strong, boundaries based in abiding self-love and to take a big leap deeper with my capacities to work with intuition that's based clearly from the heart, from love that is Universal, rather than emotionally based.

Little did I know how clearly Life was listening, and the speed with which it would bring me circumstances so far outside of my experience, and seemingly out of the clear blue sky (even though I keep being reminded that there just aren't any accidents).

I'm more than pleased with how I'm noticing more and more support from within to keep reaching through the discomfort in a handful of situations and choosing to feel love from within.  Even when the felt sense of love has felt like a tiny grain of sand, I know that once I slow down and focus, it's not long before the feeling expands.

Cultivating the ability to recognize and feel love seems less an issue at the moment, thankfully.  Remaining fully anchored there is still a work-in-progress.

As I look backwards (yes, Mom, you're so right about hindsight always being twenty-twenty) at the moments when I've felt stuck, heavy, depressed, angry, afraid, or sad, they all have a similar feel to them.  I sense them like textures, and this particular texture is the same, irrespective of which negative emotion it's attempting to stimulate in me.  It's heavy, dark, intends to appear immovable, knows how to create confusion and drama, and withdraws in the presence of real love.

My relationship with this heavy teacher (yes, I choose to see it as a teacher rather than adversary), feels like it goes back as far as my consciousness has had some form of existence.

Generally, it seems to come into my space in costume.  Meaning, it often has a very different initial appearance than the less than positive ways I've described it above.

One of its many enticing costumes over the years has been to present me with the opportunity to get something I think I want very quickly, and with little to no effort.  The absence of the need for effort or patience can make whatever it's promising (historically:  money, love, intimacy, respect, and being appreciated, recognized, and included), appear to have a certain sparkle or glamour that appeals to my ego.

It HAS to appeal deeply to my ego to get my attention.  And it has had to be sneaky of late to get my interest in what would seem like unfamiliar ways.  It can't actually look like a short-cut, as I'm on the lookout for those and cultivating my discernment with these trojan horses.  It will try to look like something I've wanted, like say a really ready-to-go relationship.  And in a case like that, it'll have the potential partner be incredibly appealing to my ego so that when this person so emphatically tells me how amazing, how beautiful, how hot, how smart, how talented I am, that I'll take the bait.

Why is it bait?  I didn't grow up thinking I was beautiful, hot, or amazing.  And there are still holdouts through my memories of growing up with these insecurities.  So these "tantalizing" opportunities will do their best to offer to erase my past pain by filling me up with another person's need, want, and desire for me.

I'm not interested anymore.  The glamour is wearing off.  I'm beginning to see the pumpkin masquerading as a Maserati sooner and sooner each time.

And because everything in this vast world of duality is generally a mirror, I'm becoming more and more cognizant of the places where I have let the little boy in me think he was being loved through a person's infatuation with the tremendous energy the accompanies the work I do personally and professionally.  I'm learning to discern the difference between infatuation and readiness.  I'm studying it more closely than ever.

Getting deeply involved very quickly with someone who is merely infatuated with me based purely on the externals of appearance or life-circumstances, or glamoured by the energy associated with the work is a short-cut.  It's a temporary gratification to my ego, that has a tremendous cost to my personal energy when the obvious need to de-escalate the romance arises and drama of one sort or another ensues.

The closer relationships in my life require me to be very conscious, and I'm setting a stronger filter for that consciousness to be reciprocal and based in self-love.

As a very clear example, and a strong communication from me to the Universe, I said to a friend this afternoon, "I no longer wish or need or am willing to date anyone who needs healing from me."  I am no longer willing to let my work be an enticing pull to be in relationship with me as a friend or a lover.  While I recognize that we all will continue to grow in relationship with each other, it is not my job, my interest, nor am I willing to be holding the role of the healer in my close relationships.

This is something I have used in the past as a short-cut to connect with the appearance of Love.  As my experience of self-love continues to expand beyond my wildest dreams, I'm far less seduceable in these ways.  On the heels of these last several weeks studying boundaries with a more refined magnifying glass, I'm definitely not interested in being seduced by anything that doesn't know Love.

Someone recently asked me, "Why aren't you trying to 'sell' me on working with you?"

I said, "Well, for starters, for this work to go anywhere, you need to be sold on working with yourself.  My job is to be a witness, not a salesman.  When the time is right for someone to engage with this kind of work, they know it, they feel it, and their Spirit nudges them along to the best places to do the work."

I don't want anyone dependent on me for a sense of self.  At some point they'll resent it, and get aggressive about it.

AND, selling anyone on working with me is an attempt to take a short-cut in expanding my work short-term.

It's far cleaner for me to love myself, focus my awareness on deepening and expanding this self-love, and in the words of one of my great teachers over the years, "Let what comes come, and let what goes go."

By the way, that last quote is not at all about being passive.  It's not about being a victim of life's circumstances and just sucking it up.

The quote depends on a foundation of self-worth and self-knowledge which recognizes that everything truly lasting and worth having comes from the openings around abiding self-love.  Self-love leads to awakenings, joy, peace, and happiness that aren't based on better circumstances.  They're qualities of my True Nature.  No one can give them to me.  No one and nothing can take them away.  It's my job to let these qualities live me fully, and from there to enjoy letting what comes come, and what goes go.

It's fine to take time open-heartedly exploring a situation before signing any binding contracts, physically or energetically.  It may not feel like an exciting short-cut, but it may just preserve a tremendous amount of life-force down the road.  I'm worth it.  So are You!

What are you Investing in? Wealth Pt.2

Picture by Gregory Colbert from the Ashes and Snow series

How do we price goods and services if the metric is no longer scarcity and uniqueness?  Can we still seek to thrive through short-cuts?  Will we have to be more conscious of everything involved in an exchange at an awareness capacity beyond mere industrial 1950's linear rationalization?  Are we willing to be as clear and grounded as that type of economy would require for fluidity and mutual benefit to all involved?

These are just handful of the many questions coming up for me as I study the money system alongside my exploration of Self-Love and Exchange.  As I write this last line, it's just fallen dark outside and a hummingbird is poking his beak through the screen at my window repeatedly, and buzzing in his characteristically George-Jetson-car-like way.

After my last blog piece on Wealth, my Mom emailed me, commented, "Losing our way with financial discipline does not get resolved by bartering, as we still must deal with the history of making financial choices that hurt us." 


I let her know that I wholeheartedly agree.  One of my biggest concerns with the various local currency systems and barter groups that are proliferating is with the repetition of the same dysfunctional self-images re-creating similar patterns around exchange.  Rules can only do so much to guide the unfolding of a project.  The awareness of all the people involved intimately shapes the emergence from and through the group.


Number one ~  I must know myself.  Not just my address, or my favorite kind of cheese, but who and what I really am; independent of thoughts and emotions.  Who and what am I?  I if I don't know myself, I'm liable to be unconscious at the wheel of life and make blind decisions detached from their impact on the world I am integrally a part of.


Number two ~ I must honestly value myself as a beingness.  This is where the self-love comes in.  Self-Love stems from true Self-Knowledge.  Self-love doesn't come from a number of standing ovations from large crowds (though it can help break up a person's distorted negative self-image by having his gifts witnessed and appreciated).  Self-love comes from intimately knowing that I am not my past, I am not my psychological wounds, I am not the thoughts in my mind.....moving into the realm of knowing ~ I am Nothing, and I am Everything, and I am right here.  I am perfect, whole, and complete in every moment.  Nothing I can do, say, think, or feel can change what I truly and already Am (though these things can hide it from my conscious awareness).


Number three ~ I must value You!  And see that you also are Nothing, Everything, Perfect, Whole, and Complete.  I can't do number three fully without first deeply engaging with numbers one and two.  If I try to value you without knowing and valuing me, my perception of you is only a projection.  As soon as you do something I don't like, I'll withdraw my valuing of you.  What about that makes sense?  Either you're valuable, or you're not.  


Number four ~ I must consider the impact of every footstep I take on the whole of which I am a part.  I'm not suggesting shredding your mind with a infinite number of new thoughts for policing your actions.  I'm suggesting that when you begin to know yourSelf as you Are, you won't have to go to the mind for that kind of Awareness.  It'll arise spontaneously in the moment, fed by your intent and willingness.


In a competitive paradigm driven by scarcity and uniqueness, someone must lose.  Someone goes hungry and without clean water.  We have the resources on this planet, for every human to have enough to eat and clean water to drink.  In an "accumulation" paradigm, the competitors have no time to look out for the welfare of anything outside their sphere, unless it's a public relations attempt at throwing a "glamour" over their image to gain more resources through a short-cut.


It's time for what Buckminster Fuller calls a You AND Me world....a world where everyone matters.  But if this paradigm is imposed it won't last long.  Resistance will buck that like a mechanical bull on rocket fuel.  For a real and grounded You AND Me world to emerge, awakening must dawn in more humans.  A powerful pathway?  Self-Love.  It's only a matter of time and focus before Self-Love reveals Awareness of One-Self....even if it's like a flower fluttering open and closed throughout the day, a little goes a long way.