Monthly Archives: August 2007

I’m sitting at my favorite coffee house once again marveling at the power of a car wash to make rain a day later, and considering the subject of paradoxes. Merriam-Webster defines paradox as “a situation, person, or action having seemingly contradictory qualities.”

Some have said my picture belongs next to that definition, but aside from the extent to which I may personify the term to some, it has been a topic of considerable interest to me lately.

Specifically, I keep coming back to the subject with regard to the relationship between happiness and manifestation. I keep hearing that in order to create the life that I want, I need to feel good about the life I’ve got.

One of my favorite psychologists, Carl Rogers, once said, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I can change.” So I stopped scratching my head long enough to ask The Shower Team to please ‘splain this apparent paradox . . . to help me understand about happiness as the means for getting what I think will make me happy.

We regularly say to you, “Be as happy as you can possibly be . . . feel as good as you can possibly feel where you are, and the Universe cannot help but yield to you what you are asking for. You hear this as a contradiction because you continue to believe that happiness is an outcome of having what you want and not a choice you can make at any time or any place. You continue to regard happiness as the byproduct and manifestation as the goal or objective . . . And we continue to say to you, that’s ass backwards.

We continue to dance this seemingly paradoxical dance with you because we want so much for you to get it through your thick head—or rather, to come to a fuller understanding of—the fact that happiness or feeling good is always, without exception, the reason for wanting anything that you want.

However you persist in believing that happiness is just a label attached to some object or experience and that if you can only acquire that object or experience, then you will go ahead and wear the happiness label, at least for a little while.

You miss the point over and ove–and that point would be that you can have the happiness where you stand. It is always only a choice or two away. You miss the point that as you make that choice to be as happy as you can or to feel as good as you can feel where you are, that happiness cannot help but magnetize more happiness. The happier you get, the happier you get—and the more you will draw to you those dreams and desires that will add more happiness to that happy heap.

It doesn’t take a psychologist to figure this out, but at least the one you admire managed to do so, for his words are absolute truth: The more you are able to feel good about you where you stand, the more you are able to see and appreciate the you that You really are, the more easily and effortlessly you will allow the changes you desire, because you are no longer spending most of your time and energy and attention pushing against the you that you want to change.

Rather than using the unfulfillment of some desire as an excuse to feel bad, find whatever reasons you can to feel good right there where you are. We promise that nothing can or will prevent the desires that are a match to that happiness from being drawn to you.

Practice choosing happiness. Practice feeling as good as you can possibly feel. Make that practice more important than the producing of the desired object you have associated with your happiness. See happiness as the cause and the effect . . . and get ready for the happiest ride you can imagine, to the happiest times of your life.

Sometimes I wonder if they’re really allowed to talk to me the way they do–but then who would I ask?

It’s occurred to me that perhaps we may actually prefer the bumpier rides, but that’s a paradox for another day. Today, as the sun makes its inevitable return to brighten the Colorado afternoon, I keep hearing the song, “Don’t worry . . . be happy” in my head, and wondering about the me who simultaneously gets the simple truth of that lyric and the me who usually finds it annoying.

I’m sure there’s more mulling over to do about all that, but in the meantime I will look for any happiness I can spot in my immediate vicinity . . . and allow myself to feel, if only for the moment, paradoxically complete.

Recently a very special friend of mine sent me a gift that by my standards at least, was unusually generous. It was not something I had asked for and not something I would have expected him or anyone else to offer. It was so unexpected and so generous, in fact, that my first response was to say it was too much and that I couldn’t accept. I was in the process of turning it down when he cut me off and basically said, “Please don’t make this something to feel guilty or obligated about. This is a way for me to give back to you.”

He began to list for me some of the ways that he felt our friendship had benefited him. And as he did, I started wondering about my own sense of worth and the way I was comparing his gifts to those he was saying he had received from me—and feeling that whatever I had given him was somehow less than what he was suddenly offering to me.

It reminded me of a stream of gifts that have been flowing into my life over a period of many months now, and from many sources. People have just been giving me things—unsolicited, unexpected, wonderful expressions of affection or gratitude or friendship. It’s not the first time I’ve wondered why or what it was that prompted these generosities, but it was the first time I really confronted my own sense of worth in the process . . . the first time I had really wondered specifically if I was somehow unworthy or undeserving of all this. It made me wonder—and ask—what am I really worth? And what criteria am I using to determine that worth?

It is a very curious system that you have all devised and accepted as the norm, this measuring of your value in dollars and cents. Monetary or financial gain—what you sometimes call “net worth”—has become the way that you define success. It affects your lives in more ways than you even realize and perhaps the most profound effect that it has is to consistently separate you from Source, from the You who remembers who you really are. You judge each other based on this criteria but even worse is your judgment of yourselves for what you think you lack compared to anyone who you perceive as having more.

These gifts that have come to you have been gifts in more ways than what is obvious to you. Beyond any physical value that they may have had or any comfort or pleasure they may have afforded you, they have been opportunities, each and every one, for you to recognize the value that you add to these connections—value that, instead of seeing and appreciating and accepting, you often minimize or dismiss altogether because it is not in the form that you feel is considered real or valid or truly worth something.

Your friends can say to you repeatedly how much you are appreciated on any number of levels for any number of reasons but when that appreciation is expressed to you in a physical or material way that you feel you cannot match, you hold yourself back from the fullness of joy available to you, and you focus instead upon your own judgment of the ways that you have not effectively equaled their success or attained their level of this specific form of prosperity.

In other words, as one of your sayings goes, you look a gift horse in the mouth, when instead there is a wealth of appreciation and mutual joy available on both sides of the giving if you will only allow yourself to understand that your worth has nothing to do with what you have accumulated.

Your sages and philosophers and prophets and teachers have been saying this for as long as any of you have been on the planet but it only seems to get harder and harder for you to hear and believe. There is most definitely joy in abundance. There is great happiness in prosperity and that joy is available to any of you . . . but the joy that comes to you through abundance has nothing to do with any measurement of your success that puts you in competition with another. The joy that comes through abundance is the joy of recognition, the joy of understanding that there is no lack, that there is no grading or judging or winning or losing in the honest exchange of appreciation.

Your friends give to you out of appreciation for you in the ways that they are able to give. You can choose to make those gifts your opportunity to feel the abundance that is flowing to you and through you—or to pinch off that abundance by giving your attention to some standard of self worth that you believe you have failed to meet. It is the difference between greed and gratitude, between envy and appreciation, between enjoyment and discouragement, between connection with Source and disconnection . . . and in this as in all matters pertaining to your experience of well being . . . it is entirely up to you.

At some point along the way to this message I remembered a song I sang in church when I was a child: “Count your blessings, name them one by one . . . “ When it’s blessings I’m counting, the blessings just seem to get bigger and bigger, but when I start counting bills and coins, for some reason, there seems to be an opposite effect.

I have an abundance of generous and caring people in my life. A reminder not only to value them, but to value the me that they’re appreciating, feels like a path to prosperity that is worth every step I can take. It is both humbling and exalting and most important, it leaves me, for the moment, feeling richly and gratefully complete.