Monthly Archives: October 2007

Has anyone asked you lately if you were happy? Really happy? How did you respond?

When you talk—or think—about being happy, is it in present or future tense? Maybe when your dream lover shows up? Or when you get that big career break? Or when your house sells . . . or you leave for vacation or your complexion clears up . . .

Does happiness always feel like an event that hasn’t happened yet? A place you haven’t been yet? A person you haven’t met yet?

I wondered to The Shower Team about the nature of true happiness and more specifically, the timing of it . . . why does it so often feel like something somewhere up ahead rather than something right in front of me? Is it possible to reach out and touch it now—and to hang on?

The reason that happiness so often feels remote or removed from you, the reason that it often feels like something‘out there rather than something right here is because of the way you tend to think about it and to describe it to yourself and others.

You usually describe happiness as a noun when in fact it is a verb. You think of happiness as a person, place, or thing . . . as yet unattained, and you hold yourself back from the fullest possible joy available to you, believing that your happiness must be earned or achieved or perhaps, granted as a favor by some benevolent bestower of random reasons to be happy.

You think of happiness not as the constantly flowing stream of well being that it is, the ever-present joyful current of life that you are living . . . . but rather as this stop or that stop along the way, as this piece of treasure or that interesting character that you might find . . .. It is as if you were deciding to take an exhilarating ride down a scenic river . . . but then concluding that the real joy is getting to the end and pulling your boat out of the water rather than savoring the wild time that you’re having . . . . or purchasing a ticket to an amusement park full of stimulating experiences and deciding that happiness is being done with it all and calling it a night and heading home rather than throwing your hands up in the air and screaming at the top of your lungs as you experience each available ecstatic moment on each available attraction.

The point is that you get your ideas about happiness rather twisted up to the point where you really believe that your joy comes when what you want is in your hands rather than in the journey toward it. You make happiness—not unlike love—conditional and contingent. You essentially say, “Happy means having this” . . . or “Happy means having that” . . . . and then because deep down you know that’s not it . . . you are constantly coming up with something else to have that you think happiness will result from.

It is not the wanting of more that is screwy here. Rather, it is your mistaking the having of wherever ‘it’ is for happiness when happiness is so not the ‘thing’ you want . . . but rather the joy that is always calling to you and always taking you in the direction of whatever you want, when you let it. Happiness is the choice to see what is perfect right where you are. Happiness is the choice to appreciate what’s in front of you . . . AND what is ahead of you . . . AND what’s behind you . . . Happiness is the decision to ‘be’ happy no matter where you are or what you want that you don’t have yet . . . simply because it feels so much better to feel good than it does to feel sad or lost of afraid or angry . . . .

Happiness is you choosing to see that well being is the natural state of things. Happiness is you recognizing that nothing you want that hasn’t come yet is an excuse for you to feel bad. Happiness is you coming to the conclusion that you get to decide how you feel in any and every moment of your experience . . . and that no as yet unfulfilled desire . . . no as yet unobtained goal . . . no as yet unmet lover . . no as yet unexperienced level of satisfaction or wellness or abundance . . . is a good enough reason for you to stand there in you’re here and now, choosing to feel unhappy.

Happy is the act of choosing to see who You really are. Happy is the act of deciding that you will not use any of the excuses available to you to hold yourself back from the stream of well being that is always flowing all around you.

Happy is the act of choosing to see that there is no destination still in front of you that is sufficient cause for you to be miserable where you are . . . it is the process of allowing yourself to feel good along the way . . . . to truly, genuinely, savor the ride you’re having . . . to understand that where you’re going or what you’re hoping for or who you’re waiting for is never really the point . . . . but rather it is the exhilaration, the stimulation, the satisfaction, the sheer pleasure of being on your way that is your happiness.

And that, dear ones, is never more than a choice away. Never remote or unavailable. Never off limits to you. You can decide that happiness is in the hands of some prince who hasn’t come yet or some ship that hasn’t come in yet or that it is some trophy you haven’t worked hard enough to earn yet. But why? Why decide to postpone what is so there for you now? Why wait to enjoy the ride? Why keep putting off the truly limitless joys that are right in front of you?

Your happy place is not a place. It’s a simple choice to be made over and over . . . anytime, anywhere, with anyone, one happier or more pleasing thought at a time . . . When you really let yourself realize—and believe—that . . . what a truly happy traveler you will be.

Actually, I tend to like roller coaster rides better when they’re over, but that’s just me—and not the point. What a compelling idea it is, to think about happiness being something I can do, not something I have to hope or pray or strive or slave away for.

Old habits often die hard, and I know my habit is to believe that things have to be different if I’m going to feel better. But what if happiness really has nothing to do with ‘things’ being different? What if it really is just a choice I make. How powerful a magician would that make me—able to transform any moment into at least a slightly happier one?

It leaves me feeling . . . well, happier, able to go a bit more merrily on my way, and for the moment, complete.

Lately I can’t seem to get away from the subject of relationships . . . what to do about them . . . how to find them . . . how to live with them . . . how to live without them . . .

Whether in one or not, the questions remain. Most recently, a friend voiced her conviction to me about the necessity of ‘working’ on a relationship in order to preserve and keep it healthy. She was only stating what we probably all have heard and hold true: that relationships are hard work, that they must be given our diligent and determined effort in order to succeed.

So it felt like time, again, to ask The Team to talk about relationships. Specifically, what makes them seem so complicated and so hard? Why does it take so much effort to make them fly?

There is considerable accumulated consensus among you that relationships are hard work and that they take great effort and care and sacrifice and compromise in order to succeed. It is really just a part of your larger flawed premise about the necessity of hard labor for the obtaining of anything that you want.

With relationships as with most things that you deeply desire, you have agreed together that it surely cannot come easily or without struggle and so you perpetuate this myth and treat it like law and so, not surprisingly, your relationships are often trying and tedious and demanding—because you have decided, in effect, that they must be that way because, after all—isn’t anything worth having the result of blood, sweat and tears?

And we say . . . no.

We also assume that you would prefer that we not leave it at that, and so we’ll also say this: Get over it. With relationships as with any other powerful desire that you give birth to, what matters is your alignment with that desire. What matters is you allowing yourself to so line up with the joyous wanting of that desired thing . . . allowing yourself to ‘be’ the person who can give and receive the love that you desire . . . allowing yourself to believe yourself worthy of that love and able to both give and receive it . . . And here’s the real kicker: you have to decide that your happiness matters more than that relationship that you long for.

And immediately the protests begin. “But aren’t relationships about selflessness?” ‘Isn’t love all about putting the other first?” “Isn’t love defined in the great user manuals for our species that have been handed down through the ages as care and attention to the ‘other’s’ happiness more than my own?”

Even those of you who don’t buy tickets and board that train of thought still object to the notion that a relationship can flourish without your toil and trouble. You have learned just as diligently from your own brand of experts that two people can only maintain a happy and healthy connection with each other if both people are putting the other first . . . or at least, putting the relationship first.

We get how hard it is for most of you to hear this, but you’ve been sold a bill of goods. You are barking up the wrong tree. You can’t get where you want to be from there. What you must do—every man and woman jack of you—is decide that you are going to be the happiest, most fulfilled, most satisfied, most stimulated and stimulating you that you can possibly be . . . that you are going to create the most exhilarating life for yourself that you can possibly create . . . that you are going to fill your life with appreciation and eagerness and enjoyment . . . And then, dear ones, we promise you, the relationship that you truly want . . . the relationship that IS about joy and fulfillment and appreciation will emerge from the confluence of your alignment with your desire and the alignment of an other with theirs.

Here’s the rub. You confuse what you want—with what you think you need. You think about relationships often from a place of not believing in your own worthiness . . . You start your approach to connection with another from a position of weakness or discouragement or self-doubt or insecurity. You look to another to fill some void you think you have. You look to another to reflect something back to you that you have trouble seeing on your own.

And so your connections become more about fixing some aspect of you that you feel is broken than about the mutual discovery and exploration and sharing of life’s greatest joys and pleasures. You decide you need work . . . and so it is not surprising that any relationship that you’re lucky enough to stumble into will probably need work as well. You even jokingly refer to yourselves as “works in progress”.

You can continue to tell yourself that story. You can continue to believe that the best and the most blessed of your shared moments with others come from your determined labor. . . but if you stop and really look at the best, most blessed moments of connection that you have shared with any other . . . . we are relatively certain that you will see that they came to you effortlessly . . . that they just ‘happened’ . . . that they felt like ‘a gift’ . . . that you weren’t even sure how or why you received them . . .

You practically kill yourself—and each other—trying to prove that you can “work on’ whatever you want hard enough to make it happen the way you want . . . and oh the frustration that always follows this approach. When all the while, the real work—the real challenge—of choosing YOUR happiness above all else and then allowing the Universe to deliver to you one who can truly share that happiness—is effort that you often refuse to put forth.

You offer too many excuses or reasons to list, but they all boil down to the same refusal to believe that putting your joy first . . . that letting your joy lead you . . . that giving your attention and effort to being the happiest and most fulfilled you that you can be . . . will always yield to you the most joyful results . . . the most joy-filled relationship.

Start telling yourself a different story. Imagine a happy ending that results not from determined work on the relationship but from devoting yourself to being the you that a devoted other can’t help but love. Offer a truly joyful, loving, engaged, stimulated, eager, expanding you in your connection to another . . . and see how very little effort your dream takes to come true.

I’d love to hear the wedding vows The Team would write. Or the romance novel. Every single time I ask a question about this I try my hardest to argue and always end up feeling like I’m more or less sticking my tongue out at them. Very mature.

Whatever will I do if I discover that in fact, a happy relationship is really all about a happy me? What if I’m not meant to suffer? What if love isn’t supposed to hurt? What will I write poems about then?

It blows my mind just a bit. It also leaves me wondering how much joy I could have with someone else by just enjoying me, who might like to play that game with me instead of the one where we’re both busy working at it. It leaves me holding my hand over my heart, scratching my head . . . and feeling, for the moment, inexplicably complete.