Should We Abandon Happiness as the Impossible Dream?

Heck no!

I remember being struck by a conversation I had with one of my nieces a couple of years ago when we were talking about what she saw herself doing with her life. She wasn’t particularly inspired by the lives of adults in our society, whom she viewed as quite stressed and harried most of the time.

It was a fair point, one that gave me pause. It reminded me of a little plaque I bought years ago when visiting the California Redwoods, it says “We don’t inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” While that is an obvious reference to our ecosystem, as a mother it also makes sense to me in the context of our emotional ecosystem.

I decided I am going to be an example either way, good or bad; I can either be an example to aspire to, or one to run from.

This came up again when I asked another of my beautiful nieces what she would give if she could gift one thing to every person in the world. Happiness was her answer. I then started to think about what happiness is.

What immediately came to my mind were the things that keep me from feeling happy - the stories in my head, the meaning I assign to everything that happens in my life.

What I did inherit from my ancestors are a lot of those stories, and they are not stories I necessarily want to gift my children.

I saw an advert yesterday for a course that was about helping kids and teenagers look at their inner critic. One of the exercises involves filling in the thought bubbles above a monster’s head about all the things I think I’m no good at. Where do those voices come from?

Mostly those voices in my head are ones both deliberately and inadvertently planted there by my parents and other influential adults as I grew up, no doubt echoing the voices of their parents and so on. There were certainly things they wanted to teach me about life, what they deemed good values and behaviours, but what I actually took to heart about those might not be the same as the intention behind them.

To give an obvious example, a friend of mine recalled an incident this week that happened when she was a little girl, when she (and a little boy she was playing with) were being naturally curious about body parts. Her grandmother’s reaction created shame by the bucketful and she was reflecting on the magnitude of how that had contributed to how she felt about herself.

I also recall my mum sharing with me (many times) the story of overhearing her older brother’s friends talking about girls in a derogatory way. The key messages I took out of that story were multilayered, from the obvious intent “do not open yourself to be the topic of that kind of conversation” to the many others about having sex out of wedlock, and the general disgust towards the male sexual psyche.

But aside of these examples that shape body image and attitudes towards sex, there are many more examples of the ways in which my attitudes towards myself and other people have been shaped. In every minute of every day there are thoughts running through my head that have probably coursed through the minds of my ancestors for generations.

What I have found though is that the feelings I have about those thoughts, when I bring them into conscious awareness, are usually a good litmus test as to whether they represent my truth, are these thoughts a fit for my authentic self? Do these thoughts make me happy?

To stick with the example I gave about beliefs around sexual relationships, and then put that with my own life experiences of going on to have multiple failed relationships, marriages and pregnancies. I can see just how much the swathe of inherited beliefs about myself and the world actually played into those so called failures.

What is more true to say is that each led me towards more authenticity, and when my inner world is not at odds with itself, the chance for happiness is so much greater.

When I asked my niece how the gift of happiness could be achieved she talked about looking beyond ourselves and others, and being kind to ourselves. Beyond those stories, that’s the work right there, the goal to pursue to attain the (not so) impossible dream.

Of course it’s not as simple as just deciding not to buy into those stories. I can’t just tell myself I don’t believe the story in my mind because it has a lot of supporting evidence accumulated over a number of years.  But if it’s a story that is making me miserable in some way, it’s an indication that my mind and heart are not in alignment.

Recently I was asking my homeopath whether there was a remedy concoction she could recommend for headaches. She made the point there is no one cure-all as headaches carry a message, and the remedy would depend on the cause. But once I pause to listen to the message that in itself will usually sort out the headache.

She did go on to say that there is nothing I need to do/sort out, just come into my heart space. It is no coincidence my chiropractor also recommended coming into my heart space to feel the love within myself rather than pinging all over the place intellectually seeking solutions to satisfy my inner critic.

I’m often in my head. To set my mind at ease and tune into my heart’s voice, this is a practice that can be achieved in many ways, but it is a practice, it requires – well – practice.

One of the best ways I find to tune into my heart space is getting out in nature; I particularly like walking along the ocean shore, whereas my partner is more a fan of the forest. Just sitting listening to the chirruping cicadas and birds in our garden can be enough to bring me into the present moment, or even just looking around the room I’m in through fresh eyes.

Certainly I would be far less present if I also hadn’t learned to practise daily meditation. Presence is the core point of Eckhart Tolle’s teachings, some of my favourite quotes of his are:

·        “People don’t realise that now is all there ever is. There is no past or future except as memory or anticipation in your mind.”

·        “Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.”

·        “The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.”

·        “Anything you resent and react to strongly in another is also in you.”

I’ve come to recognise that when the same themes emerge in my negative stories about life and people, these are old patterns there that are no longer serving me and need to be brought into the light of more conscious awareness and deactivated. Some of my favourite techniques for that deep work are Brandon Bay’s Journey Work and Teal Swan’s Completion Process and Part’s Work, among others.

But there are also many more moments when it’s less about doing anything and just being in appreciation, learning to tune into my heart and the love that dwells within me for me, my life and all life in general. A quick fix is often the soothing tones of a Sarah Blondin meditation, Loving and Listening to Yourself is a great one.

So coming back to this idea of happiness as an impossible dream, no, I know happiness is always there beyond the “triggered and distracted” pattern of life. In the quiet of a moment when I allow myself to be still and be present and open my heart to all that is good in my world, and even to love those things that don’t always feel so good, they are all pointing the way, that is where happiness lies.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Are You Getting Distracted From Who You Came to Be This Life?, What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances, How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.