Chasing Happiness

How many guzillion self help books, seminars, workshops, retreats and magazine articles are all about finding happiness?  And how is it working?  I mean really!  Are you really happy?  And can you maintain that happiness?  Why is it that we place so much emphasis on being happy?  Are we supposed to always be happy?  How many times in your life did you feel really happy only to be let down again because of some circumstance, event, or relationship that negatively impacted you.  That continuous happiness roller coaster:  up/down, happy/sad, over and over and over.

What if instead, we seek wholeness, with happiness being just one aspect of wholeness?  What if we could be ok with sad, angry, or frustrated?  What if we no longer qualified happiness as being the ultimate emotion?  What if we no longer believe that if we are not happy, then we have failed?

Ok, enough of my "what if" questions.  Seriously, can you see that as long as we judge our emotions, whether good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable, then we are separating all those parts of ourselves that make up our wholeness?  No wonder why we continue to chase happiness.  We are so attached to only feeling happy that we continually set ourselves up for what we judge as failure and feel disappointed, which we judge as well!

No feeling is permanent.  Have you ever met anyone who is authentically happy all the time?  I bet not.  And that’s because our human nature was designed to experience every  possible emotion so that we can experience life to the fullest.

I had a client who asked for my assistance on this exact issue.  Chasing happiness.  The client was a self help junkie, attending workshop after workshop, reading book after book about happiness .  She would use the tools that she learned and had lots of blissful ‘aha’ moments, only to find that she’d come back down and feel like crap again.  Her internal dialogue sounded like “Maybe the next workshop will fix me.  Maybe the next guru will have the answers I need.”

I coached her to understanding how attached she was to being happy all the time.  She realized how unrealistic it was to always feel the same way.  I guided her to connect with all the emotions that she deemed unacceptable; i.e. fear, anger, boredom, etc. and with time she learned how to let go of the way she judged her feelings.  Things began to shift for her.  Her eyes were opened to the value of experiencing everything she felt and over time she became ok with all of it.  It was actually magical.

The moral to the story:  Wholeness is about loving all parts of yourself.

Happiness is merely one of those aspects, yet there are so many other parts of you to love.  Imagine loving the parts of you that you judge!  And this is even cooler.  If you can learn to love all of yourself, just think of how much more you can love others.  Imagine that!  That’s really all you have to do!