The Radical Happiness Newsletter is written by Gina Lake and offers inspiration and support for awakening out of the ego and living in the Now. In this issue, you will find three blog posts: Life Is Interesting, How to Make Yourself Miserable, and What You Really Know.

April 9-11: Love Intensive in Sedona, AZ. Moving from Ego to Essence in Relationships: This intensive is not just for couples, but for everyone who wants to experience more love. Discover the love within you and unlock any blocks to that love flowing to others. This intensive with Gina and Theo will be held in a beautiful home overlooking the red rocks of Sedona, Arizona. Please see About Intensives for a description of the weekend. $150. Space is limited to twenty participants, and space is still available. Attendees are responsible for arranging transportation, housing, and meals. For more information, including information about hotels, and/or to register, please download a registration packet here or contact Gina through the form on the Contact page. Find out more about Sedona here, one of the most beautiful and sacred places on the planet.

Sedona, Arizona

A 2-DVD set (totaling 4 hours) of the October 2009 intensive called Moving from the Ego to Essence is available now. If you wanted to attend the intensive last October but weren’t able to, this is one way to have some experience of it.

You can get 30% off of the $29.95 price by following this link (on CreateSpace.com): https://www.createspace.com/275959 . Use this discount code: 94B2JPKG

You can buy the DVD set on Amazon.com for $29.95 by following this link:
http://www.amazon.com/Moving-Ego-Essence/dp/B002YK46FE/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1259110335&sr=8-2

Topics on the DVD include: You Are Consciousness, How to Be Present to Others and to Life, Your Natural Self is Good, A Guided Meditation, Life is Trustworthy, The Egoic Mind Is Not Your Ally, How to Let Go of Conditioning and Live from the Heart, How to Deal with Difficult or Abusive Family Relationships, What to Do When Conditioning Is Triggered, How to Help Others, How to Clear Negativity, How to Cope with Terminal Illness, How to Cope with Suicidal Thoughts, How to Cope with Fears About the World Situation, The Earth Needs You Now LIFE IS INTERESTING from Gina's blog at radicalhappiness.com

From the point of view of Essence, our true self, life is neither good nor bad, but interesting. Even when you are caught up in a difficult situation, it is possible to find that which is within you that finds whatever is going on interesting. Whenever we enter into an experience, we enter into the unknown: You never know exactly what is going to happen, even if the experience is similar to one you've had before. Not knowing what's going to happen is one of the things that makes life interesting.

Take going to the dentist: You've been to the dentist many times before, but what will this time be like? Your attitude is actually what determines your experience, so when your attitude changes, your experience changes. Even so, every experience is different; no two are the same. Going to the dentist isn't just a matter of someone working in your mouth, it also includes the experience of the dentist and any other people you encounter and many other things. How will you experience those people? How might they be helpful to you? What might you learn? How might you share love and friendliness with them? How might you serve them or make them feel good?

Any experience, even going to the dentist, is an opportunity to share love or share of ourselves in any number of ways. People benefit each other all the time in all different situations by sharing love, information, and assistance in other forms. So, a trip to the dentist isn't just about teeth, it is potentially about any number of things if you notice. And it can be about giving if you make it about that. You have the power to make everyone around you feel good, no matter what else is going on, and that changes everyone's experience.

Life is interesting because life is an opportunity to create our reality through our choices and to create our experience by what we choose to think about an experience. We create in the real world, and we create our inner experience with our thoughts about the real world. This ability to shape experience is very interesting to Essence, and it is one reason we are here—to learn to be creators in this reality, and to learn about the impact that our thoughts, attitudes, and feelings have on reality and our experience of reality.

Life isn't simply a matter of going to the dentist or doing whatever else we are doing because whenever we are doing something, we bring our consciousness, our mind, our understanding, and our conditioning to what we are doing. So many things are influencing every moment, and we are in control of many of those things. This is very interesting. What if I act this way in this situation, or what if I do this instead? What if I think this instead of that? Life is like a laboratory for experimenting with creating. We are experimenting with life all the time, whether we realize it or not. Why not become more aware of your role in creating reality and creating your experience of reality and more consciously play around with what works and doesn't work—what brings the results you'd like and what doesn't? And why not learn to do the things that bring the results you would like, such as love and peace?

Life is not interesting when we feel we are at the mercy of it, when we feel we have to do things we don't want to do or experience things we don't want to experience. But life is interesting when we see that we are in control of our experience of whatever we encounter in life, even though we can't control what we encounter. We learn that, with the proper attitude and the willingness to bring love and pleasantness to any experience, we can face anything. We are powerful creators of our experience of reality, even if we don't create reality single-handedly. We discover that it doesn't matter what life brings us, but what we bring to life that counts. That is freedom.

HOW TO MAKE YOURSELF MISERABLE from Gina's blog at radicalhappiness.com

- Think about all the things other people have that you don't have (a relationship, a nice home, a new car, a great job, children, a thin body, perfect health, lots of money, success, popularity, beauty, fun, sex, etc.) and imagine how happy they are and how happy you would be if you had what they have. Daydream about what your life should look like.

- Keep a running mental list of your "problems," shortcomings, and how you and your life don't measure up and what you should do about it. Then make this the central topic of your conversation with others.

- Think about what happened in the past that made you upset-and talk about it.

- Go over past conversations you've had and draw conclusions about how that person or persons see you or you see them.

- Think about everything you have to do.

- Have an opinion about everything.

- Notice what you don't like.

- Think about other people and talk about them.

- Think about yourself and how your life is going.

- Think of all the things that could go wrong and all of the terrible things that have happened to other people.

- Spend a lot of time looking at yourself in the mirror.

- Set goals for yourself and your life and wait until you achieve them to be happy.

- Be too busy to let yourself rest, play, do something you enjoy, or do nothing, except maybe watch TV.

Can you find other things to add to this list? How do you make yourself miserable?

How do we make ourselves happy? Don't do the things on the above list. Happiness is our natural state, and when we stop doing what makes us unhappy, we are naturally happy!

WHAT YOU REALLY KNOW from Gina's blog at radicalhappiness.com

What you really know is mostly what comes in through your senses, and that has a limited radius. How far do your senses extend? You may see mountains many miles away, but you don't really know what the experience of being on that mountain is until you are there, within yards of it. The same is true of everything else we experience. We only really know what our senses tell us about our immediate surroundings. We may know that the ground is damp, the couch is soft and made of leather, the tea kettle is boiling, the tree is starting to bud. But there isn't a lot more we can say with surety about life except what our senses tell us.

Outside of our immediate sensory experience is our acquired knowledge, suppositions, and assumptions, all of which are stored in the brain and may or may not be true in this particular moment. Most of the things we think we know, such as what we are going to do tomorrow, next week, or next year, or even what happened in the past are imaginations, plans, ideas, memories, not something we actually know. Even our knowledge is more limited than we assume: We assume the earth is round because it has been so, but we can't assume it will be round tomorrow. The earth may not even exist tomorrow. We don't even really know that.

We create a sense of ourselves, our life, and our world with our ideas about ourselves, our life, and our world, but these are just ideas, imaginations, when all we really know about life is what is coming in through our senses. These ideas are useful, of course, and they are obviously meant to be part of our experience as human beings. Without the ability to think and imagine, we couldn't be the creators that we are. And yet, all this imagining and thinking takes us away from real life and from the real experience of ourselves as life itself. It takes us away from the here and now, from reality. We live, instead, in a mental world, where we think we know things and pretend we know what will happen.

The distancing from our true self and from reality that thinking causes makes us feel fearful in the world. When we are detached from our core, from Essence, we are detached from our innate trust of life and our natural responsiveness to life. Too much involvement in knowledge and thought leaves us responding to life from our knowledge, beliefs, and opinions rather than from our innate wisdom. The simplicity of living close to our true nature is enlivening, refreshing, peaceful, and kind, and our world needs this so very much these days. We need this.

So notice how your real world, your real experience, actually extends only a few yards in every direction, and that will help you live more in the here and now. Beyond those few yards where your senses reach, you don't know, you only assume you know. Notice how much you really don't know—it's a lot! Instead of being a problem, this is actually a wonderful discovery. You can relax and be at peace—you don't know and you don't need to know anything more than you do. You can leave this life up to the life that is living you, and see what it will do next, when you are not letting this being that you are be run by your mind, your beliefs, your judgments, and your knowledge. Get to know this being that you are by realizing that it is alive right here and now and sensing life and that everything else is what you pretend life to be.

This being that you are is wise and knows how to live life, but it doesn't let you know ahead of time what it is up to or where it will take you. This inner knowing doesn't come through your ordinary senses, but when the mind is quiet, this knowing is felt strongly and clearly, and it is experienced as very real. The knowing that comes from the being that you are is a moment-to-moment knowing, not a pretend knowing. It shows up in the moment and guides you for that moment, until another knowing shows up. You could say it is an ephemeral knowing, a knowing that lasts as long as it needs to, and then disappears when it is no longer needed. This knowing is trustworthy because it is real, because it comes out of the here and now. Pretend knowings make the ego feel safe because the ego needs and wants to feel safe. But we don't need our pretend knowings to be safe, since life is trustworthy and safely evolving us toward greater wisdom and love no matter what is happening.

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Blessings,
Gina