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The
Radical Happiness Newsletter
January,
2008
Desiring Happiness over Being
Somebody
From Anatomy of Desire by
Gina Lake
This may sound obvious, but you have to want happiness to have it. You
have to want to be happy more than you want to be you (the egoic self),
with all your stories, beliefs, opinions, judgments, dreams, and
memories. Happiness will never be found in being you, not even in being
a better, improved version of you; it can only be found in losing your
self—losing all thoughts that relate to the me—and
finding
your true self.
This is the price to be paid for happiness. Happiness isn’t
attained by working harder on improving yourself or working harder in
general or by having more money, more beauty, more success, or more
friends because you will never have enough of these to make you happy.
As long as you are focused on this you, you will not find happiness
because the you doesn’t know how to be happy. Only in
realizing
that you are not this you that you think you are will you find true
happiness. When you discover who you really are, you don’t
need
anything to make you happy because you already are.
The real you has always been happy, and it has always been possible for
you to feel this happiness. Whenever you stop thinking or stop paying
attention to your thoughts, there it is: peace, contentment, happiness,
and joy. It turns out that the only thing in the way of your happiness
is your thoughts about you. Involvement with this you (the egoic self),
is the cause of suffering. This you and suffering go hand-in-hand: You
can’t have one without the other. So, the choice is clear:
You
can be involved with all your thoughts about you and suffer or you can
be involved with essence and be happy by ignoring your thoughts.
Although this choice is clear, it is not easy to make because we love
our stories, beliefs, opinions, judgments, memories, fantasies, and
other ideas. We love them more than we love love (essence). We want to
be who we think we are more than we want to stop suffering. When it
comes to choosing between our ideas and love, we often choose our
ideas. But there is no blame in this. We are programmed to make this
choice. Nevertheless, there comes a point in our evolution, when it is
time to wake up out of our programming and make another choice. When
this time comes, essence’s pull becomes stronger.
This is the point which most of you are at, or you wouldn’t
be
reading this. It is time to see that you don’t have to
suffer.
There is another way to live, but you have to choose it, and doing this
is not so easy because of your programming. The hardest thing about
making this choice is that it has to be made again and
again—in
every new moment.
You are never done with making this choice because the ego continues to
play its role of protagonist, even long after you have realized who you
really are. The egoic mind weakens the less you pay attention to it,
but it continues to tempt you with stories, judgments, opinions,
fantasies, and memories. You come to see these thoughts for what they
are, but they still have some power to draw you in for as long as they
do. How long this will continue remains to be seen. It is different for
everyone, but many who have seen the truth never fully get the ego
behind them.
It doesn’t matter how strong the egoic mind’s voice
is as
long as you ignore it. You can’t change the programming, but
you
can change your relationship to it. When you do, the programming does
weaken. This is really the only way out of the suffering the ego
creates, and no one but you can do this choosing. Waking up is not
easy, but neither is suffering. However, suffering is our default
position, and there is some comfort in that position because it is so
familiar. So we are pulled in one direction or the other until
eventually essence wins out.
This moving back and forth between the ego and essence can go on for a
very long time, even an entire lifetime. Without the spiritual
understanding needed to get beyond the ego, it is a formidable
opponent. Once you understand how the ego operates and maintains
suffering, however, it becomes easier to choose essence over the ego.
Furthermore, the more you choose essence, the stronger its voice
becomes. The desire to awaken and to be done with the ego and its
suffering becomes stronger than the desire to indulge your thoughts,
and then you are on your way to freedom—and happiness.
Anatomy
of Desire: How to Be Happy Even When You Don’t Get What You
Want
by Gina Lake is available by going to the Books page on
radicalhappiness.com. The price is $13.95. It is also available as a
pdf download for $6.00.
Healing Emotional Complexes
From Getting Free: How to Move Beyond
Conditioning and Be Happy by Gina Lake
Behind every emotional complex lie a number of mistaken beliefs, which
need to be erased or reprogrammed. This is done by first getting in
touch with the mistaken beliefs and then replacing them with a truer
perspective. Once the falseness of these beliefs is seen and they are
replaced with new beliefs, the emotional energy that they generated,
which also held them in place, dissipates. Then new behaviors become
established based on these new beliefs, and the healing is complete.
These complexes are what get triggered by other people’s
conditioning. Conditioning triggers conditioning, and that’s
how
everyone’s conditioning gets healed. When an issue is
triggered,
it usually causes an automatic emotional response. Any number of
negative emotions gets triggered and usually more than one, which is
why it is called a complex. It is made up of many hidden beliefs that
trigger a variety of emotions. Unless these beliefs are investigated,
the usual circumstances will continue to trigger the conditioning.
Furthermore, the more this complex is triggered, the more entrenched
and automatic the emotional responses become. The responses become
habitual, and habits aren’t so easy to break. To break this
cycle
takes a conscious choice and willingness to investigate the ideas
behind the feelings.
To do this, it is necessary to allow the feelings to be there without
responding to them in the usual ways. These feelings are the trail that
leads you to the goldmine of understanding. They contain the answers
you are looking for, which will free you from your conditioning, but
acting out your feelings will take you away from that goal. So, you sit
with these feelings and wait for them to reveal the mistaken beliefs
that are the cause of your unhappiness and your so-called problems.
These beliefs are things like “Life should be
different,”
“Life is unfair,” “I will never be
loved,” and
“I’m flawed and will never be happy.”
Beliefs like these are sad and inaccurate conclusions your ego came to
when it faced disappointment, disillusionment, and pain. They are a
story the ego told about an event, and it became attached to that story
and created an identity around of it. It concluded something that
wasn’t true, but it believed its conclusion. To admit that
its
story isn’t true is very difficult for the ego. It is very
attached to its point of view and doesn’t want it questioned
or
examined. The ego will come up with all sorts of reasons why you
shouldn’t bother to investigate your feelings and your
beliefs.
The ego will try to talk you out of doing this because it
doesn’t
want you to see the truth because if you do, you won’t need
the
ego and the identities it gives you.
Once these beliefs are seen as false, they stop driving your behavior,
and then more positive beliefs can begin to drive your behavior. Some
literally disappear, never to appear again. Others remain but are a
mere shadow of their former self, without the ability to convince you.
Eventually, they too will disappear if you don’t decide to
resurrect them. What allows you to see these beliefs is an attitude of
curiosity, gentleness, and acceptance. In just being with the emotions
that are tied to them, they reveal themselves quietly, intuitively one
by one.
Being with an emotion is an act of not doing: You don’t think
about the emotion and you don’t act on it. You just wait,
listen,
and receive. You are very present to it, as if that is all that exists
in the world. You give your full attention to it, without an agenda and
without straining or trying. You bring gentleness, curiosity, and
acceptance to it, which allows the beliefs to be revealed. What you are
looking for is not so much a thought but a knowing—an insight
that pops into your awareness, which may have an image or a sensation
attached to it. Intuitions often come in the form of images or
sensations, which deliver a sense of knowing, which you then translate
into words. The longer you sit with an emotion, the more beliefs are
likely to be revealed because the beliefs are linked together, just as
the emotions are.
Insight into an issue is really just the beginning of healing, although
a very important first step. The healing happens as new beliefs and
behaviors replace the old ones. Once the old beliefs are seen through,
then new beliefs become the basis for behavior. Once you have uncovered
the beliefs, or conclusions, that underlie the feelings that get
triggered, you ask for healing from beings of light for these beliefs,
which will come in the form of love energy and further insight and
guidance about this issue. This complex will continue to unravel over
time as you continue to see the truth about it and replace your old
behaviors with new ones. This is not instantaneous but a process that
can take quite a while to finally be healed, even with the help of
beings of light.
Getting
Free: How to Move Beyond Conditioning and Be Happy
by Gina Lake is available by going to the Books page on
radicalhappiness.com for $14.95. It is also available as a pdf download
for $6.00.
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