How To Be Happy. All Day. Every Day.
You have to listen to the clues shouting at you.
The mind rules us.
It’s a guarantee it will try to tell you differently.
There are clues that are jumping up and down like a circus act telling us who is in charge.
If you're upset and yelling externally or on the inside, this is a clue there is a story going on.
A story that is orchestrated by the mind and is pulling you around by the nose. Making you believe you are in charge.
But you’re not even awake. Much less in charge.
Do Stop Believing
We have to stop believing the mind made stories. Stories like this.
“Oh right! Everyone else can take a day off. And sleep in. No one else seems to see the dishes that need to be done. They can play all day. I still have to get the kids from school. I still have to work. I still have to make dinner and wash the dishes that seem to bother me more than anyone else in the house. I am the one who gets dumped on with all the crap no one else wants to do. Or it doesn’t get done. I’m a dumping ground.”
This is an example of a bullsh!t story we need to stop believing. It’s a story where the hero is playing the victim. Feeling trapped in the chores of life. Feeling drained. Alone.
Others become the target of our blame because of childhood hurt we didn’t know how to let flow through our little body way back then.
When we’re trapped in a story like this it’s hard to turn off the rank. It is hard wired in. This is a clue!
If we are heels dug in to blame and find justice, there is an emotion trapped in this story. This emotion is being held down by the story.
We have to learn to pause and feel the emotion. When we place our focus on feeling the emotion, the ranting story starts to lose power because it no longer has our attention.
Great Big Bear Hug
We need to embrace the emotion.
Welcome it.
Give it a big bear hug.
FEEL it.
Don’t just make it another mental narration. The constant fear of feeling our emotions usually feels worst than the actual emotion.
The emotion that has been trapped and accumulating debris since we were a kid and we got scared about something and shoved the feeling into our little bodies.
Don’t stop short. Commit to feeling. Keep the doors open to a celebration with rotating keynote speakers. The voices of your emotions. Don’t listen to the words. Your job is to feel what they are saying.
You don’t have to be able to articulate the emotion. You don’t have to know the childhood origins and trauma. You don’t have to figure out the hidden subconscious beliefs that are wrapped up in all this.
We use all this mental stuff to avoid feeling. We might get insights about this information. But the point is to FEEL.
Stop avoiding it with mind games.
Be free little one
As we practice embracing the scared, child feelings we give them a door to be released. They will feel seen and heard when we embrace and feel them. And they will evaporate into the ethers.
This will free up that space in us that was once filled with hurt and disappointment and terror and feeling unloved.
This space becomes a home for something much grander. It is now freed up space we can fill with Joy. Awe. Wonder. Deep rich lasting happiness.
If you focus on feeling the emotion and you come out of the exercise and the story starts to play again, the blame has been sitting there in the lobby waiting for you to come out of this silly feeling game. It’s a clue there is more in there.
We have spent years shoving emotions down. It will likely take multiple events that you choose to use this practice in before that original kernel of fear is excavated and released.
It’s a process
Stay with it. In as many events as you can during your day. The loud ones and the soft ones. The ones that really get your goat. And the ones that feel like normal day deadness.
You don’t have to feel pressure to clear everything out all at once. Some people do this by accident. They reach rock bottom and everything comes crashing out all at once and they see the light.
Actually they “feel the light.” And it is amazing. And miraculous. It feels so big it’s hard to believe it can fit in the space of our body.
Most of us work toward feeling our true self in layers.
The speed of the unfolding is determined by how committed we are to practice this mindfulness training and emotional embracing throughout our day.
Final Thoughts
We’re not supposed to be having a life of fluctuating between being p!ssed and being numb.
We are here to have a life with our days FULL of Happiness. Joy.
We need to be ripping our attention away from the stories our mind is tormenting us with all day.
And instead we need to direct this attention to embracing and feeling the emotions behind the story.
Our dedication to learning to feel Joy is our free will choice.
We get to decide how long we want to stay miserable.
And we get to decide how quickly we want to learn to be happy and radiate Joy.
Tell me what struck a chord in the comments.