Being Happy

In the summer of 2015 I completed the writing of my first book. In the end, the entire writing process took just over five years. I however, completed the original manuscript in 2013. I wasn’t in any particular hurry to get the book published. So it was just sitting around in my computer with a couple of other copies stored in strategic places for approximately eighteen months. Then, shortly thereafter, a cataclysmic and explosive and volcanic series of closely interrelated events rocked both my inner and outer worlds. This occurred in the last quarter of 2014. The deeper rumblings of these events are still active in my life to this very day although they are now being transformed into Light where previously they had become a source of extremely deep shadow work.

The emotional impact these closely interrelated events had on me was that they left me feeling betrayed, very hurt, and very angry. They had me perilously teetering on moving into rage, and also very precipitously moving into depression. They left me emotionally exhausted and questioning many of the values I had. In many respects a huge and very important rug had been yanked from underneath me, leaving me seriously questioning who I even was to a significant degree.

The series of events that precipitated all of this in and of themselves were not so terribly horrific, although they were indeed problematic for me of various real and important levels. It would be a lie for me to say otherwise. The larger issue however, in many regards, was the timing of it all. These events occurred while a prolonged and deeply traumatic difficulty was simultaneously occurring in my life and the life of my immediate family (homelessness and all the resulting horrors that often are correlating factors). An additional problem was that many of the very specific elements of these closely interrelated series of events singularly triggered aspects of a deeply buried, extremely horrifying aspect of my personal history.

I have done enough personal healing and spiritual work on myself with and without the assistance of various others (psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, multiple forms of somatic and other kinds of healing work, prayer, and decades of meditation including the achieving of numerous samadhi experiences and a few transcendental states even, for me to know very clearly what my core wounding/injury and work is in this life is. I know what it is. And I have been healing it and doing the work for nearly four decades. The series of interrelated events I experienced in late 2014 however, triggered this core wounding in ways I believed was no longer possible, precisely because of all the work I have done to address it. It is very important for me to state this because it is difficult for me to imagine many people doing sounder healing and transformational work on themselves than I have done on myself. And I have received enormously positive benefits from all that work. And still, and still, this series of interrelated events completely rocked my world. Completely! Let this serve as a deep instruction that our work is never done. Never. It doesn’t matter who you are or how much inner transformational work you have done. I don’t care if you are the greatest spiritual teacher/guru/mystic/meditation master the world has ever known. It doesn’t matter how many empowerments you have received or how many deeply transcendental states or genuine samadhi experiences you have achieved or experienced. I don’t care how many “students” you have. Our work is never over in this life until that life itself is over!

After the eruption of the volcano and in the aftermath of it I realized the book I had completed was now almost totally useless and in need of a serious revision. I decided I needed to add some additional chapters that reflected the new insights and such that had come to me after the massive eruption had occurred. I also had a need, a calling even, to describe the eruption itself as well as many aspects of the aftermath. I found however, that I simply could not write. Perhaps I was experiencing a massive writer’s block. Perhaps I simply needed to integrate it all into my consciousness more before I committed it to formal writing. I’m not sure. If I was, the block ended up lasting several months. When it subsided, which seemed to come about as a clear and direct result of my leaving California and moving to the State of Washington, near the beginning of 2015. With this move to Washington I found the words now flowed effortlessly and copiously and even in a seemingly inspired fashion. I completed the new chapters in less than six months, in an absolute frenzy of writing. I also ended up re-writing more than eighty percent of the original manuscript as well. Only a very small percentage of that original manuscript has been retained in the new one. For all intents and purposes a completely new book has been birthed as a result of the powerful influence the volcanic eruption had on me and my life. In a very real sense this explosive series of events in my life has birthed a book. Yes!

I am now in a state of transformation with regard to the closely related series of events that rocked my world in 2014. It has become very clear why this experience was necessary and what types of decisions are now being called up as a result. It has become clear how I am to use this experience to guide my life, in various ways, for the rest of my life, including the helping and guiding of others. I am moving into a state of divine grace around it all.

During the manuscript re-writing process, I experienced a series of insights. They feel important. They also form the foundation of my new approach to spiritual guidance and teaching work. Here are those insights:

1.      Most people simply want to be happy.

2.      Something that becomes an enormous obstacle to us experiencing happiness occurs when we experience not getting what we want and/or getting what we don’t want.

3.      Not getting what we want and/or getting what we don’t want. Not getting what we want and/or getting what we don’t want. Not getting what we want and/or getting what we don’t want.

4.      This is always going to happen very often, regularly, and repeatedly in our lives. It cannot be avoided. No one is exempt. We are always going to both not get many of the things we want in life and we are also going to get many things in life that we absolutely, incontrovertibly, unquestionably don’t want. Period.

5.      We must accept these as the absolute, universal truths that they are. If we do not accept these truths, we are bound to always be caught up in the cycle of blaming ourselves, others, or various life circumstances for what is occurring to us in our lives and as a result, we will block the possibility of us attaining any real, authentic, and lasting happiness in our lives.

6.      What we want (other than to simply be happy) can be a very long, tedious, exhausting, and very diverse list indeed. It can include all kinds of strictly material things including money. It can also include relationships with specific and non-specific people, various careers, “sanity,” breast implants, peace of mind, “love,” good sex, fame, ease, physical health, grandchildren, union with God, all kinds of silly and relatively little things, etc.

7.      What we don’t want, I believe, is mostly simply pain of any and all sorts. There are innumerable forms that pain can take. These include although are not limited to—physical pain, emotional pain, psychic pain, spiritual pain, generational pain, mental pain, the pain that comes about as a result of experienced trauma, guilt, shame, and grief, and many circuitous combinations of all these forms of pain and other forms of pain not listed here.

8.      This experience of not getting what we want and/or getting what we don’t want can then take on a life of its own. It doesn’t have to. There are other options.

9.      There however, tends, in the vast majority of people, to be an extremely strong inclination towards this stuff taking on a life of its own and of our needing to find fault with/to blame someone or something around the fact that we have not gotten what we wanted and/or have gotten what we didn’t want.

10.  Some of us find fault with or blame ourselves primarily/mostly. A lot of guilt and shame, and misery usually ensues from this.

11.  For the vast majority of the rest of us, the most effective, primary, and readily available way for us to find fault or to blame for us not getting what we wanted and/or us getting what we didn’t want is to blame or find fault with another person or group of people. Mothers, fathers, children, grandparents, grandchildren, other biological, foster, or adoptive or even very distant relatives, boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives, ex-wives and ex-husbands tend to be the go to people for this, for many of us. However, bosses, supervisors, co-workers, subordinates in work situations, professors, gurus (abusive or not), spiritual teachers (abusive or not), Buddhist and nondual teachers (abusive or not), catholic priests and nuns and/or all other religious or spiritual leaders (abusive or not), people who have verbally, physically, emotionally, psychologically and/or sexually assaulted and/or exploited and/or abused us, various bullies we have had to contend with in our lives, God, all Muslims, the Jews, blacks, brown people, women, all black men, “white people,” “terrorists,” feminists, right wing conservative Christians, any prominent political figure or leader, The Republicans, The Democrats, LGBTQI people in general, corporate CEO’s, police officers and other law enforcement personnel, “the homeless,” poor people, immigrants, the undocumented, whomever the current most prominent refugees du jour are, active addicts, judges, lawyers, convicted criminals, convicted or even just suspected or accused child molesters and/or suspected or accused pedophiles, violent criminals, other violent people not in the criminal justice system, specific and various dead people in our lives who did things while living that we have never forgiven them for, racists, suspected racists, billionaires, millionaires, other “rich people,” all the inhabitants of country’s that are richer than our own or that are perceived or believed to be richer than our own, The IRS, “The Government,” and people who work for collection agencies, etc.—will also do just fine.   

12.  If it is not extremely easy to find an actual person or group or collection of people (the most preferred method) to blame for the fact that we have not gotten what we wanted and/or got what we didn’t want, which in point of fact is extremely rare, we then tend to very quickly and very easily and very efficiently find other very suitable substitutes.

13.  Some of the more reliable substitutes easily available to us all in this case are an infinitely long list of personal life circumstances, situations, influences, experiences, histories, and perceived limitations; a plethora of institutional, societal, and/or organizational and structural flaws and syndromes such as structural racism, white supremacy, all forms of bigotry, sexism, patriarchy, corporatocracy, all kinds of real or perceived inequities, homophobia/heterosexism/transphobia/biphobia, an exhaustive list and all forms of unearned privilege people can naturally have or seek to gain, corporate culture, structural and other types of social disparities such as worldwide economic disparities, access to good, affordable healthcare disparities, affordable housing disparities, access to clean water disparities and many others; personal and/or historic and/or generationally experienced traumas, institutionalized religions, warfare and wars, and the innumerable impacts of warfare and wars, the fact or belief that our mother didn’t show us enough love, or the zodiac sign we were unfortunate enough to be born under, etc.

14.  The information contained in number 13 is particularly useful for being experienced by us as the justifiable reasons why we have been or are not currently getting what we want and/or are always seemingly getting what we don’t want because everything that could possibly be found on a truly exhaustive list in number 13 often represent very real problems and very real difficulties and challenges in the world that can and often do cause real pain, real suffering, real trauma, and real, tangible grief in the world and that we can also personally experience and feel very hurt, impacted, abused, marginalized, disenfranchised, and extremely limited by.

15.  Sometimes, it is important for us, or for part of our learning in this life, or as part of our spiritual journey, or as an aspect of our awakening into enlightened consciousness, for us to experience deep anger, rage, and various forms of discomfort, angst, and grief. However, above and beyond this consideration, there are ways to be aware of all the wrongs and ills in the world, to very seriously work for social justice in the world, to absolutely be dedicated to making life better for as many people on the planet as we may desire without making anyone bad or wrong, evil, or the enemy. There are also ways to do this that do not require that we absolutely need to always be or even ever deeply angry, enraged, always mad at somebody or something or mad at the world in general, always in a state of despair, always feeling victimized, always engaged in finger pointing, are chronically hopeless, deeply and routinely depressed, anxious, mean spirited, terminally sarcastic, completely dismissive of other people’s feelings, realities, opinions, and points of view, often experience ourselves as being out of our bodies, being nihilistic, nor being completely numb and/or exhausted all the time. There are many teachers and systems available to us right now that can help us understand and achieve this as a learned skill and competency.

16.  This takes us back to #8. This is what was said there, “This experience of not getting what we want and/or getting what we don’t want can then take on a life of its own. It doesn’t have to. There are other options.”

17.  So, what can we do to prevent the experience of not getting what we want and/or getting what we don’t want from taking on a life of its own? More importantly, how do we keep from perpetually blaming either ourselves, other people, or various other life circumstances, situations, or realities when either of these things occur in our lives—as they absolutely will?

18.   I believe the first and most crucial step is to take personal responsibility of and ownership for our own emotional and social lives without blaming ourselves, shaming ourselves, guilting ourselves or framing ourselves for our own experienced emotional and other personal truths. The words personal responsibility don’t have to be dirty words or guilt or shame producing words in our lives nor do we have to reflexively and reactively absolutely find ourselves deeply resistant to them. All of this absolutely can be done in a gentle, compassionate, self-loving, non-fear based, non-blaming, holistic, joyful, and extremely healing way without needing to pretend the world is perfect (because it isn’t from a relative truth perspective) and without moving into chronic spiritual bypassing behavior, chronic spiritual materialism, or moving into some form of misguided spiritual nihilism. We also have to ask ourselves a very serious and sober question at this point. Here is that question: Do I really want this? This is an extremely important question. It is an extremely important question because we must decide (choose) that we really want this more than we want to blame, shame, guilt, and frame ourselves and/or others and/or life, life circumstances, situations, and realities and/or all of the “bad” things life may have presented to us in the past and very likely will continue to present to us for the rest of our lives in the form of us not getting what we wanted and/or us getting what we didn’t want. And it will take a lot of work and a lot of commitment if we truly do indeed want to learn how to deal with all of this from a place of consciousness where we do not always find ourselves chronically blaming, shaming, guilting, and framing ourselves and/or others and/or life circumstances, situations, and realities. Some of you may not want this now. You may have become very comfortable with always blaming, shaming, guilting or framing yourselves and/or others and/or life situations, circumstances, and realities for why you are having the experiences in life you are having. Please be honest with yourselves. I certainly don’t need anything from you. However, if you decide you do want this or if you are even just curious, here is the foundational teaching: Whenever we find we don’t get something we want in life and/or whenever we find we get something we didn’t want in life, no matter what the situation or circumstance is, the very first and most crucial step is to look very deeply inside ourselves, not outside of ourselves, and not looking inside ourselves in a blaming, shaming, guilt, and framing way, and realize that we have all the information necessary within ourselves and with how we are holding and understanding the situation of not getting what we wanted and/or of getting what we didn’t want, to potentially obtain complete and total freedom. Yes! With this looking deeply within ourselves we make available to us the realization that we need not look any further than ourselves and how we are holding the experience/situation in order to understand the experience/situation wholly, perfectly, and completely. Other people and various other outside stimuli, including prayer (just one of the many ways to commune with God) may be freely chosen in order for additional and sometimes very important and very healing insights to manifest and for the potential healing of others, sometimes many others, to additionally and potentially occur. However, for a whole, perfect, and complete understanding and holding of the situation as far as we ourselves are concerned and as far as our own potential freedom is concerned, it is important to understand that no additional people nor anything outside of us need be examined nor looked to initially. And most importantly, no other people, life situations, circumstances, and realities need ever be blamed in any experience/situation where we find we have not gotten what we wanted and/or have gotten what we didn’t want.

19.  The good news is that there are already many systems, programs, teachings, and understandings available to us right now that can help us with this enormously. We do not need to invent something new. It can be something as simple as applying The Serenity Prayer or the Ho’Oponopono statements very intentionally in our lives every single day of our lives. It could be seriously working our 12-step program and very intently working with our sponsor(s). It could be our deep involvement in a Harm Reduction Program we find and experience as both very useful and very valuable. It could be doing “The Work” as presented by Byron Katie and very deeply asking ourselves those four foundational questions she formulated with regard to every single incident in our lives and apply these to where we find we have not gotten what we wanted and/or got what we didn’t want. It could be using the Principles of Attitudinal Healing and applying them to our lives. It could be using the Principles of Psychosynthesis and applying them to our lives, or The Reiki Principles, or an endless list and supply of principles that are out there already helping millions of people achieve freedom. It could be engaging in a daily meditation practice. It could be engaging in a physical practice that has also been proven to have significant healing properties such as Tai Chi. Many people find that a daily metta practice, which is an ancient practice that comes to us from the Theravadan school of Buddhism, is very helpful and beneficial. The same is true with both spiritually based or secular mindfulness and compassion practices. It may require going into therapy first, going to a life coach first, getting sober first, getting out of an abusive relationship first, leaving our parents’ home first, getting a puppy or kitten first, or it might not require any of these things. BTW, there is no universal law that says that sobriety or being free of an abusive relationship is an absolute necessity in becoming free in absolutely every single case. However, these things are likely true in many such applicable cases.

20.  Recognize that you are not alone. It is true. You are not alone. Others are going through what you are going through whether you ever see them or not; whether or not you ever hear of them or not. And there are those who are not going through what you are going through who are also there for you. Recognize that both ego and duality are both things that can be of great use and aid if approached in certain specific ways. Recognize that you already have intelligences and forms of wisdom, skills, and aptitudes you may be completely unaware of including intelligences, wisdom, skills, and aptitudes that may go far beyond or that even nullifies something or everything I have written here. Recognize that both saying “No” and saying “Yes” with love, mindfulness, and consciousness, can each be very powerful spiritual practices. Find ways to access and use your innate resiliency. Realize that ultimately both you your very self and the universe both need your brilliant, radiant Light much more than it needs your shaming, blaming, guilting, and framing of yourself and others and other life situations, circumstances and realities even though both you and it may need to use those very things in order for you and others to discover your brilliant Light. Good Luck and Godspeed!