Listen to free podcast on being a master of your emotional state and creating your happiness (25 mins.)
(Put your mouse arrow over the link, right click, then select save target as)
What makes us happy?
Popularity? Impressing the opposite sex? Finding our soulmate?
Athleticism? Having a lot of friends?
A flat screen TV? A meaningful job?
Helping those less fortumante than us? Being involved in the community?
Do any of these things actually "make" us happy? Being happy is really very simple. Some may think being happy and living a joyful life is very complicated or some elusive mystery like I did for years and that there is a lot of hoops one must jump through. But the secret isn't really a secret. All spiritual traditions have been teaching this for thousands of years.
Anytime you to choose express love, you create your own happiness. Everything "external" like people's approval or love expressed to you is just a trigger for the "internal", or your love and acceptance you express for yourself and life. You don't need other people to do this.
Does our beloved, friends or other people's love and acceptance actually "make" us feel happy? For me, in order to begin to take responsibility for my own happiness, to be a master of creating my emotional state and truly understand how to experience inner freedom and peace, I had to take a moment to precisely see that it is the love and acceptance I expressed for myself and life that created my happiness. Not the love from other people or events in life.
What's really happening internally and learning Self Mastery
When we meet that certain someone of the opposite sex we're interested in and they say or do something to express they like us, is this really responsible for that boost of happiness we experience? This again is really just a trigger for us to express love for ourselves. To acheive freedom of feeling like you must get other people to like you just so you can like yourself, one must adapt the skills to change the belief structure the leads you to believing other people or things make you happy.
When we get that job or degree, for example, that we've been seeking, we express gratitude and then acceptance for ourselves and for our lives. We may notice a drop in stress as well. We say or silently believe, "I've finally done it!" It is not really the job or degree that made us feel complete. It was our choice to believe that nothing is missing in our lives that led this feeling of contentment.
When we get that flat screen TV, we choose to express gratitude, although it usually seems to diminish quickly. When we believe we've gotten that athletic fame or popularity, we express self-respect and contentment (although in this case, usually the opposite quickly forms, an inflated ego). And, when we believe we are making others laugh, we choose to express love for ourselves in the form of believing we are funny.
If all these things are mere triggers, then we have 100% control to express these emotions without the triggers, which is to say we don't need to do these things or try to minipulate other people with the intent to feel those emotions. We can choose to express these emotions on our own through mastering the proper skills that anyone can learn, called Self Awareness. This is what led me to true inner freedom after so many years of feeling not good enough and low self confidence.
Feeling afraid, unworthy, or too jealous or resentful and actually not wanting to love
I used to feel too afraid of what other’s thought of me to express love for myself and others. I also felt unworthy to love because I didn't think I had enough friends and too many things in my past that made me inadequate to be "worthy" to love. Or, I didn't even want to love based on the jealousy and envy of others who I felt had more of something I needed to be good enough, or resentments I felt of my past that made me too angry and hateful to even want to love.
I can tell you from my personal experience of transformation that it only seems impossible to be able to change to this type of belief system because I had so much of my faith invested in agreements that I thought was the way life worked. Of the many years of therapy, one serious program I studied for years and attended for months is called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).
They taught me it was not the action, rather the belief I had about the action. While I respect the principles of this program, the psychologists and therapists would give me suggestions on new beliefs to replace the old beliefs. But how was this really supposed to work without understanding why I created the false belief in order to dissolve it? I just layered a new belief and because of my fear, I had not faith left to put in that new belief. I tried and tried to believe their suggestion for a "new or different belief" but I just couldn't believe it without truly understanding why and how I created the fear based beliefs keeping me afraid.
What we are conditioned to believe through upbringing and through society
All spiritual traditions teach the same Truth of expressing love, compassion, and gratitude for yourself and everything in life. But what are we conditioned to believe? What do songs we hear, our upbringing, other people’s stories about life influence us to believe we must go out and do, people we must control, things we must achieve to feel acceptance and love for ourselves?
Seek love, respect and approval from others by believing it is the opposite sex or friends' love, respect and acceptance for us that we need in order to love ourselves.
Agree to be afraid of them rejecting us because we believe their love, respect and acceptance for us is needed for our happiness and for us to be "good enough".
Seek respect and approval from others by getting feedback from them that we have an important job or degree. Seek a career or degree that we find "meaningful" so we can then 'finally' choose to believe we're somebody and be content.
Agree to sacrifice our lives and feel like we're 'not somebody' or 'inferior' until we get there.
Seek compassion from others to "feel sorry for us" by the part of us that acts out the Victim role. Agree to need acceptance, feel not good enough, feel inadequate, and unworthy as a means for finding some sort of security in an identity, even though we don't want the Victim-identity, we feel we're powerless to change and feel safer by being "something" than not knowing at all as to what we are.
Seek gratitude from others by doing things for them just so they'll thank us and like us for doing it, not because we genuinely love doing it and we want to help them.
Agree to let these activities control our lives.
Agree to suffer just like those who are starving, less fortunate or in pain that we feel obligated to help.
Through mastering the skills of Self Awareness we begin to truly understand why and how we agree to these types of belief paradigms that create our suffering. Through true understanding, I began to see that these are lies I accumulated through life with no awareness. I now see, as you can too, how we were created to be in harmony with others, with life, with God by expressing love. By seeking to control others and control life, we are acting out the highest form of selfishness through fear of rejection. More and more as you see the lies you believe and understand they are lies, you can no longer believe in them. The lies begin to fall apart and you naturally return to loving God, others as yourself. You return to happiness you experienced as a young child.
When you learn to completely accept yourself unconditionally, nobody can reject you People would tell me for years to just accept myself. In turn I would say, but I am so inadequate...my life is full of so many problems...I'm not good enough, how could I possibly accept myself or accept this life I'm stuck in?"
99% of the time, when I didn’t accept myself, it was me that was creating what I perceived as "the problem". I don't have enough friends ... I don't have a good enough job... I didn't make this grade or I didn't play this sport or that sport. I simply cannot see how I am good enough.
I believed this with as much faith as we believe the grass is green and the sky is blue. I just couldn't see how to see it any other way. I began to get angry when others would "just tell me" how I should think.
Eliminate your image of perfection and you will accept yourself
When we create an "image" of what a meaningful job is for example, we seek that "image" and only for moments will we actually "believe" we're that image. We choose to seek that image because we believe we are not good enough the way we are, and that that image will somehow make us "good enough". This is called an Image of Perfection or Image of Total Acceptance without rejection.
During this usual brief time period when we believe we're that image of perfection, we accept and love ourselves unconditionally; we feel fulfillment and happiness as a logical result. Very soon afterwards though, because we attach our happiness to being that "image" and that image is always changing, we then seek another image from our job, or something else for our happiness and we again become unhappy.
Many clients I talk to tell me when they were deciding what they wanted to be, say in high school perhaps, they created an "image" of being somebody or being important by having that degree and the job title that would come with it. They were also probably pressed to "do something in their life", to be "a winner" by their parents, coach, teacher, priest or pastor, etc. By believing in trying to become that image of perfection, they have conditioned themselves to hold something externally responsible for their happiness such as the respect and compliments from others for being say a "doctor, lawyer or psychologist." Once the feedback stops from other people, or, doesn't meet our needs, especially those who they felt they needed to impress most they start to feel as if it wasn't what they thought it was. They realize it was just an illusion. They begin to seek another "image" of what will make them happy such as an even higher degree or big cause to volunteer in. The search to be happy never ends and will always result in self rejection and unhappiness in various degrees.
The benefits of expressing gratitude and compassion
So many told me in therapy to try to be thankful for what I had. To go out and have compassion for others, to not think about myself. That this was important for some reason while going through feelings of depression. While it is important, it took finding a perspective that I could believe in and then reap the benefits of to keep up the motivation to do while depressed. As you probably know, when you feel depressed you have very little energy or motivation to do much of anything and it is likely hard to find anything to be sincerely grateful during these times as well.
But putting your intent to get to the point of being able to believe that you are 100% responsible for creating all of your emotions ... that you can learn simple skills and lessons on how to express gratitude, which is a form of loving-thankfulness for what you already have, that once you put more faith and emphasis on the gratitude than the fear based false beliefs, you will naturally feel happy. To express compassion for others because this is what makes you happy and to do this with everyone with no conditions again because this is what we would desire for ourselves from others.
Now, perhaps this popular paradigm of "just being obligated to be grateful" or "not being selfish and thinking of others first" suddenly has so much more motivation behind learning how to do so because of the ultimate experience of bliss, peace and joy by doing so yourself without the external trigger!
Compassion and gratitude doesn't require feeling sorry for anyone
Often in life we are conditioned to feel guiltily or not deserving of what we have when we encounter others who we feel and perceive are less fortunate than us. If I helped one person who was less fortunate than me and chose to enter their suffering, now I am unhappy. Say another person comes along and now sees that I am unhappy and chooses to feel sorry for me and believes in the same paradigm of needing to also suffer right along side of me in order to show me compassion. Eventually, person after person, the world would turn into a bunch of people suffering over one individual.
This certainly does not make sense and is not needed to help others and express compassion. When we learn that feeling sorry for someone involves not respecting them, that respect is form of love, we see clearly that we help others and help ourselves most by expressing respect and compassion, not feelings of enabling others to be Victims.
Another paradigm that we are conditioned to believe in is that we must go out and donate our time or volunteer in order to feel gratitude or compassion. This can lead to feeling like a slave to doing something not to mention using an exterior-motive for something just so we can reep the reward which leads to feeling un-authentic and guilt. Most of all, this is not the most effective, quickest way to feel happy, compassion for others and thankful for our own abilities, gifts and talents in life.
Choosing to learn skills to master your life which is to learn to master your emotions without having to go out and do these things and realize the emotional benefits is to experience true peace, freedom and happiness. Only then are we able to truly enjoy life and do these things such as helping others based completely now out of our desire to help others the way we would like to be helped and our natural love for our fellow human beings, never expecting to get anything
in return.
Expressing love doesn't require being taught - you were made to naturally love!
Through learning, practicing and then applying skills like Self Awareness, we are able to change our false beliefs, put aside our fears and are no longer feel afraid, unworthy, jealous or resentful to love. We see the lies that we used to believe in that led us to not liking ourselves. We naturally loved ourselves, others and life as children. It doesn't require any training; this is a natural part of your spiritual being. When you return to loving yourself, you naturally feel good. Life becomes fun and you discover there really is no hoops to have to jump through to be happy.
Can Self Awareness help you? Please complete the form below to be contacted for a free consultation. In your message, include what you would like help with the most.