“Happiness is an inside job” — William Arthur Ward
“Be happy with what you have and are, be generous with both, and you won’t have to hunt for happiness” — William E. Gladstone
The one thing most humans have in common is the desire to be happy. Although most people seek it as either a future event or something that has passed, never to be recaptured.
Happiness or fulfillment is not something we should really be striving for in some up-and-coming event — it’s something we’ve got to grab right now.
We’re bogged down with the false sense of happiness through attainment — the idea that money and things can buy our bliss.
“Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.” — Denis Waitley
Let’s take a look at some of the prime aspects that I think are worth kicking to the curb in the pursuit of happiness:
- Negative Self Talk — You simply cannot thrive on a negative inner dialogue. Masaru Emoto fluidly demonstrated the effects of positive, indifferent and negative emotion on water (see more HERE). We are made up of approximately 55-65% water (depending on your age and sex), so can you imagine what negative thoughts are doing to your body? If you’ve got nothing nice to say to yourself, say nothing at all. Stop yourself when you notice the negative gremlins popping up. Ask yourself if there’s something more encouraging to affirm. For example, say you’re thinking ‘I’m such a loser’. You can redirect that to, ‘I try my best’, or, ‘There are some things I get right’.
- Self Loathing — There is no space for anything but self love if you want a fulfilling existence. The type of self love I’m referring to is anything but selfish or narcissistic — it’s necessary. You can’t expect other people to love you if you don’t have love, honour and respect for yourself. This kind of love is cultivated from an innate knowing that you are a complete and divine piece of universal energy (or God/the Force/fill in the blank here). It doesn’t need to rehash the past or beat itself over the head a million times for past mistakes or inadequacies — it is the wholeness of self realization (your ‘I Am’ presence). For more on this topic, please read ‘3 Crucial Steps to Self Acceptance’.
- Fear — There are things much more important than fear and we’ve got to wake up and walk through the fear to get to them. Fear is a grand threshold guardian — you can either sit at the gate, dig your heels in and go no further or you can cock your hat as you pass on through. As Jim Morrison so eloquently put it, ‘Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.’ Try to see fear as the rumblings of an earthquake that is about to shake you out of your comfort zone into an infinity of possibility. When you walk through your fears there is only space left to be — when you are in this state, happiness or fulfillment is all that is left to experience.
- Service to Self — The greatest amount of happiness is achieved when we are not only seeing to our own joy but when we are helping others to find their well of happiness — service to others. Throw out the need to trample on others in indulgence of your own whims. We’re all in this life together — we should work in symbiosis with each other. What affects one affects us all.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” — Marianne Williamson
And in parting, here are some beautiful words from John Lennon that wrap this up nicely:
“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.”
Cherie Roe Dirksen is a self-empowerment author and multi-media artist from South Africa. To date, she has published 3 self-help and motivational books and brings out weekly inspirational blogs at her site www.cherieroedirksen.com.
Her ambition is to help you to connect with your innate gift of creativity and living the life you came here to experience by taking responsibility for your actions and becoming the co-creator of your reality.
You can also follow Cherie on Facebook (The Art of Empowerment).
Cherie posts a new article on CLN every Thursday. To view her articles, click HERE.
