Happiness is An Inside Job:

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...We are alive at a time when there is widespread poverty, when the gap between the haves and have-nots grows increasingly wider at an alarming and intense rate, when the growing threat of world war looms large. People have also taken that intense self-loathing and turned it outward, targeting specific groups with such bigotry and hatred that it hurts my heart to even contemplate. 

 

This is not an ‘American’ problem or a ‘Western’ problem; it is a Global endemic of us versus them. And it all stems from the even more pervasive issue that our entire focus has become external because focusing inside has become so painful to most of us that we cannot bear to look at what we might find. One need only look at the past two+ years of pandemic to see the truth of this. Still, if COVID was here to teach us anything (and it was) it is that we are all one race, one people, one mind. At the cosmic level and spiritual places, there is no separation, no time, no distance, no “us” and no “them”, simply a communal spirit of “we”. What happens to one of us, really does happen to all of us. 

 

What is Happiness

It raises the question what is happiness? More importantly, how do we access and choose lasting happiness? For me, happiness is that sense of peace and quiet Grace. It’s the gratitude I feel when I get into bed at the end of a day with the sense of a job well done. It is the presence I have when I recognize that I’m triggered and I’m experiencing another opportunity for growth and surrender. It is the love I have for every human on the planet, even (and especially) the ones who trigger me. It is breathing into fear and anxiety and overwhelm in order to sit and stay in the discomfort until it is no longer uncomfortable. It is laughing with friends, playing with my daughter, beautiful sunsets, and rainbows after a storm. Happiness to me is surrender and calm, regardless of what storm is raging around me. Happiness is knowing I am the calm in that storm....