What Does Your Happiness Depend On?

[Joyce Shafer]

If someone told you that you could be unconditionally happy, you would do whatever this took. Or, would you?

In Anthony De Mello’s book, Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality, he wrote that it is challenging to be unconditionally happy because we fight it. Why do we fight it? We have expectations, some of which are realistic and some of which are not.

To be unconditionally happy (or even just happy most of the time), you have to let go of your dearly-held (or addiction to) expectations. That is not necessarily easy to do. Perhaps, without realizing it, you have, as De Mello wrote, a thought (belief) like, “You are my happiness. If I don’t get you, I refuse to be happy.”

That segment, “If I don’t get you,” is the clincher because the word YOU can represent anything. Think of what (or who) it is you desire and use the word or words in front of the word You that starts the quote. Example: (Wealth, love, success, power, control, etc.), you are my happiness. If I don’t get you, I refuse to be happy.”

It basically comes down to saying if you do not get what you want, expect, or demand, you REFUSE to be happy. You refuse to experience happiness amid What Is.

De Mello added that what we fight, we empower; that is, you give what you resist as much power as you use to fight it. And, you wonder why it does not shift; wonder why it or they do not change, rather than focus on changing yourself.

If you continue to consider anyone or anything the enemy or adversary, can you really expect your relationship with it (money, health, weight, life) or them to be anything other than an ongoing battle? You can do what you need to, to look after or protect yourself AND stop engaging the “enemy” in a fight.

When you resist What Is and insist it or they be the way you want, you bind yourself, in a negative way, to the lack of what you desire or demand, as though you put heavy shackles on your ankles. Wherever you go, whatever you do, you drag this weight, this result of your Insistence on Resistance, with you.

You can spring the lock on such shackles with a choice to let go of your attachment to this way of thinking and behaving, and pay attention to what YOU think, feel, say, and do that causes you to refuse to be happy until or unless what you are convinced must happen happens.

You behave this way because you were programmed to do so, because that was and still is the prevalent example all around you. It is the syndrome you have seen before, “I will be happy when…,” that keeps you miserable. You stay miserable because you continue to demand others and your material reality change rather than empower yourself to understand how reality truly operates, and then practice this.

When you let go of resistance and observe yourself, others, and the smaller and bigger picture, What Is shifts, and often without any more effort than what is described here. You often call this witnessing a miracle. This is a universal law: what you give you get more of. Give resistance, you get more to resist. Give fear, you get more to fear. Give trust to the universe in all things, you get more evidence of why that works.

You have been brainwashed to believe you have to control or take control of your reality, when what is required is for you to recognize you are in a synergistic relationship with reality.

De Mello wrote, “Come home to yourself. Observe yourself. That’s why I said earlier that self-observation is such a delightful and extraordinary thing. After a while you don’t have to make any effort, because, as illusions begin to crumble, you begin to know things that cannot be described. It’s called happiness. Everything changes and you become addicted to awareness.”

When you choose awareness over illusion, stress and strain diffuse, as will anger. The path to happiness requires you challenge your entire belief system . . . to seek the CURE, which may or may not be painful, rather than just relief from the painful result of your illusions.

You can call it Law of Attraction or call it common sense; what you call Awareness does not matter. That you call it into your life and way of being does matter.

You are what you practice.
© Joyce Shafer