Finding Your Happiness: Getting What You Really Want
Feb 23, 2021
The self-help world is filled with teachings on goal setting as a road to happiness and fulfillment. Motivation is a hot commodity and we all run after new ways to assure we get more of what we say we want. We’re told we deserve more money and need to heal our relationship with abundance. We deserve the perfect home, the perfect job, the perfect mate, complete Enlightenment, and the perfect life.
When we’re unhappy, we ask our mind, “why”, and the brain answers, “because you don’t have these things. You are not living your best life and you are not achieving what you want to achieve. You’re falling short and not trying hard enough.” We feel guilty, exhausted, and victimized by how hard everything is. But the dream lives on as a talking hurdle that says,
“When I’ve finally achieved X, Y or Z, then I’ll be happy.
Now, I’m not saying that having these things is right or wrong, but I would like to point something out for your consideration.
Right now…Take your biggest goal, that thing you work the hardest on, that thing you know in your heart you just have to achieve. Really connect with it. Why do you have to achieve it? Really sit with this before reading on.
At first, you probably ran through a lot of benefits to achieving your goal. It would make your life different in a bunch of meaningful ways…but why do you need those changes to occur? Go deeper. Really look.
If you keep going with this, you eventually boil it down to a simple truth.
“I need to achieve this because I will not allow myself to feel complete or happy until I do.”
“Why not?”
“Because I just won’t.”
This is the reality. You are holding your happiness hostage until this BodyMind Complex meets your demands. You are essentially living with a terrorist and that terrorist is you.
So, permit me to facilitate a hostage negotiation on behalf of your happiness.
A couple simple truths I’d like you to consider:
- You don’t actually want any of these things. You think you do, but you don’t. What you want is to not feel terrorized. You want to be happy and feel like you are fundamentally good. Don’t you? Really look at it. Is this not the real reason you do these things? You don’t want to be the president of your company. You just want evidence of your importance so that you can feel like you are finally done achieving and now have license to let yourself feel happy, relaxed and completed. You just harbor a dysfunctional story that you cannot be happy until you feel important.
- Once you achieve this, your happiness will be short-lived and the completed storyline will be replaced by a new goal. Have you not noticed this? Think back to your last big achievement. How long did that feeling of pride and completion last? Is it even remotely permanent? Achievement is not a road to lasting happiness. For most of you, it has been a barrier to happiness.
- These barriers to your happiness, these steep conditions, are arbitrarily set by whatever nonsense stories you’ve picked up from others. This whole world runs on stories. These stories are lineages of expectations and rules for living that we take on through schooling, parents, movies, religion and just the general norms of society. Is there a reason you need to commit so strongly to them? Think on this. Probably not.
- Since these are just stories you have adopted, letting go of them is entirely up to you. You don’t have to buy in to this idea that happiness is linked to some achievement. You could simply unlink your happiness from achievement and achieve whatever you want from a place of fulfillment. Warning, you’ll probably want different things after this unlinking happens; but you will finally discover your genuine wants and needs independent of this sea of stories in which you have been swimming.
It is time to admit to yourself that all of these desires are really just a singular desire to be happy and complete.
It is time to admit that you have been holding this hostage.
It is time to admit that you could have just been happy and fulfilled this entire time and it probably would have made the work feel a lot easier.
Change doesn’t always come easy. You may have built up a lot of habitual ways of torturing yourselves. This is where Meditation and Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT Tapping) can be a gamechanger. Meditation in its purest form is the state of completion. Meditation shows you first-hand that your happiness and fulfillment is just what exists when you stop filling the space with stories of lack. You will have to see this for yourself. You can’t just take someone’s word for it. EFT is how you thread that realization from your Meditation through your system of stories so that your life-story better reflects the reality of your Freedom. Those stories are anchored into your nervous system through sensory impressions. EFT gets right to the nervous system and moves them out. This site provides everything you need to master these skills and really dig into this important work.
