Recently I found myself getting very unhappy with someone about something. As the unhappiness grew I was reminded by myself that happiness is a choice, so of course I began to use Huna-related techniques in order to get happy again (mainly Dynamind, Blanket Forgiveness, and Permission).
The problem was, they didn't work very well in this instance. Oh, they provided relief from the major tension and eliminated the anger, but I was still unhappy.
So then I started thinking about the unhappiness itself. It was a form of resistance, of course, but resistance to what? The initial experience of unhappiness had to do with resisting what someone else had done, and that produced anger. The later unhappiness felt more like a mild form of depression. I know that depression is associated with feeling out of control, but I had given up trying to control the person I first got angry with, so what was the issue I was still having a problem with?
Finally, I realized that it was related to a whole lot of things that had happened in the world that I was unhappy about, meaning a whole lot of things that I didn't like and that I didn't feel I could do anything about. And I wondered why I had to be unhappy about things I couldn't do anything about. And then I realized that I had fallen into one of the oldest unhappiness traps in the world. I had made my happiness dependent on the behavior of other people. I had, in effect, made them the owners of my happiness, able to dole it out to me by choice, by whim, or even unintentionally. My happiness no longer belonged to me.
Well, of course, being me, I couldn't let that state of affairs continue. Nevertheless, I found it surprisingly difficult to recover the ownership of my own happiness.
The awareness of what I had done helped a lot, but the hard part was training myself to feel happy regardless of people, places, circumstances, and events. I was amazed to find out how much my happiness depended on so many little things like temperature, sunshine, food preparation, news, voice tones, whether machines worked the way I wanted them to or not, bills, bank account levels, the availability of things, whether other people were happy or not, and on and on and on. My happiness was owned, not just by one other person, but by a whole multitude of things. To use a business metaphor, the ownership of my happiness was divided among thousands of shareholders.
To continue the metaphor, I am in the process of "buying up" all those shares. My aim to to create a sole (soul?) corporation where I own all the stock in my happiness, where I am the only one to decide whether I feel happy or not. It's a process, because every day I discover shareholders I didn't know existed (it's easy to recognize them: they "make" me feel unhappy). Nevertheless, it's a buy-out that I have every intention of achieving. I will own my own happiness. Will you?
Thanks Serge,
ReplyDeleteThis was a very helpful reminder. I find myself in the same boat and have to work hard and focus in order to own my own happiness. Aloha, Katherine
Thanks, for sharing, Serge. It helped me a lot, to know it wasn't just me. I just read yesterday in "Before Happiness" by Shawn Anchor that before happiness comes the belief or mindset that things can get better. And I realized that my belief was, that things could only get worse from here on out. And that may be so, but I don't know for sure and after that, surely things will get better.
ReplyDeleteThank you for being you. Your words, to me, have so much more power because they are not proclaimed from the top of a misty, sun-drenched mountain but, rather, shared from a place we are all much more familiar with.
ReplyDeleteThank you very much, it has been an excellent way of explaining it. Brings a smile to my heart.
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