The last few days have delivered a number of incredibly impactful insights on “the pursuit of happiness“. Light-bulb, aha, minor epiphany moments and I feel compelled to share 🙂
Our energetic pursuit of happiness is directly related to our experience of unhappiness. What? Let me explain… when we pursue happiness or an outcome that we believe will make us happy – and we don’t get what we want, we have conflict and are unhappy.
So the art of being happy is interestingly enough, a byproduct of just being. When we release the need to realise happiness, we also release expectations. And if we release our expectation / attachment to a specific outcome, the unhappiness never arises.
So how on earth do we do this and still achieve what we want in life? How do we release our attachment to things going the way we want them to? Would we even bother getting out of bed and trying anything if we didn’t believe we were working towards something that would make us happy?
Let’s try something: think of a conflict you are experiencing in your life right now. What expectations do you have about the situation? Write them all down in detail. Go through your list and ask yourself if these expectations have been met?
So, what if you decided to let go of your expectations? Can you do that? Ok, so for the sake of this exercise, take a moment to go ahead and decide to let go. And now ask yourself how you feel? Are you still unhappy or can you now begin to think of other ways of solving the problem?
What if we could completely surrender to how we are experiencing our lives right now? Without all the judgments of whether it is right or wrong, or the need to be right? What if it just is? And what if in doing this, we open up the opportunity of seeing new, creative ways forward?