Being Happy, Not Looking for Happiness

It’s dawned on me lately that I’m really happy.  Not just that I feel a lot of periods of joy (which is a neurochemical process and not to be confused with real happiness), or that I sometimes feel happy, or becoming happi-er (which is a nice way of saying “less unhappy”), but actually and truly happy.  This is my natural state.

In this place of happiness, I can feel sorrow, grief, frustration, anxiety, joy, and all the other emotions.  But they’re now all housed in a place called “happiness” that is my home.  So when I say I’m happy, I mean I actually… happy.

And I also realize I haven’t been here in a long time.  Maybe not since college, where I had a brief stint of happiness for four years before going into the abyss.  I’d written before that I finally feel like myself after decades of feeling various degrees of lost, wandering, struggling, searching and “seeking.”  I’m home and I’m happy – with myself and my life.

Readers will note that some of my recent posts don’t seem all that happy.  (Or maybe you can notice the underlying state, but it’s hard for most to perceive.)  It’s difficult to explain the concept to people who attribute joy to happiness.  Joy is that euphoric feeling, but it’s neurochemical and as such very temporal.  It usually is followed by an emotional trough, a neurochemical hangover.  Joy is great, but the pursuit of joy and the up-down cycle is really unhealthy – it’s like binge drinking. Happy people don’t seek joy, they let it come to them and they enjoy it in the moment.  Unhappy people pursue joy in the hopes of finding happiness and usually find neither, or joy comes at a very high price.

So what about my critical posts?  Well, the great thing about being happy is I don’t need attachment.  I can look at my life and relationships clearly and evaluate whether things/ people currently in my life are contributing or taking away from my happiness.  One can’t evaluate those things from a place of unhappiness. 

So when I “came home,” I unpacked all the stuff I brought with me and started going through it.  It turns out I have a lot of great treasures, and I also have been carrying a lot of crap.  Normally I’d just toss the garbage without much thought, but a lot of this stuff are things I’d made an integral part of my identity during my “seeking happiness” stage.  I think it’s valuable to acknowledge that things I publicly held out as “this is me” are in fact not contributing to my happiness.  And doubly so when those things are advertised as ways for people to “find happiness.”

I realize I may be overreacting in some of my criticism, but I feel a lot of regret, and a certain amount of resentment, for wasting my time and money on things that were sold as “growth” which actually served to hold me back.  And I feel compelled to warn others to avoid the mistakes I made.  Because as I look at these things now, I don’t see any students of these modalities “graduating” to happiness.  They’re mostly all unhappy people pursuing joy and validation and basically doing what I did – spinning their wheels wasting time and money on magic beans.

Yes, in the process of returning to happiness, I discovered some practices and beliefs that greatly aided in my healing and finally finding my way home.  But these few very good, very valuable things were in the midst of much larger and more powerful toxic patterns that were a real disservice.

I’ve been very hard on a lot of the “growth” and “spiritual” gurus I’ve come across, because I really want them to stop and take a hard look at themselves and what they’re doing.  People who pursue joy are not happy – by definition.  It’s taken me a long time to really get this.  People who “receive” a lot of joy are only on the more short-term-successful end of the unhappiness/ happiness spectrum.  The “coaches” are for the most part no happier than their students.  In many cases, they’re actually much less happy.

The metrics of happiness most coaches use, which are basically flashpoints of temporal joy-receiving, perpetuate unhappiness.  I was stuck in this negative-feedback loop for a long time.  Longer than I needed to be.  Ultimately what got me out was an extended period of literally doing nothing other than the things I had to do keep my life going and take care of the people who needed and loved me. I disconnected from all of it, sat with that voice saying I was missing out or bored or lonely and did nothing until my mind and spirit healed itself and I felt myself again.

And it shouldn’t have to be like this.  I think it’s bullshit that wounded people who haven’t dealt with their own crap, but who have “Facebook success” are running around selling their crap advice to other wounded people.  I don’t think people do this on purpose, or that these people are bad people, but process and results are still toxic – it doesn’t matter if the intentions are good or not, you’re still producing toxic crap.

So yes, from this place, I’ve been venting.  And posting warnings.  It’s what my higher self says to do.  And I believe it’s the initial stages of formulating something that actually works for people, that actually helps people come home to their happiness.

And frankly, I feel ashamed for a lot of my journey.  Ashamed for buying into the BS, ashamed for not listening and respecting my higher self that repeatedly warned me I was off-track, ashamed for the hurt I caused others, and mostly myself. I lost good years of my life and thousands of dollars chasing rainbows and unicorns and I’m here to warn you so you don’t do the same.

You want to really evolve?  Stop eating bullshit.  It’s good for plants, but toxic for people.  Just stop.  And just because some people are finding a lot of joy from eating bullshit doesn’t make it any less toxic.  Take a careful look at their lives.  Bragging about joy on social media is usually a good indication of deep unhappiness.  Image-crafting is a sure-fire sign of unhappiness.  These “successful” people have periods of joy, maybe many, and yet when you get close you can feel the unhappiness, the festering wounds, the “I’ll-do-anything-to-not-be-me” obsession.  They’re slowly dying from poisoning from a steady diet of BS, and they sell it as ice cream.  And your money doesn’t make them any happier, either. 

And you’ll try it and find some joy and then be more unhappy than ever.  Just like trying drugs.  Because they’re just pushers.  (Some of them push drugs AND coaching, and the overlap isn’t a coincidence.)

So yes I want to warn people.  I’m not better off for spending years fucking over my life and wasting money under the guise of “evolution.”  I learned some things – some valuable things for which I’m grateful. But the experience sucked.  That part of me that feels this way is solidly grounded in my truth.  And it puts me at odds with people and modalities that I’ve identified with and endorsed for a long time.

Part of me hurts for that – I don’t like doing things that hurt people I care about.  But I spent decades hurting the person I should have been caring about the most, but was treating like absolute shit – myself.  These things I did really hurt that man -and all of it was unnecessary. 

So if I can keep you from getting sucked into that cycle and find your way to a truly happy life, I’ll do it.  Because I am happy now.  And it’s a lot easier than you might think to get here.