Let me ask you a question. Isn’t life about having experiences, enjoying and learning from those experiences? Don’t we want to be happy? Isn’t that what we say we want? Most of us take for granted that, yes, we want to be happy. After all, isn’t that the goal behind most of the choices we make in our lives?
The thing is, we attach our happiness to the conditions, the circumstances, or events going the certain ways, the way we want them to. And we won’t be happy if they don’t. We limit our joy according to external conditions. But joy doesn’t come from anything outside ourselves. We all know this. Sure, things can happen that seem to expand our joy and we say they make us happy. But the experience of joy is an internal one, an opening of our hearts to what is happening and enjoying the moment. It is our choice.
Yet we bother ourselves with every little thing. We put conditions on our ability to enjoy our natural well-being. If the weather is cold and rainy, we wish it was warm and sunny. If it’s hot, we want it to be cool. We close our hearts to the experience because we think something else would be better. But life is what’s happening at the moment. Not our thinking. Not our preferences. Not all the conditions we place on our ability to experience every moment joyfully. That choice is exclusively up to us. No one can do it for us. No external conditions can give it to us. It is an inner decision to open our heart and stay open, to follow the energies within us and keep noticing the tendency to resist — then choose to fall in love with being open and feel the inner joy that accepts and allows whatever shows up in our lives.
Life itself is our greatest guru.
If we look back through our lives at the times we felt really happy, we notice that the feeling itself is always the same. When we were young and we played with friends, we felt happy. When we got older and got our first job, we felt happy. When we fell in love or had a child, we felt happy. Those events are now gone but the feeling stays with us. It’s because it is our natural state when we’re flowing with life.
Living in present joy isn’t about situational happiness. It is about radical honesty with ourselves. It is asking ourselves if we truly want to be happy. Do we really want to live in unconditional joy, enjoying life every moment as it arrives? I’m talking about keeping ourselves open no matter what circumstances arise or the conditions we’re experiencing. If we say yes. We have to mean it. We make a vow to ourselves that we won’t break no matter what comes or goes in our lives. We choose to stay open and enjoy the ride, whatever comes.
This is the yummy way — the path of unconditional, present joy. It’s simple. I’m not saying it’s easy at first due to our conditional programming. It’s a lifestyle choice. And it takes persistent practice in the beginning. That’s why our yummy-stat is so incredible. We get an instant hit if we’re making a detour from love and joy — If there’s a glitch in our love matrix. It feels icky. It tells us we’re putting conditions on our joy and happiness. “I’ll be happy when…”
We decide to appreciate the mystery all around us feeding our lives with experiences. We have to want to feel good, in love with life itself, more than we want to be right about the conditions of our lives. We have to make an unqualified decision that we will be open to what happens, simply for the joy of it.
For me this takes care of so much shit. All those petty disputes my mind gets into with conditions, the weather, traffic, what people say or don’t say or what they do or don’t do, become irrelevant to my state of being. We don’t really have any control over the changing tides of life. But we can control how we choose to experience them. I love the feeling of joy when my heart is open. When we’re happy, we feel that freedom and open heartedness. It fills us with yummy energy for participating in life. We’re accepting and allowing life circumstances and events to come and go without bothering ourselves with the narrative describing the situation. We’re just in it. We are happy.
This is life on the fun track. We pay attention to our tendency to contract and judge conditions and let go and open instead. We get really intimate with all the subtle energies in our minds and state of being, so we can release more and open even more. And the more we do, the more joy we naturally experience and the more fun the exploration is.
When I came across the idea of unconditional happiness as a spiritual path it made total sense to me. It says that we really have only one choice in this life. Do you want to be happy or don’t we want to be happy? See how simple that is. We think we can’t make that choice because we can’t control what’s going to happen, the events and people we come in contact with. But joy is the natural state of a heart and mind at peace with itself and life just as it is. We can keep it that simple. Do I want to welcome and enjoy this moment or not? It’s up to us.
Life doesn’t bother us. We bother ourselves by resisting life as it is. We try to think our way into happiness somewhere down the line after this thing we don’t like is over. But life isn’t happening over there or somewhere in the future. It’s happening now.
If we decide we want to feel good, we want to experience joy and be happy we can quit pretending there’s something conditional about it and relax our heart. We can detach from the narrative in our head and loosen the tension inside caused by our attachment to listening to what it’s saying. We’re tired because our life force is relegated to a narrative about what’s happening rather than being available to actually appreciate and participate in life as its going on. It’s amazing the energy that gets released with this simple act of withdrawing our attention from the chatter in our minds and attending to keeping our heart open.
We can keep it really simple. Have you ever been underwater or held your breath so long you were afraid you’d drown or pass out? When we finally surface for air, we don’t care about anything else. We just want to breathe. We’re grateful to be breathing. We feel the breath more vibrantly than ever before. That’s how simple present joy is. We want its vitality, like breathing. Once we see it’s totally up to us, we do what is necessary to not go under again. We get tuned to our subtle inner energies and learn to feel when our energy starts to tighten, and we choose to open instead. We say yes to life without qualifying it.
Shit’s going to happen. Our boss will make demands. Someone will cut us off on the freeway. Our husband might get cancer. Our country might come under a corrupt president. We might be faced with a global pandemic. The thing we must ask ourselves is do we want to enjoy our life no matter what happens or are we going to let this circumstance steal our joy. We can be like the eye of the storm, at peace with what happens and feel amazing. What’s the downside? Will bothering ourselves change anything about the situation? No. Only our experience of it. Since it’s happening anyway, why not choose to be okay with it and enjoy the moment.
Mostly we don’t really mean it when we say we want to be happy. We think we do, but we don’t. How do we know? Just look at our lives. If we really look closely with an open mind, we see how much we compromise our happiness for even the silliest things. Something someone says or a bad hair day. We are constantly putting conditions on our ability to love and experience joy. We say we’ll be happy when this promotion comes through. Or as long as no one we love dies. Or once the kids are grown and we don’t have so many responsibilities demanding our attention, we’ll be able to relax and enjoy our lives.
We might not have tomorrow. We hear it, but we don’t pay attention. We so willing to compromise our present moment experience for a storyline, that we don’t realize the choice is up to us. Right here, now we can stop and let go of the story of importance and attend to the most important thing in our lives, our inner experience.
I remember first really noticing the immediate hit — the cha-chink, yes, this is right — this feels yummy. Also, the immediate grip of resistance — the impulse to pull back — no, something about this feels wrong — it feels icky.
By paying really close attention I saw how often I judged every little thing. Something would happen and I’d feel a clench in my gut and a story about what’s wrong with it would go off in my head. I’d feel shitty. I tried replacing my judgments with positive affirmations and it helped. But the next thing would disturb me, and I’d have to do it all over again.
By pausing and feeling into where I was feeling the contraction, where the tension in my body, the fear around my heart area, the localization behind my eyes and could see how the mind starts spinning a story reinforcing the icky feeling. By simply letting it do what it wants but withdrawing my attention from the storyline and focusing instead on easing the tension, releasing the resistance and being simply present, I realized I’d already allowed this experience, or it wouldn’t be happening.
Accepting it and letting love show me the path forward became more and more the only thing I was interested in. “Don’t move until you can move from peace and love,” I’d tell myself. This became my new habit.
My commitment to myself was set, I’d shortened the return to present joy. I’d simply zero down to the simple feeling within. It feels shitty to judge. Bingo! The reason not to judge is it doesn’t feel good. It takes me away from my presence, my peace, my joy. This simplified everything. I could simply tune into the energy inside and soften, let go of the story in my mind and open my heart to joy. It’s never about the thing the judgment says or even the situation that triggered it. It’s about how I want to experience myself. I want to be happy, open and in love with life, here and now.
That’s why we have to start with a definitive decision to love our life and enjoy it no matter what happens. Then when stuff happens that tempts us to close and withdraw, we can question it. Is this thing this person said really going to be the reason I give myself a shitty day? Am I really going to give up my joy right now because someone cut me off in traffic, or my hair went funky? Is this the thing I’m going to break my commitment to joy over? If my kid says something I mean, I can’t get into this yoga pose or the shirt I wanted to wear today is at the cleaners, is that worth blowing my day for —closing my heart over?
Why not enjoy the variety of experiences we’re being given every day? We’re going to have the experiences anyway. Why shouldn’t we enjoy them? We can always find something to disturb ourselves with if we want to. But why do it? Things, people and events don’t disturb us. We choose to be disturbed. We choose against our joy and happy bliss with every condition we place. But we can choose to stay open and flow with what is. Joy is condition-less. It is a universal yes to what is here and now. For the joy of it. It’s a way of being in the world and enjoying it.
