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Occasionally I find myself mumbling to myself: ‘I am not happy.‘ Add the scrunched up face…
What does that mean that I am not happy?
How do I know I am not happy?
Is it momentary that I am not happy? Or am I commenting about my whole life?
Let’s look at that. If ‘not happy’ is present, if I can notice it, then that means that there must something I compare with how I feel now. A before and an after. A now and before… The ‘not happy’ happened, like ripples on a lake’s surface.
Ripples on a lake’s surface: that mean that before the ripples the lake was smooth.
Before I said that I wasn’t happy, I WAS happy. Hm. Not how I thought happiness was…
I searched google to see what other people say happy is.
- Happiness is a thing called Joe, says Peggy Lee
- If you want to be happy, lower your expectations.
- Happiness is an inside job
- I want you to make me happy…
So you may think that happiness is ALWAYS getting what you want.
If I had a job, if I were married, if I had a child, if I had a dog, if and if and if…
But maybe getting what you want is not happiness at all. We see a lot of people who have everything and are not happy.
But of course if your whole cone of vision, your whole visual field, all your thoughts are around what you don’t have, yeah, then you live in scarcity. And inside scarcity, inside survival there is no chance for happiness, only for unhappiness.
So you live in unhappiness with blips of not-unhappiness…
Many of my clients live there. I can hear the whining as I am writing this.
I have some clients who want everything and therefore they are always unhappy. Wanting everything all at once is a recipe for unhappiness.
You can have anything but not everything, or not all at once.
Consider that all your wants come from the decision you made when something happened, when you were three years old. The ‘break in belonging’ experience, when you decided what was wrong with you, what was wrong with them, what was wrong with it. And you decided on the ‘fix’.
What if happiness is really the lack of unhappiness?
If we considered that, we would pay more attention to how we perpetuate unhappiness with our wants, expectations, and start to enjoy life. Responsibility. Responsibility for our own actions, our attitude, and remove it, change it, or at the minimum OWN IT.
My story this morning: the Spectrum story, the cable company that can’t get their act right…
…and even after total of three hours on the phone, and four promises, they can’t get that I am not a customer, I don’t have their service, and I don’t owe them any money.
But they keep calling me. 10-20 times a day. I don’t answer the phone, but every time it rings, I have a twinge of WTF? A cloud on my happy sky.
When you don’t have a reason to be unhappy, you are actually happy.
If happy were that jubilant, laughing dancing state on the picture to the left, then I have never been happy! I could pretend it. I could maybe even enjoy jumping. But wanting that state to be my life would make me unhappy 99.99% of the time…
Suggesting that happy isn’t that rare and unsustainable and maybe even unhealthy state?
And this is exactly what I am trying to say here.
The normal state of a human is happiness. Life is working. You are alive.
And then there are the ripples on that ‘lake’ of happiness…
- Pain
- frustration
- anger
- DISAPPOINTMENT
All are a version of ‘this shouldn’t be’. This is something I don’t want.
Recently I had a lot of problems with service providers.
Occasionally I had to talk to a customer service person again, and again, and again, and again… Stay on hold for 10-20-30 minutes, only to have someone promise me something that they didn’t, maybe couldn’t keep.
And that didn’t mean I was unhappy for days, week, or even minutes.
I had twinges or irritation, and then I was happy again. Waiting on hold? No problem, not a big enough reason to be unhappy. Unless…
Unless is a word that comes up in my articles a lot.
The unless.
The unless always leads down the rabbit hole to find a fixed idea about how the world should be, how you should be, how everything should be, look, feel, sound, smell like. Just like you did when you were a toddler, after the break in belonging event.
The world should be made perfect, just for your sake.
But, bummer, the world is the way the world is, people are the way they are, you are the way you are, and your job is to make the best of it.
It’s 3 am, I just got up. I am sitting by my computer typing away. Next to me is the wall and in it a bunch of raccoons. The babies are growing, so the mother diligently works to enlarge the hole the babies were born into, to give room to the growing babies…
The raccoon mom is not happy. And the babies give voice to unhappiness by squealing when they are rudely shoved out of the way. They don’t understand how life is: they are born into ‘I want the world to be the way I want the world to be’.
If you are not happy most of the time, that is a sign that you are immature, and your only job is to mature. Because maturity means that you know it is YOUR job to adjust yourself to things so you can do the best you can with what you have, to be happy, instead of wanting everything to adjust itself to your every whim.
If your time is filled with unhappiness, complaints, and doom and gloom, your energy goes to that. And you are unproductive and worthless in life…
You can’t be unhappy and be productive.
You are like a baby crying for the bottle, even though you are in your 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, maybe even your 60’s.
You bought into the hogwash that happiness is not what you feel. That happiness is somewhere else. That you have to pursue, chase, and find happiness.
Like the woman who went to an Ayahuasca retreat. Out of that her daughter lost her mind, and she ended up with a shrub growing in her lungs. She went there because she was looking to become happy. Not with what she had, but what she hoped was on the other side.
And then to another retreat… and a healing course… and and and… Ending up with cancer.
Whoever you are, if you think that happiness is outside of what your life is, you are probably a fixit machine, piling fixes upon fixes. You are so busy fixing, that you have no energy to actually PERFORM in life. You don’t have energy and you don’t even have a desire for that.
- Your desire is what I call ‘what you feel like’ having, doing, experiencing… All surface.
- Your ambition is what I call what you want. It comes from the inside.
If I told you that what you want is on the other side of a small forest, and you have to get through the forest to get to it,
- your desire would make you bump into trees.
- Your ambition would guide you to go AROUND trees…
the trees are not there to block your way, they are just there…
What takes you out of the state of happiness, which is the natural state of being alive, is your desire. Your desire for more, better, different. For fixing. And having visions of all that…
And you are so hellbent on those visions that your insides. the spirit, the Self are dying, and stop even talking to you. Because you are not interested. You are only interested in what is easy, what is fancy, what is exciting, what is pleasant, what is instant.
And, of course, you are not happy.
You are as if you were a fish and you didn’t enjoy being wet.
If you came to me because you are not happy: I can’t help you.
Even if you are not happy because you are not well.
You see, if I am stupid enough to spend my time and my energy to heal you, the foundation of your life, but the you won’t change. your attitude, your behavior won’t change. you’ll get sick again and do AGAIN what had made you sick as soon as you feel better.
This exact thing has been happening, person after person. so I am getting a bitter taste in my mouth about doing any healing.
If you are dead broke, and win a billion bucks, you’ll be broke again real soon. Why? Because your relationship to money is unnatural, inept, and immature. Having money doesn’t change it.
And the same is with health. you’ll squander your health and be sick again. But this second time, after I brought you back to health, you’ll get sicker.
And to your utter surprise: I will not do any more work for you. I will not throw good money after bad money…
My money is my energy, my time, MY HAPPINESS. Hell no.
I had an interesting experience with my landlord on Friday.
I sent him messages about the raccoon infestation. So he finally came. He found a wayward tiny raccoon baby in the next yard. He was more interested in rescuing that raccoon baby than the fact that his property is being destroyed. And I bet he will do nothing.
I saw that he would be the kind of potential client I do not want.
Hillel’s words ring true:
If you are not for you, who is for you?
If you are only for yourself, who are you?
And if not now, when?
He doesn’t mean reaching for another cookie, or playing another computer game. Neither of those say that you are for you.
Only your AMBITION, your inner, is for you. And for that you need to develop discipline: choosing what you want (ambition) every time you feel like doing something else.
Very interesting that many clients don’t know the difference…
Discipline is a skill. And in the skill building challenge I recommend building the skill of discipline. You can imagine how well that goes when someone can’t understand what the heck it is. Not too well.
My discipline level is 30%. That means I choose what I want only 30% of the time. Your discipline, I bet is between zero and 2%, meaning that you may choose what you want occasionally, every couple of days, for a minute or two.
And that is why you are unhappy, unhealthy, and unloved and unlovable. You have no self-awareness, you have no awareness.
You are unhappy while happiness is the water you swim in. It is Unrecognized. Unharnessed.
Maturity, choosing, choosing what you want instead of what you feel like is a skill. You need to develop it like Arnold Schwarzenegger developed his muscles. It takes a lot of repetition for that muscle to be worth anything.
At some point in his bodybuilding career he had perfect upper body and skinny legs. He went to a teacher who told him to leg-lift a weight that was double of what he had been using.
He thought the teacher was wrong. Hell, he thought he was going to break. But you can do a whole lot more, when you have muscles, than you think.
Some clients think that you can go, like a car, from zero to 60 in one fell swoop. Going from no muscle to big muscle. They are overdoing. They think overdoing will be good for you.
So this skinny client tried to do a 100 pushups the first time he tried, even though he has no muscles to speak of. He is now sick, having a fever, nausea, whatever. And probably will stop doing any pushups. Why? because he doesn’t understand life. It doesn’t fit his worldview of instant.
To build up to a hundred pushups, you need to do pushups every day, every other day, for weeks. How long? Muscletest says three weeks. I cannot do 100 pushups. I am lucky to do one.
So if I wanted to get to a hundred, I would start with one half…
And do one half, until it’s easy. That phase may take as long as a week! And then I would add another half and practice that as long as it takes to make it easy.
But if you are so immature that you have no idea how life works, how muscles work, how habits work, I am sorry, you’ll never amount to ANYTHING. Because you live in delusion, not in reality.
The skill building challenge is for people who are willing to practice for the long haul. And for people who are willing to practice inside an organizing principle…
If you aren’t willing or aren’t able to set an organizing principle, then please, don’t be in that challenge, you’ll just try to prove me wrong…
What should be your organizing principle?
You probably already know what it is.
Maybe it’s humility: declaring yourself not knowing, or not knowing enough.
Or maybe it is ‘being your own person who takes care of yourself first’
Often your email name gives it away.
The dude whose email says: be important, the woman whose email says: start with yourself, they are onto something… They live in hope, while they work against themselves.
But having ‘being important to me’, or ‘taking care of myself first’ are excellent organizing principles.
If you don’t know what would be a good one, the skill building challenge where you have access to me through email is a good place to fine-tune your organizing principle.
Unless, of course, you are arrogant as sh!t, and look down on me…
Here is another misunderstanding I see with people in the challenge:
they can’t tell the difference between being and behaving.
They are not the same. Behaving is skin deep, and more often than not is a pretense.
They are probably also religious, pretending to their god. Ugh.
OK, enough for now.
The Skill Building Challenge
If you want to be in the skill building challenge, you can. It’s the place where you can sort out what to do, why do it, what the skill really is, before you start practicing. And then practice what you decided to practice in earnest so you can start moving, start experiencing yourself, start enjoying the water you swim in.
Just one more thing: it is important to pick a project that has a worldly value. Like completing a course, like building a business, like learning to write stories that sell, like learning to teach English effectively, or like myself: learning to build premium courses and sell them effectively to people I want to teach.
Why? Because otherwise you’ll have really nothing to keep you straight. nothing to challenge you. no direction.
And without direction, without a challenge, you’ll fall back to being a decadent child really fast.
Make the worldly project a real project with a measurable outcome. You can get help from me inside the challenge for that too.
The path to happiness?In the skill building challenge you need
- a worldly project that increases your Extrinsic Value
- A skill that is either connected or independent really from the worldly project. I recommend the skill of discipline. But you are free to choose your own
- And an Organizing Principle like a context, like a ‘why’, like a future you are going for.
When I look what is the Organizing Principle of me learning to create longer, bigger courses, I say: it is having a life I love and I live it powerfully. Not just getting by with what I already have…
Unless you have all three, you may not have enough energy to continue doing the challenge until you get what you wanted.
And no, you don’t have to say it in every communication to me…
The dude who is learning to write stories that sell doesn’t have to remind me that he wants to, finally, be an adult who can provide for himself, And be fulfilled by that.
It is obvious to me that that is his Organizing Principle. But you need to remind yourself every time you don’t want to do what you said you would do, or every time you want to do more than you said you would do or you won’t produce results.
The skill he is building is discipline, and the worldly project is learning to write stories well.
thank you Baheej.
XOXO