The fact that you will only find lasting happiness by looking inside yourself explains why most people can’t find it. Most people spend their lives looking outside of the self for happiness, rather than starting the search inside. This truth is at the heart of the teachings of Eckhart Tolle, Neale Donald Walsch, Tony Robbins and many others.
What Stops a Person from Looking Inside
The most obvious block to finding happiness is whatever it is that stops you from looking inside yourself. People don’t want to turn and face what is hunting them, not even if it is happiness itself. It is easier to run away from emotions by watching TV, being endlessly busy, self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, or sleeping. Even pretending to be happy is a way of avoiding finding out what is going on under the surface.
Meditation and Everyday Life
Meditation is a wonderful path to stillness, and it, too, can be a way of avoiding feeling emotion. In fact, much of meditation aims at teaching the individual how to put the mind and emotions into a state of emptiness. True, it is a great way to clear negative emotions and access peace, joy and sweet liberation, as Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, author of Getting in the Gap and many other books, demonstrates. And yet, the challenge is always to come back to everyday experience and maintain that peace or happiness. Awareness will reveal a dependency if the first thought when faced with a challenging experience is “If only I could meditate right now.”
Staying Inside the Emotion
It is not the meditating that gets you where you need to go, but its exact opposite -- staying inside the negative emotion long enough for it to lose its power over you. This can take a minute, or even less, if you have learned that negative emotion is just energy which will dissipate completely if you let it come and go, and don’t act on it, don’t feed it. Eckhart Tolle speaks of this eloquently in A New Earth - Awakening to your Life's Purpose.
Brandon Bays and the Journey
Brandon Bays developed a set of guided introspections that assist people to sit inside their emotion, really feel the emotion, and then get to the heart of what is driving the emotion. Often the relief at finally being given permission to feel what is bottled up inside leads to an enormous release of pent-up emotion.
Memories and Emotions
Strong emotions are usually associated with specific memories. The body holds onto these memories. During a Journey process the person is guided to empty out the emotions in the context of that memory. The emptying out can lead to a watershed moment of release. Healing starts from the instant the body reaches forgiveness for whatever caused the pain. This does not mean that the behavior that caused the pain is condoned or that it is considered in any way acceptable. Rather, the person feeling the pain is freed from the associative link, through the act of forgiveness.
Baby Steps
If you are afraid to face what is inside of you because it causes you fear, then you also cut yourself off from access to the happiness and joy that is inside of you. Like a baby learning to walk, the first steps are the hardest. Trusting that this is the way to go is essentially a choice. It is a choice to trust that people like Tolle and Walsch are telling the truth – that lasting happiness is available to you if you are willing to look for it inside yourself.
 |
