Sitting Alone With Yourself and the Key To Lasting Happiness

What happens when you try to sit still, in the silence, alone with yourself for any length of time? Do you start to feel antsy or restless? Bored or fidgety? Do you feel uneasy or start to get uncomfortable in some sort of vague, indescribable way? Do you make excuses like, "I've got too much to do to sit still," or "I'm an extrovert. I need to be around people?"

Whether or not you're busy or extroverted is not really the point; what happens inside and the feelings that arise in your body before you get up and decide that this sitting-still-thing is stupid, is what's important.

The feelings that arise, if you're willing to stop long enough to notice them, are pointers. They point to suppressed feelings and unconscious beliefs and programs that your doingness helps you to continue to suppress. Most feelings, beliefs, and behaviors are driven by "underlying wants." These underlying wants usually fall under one or more of the following categories: wanting approval, wanting control, wanting security/safety, wanting separation, or wanting oneness.

While it's understandable and very human to want these things, we are usually trying to get them from unreliable, unstable, and impermanent sources; sources that exist outside of us, like other people, future situations, or improved outer conditions. And like most humans, once we get a taste of getting our needs met in this way, or even the hope of getting our needs met in this way, we will latch onto these outer sources and say, "I'm someone who needs ____, or prefers ____. It's just the way I am."

We then begin to think of these tendencies as preferences, personality traits, or something in our character, which helps us to strengthen or add to our sense of identity. But until you can sit in the silence alone with yourself, you won't know the truth of who you are, because the truth of who you are cannot be discovered by anything that you do, have, or who you are with. It can only be known and experienced as Beingness.

Until you can sit alone with yourself and be happy, you bring an unconscious expectation to your relationships, your work, or life in general, to meet your needs and provide your happiness. And it's ultimately a setup for suffering, because when the outer world fails you or doesn't comply, which always happens eventually, you are left with the despair of an addict without a fix, and all the feelings you were trying to avoid in the first place are up in your face - magnified.

This is why the Buddha said that desire was the source of all suffering; not because desire in and of itself is bad or sinful, but because it necessarily suggests a disconnection from the source of all true happiness and a further movement away from this source as we look for the missing thing where it is not - outside of us.

So sit with yourself if you can bear it. Watch and wait and let yourself feel. Let yourself hear from the parts of you who are wanting something because they feel a lack or a sense of not-enoughness. This not-enoughness can only be filled by your deep and conscious Presence. It's the only reliable, sustainable source. And every time you fill yourself with your Self, you're closer to the truth of who and what you are, and everything else stops being what you must have in order to be happy, and instead simply one of those things which "will be added onto you" (as Jesus said), like icing on the cake.

Peace and love to you all,

Shelly

Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and all theses things will be added onto you.

The kingdom of heaven is within you.