Postponing Happiness

If you take a moment right now to breathe and be still, what do you notice? Do you feel an open, soft, and allowing sense of peace and well-being? An ease? A sense of being in love or held in a space of love? If so, in this moment, you are living and breathing the truth of who you are. If not, you have temporarily forgotten.If you're anything like me, you often feel a certain amount of tension. Sometimes it's obvious. Other times it's barely detectable. In either case, this tension is a symptom of resistance - resistance to who you really are. It is the ego at work. It's making sure you stay in relationship with it, making sure you identify with it, instead of remembering the truth. When the ego is in charge, you may feel a sense of pushing - efforting to get somewhere, to get something. If you stop and ask yourself why you're pushing, you'll find that there's a belief that your efforts will eventually deliver you to a greater happiness and peace than what you have now. You believe that when you accomplish ____, have more money, solve your health or relationship problem, you can then feel at peace or loved or safe. 
 
This journal entry is a loving reminder that the happiness you are seeking, that this "better place" is not "out there." It doesn't lie in some future event or accomplishment. Your ego wants you to believe that you will one day get what you want through strategy, effort, and control. It says that if you just keep working at it and working at it hard enough, you will get to some magical place in which you will finally feel better. It's a trick. And it's a lie.
 
The happiness, peace, and well-being that you're looking for, that we're all looking for, lies not in your efforts, or in the crafting of your life through your will, but in your willingness to surrender to the glorious Now. If you can surrender to Now, to the truth, you might first encounter the suppressed emotions that are driving all of your doing. If you can continue to surrender to the layers of feelings that come up, you will eventually arrive at the endless peace that lives at the center of it all - the peace that is your true nature.
 
So, when you catch yourself feeling less than open, loving, and happy, ask yourself if you are postponing your happiness until some future event happens. And if so, ask yourself if you'd rather postpone your happiness until  ______ happens or would you rather be your happiness now?
 
 
Loads of love,
Shelly