Are you happy. Don’t know? How about doing this exercise: Each day write down what percentage of the time you felt happy that day.
Is that too long of a time period? Do you tend to write down how you’re feeling at that moment, when you’re tired and exhausted, discounting the rest of what might have been a happy day?
Try starting with smaller time periods and adding them up, examining your happiness in smaller increments. Each half day, each hour; find a unit of time that you can put a percentage on.
Maybe you’re not even sure what “happy” is? Perhaps that word is too watered down and meaningless. Is it a good task to find a different word for happy that resonates with you?
Or is it a more necessary task to figure out what makes you happy, because your unsureness has nothing to do with the meaning of that word.
It’s also important to determine if happy (or that word you’ve chosen) is a core value for you. If you think it is, yet you’re spending too much time embracing other emotions, welcoming them in, you’re out of alignment with your core. When you’re out of alignment like that, on the wrong path, it won’t be easy to live that declared core value.
If it’s not truly a core value, then expecting you’ll put the effort in to have it isn’t reasonable.
There’s an assumption that everyone wants to be happy, that everyone has this as a core mission. But wallowing, anxiety, sadness, righteous anger are powerful drugs and many people are addicted to them. They are powerful tools that are used to justify nearly everything that happens to them or that they do to others.
These emotions can be used to justify what one thinks as well. They create their own path, their own reality. They make their own worse nightmares come true.
Anxiety, fear, and sadness are a more natural state for an adult than happiness. We remember the “lost happiness” of childhood. We’ve embraced these emotions, believing they protect us from harm. If we hold them closely enough, eventually they’re the only thing between us and the world. There’s no way for the good to get in, good that might have left us needing less protection.
What is embracing unhappy giving you? or allowing you to tell yourself? or letting you get away with or without doing? Perhaps you don’t feel you deserve happiness. Each of us own an Unlovable Monster.
Every unhappiness that comes our way, whether we seek it or it lures us out of our bubble, can be a tasty morsel, given as an offering to that Unlovable Monster.
What monsters are you feeding by holding on to your wrongs? What happiness are you leaving wounded and unrecoverable?
The work of killing the Unlovable Monster, as it stands in the way of your desperately sought happiness, is harder in the short run, than the effort of cooking it up another meal and dining with it.
But if you love happiness like I do, it’s worth pushing away from the table, getting out of the Unhappiness Home, and going on the emotional roller coaster ride it will take to reach the place where the sun is so bright it burns the Unlovable Monster beyond recognition.
Originally posted on SparkPeople.
