Your Search for Happiness Will Only Make You Miserable

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Life should not be about finding the way to happiness. Instead, happiness should be the way of life — the way to Life.

There’s a good chance you’re thinking, yeah, sure, with all the misery and challenges you’re facing, how is that possible? How can you be happy when things are in turmoil, when difficult or terrible things are happening to you or to the people you love?

Well, that’s the opportunity — and yes, I do mean opportunity. Bear with me...I didn’t say it was easy. But it’s well worth pursuing.

I’ve lived through some pretty awful stuff. That doesn’t make me special; I know very well that I’m not alone there, which is why I’ve spent a few decades doing various kinds of work in the healing and counselling industry. And even just in my personal life, I’ve met very few people who said their lives had been relatively happy and uncomplicated.

Everyone has a story, and all too often it’s one that’s been filled with pain and disappointment.

I’m only mentioning my difficult life because I want you to understand that I’m not just talking the talk; I’m walking the walk. I know what it is to suffer, to have terrible experiences, and to be at the bottom of a big, dark hole.

And I know what it’s like to fight my way out of it.

My reason for telling you that is to say I’m living proof that it’s possible to do it.

You just have to decide it’s what you want.

One of the best places to begin is to accept that all conditions of life can serve a higher purpose — if we choose to find one.

The way I see it, finding some good, some purpose, or some meaning in the painful things that happen to us is the only way to move forward and create a better life.

I don’t believe there’s any point in trying to make sense of the senseless…those random, horrible events — the tragic death of a child, a murder, healthy people suddenly stricken with terminal illness…and so much more — we can never understand so it serves no useful purpose to try.

As long as you waste time trying to figure it out, that’s more time that you’re stuck and feeling miserable. You continue to deny yourself the opportunity to move forward and live in happiness.

I know…whatever happened, it’s left you feeling helpless. Powerless.

I get it.

But that doesn’t mean you actually are helpless or powerless.

Certainly, there is nothing you can do to change what’s already happened. It’s just important to recognise that the way you can take back your power is to shift your perspective about it.

One of the best ways to do that is to find the blessings or positives in the situation, turn a dark experience into something productive or meaningful.

By opening that door, you allow happiness to begin to flow to you.

When you choose to find meaning in your difficulties, or to use those challenges to create something meaningful, it changes you for the better. You become more focused on the positives. You discover aspects of yourself you didn’t know existed.

You stretch and expand, gradually becoming a better version of yourself.

The choice to find or see a higher purpose in a challenge — or to give it purpose — will also help to remove the angst, the struggle, and pain — and give you peace.

Am I saying this happens overnight? Of course not. Especially in tragic circumstances that are bound to leave you scarred or forever changed.

Even in those, it is possible to have something good come out of them, which can at least begin to soften those raw and jagged edges.

For example, my dear friend, Sandy Peckinpah lost her 16-year-old son, Garrett, very suddenly. One day the doctor said it was a bad flu, and the next morning Sandy found her sweet son in his bed. He had died of bacterial meningitis.

As a parent, I can’t even begin to imagine what she has been through since that horrific moment many years ago.

She began to write about her pain as a way to process it — all the while juggling life as a wife and the mother of three other children. Heaven only knows how many journals she filled over time but it helped to pour out her heart in this safe and private way.

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Eventually, she wrote a beautiful book, How To Survive the Worst That Can Happen: A Parent’s Step-by-Step Guide to Healing After the Loss of a Child, which has received numerous awards. Because of her own grief and healing journey, she has been able to help countless other grieving parents around the world.

Nothing can ever stop the ache in her heart or the longing for her son but creating something meaningful from her pain has helped with her own healing journey.

So where do you start?

Your life is a mess or you’re facing lots of challenges. You see “happiness” over there somewhere on the other side of an enormous canyon.

The first step: Accept where you are right now. What the heck does that even mean? Well, sometimes it just means to continue reminding yourself over and over again that you can’t go back. You are Here. (See? There you are, right where that big red “X” is).

Beating yourself up or wishing you’d done something differently is a complete waste of brain real estate. Stop it.

All you can do is figure out your next steps. Or at least, the first one.

The more you allow yourself to accept what has happened and that “You are Here,” the more you let go of the frustration, worry, anger, and regret. It is the sweetest relief when you can simply sink into a state of acceptance — like when you’ve endured horrific physical pain for a long period, or you’ve been extremely ill, and then the pain stops, the illness goes and there is nothing where they used to be…nothing but peace.

The second step: Understand that the search for happiness is a problem.

Huh?

Yup. It leads to anxiety, worry, competition and disappointment because once you have acquired the desired object or situation that you believed would make you happy, that happiness fades and your desire for other objects or situations will take its place.

That kind of happiness is superficial and short-lived.

And there’s never a guarantee that you’ll even get it. Searching for it does not ensure your success. So if your happiness is the prize at the end of a search, you’ve shot yourself in the foot from the outset.

You see, the problem is that in the desiring, you are focusing on “lack,” and “not having,” and “I won’t be happy unless…” You’re keeping happiness “over there” on the other side of that canyon.

When we expect external events or other people to bring joy to our lives, more often than not this will only bring disappointment. It makes more sense to bring joy to every event, every day, every moment, every person.

It is the only kind of joy that lasts because it is completely within your control, as it comes from inside you — from a choice that you’ve made to bring that perspective to your life as you’re living it.

Do not expect your life to bring you joy. Instead, bring joy to your life.

This is the only way to true and lasting happiness.

Spiritual Arts Mentor and Master Teacher, Liberty Forrest, guides you in discovering who you are, why you’re here, and how to follow that path.