Beware of the HAPPINESS TRAP! This is a common trap which a lot of us fall in to. Imagine that you are stuck out in the wilderness on a cold stormy night with little clothing and no shelter. You come across a simple log cabbin with a fire, hot food and warm clothing. Most of us would agree that this would take us from feeling unhappy to happy just by getting a small amount of stuff. Here comes the happiness trap. What we then say to ourselves is If these few simple things make me this happy, then more things will make me even more happy and thus starts our accumulation of more things and stuff. The same can be said for our health. If we go from having an extremely unhealthy body with several medical conditions to having a healthier body with no medical conditions, we will more than likely feel happier. We can fall into the same trap again here and we can say to ourselves the healthier my body is, the happier I will be. We have fallen into the happiness trap again. This causes us to always be striving for more. We think ultimate happiness is just around the corner, I am almost there, if I can just do, get, be more...... If this has happened to us, we have successfully trained our mind to never be content with this very moment. If we place our happiness on anything which can be taken from us we are setting ourselves up to live life with fear, never truly free and never truly happy. We can loose our stuff and our body can be raveged by disease or an accident at anytime. If we have placed our own happiness on stuff, our body or even other people we will be unconsciously living a life always grasping at these things. Imagine how hard we might try to hold onto these things if we think our happiness is dependent upon them. Have you ever heard of the little girl who loved her bunny so much she sqeezing it to death? True happiness cannot be taken from us, it is not dependent upon anything or anyone and is not found outside of ourselves. We cannot be told how to be happy, this is a realisation we must come to on our own. We should look past the smoke and mirrors of our life situation and realise our inward journey is far more important than our outward journey. Once we focus on our inward journey our outward experience becomes a playful expression of life itself.
Posted on: Sat, 18 Oct 2014 02:46:59 +0000