happiness – TROY P. ROACHE CONSULTING

The Prickly Side of Spirituality & Joy

“Every rose has its thorn.”

-Bret Michaels

There is a common belief that spirituality and personal development should always make us feel great, on point, and in tune. So much so, that when this doesn’t happen, would-be soul-searchers run for the hills; seeking refuge in the most convenient distraction the ego can offer up.

It’s no wonder that popular spirituality teachings often lead with sentiments like: “if it doesn’t make you feel good, you’re doing wrong” or “follow your bliss” or “fake it until you make it”. And even though there isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with these statements, they can be misleading if misinterpreted. (Like most spiritual concepts).

The first way that we get confused is by forgetting that spirituality and Joy are one in the same.

The second is not appreciating that Joy, like spirituality, can be complicated.

Joy is the result of a trained mind. It cannot be instantly manufactured with positive thinking alone or fancies of the mind. Happiness can… maybe, but Joy is a more profound state. It is a constant. From Joy we weather the most severe storm, appreciate the darkest moments and see possibilities and light where none currently exist.

Joy is forged, shaped and created in the fires of discomfort, disappointment and failure. Joy can only be seen in pain’s reflection. Ultimately, this is how we grow spiritually—by working through the rough times. The operative word here is “work”.

We may wish that Joy can be fast-tracked or manufactured with so-called positive feelings, but shortcuts never work in personal development.

Growth is hard.

This is where things get prickly.

For years, I adhered to mainstream spiritual concepts promoting easy, carefree approaches. But these approaches tend to be basic. Some people refer to these methods as “Sandbox Spirituality”.

The experienced practitioner understands that we can’t reach Joy and bliss with just a snap of a finger. It’s simply not that easy.

The spiritual shortcut approach often focuses on ritual: visualization, affirmations, gratitude journals, reciting prayers or other mantras. Unfortunately, these actions can easily become rote and lose their benefit, as we enter a state of unawareness and cease to appreciate the moment. When this happens, these practices lose their power to create change and growth.

Please don’t misinterpret my meaning—all of the above practices can be and are powerful tools to get the ball rolling, but they are only keys to the subconscious—the underbelly of the beast, if you will. If you wish to see real growth and expansion you must push the sword in deep and get to the heart of the matter.

A pivotal moment in my own practice happened when a dear friend and mentor taught me that spirituality is not supposed to be shiny and clean or even easy. Nor does it have to make sense. And rarely does. It is the “rough edges” as he called it—the dirt and the pain where the real growth happens.

You see, I’ve always liked things to be in neat and tidy little boxes—ordered and explained, even my spiritual practices. I believed that I should be able to break down the fundamentally unexplainable into explainable bits—assign process and method and Bob’s your uncle.

But spirituality, as much as I would have preferred, is not a prescribed, one-size-fits-all program or a “one-plus-one-equals-two” kind of thing. It’s more like “one plus one equals banana”. And that’s only today. Tomorrow it might equal something totally different. It gets confusing, hard and painful.

And it is here where people have their first knee-jerk and pull back from the prickly bits, hoping to sidestep the pain and frustration. Sadly, some of us never move beyond this point, choosing instead to stay well within the boundary of our established lives as we know them to be.

As we push against the status quo, we meet the leading edge of our comfort zone. This barrier is rough and sharp. It feels dangerous. The ego tells us to retreat: “Here there be dragons!”.

But it is just over this barrier where Joy and growth reside. Yes, it is rough, ragged even. We might skin our knee along the way, but it is the price that must be paid to earn Joy.

And yes, we must earn Joy—it’s hard earned.

Earned through pain and discomfort.

This scares most responsible people—and understandably so. No wonder we tend to seek out the easier, softer, approach. But this path can never teach us anything. There can be no growth here, because “easy” resides inside our current comfort zone—our happy place. So, we “sell out” to happiness, and forgo any chance at Joy. But without growth there can be no joy.

Growth = Joy.

What’s so wrong with taking the easy path if it makes you happy?

Nothing. Provided you understand the difference between happiness and Joy and you know what you want.

With the easy path, everything seems great, at first. The ego is fed a steady diet of feel-good comfort food and as a result we experience an ebb and flow of happiness as we continue to seek out those things that give us instant pleasure. As such, our lives feel comfortable and safe.

Here’s the rub.

This is temporary. We can’t actually grow from this place. And when growth doesn’t happen, we are inexplicably left feeling unfulfilled and disconnected. We become depressed and empty—even while living a life that society says should make us “happy”.

Connection = Spirituality

Those who understand this enjoy a different vantage point. They see events in a unique light. They appreciate and deeply grasp statements such as “everything happens for a reason”, Our greatest teachers are born from our deepest tragedies”, “embrace failure,” to name a few. Even death fails to have any significant impact.

Pain is also redefined for these individuals. They see pain as necessary and even joyful—a natural process playing out in a beautiful way. These people tend to go with the flow, handling whatever the world throws at them. They savor the holiness of everything—warts and all.

These few individuals have done the hard work, either by choice or necessity, thus have been granted a higher level of resilience. When hardship happens, they have the skills to cope.

This is why individuals who are further along the spiritual path often appear callus or unfeeling. They possess a higher level of resilience and are not affected by the events around them in the same way as most people are.

Your ability to respond to adversity is directly related to your level of resilience which informs your position on the journey. Those starting out on the journey have not yet adjusted to the prickly parts of spirituality and it is unfair, if not cruel, to expect them to see the bigger picture.

So, what can you do if you are not quite there yet? How can you begin to appreciate that it is the prickles, the rough edges, the dirt, the pain where your Joy resides?

Understand that spirituality is a process, and that process is different for everyone.
Understand that spirituality is painful by nature. It is designed to force us to grow—to step outside our comfort zones.
Understand that there is no quick fix or short cut to true spiritual appreciation and growth.
It takes time and perspective to build spiritual resilience.
Appreciate where you are in the moment—stay aware of your current place in time.

Take a moment today and think about how you see your life. Do you appreciate the prickly bits? Do you see value in them?

If you don’t, might I suggest you meditate on what your life could look like (and who you could be) if you did.

Choose Happiness

Choices. We make them constantly. In the morning we make a choice of when to get up, to have Fruit Loops or toast, to wear the blue sweater or the green… and we don’t stop making choices until we go back to sleep that night. If you really think about it, most of our thinking takes the form of choices: A or B? This or that? Now or later? Yes or No? We’re like walking, talking choice machines.

You even made a choice to click on this article and then another one to actually read it. Not to mention all the choices you’ll be confronted with as you decide on whether or not to use the information contained herein–no pressure, though.

It’s been said that the average person makes between 600 and 1000 choices every day. And with all these choices, has it ever occurred to you that your happiness is no different? That happiness is a choice?

In fact, the choice to be happy may be the most important decision you can make. That being said, so few of us ever do. The vast majority of people believe that happiness somehow falls outside themselves; that it all has to do with external things, people and events that they can’t control. And so they go about their days at the mercy of–well–everything. This paradigm suggests that it’s not up to us if we get to be happy or not.

Ironically, all those who buy into this paradigm have made a choice that happiness is not a choice.

Don’t beat yourself up too much—we all do it. It’s second nature to us. Something happens that we don’t like and we react—usually with unhappiness. But it doesn’t have to be that way. All paradigms can be changed, including this one.

You can choose happiness right now by doing these three little things…

1) Remember that happiness is a choice.

Happiness is a choice, just as unhappiness is. Given the option, wouldn’t you rather pick happiness?

“Now, hold on a minute!” you might say. “That is all well and good, but I can’t just decide to be happy when something bad happens. I’m only human.”

The fact of the matter is that you can (with practice) make a choice and decide to act in a different way—in a controlled and present way, instead of reacting in a way born from negative conditioning. In this way you will come to understand that reality is subjective. The events of our lives are only as real to the extent that we identify with them.

2) Limit your expectations of others.

We tend to feel injured by the actions of others when we disagree with them. The more we dwell on the imagined offense, the more frustrated, stressed and unhappy we become. But, if we limit our expectations of others it becomes harder for them to upset us. Epictetus once said, “Men are disturbed not by the things that happen, but by their opinions of the things that happen.” In this way, external factors play less of a role in our happiness. It becomes more of an internal process. We take responsibility for our own happiness.

3) Change the way you look at things.

Wayne Dyer is fond of saying, “Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.”

Say, for example, that I have a lot of work to do. The prospect of the work may make me unhappy—but only if I allow it to. If I look at my work as a mountainous chore, it tends to become just that. I begin to fret and worry about where to even start. I might get angry that I have so much to do. I might even become spiteful or jealous of my co-workers who seem to have less to do. As such, I fight and struggle with the work all day. But, if I alter my approach and look at the work differently and reduce it down to nothing but a small pile of paper, the weight and pressure dissolves. Instead of looking at the workload in its entirety, I do one thing at a time, do it well and move on. By breaking the work down into small, more manageable pieces the task seems so much less daunting. As the Buddha said, “A jug fills drop by drop.”

Choosing happiness is possible for all of us. But, it does take practice and effort. It means you will need to develop a state of awareness to keep yourself focused on your intention to choose, instead of compulsion to react.

For more detailed information about choosing happiness please read my book, My Happy Workplace.

And by all means, if you like this or any of my other posts, please leave a comment. I would love hearing your views.

Happiness,

Troy

Awareness: One Path to Happiness

Each morning hoards of disgruntled or depressed workers trudge out into traffic dreading the workday ahead. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, a happier workplace may be closer than you think. And a great first step to achieving a happier existence is to practice awareness.

Awareness is kind of like finding your spot on a GPS screen. It not only tells you where you are, but more importantly, where you are in relation to everything else.

For me, awareness means two things: “Seeing” and “Understanding”.

The first part: seeing, is pretty simple. It’s more of an inventory exercise than anything else. When I first started this process, I discreetly wrote down everything that bothered me in a small “happiness journal” I carried with me. It didn’t take long to fill, either. This step was important because it helped me to be more conscious of those things that threatened my happiness. That way when they occurred in the future I could get one step ahead of the emotion.

The second part: understanding, grows and evolves out of seeing. To help me understand I had to explore all the things that I wrote down in my journal—things that bothered me about my job, my co-workers, friends and family. Now the trick was to strip away any emotional baggage from the process. I worked hard to place no labels or judgements on these so-called problems.

Just by seeing these things in this way, I gained a greater understanding about them and from that understanding grew a greater sense of awareness. That awareness allowed to see my unhappiness in a new light.

I realized that my unhappiness did not originate from any of these outside sources. The sensation of unhappiness was created at my end as I noticed a “so-called negative event” and made a judgement about it. A philosopher who lived in ancient Greece by the name of Epictetus once wrote: “Men are disturbed not by the things that happen, but by their opinions of the things that happen.” Think about that quote for a minute. We may create our unhappiness, but we are in charge of our happiness too! This gives us all the power. When was the last time you went to work filling empowered? Tomorrow morning try to take on a new sense of awareness about the things that have traditionally bothered you. Maybe start your own happiness journal. Ask yourself: Is my unhappiness really caused by others? Or is it more about how I relate to the people and events around me. And remember, you can control that relationship with practice and determination.