Allowing Happiness
June 23, 2011 at 2:29 pm | Posted in beliefs, emotions, family patterns, parenting, peace | Leave a commentTags: beliefs, emotions, happiness, mirroring, withholding happiness
I’ve written before about how children are a mirror of what we don’t notice in ourselves, and about my surprise the first time I heard LB use expressions I only later noticed in myself. You’d think by now I’d have learned that if I see something in them it’s going to be lurking somewhere within this being I call myself. Sometimes, truth be told, there are times when I haven’t wanted to see it, and other times just as in a hall of mirrors, the reflection is distorted. It pays to look beneath the obvious.
A few months ago we went on a family outing to a large furniture store (you know the one, it’s all over the world). The plan was to buy a lamp for LB’s room to replace a broken one. As we walked round she saw other things she wanted: a set of pastry cutters, some ornaments and a plant. Mostly I said yes, occasionally no.
We then went to a large outlet warehouse, where LB got a new tee-shirt, but not some jackets she also wanted. Lolo asked for an alarm clock, and got it. We went to a pet shop for hamster food. LB wanted a frilled neck lizard. We said no.
All the way home LB raged. We were horrible parents. It wasn’t fair. She’d wanted one all her life, and we never let her have it. It would never happen. It just wasn’t fair.
I felt annoyed. Couldn’t she feel grateful for what she had got instead of focusing on what she hadn’t? Yes, I remembered my blog post on gratitude, and knew that no, in that moment she couldn’t be grateful if she wasn’t. Yet still I longed to stem the seemingly endless wanting that I could see no way to satisfy. (Yes, I was trying to control her experience.) Actually she said she was grateful for what she’d got AND angry that we would never let her have the lizard. Later she said she didn’t really want any of the “other rubbish”, she only wanted the one thing she hadn’t got.
I tried to explain we did take her feelings into account. (Okay, really what I was trying to do was to get her to see it my way and to defend my decision – now, what is it Katie says about defence being the first act of war?) We had the debate about whether there’s room in our house for a another pet. That led nowhere except to me briefly wondering how on earth I’d managed to make such a mess of parenting that my child appeared to be a bottomless pit of wanting. I told LB that if I believed that giving her this lizard would make her truly happy I might have considered it, if it had been possible. (And yes, it crossed my mind that I wasn’t 100% honest, because of course it would be possible, just not very convenient. Our house already feels cramped to me, without a lizard that needs a large heated tank!) I said that I suspected she would feel pleased for a while but that the wanting would soon come back.
Not surprisingly, this didn’t satisfy her, and I felt frustrated at the apparent gulf between us. We began to bridge that gulf when I recognised that we both wanted for her to feel happy, we just had differing perspectives on how that could be achieved.
Then I noticed that she was not allowing herself to be happy unless she got this lizard, and it occurred to me that if she wasn’t allowing herself to be happy unless the various conditions were met, she’d learned to do that from someone. She certainly was capable of allowing herself to be happy as a baby!
Happiness comes naturally when our minds are still
So where to did I not allow myself to be happy? Not long before, on a Sedona Method weekend course, I had noticed a belief that I couldn’t be happy if others weren’t. And by others I did mean everyone in the entire world. No pressure there then! Nearer home I had not been allowing myself to be happy until LB was well (she’d been repeatedly ill for months.) And I need to make my mother happy first, the cats, the hamster, that sad looking person I saw on the bus…
Okay, so can I just start with me? Can I allow myself to feel the joy of sitting here typing, smiling at my own silly sense of humour?
Feeling miserable and guilty because others are unhappy doesn’t help them one bit, and yet there is such a tendency to think it’s selfish to be happy if others aren’t. I’ve begun to think of it this way: am I more likely to be of service to someone else if I am caught up in worry and fear or if I am peaceful? Being happy doesn’t stop me caring about another’s feelings, it just frees me to understand them better. Since the lizard incident there have been a couple more of these desperate wantings of LB’s, and I realised they occur just before she begins to recover from an illness. Lately it’s been easier to sit with her and not feel I have to do anything other than be there and allow the feelings to come and go. Lately too there are moments when joy simply erupts within me for no apparent reason.
Where do you withhold happiness from yourself? What needs to be fixed before you can allow yourself to feel bliss? Could you allow yourself to be happy even if your loved ones aren’t? Could you allow yourself to feel happy just because?
The Tao of Meow
January 19, 2011 at 3:48 pm | Posted in beliefs, emotions, fun | Leave a commentTags: beliefs, present moment awareness
I am cooking. I notice my body feels tense, and then the cat comes in, meowing. She wants food, not just any old food but the kind that comes out of a little sachet and has lumps of meat and gravy, and is fish. (Or at least it says on the packet it’s fish though it never looks much like it to me.) She has already had some today and, according to the vet, she is overweight. Certainly she is a little barrel of fluff. I am fairly certain that if I put dry food into her bowl she won’t eat it, and that she is not really hungry.
I wonder why she wants food when she’s not hungry. Then I remember reading years ago that when animals live closely with humans they develop human-like traits. I have no idea if this is true, but it reminds me to look behind the obvious. That, and remembering that when I see something in someone else, even if that someone is a cat, most likely it’s also in me. Recognising that the cat’s meowing alerted me to my own wanting I say thank you to her and tell her she’s a wonderful little thing and I love her. She understood every word. (No, I don’t really believe that, but sometimes it’s fun to project.)
Then I ponder what is it I want? For a start, I want the tension in my body to go. I want a reply to an e-mail I’ve just sent and I want that reply to be favourable, for the recipient to think that I am wise or clever or some other such nonsense. I want a reply to something I’ve posted on a forum and I want it to be similar to the e-mail. So it would appear that what I want is approval. As I allow myself to welcome this wanting of approval the cat goes quiet and sits still and apparently peaceful. (Of course this could be more projection on my part, perhaps she’s really seething underneath and plotting her revenge.)
More to the point, as I allow myself to welcome this wanting approval I feel calmer. It leads me to contemplate the many ways I seek approval. As I type this now, remembering the story of cooking and the cat, am I again editing my thoughts to make myself look good and so create a favourable impression on any reader? Or am I being totally, ruthlessly honest? The truth right now, is I don’t know. This has perplexed me ever since I started writing this blog, and now it doesn’t matter any more. In the past I’ve agonised over whether I was writing it for the right reasons, as I’ve done about most of my writing. (A good way to develop writer’s block if anyone wants to know!) The right reasons being to do good, to help others, to be of service. And why would I want to do that? Well, so that I can approve of myself of course!
In I Need Your Love – Is That True, Byron Katie asks: “Who would you be without the thought you need to make an impression?” She also writes: “Seeking love becomes so much a part of our lives that it’s automatic. We hardly know we’re doing it. It’s easier to notice the anxiety it creates out there among our friends and colleagues.”
So it is, and Katie invites us to judge our neighbours so that we can see these traits in others and then turn the spotlight on ourselves. She does not invite us to do this so that we can judge ourselves, condemn ourselves, and force ourselves to do better. That’s pretty much what got us into the whole approval-seeking game in the first place, so it’s not likely to get us out again.
Can we ever be totally free of wanting approval? Perhaps that’s the wrong question to ask, perhaps a better one would be can we be free with wanting approval? I’m not sure the first question is even answerable, and so is likely to keep the mind spinning. I might imagine that a few awakened beings – Katie for instance – have transcended this need, and that if I try hard enough, do The Work rigorously enough, use the Sedona Method often enough, if I’m lucky I’ll eventually get rid of all my wanting approval and find the happiness I crave.
You may already have noticed a few flaws in this plan: for a start, though it seems possible that Katie never wants approval, I can’t absolutely know that’s the case. Then, if the whole reason for wanting to get rid of the feeling of wanting approval is to feel approved of this has much the same effect as the cat chasing her tail.
The second question is a different matter. Can we be free with wanting approval? I’d say the answer is yes. When I welcome that wanting there is freedom, or maybe more accurately there is awareness of freedom. All that ever stops me noticing that awareness is a thought or belief that I’m not free, that I need approval, that happiness is somewhere else at some other time: when I have got rid of all my accumulated baggage, when I’ve got my children to sleep, when they’ve grown up safe and well, when they have careers they love, when their children have grown up safe and well…
by which time this body would be
six
feet
under
Gratitude and Guilt
October 23, 2010 at 5:58 am | Posted in emotions, society | 4 CommentsTags: beliefs, gratitude
If you’re reading this (which of course you are) there’s a good chance you also read personal development blogs and books. If so, you will probably have read that feeling gratitude is essential to finding happiness. It makes sense: there is nothing quite so joyful as feeling waves of gratitude pass through you, and there is little more painful than feeling consumed by resentment.
One way it is often suggested we cultivate gratitude is to “count your blessings”. There are many ways to do this, and one way is to keep a ‘gratitude diary’ each day, writing down all you feel grateful for. I have no argument with this, and have done it myself. If it works for you, that’s wonderful, and you may not be interested in the rest of this article. But if you want to read on, thank you in advance! I’m grateful!
Sometimes we all have off-days. (Okay, sometimes I have off-days and if you don’t you probably don’t bother with blogs like this, so I’ll assume you do.) Sometimes gratitude seems like the last thing you can ever feel, and if that’s you right now, perhaps this article can offer some peace in that.
You can’t feel grateful right now if you don’t, and no amount of forcing will make you. I think this is so, so important that I’m going to say it again. You can’t feel grateful right now if you don’t, and no amount of forcing will make you.
Let’s go back to that gratitude journal. If you write it because you feel inspired by all the wonderful things in your life, it probably will make you feel even more grateful. If on the other hand, you’re trying to make yourself feel grateful because you’ve read this is how to get what you want in life, there’s a strong possibility it won’t work either at making yourself grateful or bringing you what you want. Gratitude is a joyful spontaneous feeling that comes naturally when we allow it to. But saying thank you, whether it is spoken or written, is not the same as feeling it.
It’s interesting to notice that most of the ways we try to make ourselves grateful induce guilt. Were you, as a child, as baffled as I was by urges to think of starving Biafrans or Ethopians when you didn’t like your dinner? It never even occurred to me then that it was supposed to make me feel grateful to be eating food I hated, and I couldn’t see how what I ate would help them. The trouble with trying to count our blessing by comparing ourselves to others is that instead of leading to gratitude it can lead to guilt when we notice the lack in someone else’s life.
When we have this sense of lack it can taint our natural ability to feel grateful. Let’s imagine you are feeling fed up, and try to cheer yourself up by thinking about the new shoes you bought yesterday or the kiss your child gave you at the school gates, or that your boss said you’d done an exceptionally good job today. Instead, you feel guilty for buying shoes you didn’t really need when you could have sent a cheque to charity, you remember the argument with your child as you walked to school, and you wonder if she only kissed you because she’s hoping you’ll relent and buy that iphone she wants, and then you wonder what your boss thinks of your usual standard of work if today was exceptional. And if this counting blessings lark works for everybody else, you must be the most ungrateful, churlish person on the planet.
Maybe there’s a different explanation. Remember the old grumpy great-aunt you used to have? You know – the one who gave you the hideous sweater she’d knitted herself in a style that went out of fashion twenty years before and still hasn’t come back into fashion thirty years later. As you tried it on and noticed the sleeves were far too short and the body far too wide, she snapped, “Well, aren’t you going to say ‘Thank you’?” If you didn’t have that great-aunt, I’m pretty confident you can remember some other adult hiss, “Say thank you,” as they shoved something into your sticky little hands. You may have loved whatever you’d been given, but how did you feel saying the words that were demanded of you? Were shame and guilt now mixed in?
What confused messages do we pass on about gratitude when we say this sort of thing to children? I’ve heard a parent tell a child to say thank you so that her grandparents will keep sending presents. Another justified asking her child to say, “Please,” when she didn’t say it herself, by explaining that adults show it in how we say things and in our gestures. Is this true? Or do they show it more? Which would you rather have: a child’s eyes light up with excitement as they eagerly grab a present – or a head cast down and a mumbled thank you?
Why should a child say “thank you” or “please”? Does learning these words teach them to be polite or to be inauthentic to get approval? And is our motivation to teach manners or because we fear disapproval from others if our children don’t say these supposedly magic words? And what do we teach them by calling “please” a magic word?
Is it possible that all this guilt is exactly what stops us from feeling gratitude? If you’re having a day where you find it hard to be grateful, I invite you to let yourself off the hook. Instead of insisting you count those blessings, or hissing, “Say thank you,” to yourself, take a few moments to notice and question the thoughts that make it hard to feel your gratitude. Like love, it’s there always, but sometimes it gets buried so far beneath ‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts’ that it is impossible to find. Don’t force yourself to feel something you’re not feeling. Allow yourself to feel your resentment and lack of gratitude. You may be surprised to discover you can feel grateful for that!
Trusting the Process
August 29, 2008 at 10:17 pm | Posted in beliefs | 2 CommentsTags: beliefs
The school holidays slipped by and I barely got near my computer. I have checked e-mails, and written a few, I’ve ordered flippers for Lolo, who has now joined the swimming club LB is already in, but what I haven’t done is find time to write a post for this blog. I (mostly) need time to write, or so I believe. Maybe that’s a thought I could question, a facet of the fear of not being good enough that still pops up now and then!
The trip LB was dreading the last time I posted went so well she didn’t want to leave for home. (Though she is happy to be back home too.)
What I love about doing The Work on a regular basis is that more and more of life seems like fun and less seems like hassle. I love how sometimes, with virtually no effort from me, stories I’ve clung to just show themselves to be crazy and disappear. I have long had anxieties about driving, to the extent that I passed the buck to my husband whenever possible. But since he couldn’t come with us, I had a 120 mile drive to do on our trip. The girls are used to me asking for quiet when I drive. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I don’t. On that trip they argued, I got tense and loud, and they got quiet – for a while. Then it felt so hot I turned on the air-conditioning. LB whined. I told her it was just for a while and I would switch it off again soon. She whined louder, said the smell made her feel sick. In the argument that followed I yelled at her to be quiet (yes I did notice the irony), and yelled that I found driving stressful enough without her arguing with me.
She cried. I pulled into a layby, and we hugged. I explained that I wasn’t really angry at her, I had yelled because I wanted her to understand that I really needed her not to argue, that I find driving stressful and so I really needed her to allow me just to concentrate on driving – all stuff I’ve believed for years, and that seemed reasonable to my muddled mind. She got back in her seat and we set off again.
I began to think about this belief I’ve had for so long. “Driving is stressful.” Was it really true? I’d been so convinced this was true for me, even if it wasn’t for millions of others, that I totally believed I couldn’t ever change on it. I also thought anyone who didn’t believe it must be extremely confident or manic, or both. But as I drove along ,I began to notice that I was thinking over and over, “Driving is stressful.” You’ve probably heard of positive affirmations – this was a negative affirmation for me. A while ago I noticed that when I was driving I often imagined crashes. (You will also have heard of positive visualisations – how’s that for a negative one?)
In particular, I believed that I can’t drive well if I’m tired, and this thought often keeps me awake the night before I have to drive. (It had the night before that journey!)
I began to wonder what it would be like to be driving without this repetitive thought – and it seemed like it might be less stressful. I went on driving, still not convinced I could change on this, and yet knowing that I had seen over and over that I can trust the process of The Work.
Then, less than ten miles from our destination, I remembered the breathing meditation I’d read about in Cheri Huber’s book How To Get From Where You Are To Where You Want To Be. In this meditation you simply count your breaths from one to ten, and then you start back at one again. Cheri wrote about doing this while she was driving, so I thought it was worth a go. By focusing on the body in this way the mind stops its racing around and comes back to the present. It probably also helps to focus on the breathing since stress creates shallow breathing, which in turn creates stress in the body. By the time we reached our destination I was calm and knew that thought had lost its grip. It popped up from time to time during our holiday, but I didn’t have to believe it.
Am I now the most relaxed driver in the world? Nah, that would be exaggerating a bit, but a couple of weeks ago after another trip away, we fetched our cats back from the cattery (and one of them had miaowed all the way). When we got home I realised I hadn’t visualised one crash! It seems that when we question a thought it gives our minds the space to find new solutions. As long as I was repeating, “Driving is stressful,” there was no room for anything creative to happen in my mind. Once there was doubt about that thought the mind could open up, whereas trying to stop imagining crashes had changed not a thing.
It’s interesting to see how even thoughts we are deeply attached to can crumble away when we start to wonder. Or these may return, but we are a little less attached, so we don’t react so strongly. I’ve noticed that sometimes after I stop believing a thought I’ve been hooked into it can take a while for the behaviour that goes with it to slip away. Sometimes it’s days, or even weeks later, that we notice the change in how we react. I’m suspect that thinking a change should happen – and so watching out for it – makes it take longer. This after all has parallels with the old way of thinking we can use willpower to force ourselves into line. I’ve caught myself thinking, “I did The Work” on that, so I should have stopped reacting this way by now. Of course, if I remember not to beat myself up over it, it becomes an opportunity for even deeper inquiry. “I should have changed by now – is that true?”
The answers I get allow more compassion for myself and others – others because what I expect of myself there’s a tendency to expect of others too.
Lastly, I am really grateful to come back to my blog and see that I’ve had readers over these two months of my silence. I would love to hear about your experiences of questioning deeply held beliefs, so please do write in with comments.
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