Happiness is Made, Not Found

For the longest time, I felt like I was merely existing until I found happiness. What I didn’t understand was that happiness isn’t something you find, it’s something you make.

That’s a key point in a lot of the books I was reading. Before you go on your own journey, you have to decide whether or not you want to be happy. Seems like an easy question, right? But the books point out, “Do you want to be happy?” or “Do you want to be happy ONLY IF…. [insert some condition here]?” Think about it. Most likely, the real commitment is that you want to be happy AS LONG AS you have a steady job, money, a husband, a wife, an iPad, a Mustang… These are all conditions you place on yourself. You decide you can be happy only if certain criteria are met.

My criteria were something along the lines of… I can be happy when I have friends, or when I have extracurricular activities. And even further, I can be blissfully happy when I’ve found the right guy. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never been the type to dread being alone. I cherish it. I don’t need a guy. I can easily leave a guy if he isn’t what I’m looking for. But finding the RIGHT guy was always the crème de la crème in my mind. Then I would be BLISSFULLY happy. Complete.

For starters, I now realize that’s the wrong way to look at relationships. I haven’t nailed down the RIGHT way, but now I get that relationships just fill voids in your soul that you should be filling with your own love and acceptance. Relationships are completely unnecessary. You don’t need them to feel love, and really, in this day and age, you don’t even need them to have kids. Relationships are completely optional.

And just for clarity, I don’t even recognize “flings” – they just don’t exist in my world. So I’m not saying, “Relationships are unnecessary! Go sleep around and forget any emotional attachment!” NO. Flings are wrong anyway, so they just don’t even need to be included in this conversation, as far as I’m concerned.

I’m rambling now. Anyways…

How do you make your happiness? You have to work on your confidence. It’s all about your confidence and self-acceptance.

There is no reason to not have confidence. Period. It doesn’t matter if you’re fat, or you always screw up instructions, or you always forget your keys, or you’re not as smart as the other people at school or at work… it doesn’t matter. Believing those things about yourself is what is keeping you locked in that feedback cycle. You’re manifesting it into reality. You stress about it, and you go into auto-pilot, and then it happens. If you believe it about yourself, that’s the problem. None of those things are WHO YOU ARE. They can be changed. They are just moments in time. You can break out of it at any time. You just have to realize it doesn’t define you, and give yourself some space to grow beyond it. Love yourself. Encourage yourself. You can’t beat yourself up about anything.

There are also those who are TOO confident. As we know, that isn’t true confidence. So if you are super secure and confident, listen up. Most likely you are confident because you’ve decided what is important in the world and what isn’t, and conveniently those things align with your own talents. Sound suspiciously correct? You feel super confident because you’ve mastered certain skills, but you have to continuously display those skills to others to remind yourself and reinforce the fact that you are amazing. And what happens if you have a bad day one day, and you are off your game? It bothers the heck out of you and you scramble to prove that it was a fluke, and reinstate your reputation as being the best. You may even see other people as threats, because really, they are a threat to your self-esteem, so you must crush them, because you hate the feeling of doubting your own worth. If that sounds like you, don’t worry. You already know you are a gifted and skilled individual. What you don’t know is that it is okay to not always conquer everyone. You are allowed to love yourself and receive love and respect even if you are not on the top of the world. Winning is not everything. You’re missing the point of life. The point isn’t to separate everyone from yourself and declare them an enemy that you must conquer. The point is to love and to be loved, and you can’t do that if you are always in some unnecessary battle with them. You will never be satisfied if you live like that. Ever. And when/if your skills start getting a little rusty, you are going to fall into a huge depression, or work yourself to death trying to get back on top. You will have missed the whole point and the whole blessing of life – love. And if you live like that, you may not even really know what love is, because you’ve probably twisted love into your power games, as well. You probably want people to need you and worship you. Well, maybe. I won’t make any assumptions there. So if you are TOO confident, realize that you are just as worthy of life, love and happiness even if you were to one day NOT be the absolute best at everything. By making life a competition, you’re turning life into an ego boost instead of genuine exchanges of love and service to and from others. Don’t trash it like that.

So once you’ve overcome whatever issues you have with your confidence and self-acceptance, the path is pretty straight forward. There are bumps, of course, but the worst part is acknowledging all the ways you have judged yourself and others and how it is COMPLETELY connected and IS the perspective you have on life. Those are the lenses you wear each day. It can take a very long time to remove those lenses, but all you have to do is know somewhere deep inside of you that this isn’t reality. Know that this is your ego trying to protect itself – claiming to protect YOU from emotional pain and discomfort. It’s natural and it is human, but it is not the truth. And yet EVERYONE does it. And THIS is why you can’t judge others – because they are doing the same thing you are, just with different filtered lenses. Even evil people ended up the way they are because they processed life in a negative way, and their ego felt that whatever evil actions they took were the only way to protect themselves from emotional discomfort and were the only way to build up whatever skills they determined were what makes someone “worthy” in life.

For example, religious disputes. People feel really strongly about their religions. Their religion defines morality and worth to them. Naturally, if they judge themselves by this standard, they would judge others by that standard, as well. And depending on how insecure or overly confident they are… well, bad things can happen and they can become extremely dangerous to other human beings. They’ve missed the point about life and morality. What’s funny is how ironic it is… they judge themselves based on their religion, and yet they don’t follow the teachings of their religion, because they feel such hatred for other human beings. It’s all just the ego playing tricks, and the problem is when others play into it or have the same ego problems… If only this could all be explained in a way that would resonate with people like that.

Can you see how any of these things would apply to you? Maybe you’re not some dangerous nut, but maybe you judge people in certain ways that either props you up or knocks you down. Can you see how this applies to you? Can you accept that every thought you have is essentially a judgment, whether you mean it to be or not? Can you be open-minded and look at life through a different set of lenses?