This month, I’ve been bombarded by marketing promising to “fix”
my love life. Products to attract a soul mate, products to spice up
a relationship, products to get over a bad one… Quite an array.
Add to that the magazine headlines in the checkout lane, random
conversations with friends and strangers, and so on…

The message “I can fix your problem” sells. It sells products. It
sells magazines. It just plain sells. The problem is that it sells
the problem as well as it sells the solution.

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(This was originally posted on the Universe of Power’s Discussion forum, in response to a member’s two part question: what about the overwhelming input we get from everything around us that getting what you want out of life is always hard, time-consuming and a struggle; and, why do any of us deserve to have happiness or prosperity when so many in the world are suffering from poverty, illness or war.)

It’s certainly true that we were raised and are now surrounded by messages about how hard everything is. I think this is based on the idea of an intact external reality moving along outside us like clockwork, a reality that doesn’t need us to exist, barely notices our existance and has no urge or tendency to provide us with what we need. That seems to be the “science” of the world view we’ve been living under. On the other hand there’s the traditional Christian view that most of us are exposed to in the western world (whether we are Christian or not our culture and social ideas are based on Christian beliefs) which says that there is a judgemental God, again external to us, who is intact, pre-existing and complete without us; a God we have to somehow please or cajole into providing something for us.

With this as our surroundings it’s no wonder everything seems so hard. How can our single psyche and our frail body make an impact on a huge pre-existant universe that has it’s reality so intact and complete that we are just a blip in the dark? Read the rest of this entry »

So much of our effort goes into trying to gain happiness! All the struggle after money, relationships, career, shopping and on and on is really a struggle after things that we think will lead to our happiness. Whether we are trying to reconcile an unhappy past, or achieve a distant happier future, our attempts to gain happiness influence all our activities and actions in the present moment where we really live.

Don’t you find that at the bottom of all your desires there is the belief that the thing you are striving for will make you happy? Isn’t that why all of us want what we want? We’ve constructed a sequence of reasoning that says things like: “I’m not happy; I don’t have money or a relationship. If I got them, then I’d be happy.” That’s the future oriented way of struggling for happiness.On the other hand, we sometimes say: “I’m not happy. I had a terrible childhood (or a bad first marriage, or got fired from my first job, or had a bad accident); if I could just reconcile THAT, then I’d be happy.” That’s the past oriented way of struggling for happiness.Both of these ways put our attention outside the Present Moment. We are either focused on something that happened in the past that we need years of therapy to “work through”, or we are focused on something in the future that we need to acquire. Either way, our focus is outside the Present, which is the only time we really ever have. Just think about it: can we ever go back and get into any past moment with our direct perceptions? Can we project ourselves ahead and experience something from the future? No. Our entire experience is contained in this single Present Moment, the only moment of true experience we ever have. We carry this Moment with us through our lives, like a bubble of reality surrounded by a constantly changing sea of Past and Future. Within this Present Moment is our only real experience. When we spend our lives longing for or regretting the past, or striving for a future that never comes, we ignore the one point of personal power that is all we ever have: Right Now.

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Does that sound backwards? Does it seem like it ought to be stated that once you are happy you can feel grateful? Sometimes turning our assumptions upside down brings insight and discovery. Gratitude felt before the happiness, before the manifestation of something we want, before the fulfillment of our dreams is a surprising idea, but in the energetic sense it is the most logical thing we can do.

How grateful are you? In this sense, I don’t mean just saying thank you if somebody gives you a gift, or holds a door for you. That is just politeness, or social convention. Gratitude isn’t words, it’s emotion. It’s an openness of heart to experience that lets your spirit flow out in a particular way. If you think of emotions as indicators of how you are expressing your spirit, you can see that these emotions tell a lot about where you are headed in your life-towards something great that you’ll enjoy, or something not so good, that you won’t enjoy. Learning to focus on emotions and see what they are telling you about your energy is an important step in learning to create the life you want. And learning to nurture and magnify the emotions that serve you is an equally important step.

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