Living an Unconditional Life.
A while back I was deeply unhappy, dissatisfied, and overall unhealthy. My husband, Bill, who was at the peak of his career, stamina, and confidence said to me one day, "I am so happy... I have everything - two beautiful and healthy sons, a life with my best friend, awesome friends, a newly renovated home - the only thing missing is your happiness."
Well, that was it - the moment of satori - epiphany!
I realized that my happiness is "my own" - my responsibility and thus in relationship to my response; and by placing it in the hands of others or within the conditioned objects outside myself or this moment, I was disempowered from being the happiness that I sought.
I was living a conditional fife: I'll be happy 'when', I'll be happy 'if', I'll be happy 'then'.
This journey toward Self-understanding - the way I process these emotions, memories, and stories, and the behavior, beliefs, and longing that confluence - is that response; and, noticing the process, those patterns and relationships return us to a potent recognition:
When we are present - when we hold life close - happiness finds us; and believing that it belongs or exists outside this moment is exactly "why" we feel unhappy - "what" keeps us from actioning ourselves in ways that support "happi"ness -- that which is always "happening" - replenishing the quality of happiness.
On the outside, it looks like a place or a thing or a certain way - a.k.a. Heaven - but what it is cannot be measured or experienced - is like ether ... has no external location, though it can be easily transmuted, projected outside ourselves.
Still, we long for it - the way our Gen Z youth longs for Vintage Clothing, the way we (Gen X) longed for antiques or some memory in the past - to inhabit a time when life felt safe or happy or steady.
The time is always NOW.
Anywhere else is in time and ruled by condition. The confusion is not in where we are looking but in how. When we seek with the heart we are directed right back to this Now, One with the Author of this script called Me, right back into the flow of well-being.
And here's the gig:
You don't have to wait until you're 40 or until something bad happens or until someone says something or after the weekend. You can start right now, from where you're at ... because everything (and I mean everything!) that has transpired up until now is useful, loving - grist for the mill!
Let's face it, it would be pretty boring if I just wrote about what life felt like living on a cloud! The ground of our Being requires traction, texture, and tension.
This is why the Curriculum below means so much. It's an homage to the students that have been my greatest teachers! And it is them that I want [w-ant, have willing agency] to serve.
This is the sweet spot - at the tender (tensive) precipice of growing up and waking up - within the energetic bodies of emotion, intuition,
and wisdom called by many names but which share one destination - the inexhaustible, boundless Beingness of Happiness that we are.