High on Happiness

Posts Tagged ‘acceptance’

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I come to this day expecting nothing, but knowing whatever unfolds will be a gift and perfect.

Whether my plans and intentions flow through its hours without encumbrance, of whether they meet with challenge or delay is no matter to me.

I shall dance regardless, and with joy.

Let the morning song begin.  Let it come now, with its once in a lifetime score and set me in motion.  Let me merge with its melodies and ride its crest and fall, resisting nothing.

Oh, for the lovely gift of this day, I open my eyes in yes.

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“Tell us,” we asked the ancient ones, stretching high above us, “the secret of your longevity and strength.”

“Every day, I taste happiness,” the first one answered as its last leaves floated to the ground.

“I have learned to accept all that comes to me with gratitude, for everything is a either a lesson or a gift, both given to me with love.”

“I looked in wonder at the changing sky,” the golden one said, “with its endless depth, its sweeping clouds–now wispy, now billowing, now blanketing it all. And oh, the waxing and waning moon, the panoply of stars!  And I saw that all is change and learned to rejoice in time’s cycles.”

“I learned not to push against the winds, but to dance with them, and so I grew supple,” the first one added.  “I stretch my roots deep into the rich earth and it nurtures me.  Above me, the heavens beckon me to reach for their heights.”

“I welcome visitors,” the golden one said, “as they come with their stories and songs.  Some stay long and raise their families in my boughs, and I delight in their companionship and in watching them grow.”

“But mostly,” the older tree said, “we listen to the songs that sing within us, the love songs.  They are what opens us and propels us to grow.  They are how we learned the joy of our connection—to the earth, to the sky, to the winds and the rain.  The love songs that sing through our cells, and through yours, I might add, hold all the secrets.  ‘Live in joy,’ they say. ‘Taste happiness every day.’”

“Yes,” whispered the golden one, her leaves shimmering in the breeze.  “Taste happiness every day.  Taste happiness.”

From the earliest days of spring, the Joepyweed watched the other wildflowers blossom in the field around her, wondering what she herself would be when she grew up.

First came the coltsfoot, so tiny and bright.  Then the shy violet, fragrant and lovely in shape and in hue, and the delicate pastel blossoms of the fruit trees.  Oh, such beauty!  Surely she, too, would soon burst with sculpted petals and perfume the summer air.

But as the days passed, each one bringing forth another bit of colorful splendor, she wasn’t blossoming at all.  All she seemed able to produce was a tall, thick stem and big, bulky leaves.

She was, she thought, hardly the picture of grace.  In fact, as her chunky stem shot higher and higher, rising above every other plant around her, she fell into a deep sadness, concluding that she was some ugly deviant of nature.

Below her, as the sun passed the equinox and the days began growing shorter again, she watched the daisies and clover and thistles bloom, and at last the sweet yarrow and Queen Anne’s lace.  At least, she thought, she had the perfect vantage point for watching each one come into season, blossom and fade.

She had long since accepted that her dreams of personal beauty were not meant to be.  Now, she spent her days feasting on the beauty the other plants produced.  She noticed that, for all their loveliness, their life spans were brief, their days of glory short-lived.  Perhaps beauty wasn’t everything, she thought, and she began to feel a growing sense of gratitude for the gifts of height and longevity that nature had given her.

Then, one day, as the late summer sun burned away the morning’s mists, she felt an unfamiliar tingle at the edges of the small stalks that had risen from her clumps of leaves.  She was budding!  She was actually budding!  She could hardly contain her astonishment and joy.

Time flew past as she watched her buds swell and open, and she laughed as she saw the fluffy clusters of orchid-colored strands that they produced.  I’m still more a clown than a beauty, she thought.  But the bees loved her and she loved the way the breeze felt as it danced through her feathery petals.  And she was glad for them and at peace and happy in her life.

How very busy we are at wanting what is to be something else!  We paper over today with daydreams of yesterday’s news and regrets.  We scribble plans and worries all over tomorrow, while today sits sparkling all around us, all but unnoticed.

And yet, it’s today—this moment—that holds all the joy if we would just take it as it is.

Happiness—the real stuff—comes from opening our hearts and minds to what’s before us, to diving right into the moment’s juice and color.  Not judging.  Not comparing.  Not looking for lack or shortcomings.  Not even looking for treasure (although it’s always there, just waiting to surprise us).  Just simply looking, and allowing, and embracing it all as the gift that it is.

The moment asks nothing of us except that we receive it; it offers itself to us wholly and pure.  When we accept it as it is, standing in its center, we can respond to it from our hearts.  We can feel the depth of its texture, the sweep of its breadth, the direction of its flow, its unfolding potentials and possibilities.  And then we are free to dance with it from a place of conscious choosing, in accord with our highest and best.

From time to time, check in with yourself.  Ask yourself, “Am I awake?”  Let the dreams go; trade them for the now.  Be here—where it’s real.

So this is it, she thought.  Here I am, a yellow violet on a woodland floor.  I’m not a rare and elegant orchid, or a ruffled rose exuding heady fragrance in a garden, or even a cupped tulip on the edge of a manicured lawn.  But I am a violet.

And look how beautifully the sun shines on me!

She had dreamed grand dreams when she was still a bud, unfolding.  As she felt her green leaves unfurl, and sensed the DNA of orchids directing the shaping of her cells, she imagined she was destined for greatness.  She would be among the queens of the flower kingdom.  She imagined herself opening in an exotic botanical garden where she would be protected, pampered and highly admired.

So when her petals first stretched themselves open and she took a look at herself, she was quite stunned to discover she was but a lowly cousin of the grand orchids whose genetic heritage she shared.  She was still more stunned to see that not only was she not in a finely tended botanical garden, she was in no garden at all.

Had she been a human, she might have tumbled into a snarl of resentment, even anger, or despair.  She might have felt cheated by the fates and decided she was a victim of misfortune, left to the mercy of the wilderness and weather.

But violets are simpler than humans, and far more skilled in accepting what is.  So despite being quite surprised at the reality that faced her, the little violet quickly released her fantasies and looked around to see what was really what.  And that’s where we stepped into the story, you and I, just in time to hear her exclaiming “And look how beautifully the sun shines on me.”

As the kaleidoscopic moments moved across her little violet life, she would discover wonder after wonder – the insects with their iridescent wings, the marching armies of ants, the singing of the leaves in the boughs above her, the sparkle of dew and starshine.

That’s the luckiness of being a violet, this skill at accepting what is.  Once you get the knack, wonders appear.  Wonders and wonders and wonders.

Some close friends and I were talking today about our personal hopes and plans for the new year that’s about to dawn.  None of us intended to make any formal resolutions.  For the most part, each of us is happy with the paths we are on.  We’re already committed to growing in our awareness, deepening our spiritual consciousness, expanding our skills, developing our talents, moving toward increasingly vibrant health and well-being.

But then one friend confessed that she was feeling stuck and seemed to be going around in dull circles in her life.  Nothing seemed to have any special appeal for her right now.  Nothing was grabbing her interest or attention.  Her life was all questions and no answers.

“Ah!” Charles said, “You’re resting.  That’s what you’re wanting right now.  Enjoy it!”

That’s great advice.  When you find yourself at a standstill, embrace it.  Meet it with open arms, allowing it to be exactly what it is—a time of inner renewal.  When you can learn to enjoy life’s pauses, you’re all the more ready when the time for new creations appears.

Being at a standstill is like being in the midst of a psychic winter.  It feels as if everything has stopped growing.  The nights are long, and the days lack color.  It’s a time when everything seems turned inward.  You hunger for light and yearn for the days when you can run bare-legged beneath a warm and friendly sun.

And yet, if you listen with your inner senses, you can tell that miracles are happening beneath the snow-draped fields.  The bulbs and seeds are alive with magic and silently preparing to birth wonders.  Within the trees, looking so barren and lifeless now, cells are performing secret alchemies that will burst into blossom and leaves.

Yet the soil knows no restlessness, and the trees are masters of waiting.  They are masters of patience, and in their wisdom they say.  “Enjoy the beauty of the moment, of this day.”

They know the secret expressed by the 19th Century poet Bulwer-Lytton:  “Patience is not passive; on the contrary, it is active.  It is concentrated strength.”  It’s the strength of regeneration, of inner construction, of preparation for the next outward swing of the creative force.

Patience waits with power and dignity, with poise and self-possession.  It understands the down strokes of life’s rhythms, its in-breaths.  Patience sinks into them with persevering calm and steadiness, humming a contented little song, for it knows the purpose of its waiting.  It goes about its tasks with an even temper, resting on the outer quiet of the phase.  It busies itself with observations as it waits, and indulges in diversions and play.  It likes the holiness of the moment’s hidden magic and feels the intensifying joy of hope and anticipation, asking, “What will this bring?  What will this bring?”  as the process flows toward birth and completion.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves,” said Rainer Maria Rilke.  “Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is to live everything.  Live the questions.”

“Every now and then,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye, “a moment comes along that makes all the rest of them worth it.”   He was talking about the golden moments, the ones where you are so perfectly contented that you feel as if you’re made of warm honey.

It’s that contentment that’s the key.  It’s made of a special kind of satisfaction, where you simply let go of wanting things to be more, or different, or better than they already are.

I’m not talking about resignation, about surrendering your hopes and dreams.  Oh, no.  They’re part of the golden moment.  It enfolds them and paints your desires with a glow.

The contentment of the golden moment comes with sinking into everything that the moment holds and wrapping it in a whisper of yes that flows up from your very soul.    It’s a kind of deep acceptance of the perfection of the present, the whole of it—even those aspects we would normally reject.   It’s a sensing that everything is exactly where it needs to be and moving as it ought, and that it all has purpose and meaning even when it is beyond our understanding.

The happiness of golden moments is gladness for simply being alive.  It’s beyond reason, beyond emotion, beyond mere comfort.  It’s a moment of total ease, so big and broad that it embraces all possibility.  It contains you, and you contain it, and all the definitions that would keep you from your joy simply dissolve in its radiance and wonder.

They come unbidden, these golden moments.  They linger briefly and then they’re gone.  But they are always flowing down the stream, and now and then we catch one, when we’re lucky.  When we’re open.  When we’re willing.  And when we do, we see why the fellow had a twinkle in his eye from tasting one.

The other day I wrote about how I was stubbornly clinging to an irritation–stuck in a kind of perverted pride about how right I was in nursing  it, how deserving I was of something better.  You know the feeling.  It’s a tightness, a self-righteous clinging, a stubborn defense of your thwarted dream as the only thing in the entire world that could possibly bring you satisfaction.

But in truth, it’s clinging to those thoughts and feelings that prevents you from being satisfied by anything else.  One universal key for allowing happiness into your life is to begin with accepting what is before you.  Not to fight it, or resist it, or to cry that things weren’t otherwise, but to allow yourself to accept what is.

Sometimes we make it so difficult, this letting go of our wanting something else.  The feelings of disappointment, or resentment, or anger, or grief can be so very strong.   But only unhappiness comes from comparing what is with a mental image of something else, and telling ourselves that our story is better.

As long as we’re focused on the story, we’re blocking our vision of what exists now, of the possibilities and gifts the infinite present always holds.  By holding on to our story of how things could have been, or should be, we squeeze our perceptions down to a tiny sliver of reality, repeating to ourselves all the things that don’t match what we imagined would make us happy.

By holding a grudge against reality, we color it arid and mean.  But genuine reality is neither.  And if that’s how you see it, you haven’t quite opened your vision yet to all it has to offer.  True acceptance isn’t grudging.

Okay, you say, I can see that.  But how do you drop the story?  Despite the pain it’s causing you, how do you let it go?

First of all you have to recognize that you’re telling yourself a story (Clue: If you’re upset, it’s a story.) and then make a choice to let it go.  Here’s an image that works for me when I’m fighting to hold onto a story:  I think of my story as a shiny, glistening wasp that I’m clenching tightly in my hand.  As long as I hold it, it will sting me.  But if I open my hand, it will fly away.  It really is that easy.  You simply see the possibility of freedom from pain and choose to walk through its door.

Next you change your physical state.  You straighten your posture, let yourself breathe, take a good stretch, and tune in to what your senses are telling you.  Then get yourself into motion.  If you have been immobile, go for a walk.  Do some physical work.  Put on some upbeat music and dance.

If you were already engaged in physical action, let yourself sit quietly for a little bit, or lie down.  Then begin describing in words to yourself what your senses are telling you.  Describe what you’re seeing—the colors and textures and forms; describe what you’re hearing, and listen for the quietest, faintest sound.  Pay attention to what your skin is feeling—to the temperature and movement of the air, to the weight of your clothing.  Which muscles are tense?  What odors or fragrances you can smell?  What tastes and textures can you sense inside your mouth?

This little exercise—“Recognize, Choose and Act”—will give you immediate relief.  Even when you’re in the throes of deepest grief, it will give you a moment of respite.  And the more you practice it, the more powerful it becomes, and the more deeply it will carry you into the vastness of the eternal now—where all the genuine meaning and beauty and fun is, and the only place where your true power resides.