Pause for Happiness 6-15-22

LakeWoodsFlowers

SECRETS FOR A HAPPIER LIFE
Inspiration and Practices

Pause For Happiness

Hello Michael,

Just as the law of inertia reminds us that a body in motion tends to stay in motion once you are engaged in activity it is difficult to take a pause. And once you begin down a path of negative emotional thinking watch out; its a slippery slope all the way to the bottom.

How do you break the cycle of becoming frustrated, agitated, upset or even angered when a situation gives you the opposite of what you want? How do you let go of the tightness in your chest and the building heat on your face when you know you are right and you have already walked away?

The short answers that usually do not help very much are to take a pause; count to ten; breathe slow and deep; scream let it out; see the emotion as an object and not you. All well and good and a step in the right direction but only a short term help at best.

An alternative might be the view to consider the object of the emotion such as frustration to be embraced rather than repelled. There is you as the subject and the situation the “cause” of the frustration as the object. Easy to see the separation of the subject, you, and the object frustration. However you might continue and subdivide the object of frustration to being the resistance that you have to not wanting the frustration rather than the frustrating object itself. This is a tricky point to understand.

What causes the feeling of frustration is the resistance to what is rather than the specific situation that appears to be causing it. It is the field of resistance ie the not allowing of reality to be as it already is. However the resistance is of your own making; not the situation. You are pushing yourself away from yourself.

Although you cannot change the situation that has occurred you can let go of the tightness in your chest and heat on your face (but only if you want to). There is a gap between you as happiness and your resistance to being happy. If your mind and will insist that you hold on to your righteous indignation you will still be yoked to their accompanying unpleasant felt sensations. All you need do is let go. Like jumping out of a plane and opening a parachute; as the chute opens you are floating in air and all of the irritation of resistance drops away.

Imagine you live on a farm and you pick up a baby calf. The next day you pick it up again. You continue day by day until you can pick up a full grown cow. Almost, right?
Consider when you were an infant. You received care for all of your needs without your care taker being frustrated thinking that you should do things by yourself. However, at some point you cannot pick up the calf and as a care taker you expect the other person to take responsibility and do things for them self. Imagine your true inner self to be happiness awareness and your frustrated self to be the acting out of your ego. When you stop resisting the objectionable situation and allow the object of resistance to frustration to also drop away you merge back into your true self of happiness. Let come what comes, let go what goes and see what remains.

Experiencing the situations of life creates wanting and not wanting. Wanting and not wanting creates the actions of the ego. The ego starts to “think” it is a separate self and resists its disappearance by resisting what it does not like. Close the gap between your natural state of happiness and the resistance by embracing the very resistance.

You are a stranger in a strange land where you are both the happiness as well as being revealed as the illusionary play of resistance. Imagine it to be an infant that needs care, an infant called resistance that cannot as yet care for itself; be soothing at first and then hugging and then welcome it back into your heart of happiness.

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Michael Selzer DDS (retired)
Happiness Coaching
Charlottesville, Virginia
MikeSelzerDDS@aol.com

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Thoughts To Ponder For Happiness 3-01-2021

SECRETS FOR A HAPPIER LIFE Inspiration and Practices

Thoughts to Ponder for Happiness 2-22-2022

Hello Michael, I remember my dad coming home from work and sitting at the dinner table with his tie on.  But even more than that I remember his hat.  Maybe because although he had a number of ties he had only one hat.  As a I did not wear a hat  I remember he wore it a lot; anytime he was outside and going somewhere.   When I was a teenager he stopped wearing starched white shirts every day to work. He also loosened his tie and started taking off his shoes before eating dinner.  Imagine expanding the feeling of “taking off your shoes and being at home.” And then expanding that feeling a little bit at a time to being outside in a park and then outside on a city street and then inside a crowded NYC subway car. Imagine not the closed down separating yourself sensation of being in a dense noisy crowd and not the excitement of being together with thousands of others at a rock concert.  But being at ease, unguarded and fully at peace; and being with this feeling in more and more places.   If you are one of those people that already feel comfortable anywhere then you can stop reading. For the rest of us …What are the feelings associated with not feeling at home? Self consciousness Wearing clothing that is less comfortable Fitting in to a particular behavior type  Being dressed accordingly  Role playing Working What if all of the actors in a play or movie were dressed the same?  Would the story they told be affected?  Could they portray their character without the outward visual appearance of a costume?  What is the costume of being at home?   Do rock band performers wear their most comfortable clothing or is it part of the act for them to dress as if they were? If getting “dressed” for an occasion whether it is for a picnic, beach, rock concert or funeral do the outfits create your personality for the occasion?   How much of “me” do I try to portray when I go out of the house? As I have relaxed more into me and less of my projected me I am more able to dress less.  Although I still put on a collared shirt when I am going to a doctor’s office or as most golf courses require a collared tucked in shirt.  From a philosophical viewpoint there is a larger field of view than our usual constricted image of ourselves.  When we can tap into and merge with this field we tend to loosen our ties and wear softer more flexible footwear.   Meditation enhances this change. Why is that?