Alright, so one question that I’ve been letting bubble around recently is “What does it take to just be HAPPY?” I mean really. No B.S. here. A simple question. Pretty basic and universal. What does it take?
It is often said that what we are seeking is always here, yet that’s often not the experience that we have, is it? In fact, we often experience that we don’t have what we want. Why the discrepancy?
Well, it seems that one of the big keys to experiencing happiness is resistance. The more we are resisting something, the more tension, negative emotion, knots in our stomach, dis ease, and all those unpleasant things we experience.
In the Sedona Method, they talk about resistance taking two primary forms: attachment and aversion.
Aversion
Aversion we are all pretty familiar with. This comes in the form of hate, judgment, complaining, saying no to, trying to push against or destroy something, etc. It’s basically a sense of war to various degrees. It’s a lot of that “bad stuff” in the world. On a small scale, it may show up as an internal felt sense of opposition or conflict. Someone says something and we notice ourselves subtly going into opposition against them. There they are, and here I am, pushing against them. This is how the experience of an enemy is born. This internal opposition then can grow and manifest into emotional opposition, physical opposition, and when taken to the extremes such as murder and war. Even suicide counts here, which involves an aversion to life and to yourself.
Aversion and this war-like conflictive pushing-against energy is usually pretty obvious when it shows up. It can be very violent and so it is pretty easily recognized, particularly in its more intense forms.
Attachment
Attachment, on the other hand, seems to be far more subtle. Attachment, the way I want to use the word here, is a sense of grasping or trying to get and hold in order to fill a presumed sense of lack. To illustrate attachment, try this quick exercise. With one of your hands, repeatedly reach out in front of you and grasp the air with your fingers, trying to pull it back towards your body. This is what that grasping energy is like. It is that grabbing and holding on energy that we are talking about here. Examples of attachment this context would include trying to gain approval, trying to control, neediness, clinginess, trying to get something to be other than it is, resisting change, trying to elicit a particular response from someone such as them liking you, and on a very basic level, somehow trying to “extract” happiness from something or someone else.
It is this clingy grasping process that I’d like to explore here, how it works and what life is like as we let go of that sucking energy. I’m finding this change to be fantastically transformational thus far…
A Closer Look at Seeking Happiness
Lately I’ve been exploring the idea of happiness and whether or not it really comes from living the dream life, whatever that means to you. To me it involved traveling. (CaterpillarWoman from the forums actually brought up an eye-opening perspective. She explained that she was a military brat and had traveled a lot growing up, so to her traveling doesn’t hold a lot of glamor. This was a big ‘aha’ for me. Sure lots of people want to travel, but it’s not a universal desire.) So again, we’re talking about what “the dream life” means to you.
Looking into my own experience of trying to derive a sense of happiness and freedom from living a mobile traveler’s lifestyle, I’ve found that it felt like I would (without consciously realizing it) subtly demand (perhaps too harsh a word as it feels far more subtle than this), but I would try and obtain a sense of happiness from the experiences I was having. Follow your bliss, they say, but we may mistakenly get caught in thinking that the blissful thing we’re chasing actually contains that bliss! Go get it! Go! Go! This is not the point of following your bliss. When looking at this more closely, it was like constantly trying to get something from the someone/something, be it approval, love, control, money, positive experiences, or whatever else.
Honestly it almost feels like inserting energetic tendrils into other people or things and quite literally trying to extract the happiness that I seek from them.
The pattern was “do something and get happiness from it.”
Withdrawing Your Tendrils
Recognizing this happiness seeking/sucking/leeching pattern consciously, there was then the ability to stop that grasping and withdraw my tendrils.
This is something I’ve been exploring the past few days. For me, this subtler sense of grasping attachment happens more often than the aversion. Both still happen, sure, but the grasping energy feels a little more ninja-like and less obvious to spot. Whenever I experience tension, fear, or basically anything other than happiness or peace, I now look to see if I’m energetically reaching into the world and trying to get something from it. My experience with this has been quite profound and I’d like to share a few examples with you guys.
Experiences with Relationships
Can anyone relate to this?
How many millions of missed opportunities and how much unnecessary suffering has there been due to experiences like this?
With women, particularly the ones I’m attracted to, often I’d look at them and notice a sense of discomfort. Exploring this this more closely and seeing what it is that I wanted from them, I noticed the thought pattern “I want your approval. I want you to like me and think I’m attractive. I want your love. I want this to go well.” Already, before a single word has been spoken, I’m already reaching into her and trying to get something from her, trying to extract approval, love, and even impose a certain response upon her. “I need you to react this way. I want you to like me.”
Seeing this and withdrawing that tendency to get something from her, I noticed a sort of falling back. It’s not a falling back into fear like you’re running away. Rather, you simply observe and notice without manipulation. Surprisingly, happiness and appreciation naturally arise on their own. A sense of warmth and love would be present as well. Rather than focusing on getting something from them, it felt more like I was just glowing in happiness and love within that I wasn’t conjuring up deliberately or talking myself into. It was just naturally present every time I’d withdraw the tendency to try and get happiness and love. Really cool…
Reaction-wise I’ve noticed far more smiles from women, I’m far more comfortable with them, and I’m much more lighthearted and relaxed. The sense of anxiety drops and I’m free to be much more intimate. It’s like without trying to pull them in, you automatically feel closer. Go figure… It’s a much more enjoyable experience for me, and it takes away a lot of the stress of trying to accomplish something. Anything.
No fear of rejection. No desire to try and be loved. No worrying about how things will unfold. That stuff just doesn’t even seem to come up when I stop trying to get something from the situation. Very surprising! What freedom!!
Amazingly, there is the experience of already having everything I’d want from her: Love, approval, appreciation, joy, and so on. I find I actually really enjoy being with people whereas it used to be a source of stress and anxiety. HUGE improvement!
Not Trying to Get Happiness from Travelling
With travel, I’ve noticed sometimes I’d travel around and yet still feel miserable. Okay, wtf, something’s definitely off here… Seeing this, I’d look more closely and found that I was subconsciously expecting some sort of magical *something* to come in and fill me up with happiness. The thought pattern was along the lines of “Here I am, now let’s go out and find all the things I can do or see that will make me happy.” Make me happy. I was reaching into the world and trying to find the experiences that would be my source of happiness. This sensation of grasping, when you pause and pay attention to what’s happening just below the surface, it’s clearly present and very real.
Seeing this, I would then withdraw the sense of grasping for happiness. Just stop trying to grab anything at all. Grasping seems to lead to suffering, not happiness. With this withdrawl, there would be a natural stopping of waiting for something special to happen in order to be my magic pill. There was a stopping of needing to get anything from the experience at all.
To some degree, it’s a death of an entire way of life. It feels like something very important is dying. In fact, if you’re identified with this grasping, it feels like you are dying, with no hope for the future. Pretty scary…
Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly.
What I’ve noticed happen every single time thus far when I withdrew the grasping is that a natural sense of appreciation and happiness would again come up from nowhere. Oh here it is! There would actually be an immense sense of happiness that would arise, a profound blossoming of appreciation, simply because I stopped demanding that the situation give me anything at all. Weird…
I’ve found that when I travel without seeking happiness from traveling, I actually enjoy traveling 10x more than I did before. Whoa.. It’s like this moment is already so beautiful. It’s not because there’s anything particularly special about what is here or where I am, but it’s like a much more pure seeing. It’s a different type of seeing when you’re not trying to get something from anything. It’s like everything is seen to be beautiful. At the same time, I find I’m not concerned with trying to get more more more in this moment or the next. This moment is already filled with peace, satisfaction, happiness, and joy. All the things I was trying to find! Sweet!
Whether sitting in a coffee shop, driving in my car, going somewhere new, being with friends and family, or being at home and not going anywhere.. this doesn’t depend on where I am or any of those external conditions or places. In a nutshell, when I stop trying to get something I want, I find that I already have it. It just reveals itself when the search for it stops.
It’s almost like the search itself actually overrides the experience of actually having it, ironically enough. It’s like you can have anything you want. Just don’t go out looking for it. 
This pattern seems to happen a LOT. Trying to get a sense of comfort, security, and on and on. It’s pretty amazing to look and see how often this grasping tendency seems to happen when you become aware of it. It’s shocking actually…
What About Wanting “Things” Outside Yourself?
What we’re talking about grasping for here is mainly internal things. It’s emotions, feelings, states of being. Happiness, love, that sort of thing.
What about wanting stuff outside of us? Perhaps a good mate, a certain amount of money, a new car, a trip up into space, etc.
We could say that that’s different. After all, money isn’t inside of us. Going to the moon isn’t inside us. Our ideal lover isn’t inside of us… okay wow, that sounds like the setup for an awesome sexual joke, but I digress… 
In any event, it feels like physical things other than emotions and feelings are outside of us, and I used to think that too.
3 points about this:
1) Sure those things may appear outside of our physical bodies and we may perceive our bodies to be the physical limits of “us,” but it seems that the “cause” or source of all this is actually within us. Our perception and experience of the world is driven by thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and states of being. It’s that whole “your inner world creates your outer world” bit.
2) There may also start to be the experience of a collapse of both space and the perception of inside and outside as you lose the perception of being centered in a particular point in space and time. When this happens, you find that nothing exists outside of you. In fact, since you don’t exist in any particular location, nothing can truly be said to exist within you. As a manner of speaking, we can say that it all exists within awareness, but perhaps a more accurate way of saying it is that it’s all simply HERE. Since it’s already here and can go no place else, why grasp, try to bring something here, or try and keep it here? None of that even makes sense when it’s all already here.
3) Is it really the *things* that we want? Let’s look at money for example. Money is boring. It’s sheets of paper and chunks of metallic discs. It’s 1′s and 0′s in a computer. There’s nothing special to it. It’s dead and lifeless. It’s not the money itself necessarily that we want, but the experiences that money can give us. Whether it’s the ability to afford different experiences, the feeling of being rich and successful, or whatever else, in the end we want the feelings and emotions that the money brings about. The emotions are available now. We think “I’ll be happy when I get the money.” Why not be happy now? Why wait? What you want, even if it appears to be some thing outside of you, it’s the internal effect that it has upon you that we truly want. In a nutshell, whatever it is that we want, we want it because we believe it will make us feel better. It’s that simple.
So even external things, it again comes back down to the internal game. It’s within. The key is within.
What’s Your Experience With This?
So what about you guys?
Do you find yourself also reaching for something in life?
When you stop and take a look during those times when you feel uncomfortable and want something, do you experience the same sort of energetic tendrils trying to grasp something you think you want?
If you stop doing that, what happens then?
What’s it like for you?
