How to claim happiness as your birthright.
If I asked you, what do you want? Would ‘happiness’ figure in your answer?
Most of us want that – agreed?
So how come so many of us think we don’t have it, or if we do have it, our experience of it is fleeting.
Here’s the kicker!
We think happiness is something external we must earn, obtain, and grasp on to for dear life! When truth is, it’s something we have free access to. All the time!
Happiness (Yoga reminds us) is in fact our birth right.
But that’s not what’s been taught. And we sure as hell are not being shown how to access it. But we can!
We Can Find Happiness Through Yoga!
Here’s how I know…
It’s 2013 and I’m in my story. I am a journalist, I write. I publish content, produce magazines.
I am a mother of two young children. I’m a wife. I’m a daughter. I work hard and I mostly do what I’m told.
“Be a good girl, do as you’re told” – was how I was told you can win at life.
As a well-trained people-pleaser that story served me… for so long.
It got me the home, the car, the profession.
You know what the truth was…? I wasn’t happy and I wasn’t winning at life and I underneath it all the compliance and making everyone else happy, what I was thinking was – this is BS!
Say hello to the big 40 and I had very little freedom, I was far from being myself and I had no idea how it happened!
Want to hear what happened?
I was in-waiting!
In a self made holding space. For circumstances in my life to change, my job to change, my salary to change, my relationships to change, something, anything to change.
Waiting for…
- when I didn’t have to work all hours to be successful
- the moment I didn’t have to conform, or wear clothes I felt uncomfortable in
- not having to write content that served an agenda I was not aligned with.
- no more guilt around not being at home with the kids
- my worth to be noticed even if I did work part-time
- to be heard because I did have something worth saying
- that promotion to happen
- any external acknowledgement that I was doing a good job at anything. That I had something worth listening to, something to offer. That I mattered.
How long was I going to wait?
Good grief! It still hollows me out when I think back.
Although on the face of it, it felt reasonable request to ‘be good’.
For someone with an inner curiosity, that did want to question (everything) and sought answers, when none where forthcoming, ‘doing what I was told’, was never a strategy that was going to work long-term.
Eventually the lid blew off the whole thing. It had to!
The good news, I came to learn was, although I felt 100 percent duped, none of it was my fault.
And yeah, people might not ‘think I was good’, if I didn’t do what I was told or what was expected. But that didn’t make it true.
There was a lot to unpack!
Why? Well, because like most kids, I was taught to look to the world for fulfilment pretty much straight out of the womb.
Not only that, but what was modelled was that to be happy you went looking outside of yourself and look to other people for happiness.
Go and accumulate positions and possessions, is the call.
And don’t forget the drum beat that success (mainly financial) equals happiness, and we must work hard, be in a certain group, drive a certain car, wear a certain brand of clothing to be socially accepted or perceived as having value.
Naturally there are problems with this approach.
Not that we shouldn’t want what life has to offer and enjoy in all its opportunities and abundance.
Don’t we just love things? I love achievements and realising goals.
Trouble is, when you start to define yourself by the people, possessions and accomplishments in life and the objects that, (let’s face it) can come and go, it makes for a very unstable existence.
None of that is who we are!
And at some point, we get to a place where we’re struck with the realisation that on paper things may be going well.
However, something remains missing!
And we realise…
…we’re struggling.
We have built a story, a way of how we identify ourselves, and how we project out into the world.
But that story is keeping us stuck. Glued to unhappiness and feeling unfulfilled.
For the love of yoga, we have to change that story. And get unstuck.
I’m learning to change that story daily, through my practice.
Do you want to do the same?
How We Can Help You Find Happiness…
It’s a mission of mine to be a voice that reminds people that the tools and teachings of Yoga have always been available to us to address the human condition called suffering and struggling.
We should remind ourselves daily that yoga is a much grander offer than we’re currently being sold in the West. Even in this industry you see yogis trading off the insecurities we have around our external physical form and discouraging us from going any deeper in our practice. You know why? Because it’s a much harder sell.
What’s more, I’m being a voice that reminds us that if we find the right teacher and the right teachings, you can turn your lens inwards and lean into all you are and all you are meant to be to become, beyond just your physical form.
That’s where happiness lives.
Not in what we acquire but in our sense of purpose and in the meaningful activities we love to do that serve the bigger picture and as a result ourselves and everyone!
Trust The Tradition Of Yoga
Just know that if we trust these age-old time-tested practices and work with them as they were meant to be taught, we slowly move away from limiting beliefs that hold us back from remembering ourselves and keep us in the ‘story’.
Slowly we learn to master our mind and redirect our energy.
And that gives us the capacity to navigate past all the conditioning, the negative emotion, experience and finally see life differently and step into our power.
It’s in that process you get to take control of your health, sleep better, think better and become happy from the inside out.
You get to stop searching outside what can only be found within and learn that that is the quickest way to making real and lasting changes in your world.
When you shift to self-referral and have experience of your true self, that self that is unchanging, your essence, soul, you can maintain an internal sense of well-being, no matter what’s going on around you, and no matter what you are told.
We are all creatures of habit and find change difficult, but the rewards if you are dedicated to your practice, are many and enduring.
They will also be with you for life!
It’s the freedom that we are all looking for. To be ourselves.
If you are interested in true, lasting happiness, join us and practice! Rewrite your story. Become yourself again.
