Can’t get no satisfaction?

Here’s a question for you to consider, hand on heart.

Are you seeking satisfaction anywhere in your life?  In your work, your relationships, family, social life, with your body, your health?  Anywhere at all?

Do want to tweak, change and improve certain areas, believing that you’ll be happier when you do?

How’s that working out for you?

This is how I lived a lot of my life, and it didn’t work out so well for me.  Over the years I came to realise that it didn’t seem to matter how much tweaking I did, or how much I tried to control the circumstances of my life, I never seem to be able to get to the point where it felt “finished”.  I never got to the point where I could relax, content that my external circumstances were now perfect.  Not only that, I couldn’t imagine a point where I ever would!

Realising this sounds like it could create a feeling of despair or depression.  My experience has been the opposite.  Realising this has been freeing.  What a relief; to know that the satisfaction that I seek cannot be attained.  Turns out, what I really wanted, was relief from all the seeking!

Contrary to what the famous life coaches might report that “If you believe it you can achieve it”, or suggestions that you should “Live your best life”, which imply that happiness is to be attained through getting what you want. I’d like to suggest that happiness is attained by refusing to believe that anything that you don’t already have can make you feel a certain way. 

What is the one thing that is consistent in all of your experience? 

You. 

The experience that you seek is not separate to you.  It is subjective.  It cannot create a feeling within you.

I’m not talking about learning to love what we have, or making an effort to be grateful.  I’m simply suggesting that we question the whisperings in our minds that “This thing is what you need”, or “When you get that, you’ll be content”.  Believing that we’ll be happier at some future point, immediately creates a condition of lack in the only time we ever experience – NOW.

We experience happiness in the now as often as we forget to want things to be different in the future.