I'm not going to go into great detail on this here because I need to sleep soon. But I'm going to get it off my chest before laying down for the night. Maybe I'm the only one ...
I was reading the CNN website last night and found 
Where is Your Happy?
Did you know that life is about joy? Children are pure soul-essence, living free and without care, immersed and moving from thing to thing that makes them smile and laugh and celebrate. At some point, this inner knowing gets overwritten with ideas of responsibility at all costs, living up to expectations, falling in line, “growing up”.
But our soul’s urge, our life’s work, extends from this joy. When we don’t participate in the Rite of Joy within, we become bitter. We wonder what life is about and what the meaning of life is.
The quickest and easiest path back to the Center of our Soul is to ask ourselves about our own Happy-ness.
Now, notice I didn’t ask you what MAKES you happy. Happy-ness is not a result of something else. Happy-ness is a state of being, a place within you where all things that proceed from you come from a core of joy.
Can you remember a time when you gave wholly and openly and without thought of return, like a child giving someone a flower, just because? What were you doing at the time that you felt that openness?
Can you remember a time when you worked at a task with total awareness and devotion to what you were doing, what you were creating, what you were assisting with?
Can you remember a time when you woke up every day with a sense of adventure and a list of joyful things ahead of you that you wanted to experience?
Can you remember a time when you sat down to each meal with a sense of gratitude and wonder, when you saw the colors of the sky as though for the first time, when you knew your worth even though you were doing “nothing special”?
These are all markers on the trail to your Happy-ness.
Share, if you will, about your Happy-ness… and we’ll look a little deeper as we go along about what things occurred in life to separate you from that place, that caused you to put it on a shelf or bury it in the graveyard of Childhood Dreams.
The work of a spiritual path or a spiritual guide is to help you remove anything and everything in your life that separates you from your joy. That means deprogramming old thought patterns, old sabotaging habits, old self-defeating language that keeps your Joy buried out back. It’s not an easy thing to do — reclaiming your Joy — but it is the only work of this lifetime. Within the things that bring you Joy lies your true path and the work you are meant to do in the world. Once you have found that, your real Work begins, but it feels too much like the Play that it actually is!
I have a map. Let’s try and find it, ok? I’ll let you have the machete if I can have the binoculars. 
Photo by Nicora (via Flickr).
Kalamar Nur |
Monday, 19th October 2009 at 11:55 AM