What’s Your Story?

You have one.  Every moment of every day you have one (many, actually).  Because human beings are story makers.  And your over all experience of life is determined by the stories you choose.  Life is made up of the simple reality of what is, experienced thru the lens of your story.

The simple reality of what is, is that you are a human being sitting, or standing.  You are a human being sitting or standing, and reading words on a computer screen.  That is it.  Until the story.  The story may be “I don’t really have time to be reading this . . . I have so much work to do . . . I am never going to catch up . . . I’m so tired . . .I should have slept more this weekend . . . but I needed to go out . . .I’ve been so stressed . . . I never have enough time to get everything done . . .why am I wasting time reading this . . .I need to  . . .

How does that story make you feel?  And notice that you believe the story – you accept it as part of the reality instead of seeing that it is an interpretation, a fabrication of your own mind, a story.  Always, in every situation, there is only simple reality (person sitting, reading words) and your story.  You can begin to discover the powerful truth of this for yourself by noticing your stories and playing with changing them.

Stories called “I have too much to do”  and “I am so far behind” are seldom pleasant, AND they are false.  What is true is that in any moment you are doing exactly what you are doing.  And in the next moment you will be doing exactly what you are doing – and the story of being behind and having too much to do is the lens that colors your experience of the simple reality of a person doing what she is doing.  Who would you be without that story?  You would be the same person, doing the same thing, but having a different experience.

Once you truly understand the power of your stories, and the fact that YOU are the one writing them, you can have whatever experience you want.  What story do you want to experience today? 

Happiness - The Choice That Never Gets Old

Did you choose happiness today? Sages, poets and studies agree: happiness is what everyone wants.  Yet so few of us live happily as an ongoing experience.  And this is a direct result of the fact that almost none of us were taught that happiness is a choice.

Human beings are choice makers.  We choose moment after moment, again and again throughout every day of our lives. We are choosing even when we are not aware of choosing.  Sometimes we choose consciously, more often we choose on auto-pilot. 

We choose our beliefs, our friends, our goals, our activities, and our actions. We also choose our clothes, our cars, our food, our toys and our pastimes.  And the prevailing hope/assumption is that the sum of our choices will create happiness.  When we fail to achieve happiness, we believe that we must choose new/different people, activities, work, recreation, cars, toys, etc., until we hit on the right combination that will create happiness.  This is good for the economy, but it is never going to produce happiness.

We get fooled into thinking these choices can produce happiness, because some of our choices do result in pleasure, and we are so unfamiliar with true happiness that we mistake pleasure (which is always conditional and transitory) as happiness.

Pleasure and happiness are not the same, but they are connected – just not in the way we have been conditioned to believe.  Most of us live our lives as if the more pleasure we can experience, the happier we will be.  This belief is backwards.  The way it actually works is this: the happier you are, the more pleasure you will experience in life, no matter what you are doing or what is going on around you.

Happiness is not conditional.  It is the natural state of all human beings.  Most of us don’t experience it as our natural state because nearly everything we have been taught about how to live our lives creates barriers to our moment to moment experience of happiness.

This blog is dedicated to helping you understand what is creating those barriers, and assisting you in making new life choices that will dissolve the barriers and allow you to experience happy day in and day out.  And, believe me, happiness never gets old.