You can never trust a happy person who says, “choose to be happy”. You certainly can’t trust an unhappy person who says, “choose to be happy”. We all know that if we were asked to check a ballot to choose our next emotion, we would universally check the box next to happy over misery.
It is absurd to think that we wouldn’t choose to be happy if we could. When we look through our emotional menu to pick what we will feel, happiness may not even be an available option, let alone our choice.
Rather than tapping into our innate capacity for happiness, we often roll like a pinball through the machine, hoping to bump into happiness and bounce around with it for a while. We try to create life conditions for ourselves that will assure our happiness, and whether we achieve our hopes and goals or not, happiness remains elusive, around the next corner.
To choose happiness, we don’t generate it, but we stop hiding it in a fog of fear. To clear the air, we have to shut down our fear factory and stop thinking about things for a moment. Our thinking gets us all revved up and the revving gets us thinking. To stop the revving, we have to stop the thinking. To stop the thinking, we can rest our attention in our belly or chest and let our body breathe open, spacious breaths. In any moment, we can choose to open our mouth and let our lungs take in all the air they want.
Instead of breathing like a bagpipe, with wind squealing out though the little tubes of our voice box and nostrils, we can let air come in and go out through the open tunnel of our throat and mouth. In that moment that we choose to bring our awareness to our breath, we stop generating fear, and as the fear stops, a sense of safety ensues. The most frustrating part about shutting down the fear production is that the sudden sense of wellbeing can be frightening.
Although you may not be able to choose a given day or week or moment to be delightfully happy, without breaking stride you can choose to check in with your thinking and your breath everyday or 100 times a day. Over time, those little glimpses of safety aren’t so frightening, When we get our fear production down to tolerable levels, happiness begins to glow like the moon in the night sky as the fearful fog blows away.
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