What if you didn't know that you are already happy?

Sand Art and photography by Benny Olvera

It's one of those questions that makes the brain grunt and back up a few paces, asking, "Is this a trick question?"

Seriously think about it. It's a bit like when you're sick as hell, barfing your guts up and you realize that months, even years have passed and your health was there in tact the entire time while you were busy complaining about other things. 

Or when some miserable SOB dies, and suddenly his wife who bitched night and day about him, has nothing but nice things to say about him?

The perpetual pursuit of happiness seems like a symptomatic plague of privilege. The easier our lives become the more we suffer from invisible plight. The more money we throw at self help, escapism, and "Fix me" snake oil remedies, and the more frustrated we become.

Is it only in hindsight, looking back on photos, recounting the good ole days that we realize how happy we were?

Yesterday I was driving in a rain storm. My 19 yr old son in the front seat shouts, "Mom I don't think this guy is gonna stop!" 

I hit my brakes just in time to avoid being broadsided by the black blazer speeding through the stop sign. We came literally inches from smashing into it. With my hands tingling and my heart pounding, I pulled over to devote all of my attention to just breathing.

The litany of petty customary complaints that sully my first world perspective fell away instantly in the stark reality of life's fragility. Flashes of what it would be like to be paraplegic, brain injured, or childless, shocked me awake. Problems? What problems?

Suddenly working limbs, eye contact with my boy, a family and partner that love me, and the blank canvas of life ahead was all I ever needed in the world. 

Happiness has been there all the time, like my heart beating whether I notice or not. It's a baseline condition when all my essential needs are met: shelter, food, water, and love. Yes I cover happiness up with concerns about business, parental expectations, political stress, and other drama. But when something like almost dying clears the bullshit away, all that remains is gratitude and the simplicity of happiness.

Last night my husband read me a beautiful reminder from Eckhart Tolle. Success isn't something that we attain by sacrificing and working hard. Success is simply being awake to the one and only moment in front of me. Making this moment the best one. Then whatever I am "doing" is infused and amplified with how I am "being". That conscious moment is success. These moments strung together like pearls make for a continuous life of success. Never forfeiting present life for some accomplishment down the road. (Ask any old or dying person, they will agree.)

I bring this up for two reasons. First this gives me a chance to thank my husband, Benny, for inspiring me to write this post when he asked the question, "What if you didn't know that you were already happy?"

The second reason is that happiness and success are often linked. Therefore it is imperative that we understand the true meaning of success. When we see it as possible in this very moment unburdened by effort, deed, or triumph, then we can slow down. We must slow down, let go of the all the ways we're shoulding on ourselves, all the ways were making this moment wrong.

Stop now. Breathe. Success and happiness are yours right now. See you've been happy all along and you didn't even know it. 

Can you feel it? 

What we give our attention to grows. I think I'll leave mine here for awhile.

Losing It All

It’s the generic times that go on without intention or notice. The minutes we squander with our endless doing. They add up and in my mind I am a young girl again listening to the ominous warning coming from the TV.

At five years old before my parents had liberated our household from the Boob Tube, (as my stepfather referred to it) my mom had a standing date with the soap opera, Days of Our Lives. “As sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives” would reverberate through our house like a gong, rooting into the fissures of what I would someday be, I was shaped.

These days I'm doing the grown up duties. I’m making to-do lists of food shopping and errands to run, when suddenly the mundane is punctured by the stabbing truth of my own mortality. The acrid pause of dry mouth and halted breath violently sucks me out of the trance of the undead. I’m a cockroach fleeing from the fluorescent light of “What the fuck are you doing with your life?”. That momentous shredding of common day reality visits me often, rendering me a child, who has been spanked and sent to my room to think about it.

 Then I remember these words by Jeff Foster and finally exhale.

 "You will lose everything. Your money, your power, your fame, your success, perhaps even your memories. Your looks will go. Loved ones will die. Your body will fall apart. Everything that seems permanent is impermanent and will be smashed. Experience will gradually, or not so gradually, strip away everything that it can strip away. Waking up means facing this reality with open eyes and no longer turning away.

But right now, we stand on sacred and holy ground, for that which will be lost has not yet been lost, and realizing this is the key to unspeakable joy. Whoever or whatever is in your life right now has not yet been taken away from you. This may sound trivial, obvious, like nothing, but really it is the key to everything, the why and how and wherefore of existence. Impermanence has already rendered everything and everyone around you so deeply holy and significant and worthy of your heartbreaking gratitude.

Loss has already transfigured your life into an altar." 

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Hottest Success Formula EVAAAAAA!

I’m writing to you from the sky. I’m on the plane to Mexico. These words are the last minute wrappings of any professional duties before I completely surrender my brain and body to a much craved winter vacation. Yes it’s 6am and I just got a little rowdy. I ordered a Bloody Mary to pad the transition from work to play. Caution: this could go rogue any minute.

Once upon a dream there was a diligently devoted Dame of Duty (and let’s get honest, it was drudgery). She was a gold medalist, breaking records and hearts on her conveyor belt of everlasting toil and tasks. A first world entrepreneur, (wow “first world”? Nothing existed before us? Such a mix of arrogance, privilege, and pathetic, and yeah, I’m going with it anyway.) she was beholden to a bold but bizarre work ethic. She would stop at nothing to get the job done. Wearing her badge of workaholic faith, she abandoned family, friends, entertainment, even food and sleep She probably even passed up sex just to check that one last thing off her to do list before retiring for her 4 hours of beauty sleep.

In the midst of her magnificent flow of fierce productivity, out of nowhere swung the inevitable cosmic 2x4. You know the one. It lays you flat on your sweet ass. It was the mirage in the desert she was galloping towards that turned out to be no mirage at all, rather a quite tangible solid brick wall.

Only as she lay in the wreckage of her shit and shock did it all begin to make sense. There were signs along the way she refused to see.

Like when she missed her brother’s wedding because with the flight and all, the timing just didn’t work, or the fact that she hadn’t been out with the girls in oh… two and a half years? Really, had it been that long?

The lazy Sundays of sleeping in, cuddling, watching movies and strolling to the coffee shop were either distant memories or something she watched in a Nicholas Spark movie. To put it bluntly she had put all her eggs in her fancy, hope gilded career basket. She failed to recognize that in her efficiency and fast tracking she’d been riding the crazy train.

If you’re reading this and haven’t connected the dots back your self; I’m here to burst your blissful bubble of naivety. The rest of you have a self-signed copy of this tragic novella on your internal bookshelf.

The spiritual sledgehammer comes in a variety unrelated forms, bodily injuries, divorce, disease, maybe depression, whatever it takes to get your attention. In the end it kicks your ass regardless. Its not so subtle message boils down to this: “Bitch, slow it down. I mean NOW”.

Demonstrative grand sweeping displays of flagrant self-care might be just what your inner lady is calling for.

I’ve concocted an infallible formula for this imperative.

I call it the holy art of rest and play.

1.)  PLAY

Most of us don’t even know how to play. In classes I lead, I often ask students to share how they play. What I most commonly hear are things like, “I read books, I go for long walks, I work out, I watch a sunset, or I meditate.”

So if you took a pack of 5 yr olds and told them these were on the menu for playing, they’d burst into to tears and want to go home.

Oddly enough playing takes effort. Most adults suck at it.

Ask yourself how do you play? I mean really play! Can you put away agenda, restrictions, logical objective, or strategies and just play? Be silly, laugh, explore, be nonsensical and outrageous!

2.)  RELAX

Sleep is usually first on the list. It’s good and totally necessary. I give it two thumbs up. As a matter of fact I’m a total nap beast.

 In the vast spectrum between work and slumber there are heaps of relaxation variants I invite you to explore. How do you relax without totally checking out? I’m not talking about mindless internet browsing, Netflix, or snoring. After your inner child had been let out to frolic and romp let the pursuit of relaxation begin!

Okay that being said, my plane is about to land and I’ve got some boogie boarding, Frisbee playing, and hammock lolling to do. 

(finishing this post 2 weeks later...)

When my ladies arrived for our retreat, my head was clear and my heart wide open. I got to resume the amazing work I do in this world with a fresh appreciation and perspective.

Are you postponing self care, relaxation, play, and restoration? What’s your excuse? Is it money, time, or an endless task list that is sabotaging you? Please check in with your body. Take even one day and devote yourself to yourself.  This is the key to sustainable success…Trust me I’ve had to learn the hard way. Yep I still have the scars to prove it!