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.

Surrender to the Suckiness

“Would you rather slowly reverse your outer aging process, so that each day you look younger, but you continue to feel older and experience the aches and pains associated with normal body entropy? Or would you rather continue to age outwardly but inwardly you are growing younger each day, feeling more energy, strength and flexibility?”

That question is a test of wisdom and vanity isn’t it? Someone asked me that the other day. Glad it wasn’t today.

I’ve been in this Earth Suit for nearly 44 years now. I’ve been scrutinizing it for about 34 years, learning to love it for 20 years. I’ve been in true and utter awe of it every once in awhile, maybe 2 years if I combine all those moments over my entire lifetime. (That’s being generous.)

I work with women a lot, so I hear about body issues A LOT. I can sniff em out from a distance. Takes one to know one. I’ve been to eating disorder land and back, worshipped at the porcelain bowl, mastered the silent gag and double flush techniques. I know the holy high of starving myself. I’ve made exercise a religion.

I’ve been clean a long time, yet still there it is, those occasional days when my Earth Suit doesn’t fit. No matter how I sit, stand, dress, eat, or work out, my skin is suddenly an ill fitting irregular garment. I want to trade it in. Instead I move about in the world doing all my normal functions, smiling when it’s time to smile, and I robot my way through what could be, on any other day, meaningful interactions.

My old inclination was to forcefully overcome my shit, to get frantic and really intense about fixing it. Go for a run, do some yoga, or green tea should do the trick. In the back of my mind the voice of my inner critic ramping up, so that not only do I feel like shit, now I feel like shit for feeling like shit in the first place. “You’re a fake, an imposter. All this progress you thought you were making, HA what a joke.”

The hamster wheel of hate and self-loathing is hard to jump off when it gets spinning. For all my talk of sovereignty, being of service, and self-help one truth is persistent and persuasive. What I resist only persists. The harder I fight it, the faster the spin, and greater the suffering.

Then what the hell is there to do? Nothing. Truly, I swear that is the secret oh so passive weapon.

You know how it goes, something like this: life is great, then you wake up and suddenly it isn’t. A stranger looks at you funny, you don’t get the job, your beloved forgets the plans you’ve made together, dog pees on the carpet, you lose an eye lash, a spider sneezes. Who knows why your entire reality can shift in the blink of eye, why one day the mirror is a benevolent benefactor, and the next day a pratty antagonist. Trust me I’ve tried to get to the root of this mystery. It’s a huge waste of time and energy.

I will share with you some of my tried and true survival strategies for a shit day.

1.)  Surrender to the suckiness, just allow it to be.

2.)  Take a shower, get dressed. Seriously this helps.

3.)  Permission to wallow for a day. Sleep a lot. (This is not a lifestyle choice.)

4.)  Chocolate, it helps.

5.)   Netflix. It can be your best friend in a pinch.

Yep that’s it. Let it ride. Be shallow. Let your “practice” go for a day. Remember what its like to just be a muggle.

Oh one more survival strategy: write a blog post about what it’s like to be uncomfortable in your beautiful body, ungrateful in your bounty, miserable in your health. Write about what it’s like to be a whiney a lil bitch once in awhile.

Tomorrow will be better, I promise.

PMS, Love, and rockets baby. No greater than a speck of dust, no lesser than a god. We’re only messy humans after all.

Is Your LOVE The Real Deal? (Or are you as full of shit as the rest of us?)

I keep reading about unconditional love, and I feel the need to share an ever-emerging uhoh.

There is no such thing as conditional love. Bummer #1 folks, here it is: When there are conditions all over your love, ahem it’s no longer love. That’s a real pisser, huh?!

While I’m on the topic, newsflash to all of us (especially me, always to me, hear that Self? Yeah I’m talking to you.) There is no love shortage!

Why do I withhold my love? Is there some love drought and I need to be conserving? Or maybe there is a test, and only the loveliest, kindest, most compassionate beings make the grade. (Bummer #2: Turns out the easiest people to love are usually those in the least need of it. They’re tanks are pretty full, hence the loveliness.)

Apparently I thought someone appointed me to be the hotshot decider, director, and dispenser of love. You have to work for my love, work hard for it.  You must toil all day in the hot dusty love fields. Did you get my updated rules and regulations of love? Go away I’m no longer accepting your counterfeit Love vouchers. They don’t bear the certification stamp of my  philosophy, income bracket, religion, politics, race, sexual orientation, etc., just get out!

Let’s up the ante and go with the old biblical saying, “God is Love”. What happens now when I block Love? Oops I’m blocking God. (She had to bring in God and make it all religious.) Well shit.

Stay with me, let’s examine it through the Christian religious lens (only because that is the one I’m most versed in.) Jesus threw down some pretty tough stuff in his day. Crazy notions like, (some might even go so far as to call them commandments) no really guys, this one is supremely important, listen up, this is where it gets tricky, where your actions speak louder than your words. This is where the rubber meet the road, where you walk your talk, where you better live it to give it…Ready?

“LOVE your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Doh. Don’t be mad at me. He said it, I didn’t. Kick in the self-righteous ass, huh?

Who are my enemies? At first I say no one. Then I stop lying, off the top of my head I’d say: racists, corporate money mongers, environmental destroyers, human rights oppressors, and sadly the list goes on. Okay I have my work cut out for me. Instead of ranting and screaming in their faces, instead of blowing them up and breaking their war toys, rather than posting my own anti-THEM memes all over FB, I’m supposed to L.O.V.E. them? Yeah, I agree that’s a tough pill to slide down my hypocritical throat.

Okay shake off the religion if I got any on ya. Let’s dial it down a notch and just talk about the less horrible people in our lives, the people we kind of already love: Our family, friends, children, spouses, those sorts. When I do a love check up to see if there are any leaks in my love hoses, if I need new filters, you know a general love lube and oil change, *wince* I’m frankly shocked and embarrassed. Without examination it’s easy for me to assume I am the greatest, most benevolent, love generator of all time. Underneath that is another reality, which repeatedly turns up incongruent with my ego’s self glorified version. Truth be told, a lot of the time I suck at loving. If you’re in my life and you didn’t call me back I might just make up a story in which you are the evil agent of all darkness and suffering here to snuff the light out of me, (especially if you are my husband not calling or texting me). Or the way my “love” suddenly jack knifes when my 19yr old son lights up a cigarette, wth? This one is a fave, brace yourself. I have certain members of my family who want to vote for Drumpf. Who can love that??? Help!

As far as I can tell, Love isn’t something in us. Love is everywhere all the time. Love creates us. It is us.  It is all the space between us. We can’t stop it or make it go away, we can only deny it. The moment we do, we are in suffering, separation, loneliness, greed, jealousy, hate, despair,… you fill in the blank.

I don’t have the answers, just some questions worth asking yourself, questions I am regularly asking myself. Here they are. You’re welcome to use them.

1.)  What does it mean to truly love?

2.)  How can I be even more loving right now?

3.)  What might happen if I chose love right now (instead of this other thing uncomfortable thing I’m doing?)

4.)  Where am I denying Love, (where am I denying God?)

I say I want peace. If I truly want peace, where do I start, if not within my own loving heart and home? Busted.

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." 

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The Imaginary War on Christmas

As this article is my first piece posted in Elephant Journal, I do believe I signed some papers saying they own it now and I need  mention that if I post it anywhere else. (There,I hope that does the trick.)

http://www.elephantjournal.com/2015/11/the-imaginary-war-on-christmas/

I saw this year’s first signs of it littering my FB in tandem with the Starbucks snowflake massacre. The imaginary war on Christmas has become a tradition with origins as muddled as Christmas itself.

 up in the Christian religion, circa 1970’s, the hot topic was Santa versus Jesus. Back then jolly ole Saint Nick was trying to usurp the Christmas spirit and upstage the nativity scene with a vengeance only a dead man in a red suit could. It was confusing because not liking Santa was as un-American as communism.

 We sat on Santa’s lap for pictures. He snuck into our carols and even forged signatures on our presents. We were taught about God, Jesus (who was God’s son, but also God) the Holy Spirit (not to be mistaken with the Christmas spirit- although they both lived in your heart), and Santa Clause. We had to be careful not to like Santa more, even though Jesus never bribed us with full stockings or candy canes. There were a lot more proof of Santa as in pictures and movies. He actually appeared in the flesh each year at the mall, school, and the town parade. Despite all that evidence, turns out it was a trick. On the fateful day our siblings, peers, or mean neighbor kid shattered our magical Rudolph the reindeered world, December was never the same again.

“Wait a minute, so Santa is not real, but everybody else is? Jesus, God, Mary, Joseph, the tooth fairy, Easter bunny, and Holy Spirit, and Christmas spirit? WHAAAAAT? No Easter Bunny or tooth fairy either? The Christmas spirit isn’t a thing, it’s just a feeling?”  I totally confused and utterly devastated.

While secular Christmas songs, decorations, stories, and characters (my favorite being Frosty the Snowman) were tolerated, they were not to be celebrated.

 From the pulpit I would hear that Jesus is the only reason for the season, and the Christmas tree somehow represented the cross he would later die on. The Christmas color red symbolized the blood He shed (the same blood we would pretend to drink in remembrance of Him). I learned to never ever write X-mas. Although it may seem like a short cut, it was just another way they were X-ing Christ out of Christmas. In my child mind I was sure the menacing they were pointing nuclear weapons  straight at us and baby Jesus!

Just shy of a decade later I had recovered from the Santa scam when another blow rendered me all but faithless. According to every source I can find Quirinius’ census (the reason Mary and Joseph were traveling to Bethlehem in the first place) happened in late spring, not the winter.  WHAAAAAT????? So Jesus could be the reason for spring, just not this season?

This is the part where I get accused of being a heretic and a major church party pooper. If you’re hating on me right now please take a moment to refer back to

Exodus, the ninth commandment: “Thou shalt not lie.” Settle down I’m only truth telling here, it’s not an attack on anything biblical, only mythical. Let’s not get the two confused.

I’m not quite in the mood to give you a thorough history lesson,

so here is the net of it: The pagans celebrated the Saturnalia on Dec. 25th, think of Carnival happening in Sodom and Gomorrah, and throw in a healthy dose of anti-Semitism. Over the course of centuries the church, media, and corporations hijacked, painted over, and sold us the kid friendly, minty fresh version we’re claiming a war over today. Please explain to me again how Jesus is the reason for the season…

In recent years the greeting “Happy Holidays” has become regarded in some circles as an offensive anti-Christian misnomer for “Merry Christmas”. This boggles my mind for a couple of reasons.

1.)  “Happy Holidays” is a super handy way to bundle up the many holidays taking place from Thanksgiving through New Years. Why argue with good old-fashioned efficiency?

2.)  If my Jewish friends went around insistently saying “Happy Hanukkah” to absolutely everyone, mandating that menorahs and dreidels be the exclusive holiday bling, well that would be just weird. Or what if Happy Kwanzaa became the only acceptable holiday greeting? Last year a radical explained to me in a very loud voice the holes in my theory. The difference he stated is that Christmas is an American holiday so it should be the overarching theme, and other “lesser holidays” are secondary. WHAAAAAT? Like America came up with Christmas? And wasn’t your earlier point that Christmas is a Christian holiday and that secularism has ruined it? So now we’re abolishing division of church and state?

3.)  I have yet to hear anyone of my Jewish or Muslim friends complain about Christmas, or the words “Merry Christmas” in relation to their own celebratory preferences. My friends who honor other holidays, or chose to not celebrate at all during the season aren’t trying to take away my Christmas. The only people I hear complaining and creating conflict are my Christian friends and family. In fact it seems they are waging their own imaginary war, getting riled up and defensive about Christmas as they read one another’s rants and listen to Fox news commentary as if it were gospel. You’re not being bullied, threatened, or attacked when I say Happy Holidays, I promise. I’m not saying it instead of Merry Christmas. I’m including Merry Christmas and the other holidays that you may observe religiously or otherwise.

 Here’s my armchair diplomat solution:

What if we let go of the defensive stance on Christmas? There’s no need to fight about whether or not it’s religious by nature. If you choose to make it that way, great! Please don’t be a dictator about it. If someone else wants to make it about Santa and shopping, so be it. Lay down your Christmas arms and grab libations of cheer!

I choose to make this a time of merriment, pretty lights, good food and drink, friends, family, Xmas songs, and movies. Oh, and lots of love! I invite you to do the same if you like. Happy Hanukkah, Solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, and New Years! Enjoy!