Are you happy & Don’t know it?

Zion National Park, February 2019

I hope this message finds you doing well and taking good care of yourself in what feel to be full-on days of surfing the waves of change. Since the dawn of the New Year I've sat down on several occasions to connect in with you, but it never materialized, until now.

Each year, starting in November, I enter into what I've come to know as a grief portal. It takes me back to the time when my husband died and my life was upended, but each year it also takes me into the layers of my life that are ready to be explored more deeply. Experiences that have come to completion. Life that didn't unfold as I'd wished. Unfinished business in one form or another. Emotions I'm ready to digest or release. Early on I used to try and rush through the discomfort of it all, but experience has taught me to cherish this period, like a winter hibernation, and quietly explore the layers as they emerge. 

Tonight I popped online and this quote was the first thing I saw. Immediately I felt to share this with you, as we enter the window of the New Moon. I trust that it will land wherever and in whatever way it's most needed in this moment, and I'm grateful it was the catalyst to re-connect with you.  

There is no evidence that we've been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.

~ Jon Ronson

Recently I've noticed an emerging theme in conversations with friends and clients around happiness.

- What is happiness?

- Why does it seem so elusive?

- Is the cause of what we consider unhappiness just a result of conditioning and expectations around what happiness *should* look like? 

- Why do we believe happiness needs to be a constant state of being when there is a full range of emotions we experience in the day to day?

I often reflect back to a conversation with a friend last year when, pondering this very topic, he said, what if while we are here being human and feeling ALL the feels, our soul/higher self, is actually riding the waves of bliss and awe and joy because it's only in the embodied human form we are capable of experiencing and feeling all this? What if we really are happy, we just don't recognize it as such?

What if?

What if you change the way you look at things? What if instead of grading your feelings on a spectrum of happy/not happy, you dug a little deeper?

What if you unpacked what happiness looks like for YOU? What would it be? What could it be? What is your particular concoction of emotions and experiences that LIGHT you up, take you into your HEART, keep you moving FORWARD?

Lately my happiness elixir is some mix of time in nature, un-interrupted sleep, laughter, walking, cooking, a house project, lots of deep breaths, an amazing chai latte, and rare desert snow.

These past months life has felt particularly strange, I've felt strange, relationships are wonky and projects seemingly take forever to come to fruition, or just fall of the map entirely. I could easily say I'm unhappy, but when I shift my view and define what happiness looks like for me, there is an ease, a peace, and a sense of deep and abiding calm that comes into play. If I stop gauging my happiness on an external scale, I discover I am in fact, happy. 

Life is not perfect, although, what is perfect anyway? Life is LIFE. There are things coming and going. Feelings coming and going. Endings, beginnings and the space in-between. And in the midst of it all, I'm enjoying being human. I'm enjoying witnessing my fellow humans courageously walking forward, even when it's scary, hard, and into the unknown. I'm grateful for the spectrum of realness clients are bringing to our sessions and honored to be trusted to walk with them to explore the tender spaces. When I let go of my attachment to what happiness looks like, I discover happiness dwells in my heart and my experiences more often than not. 

On this New Moon, I invite you to explore the spaces and places happiness resides in your life. Is it in your morning cup of tea? The few moments you have to breathe between activities or appointments? Does happiness look like the kindness of a stranger or smile from a friend? Solitude and stillness? Or the furry four-legged that greets you? Inhabit those places you find your happiness. Relish them, acknowledge and appreciate them, and offer up a prayer - Thank you! More of this please. Humans are pretty simple creatures when we get down to it, so allow yourself some room to be curious and re-define what qualifies as happiness for you. 

May you find peace where you need it most and happiness in abundance, no matter how rough or smooth the seas of your life are in this moment.