Basically, we’ve got it all wrong.

All this time we’ve been led to believe that happiness is achieved by changing the external circumstances of our lives.  We’re not entirely at fault for embracing this belief; we’re bombarded, day in and day out, with messages from just about everywhere about the efficacy of this course.

Not happy?  Change your job, your mate, your style, your home or your medication… and if that doesn’t work, do it again, until you get it right.  However, if you look beneath the surface, you’ll find some inconsistencies with this idea.  In fact, simply check your own experience. Have you ever found long-term happiness by making these kinds of changes?

Truth is, seeking to change the external circumstances of our lives in order to find happiness, sets us up for failure. This is because we end up incessantly searching outside ourselves and miss the fact that we’re engaged in the same internal struggle, no matter how many changes we make.  In fact, when we use the attributes of bigger, better, more and different as criteria for happiness, we set ourselves up for a self-perpetuating cycle of suffering, because there’s always something else that’s bigger, better, more or different.

Looking deeper into the struggle itself, rather than the objects of the struggle, we discover that the crux of the matter is a basic dissatisfaction with things, as they are.  In fact, it has often been said by wise sages, ancient mystics and the spiritually adept, that unhappiness and suffering stem from wanting what we don’t have and not wanting what we have.

Changing this, then, is more about an internal shift in attitude, moving us from a position of dissatisfaction and struggle to one of finding joy in the here and now. This is a bit trickier because we’re asked to move beyond our internalized beliefs about happiness.  Tricky, yes; but, well worth the effort.

First, let’s look a bit more closely at happiness, itself.  Basically we can say there are two kinds of happiness: the short-term feeling of pleasure we get when the external circumstances change to our liking AND the deep abiding long-term joy beneath all the surface activity.

Short-term pleasure is the one we’re generally more familiar with; but it’s transient, fleeting and totally dependent on outer circumstances.  Experiences, like praise, fame, a new mate, more money, a new job or home and the like, mediate short term pleasure; but, when the novelty fades, so does the feeling.

Abiding joy is the result of a deeper, more penetrating understanding of the preciousness of life itself, no matter what’s happening.  It has the quality of being unshakable, pervasive, fresh, alive and wholesome.  Interestingly, it surfaces when we are present with our experience, without wanting it to be different.

Ancient wisdom traditions teach us that happiness is our birthright and, in fact, has been with us along, just waiting to be discovered. Like gold buried under the floorboards, happiness is an uncovering process, not a seeking process.

Simply said then, uncovering what’s already there seems to require only one thing: getting out of our own way. But before we can get out of own way, we need to find out how we continually get in our own way in the first place.

This means paying very close attention to what we’re actually doing, thinking and saying and how all this feeds into the cycle of dissatisfaction.

Catching ourselves, in action, as we perpetuate our own unhappiness gives us an opportunity to bring unconscious behaviors into awareness. Slowly, we will get to know the true nature of our own wanting, especially the desire for things to be different.  We might catch the urge to relieve anxiety by acquiring something new or we might observe ourselves criticizing our spouse, our job, or our home as inadequate.

As we get better at this, we’ll begin to see even subtler layers of this process, like how we tend to distract ourselves or move away from our experience whenever feelings we don’t like show up.

As we gradually become aware of how we’ve been cultivating dissatisfaction, we can also begin to shine a light on the brief moments of happiness that also exist, but often go undetected.  These moments are generally overlooked because we’ve been practicing… and have become quite good at, distracting ourselves and moving away from experience. Unfortunately, we can actually become so good at this, that we can miss our entire lives.

Catching moments of happiness requires the same commitment to the aforementioned “active noticing” process.  This time, however, we focus on what’s right with our lives.  We pay attention to what’s already working, especially the times when joy shows up on it’s own.

We begin to locate the goodness in simple moments like brief encounters of true connection, a ray of sunshine warming the body, a good cup of coffee, the smiles of our children or the sheer pleasure of being alive.

We discover that life is teeming with goodness and instead of moving away from our experience, we can learn to cultivate it.  Even a simple breath can remind us of the miracle of being alive.

If we breathe consciously, with exquisite awareness, we might be stunned by the extraordinary quality of this simple act.  It’s just a breath and it has been there all along; but now it’s a conscious breath, which reminds us we are alive, we are here now, and this alone is wondrous.

All this is not to say, we become childishly optimistic, but rather that we learn to accept and embrace all of life’s experience without judgment, criticism or comparisons.

This is a path in which we slowly and steadily cultivate the ability to have an experience and then let go, without making a huge deal out of anything.  As we get better at this, we’ll gradually recognize the benefit of all of our experiences and feelings and we’ll come to the realization that they have something important to teach us about living well…, which is what it’s all about, anyway.