S2 EP267 – Unlocking Happiness: Proven Secrets for a Joyful Life

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. Today I’m speaking about happiness and joy, and how important our happiness is in our changing world. Do you have any idea how important your happiness and joy are to the healing of our planet? 

Sara asked me at one of my events:

(Quote)How can we find happiness…and create joy, despite many parts of the population who are dragging the rest down? How to find joy while still holding onto values, ethical principles and not looking the other way? In this new shift and cycle of life on our planet, putting our heads in the sand is no longer an option. How can we find balance and still do what we need to do to take care of our planet? We do not have decades, let alone years, left to continue as we are.(unquote)

Right – our planet is out of balance and so are most of the people on the planet.

Our planet is reflecting our individual lack of physical, emotional, and spiritual health and balance.

I love reading about health and many of the health books I’ve read say the same things concerning the recent research – that due to sugar, to processed food-like products and factory-farmed meats, and to antibiotics and other drugs, our microbiome – our gut flora – is severely out of balance. This creates toxicity in the brain, which contributes to emotional imbalance, which then contributes to planetary imbalance. Our imbalanced gut is a major cause of our unhappiness and the imbalance of our planet, and our planetary toxicity is a reflection of our inner toxicity.

Each person who decides to practice Inner Bonding and learns to take loving care of themselves emotionally, physically, and spiritually – who learns to treat themselves and others with kindness and to feed their body well – puts a daily drop of light into the collective consciousness. Each person who creates their own health and joy through loving themselves and sharing their love with others, helps the entire planet. What if your drop of happiness into the darkness on our planet were to be the tipping point towards the light?

There is nothing you can contribute to our planet that is more important than your own health, happiness, and joy. The very best thing you can do is your own Inner Bonding work – stopping junk food and junk thoughts. Healing the inner physical and emotional toxicity that disrupts your ability to connect with your spiritual guidance will go a long way toward healing our planet. As within, so without. Clean up our inner toxicity and we are on the path of cleaning up our outer toxicity.

We cannot allow ourselves to be dragged down by the negativity of our planet. And we cannot change it by being do-gooders – trying to change others without first changing ourselves. So focus within, learning to create your health, happiness, and joy, every day. As we each do this, the consciousness of our planet will gradually clear.

I’ve paid attention to what creates my happiness and joy, and I want to share with you the secrets I’ve discovered to creating my happiness.

I feel happy when I keep my frequency high: 

• By expressing gratitude for what I have from the intent to be loving to myself, not to control something.
  
• By thinking with enthusiasm about what I want, not what I don’t want, because it makes me feel peaceful and excited, as long as there is no agenda to control or attachment to the outcome.
  
• By thinking only positive thoughts based on love, not on fear, and not as a form of control.
  
• By staying present in the moment with my guidance and letting go of any agendas or expectations.
  
• By not attaching my wellbeing to outcomes, letting go of trying to control outcomes.
  
• By speaking up for my feelings in the moment when my inner child needs for me to be her advocate.
  
• By tending with compassion to heartbreak, heartache, loneliness, and helplessness over others and outcomes.
  
• By keeping my body clear and free of anything that lowers my frequency – keeping my physical body in a high frequency.
  
• By smiling!
  

It’s all about letting go of control and choosing love, moment by moment. Happiness and joy come from love, not fear and control. Happiness results from doing and being for the sake of love, rather than as a form of control. It’s about choosing love as my highest priority, moment by moment. 

Gratitude is the quickest way for me to feel happy and peaceful. There are so many big and little things to be grateful for. such as for my guidance, my health, my family, my work – and being able to work at home online or on the phone helping people, my gifts and talents, my home and beautiful land, my creativity, rain and sun and snow, trees and flowers and mountains, my dog and cat, a great shower, wonderful organic food, a good night sleep, clean water, and so much more! Gratitude is magical! 

One of the issues I frequently encounter with my clients is actually resisting happiness. 

My client Sasha is in a long-term, on-again, off-again, relationship with Fabio. When Sasha is taking loving care of herself, the relationship goes well, but as soon as she makes Fabio responsible for her feelings, Fabio goes into resistance and their relationship goes into turmoil.

Sasha comes from parents who were judgmental toward her and not emotionally attentive to her. She tends to treat herself the same way her parents treated her – judging herself and abandoning her feelings. She then expects Fabio to treat her the way she wanted her parents to treat her and gets angry and blaming toward him when he doesn’t. He retreats from her anger and blame, and she then breaks up with him, hoping to find a man who will treat her better. After a few weeks or a few months, they get back together and the cycle starts all over.

The issue for Sasha is that she resists taking loving responsibility for making herself happy because she is focused on punishing her parents for being bad parents. She is fearful that if she is happy, they will think they were good parents. They will think they won, and she can’t stand this thought. She would rather be miserable than have them see her happy and think they won. She projects her parents onto Fabio and punishes him, too, for her misery. As with her parents, she doesn’t want Fabio to think he is a good partner.

Because she is abandoning herself to punish her parents and Fabio, she constantly feels empty and miserable, and then convinces herself that it’s because of her parents and Fabio. She then gets angry at Fabio for not taking loving care of her and he goes into resistance to being controlled by her. They have repeated this system for years.

Until loving herself is more important than whether or not her parents think they won or think they were good parents, she will continue to be miserable.

The same issue is operating for William. William consistently treats himself as his father treated him – judging himself so harshly that he often feels like getting off the planet. As soon as he starts to feel happy inside, he immediately goes into intense resistance and does everything he can to make himself miserable. He can’t stand the thought that his father would think he was a good father. Like Sasha, he would rather be miserable than run the risk that his father would take credit for his happiness.

If you find yourself often feeling unhappy, check in to see if you are resisting taking responsibility for making yourself happy to punish your parents or partner or someone else. If you consistently find yourself abandoning yourself with your self-judgments, or turning to various addictions, or making someone else responsible for your feelings, be honest with yourself. Are you resisting happiness?

I’ve discovered over the years of my work that as strange as it may sound, this is a very common issue. People can stay stuck their whole lives – even after their parents die – resisting happiness to punish their parents, their siblings, their caregivers or their partner. Most of the time, they don’t consciously realize they are doing this. They may have made this unconscious decision when they were young. They might have said to themselves something like, “I will never be happy (or successful or healthy or slender, and so on.) I will show my mother or father or sibling that they can’t control me. They will never win.” They continue this unloving project into their adult life and then wonder why they are never happy or successful or healthy or slender.

Is this you? If it is, be aware that you can change your mind any time you want. You can decide that it’s more important to be happy than to control whether or not your parents think they were good parents, or others think they were loving partners or loving siblings, and whether or not they think they won and are in control of you.

I’m certain that if someone asked you if you want to be happy, you would say “Yes, of course!” Yet research indicates that many people have a fear of happiness. Quite a few years ago, Anna North, in an article entitled “Beware of Joy“, stated, (quote) “Fear of happiness is that creeping feeling that you shouldn’t get too comfortable, because something bad is bound to happen.”(Unquote)

I wouldn’t call this a fear of happiness. I would call it a fear of pain. It’s not the happiness that people want to avoid, but the pain that they fear will follow it.

The article goes on to state that, (quote) “At Scientific American, Tori Rodriguez looks at the downsides of fear of happiness:

“‘Past research supports the idea that an aversion to positive emotions often coexists with mental disorders. Patients with major depressive disorder, for example, have been found to fear and suppress both negative and positive emotions more than healthy people do.'”(unquote)

This is because pain and joy exist in the same place in the heart. We cannot suppress pain without also putting a lid on joy. As the research shows, depression can result from suppressing all feelings, both the positive ones and the negative ones.

The reason people suppress their pain is because they never learned how to lovingly manage it. They are so afraid of their pain that they suppress all their feelings, which leads to depression.

I have worked with thousands of people who came out of years of depression after learning how to compassionately embrace all their feelings with an intent to learn about what their feelings are telling them and then taking loving action on their own behalf. Inner Bonding is an amazing process for healing the depression that results from the suppression of feelings. As I’ve previously stated, there are numerous causes of depression, and the suppression of feelings is one of them.

Life will always have its ups and downs. We can feel very happy for an hour or a day and then something painful occurs and the happiness is gone. But when you practice Inner Bonding and immediately attend to the pain – whether it’s from a painful event, a person being unloving, or from your own wounded self judging you or abandoning you in other ways – you can get back to happiness in a relatively short time. Of course, when a big loss happens, it takes longer to move through the grief, but the time is way shorter when you have learned to be very kind and compassionate with yourself than when you attempt to suppress your feelings and try to be ‘strong.’

I would much rather accept the highs and lows of life than live in the flatness of depression. There is no doubt that the pain of life is very painful, but when you put a lid on your feelings to avoid the pain, you miss the joy, the love, and the passion of life. What’s the point of being here if we can’t feel the joy of life?

When you learn how to open to spirit and bring in the comfort, love, and compassion that is always available to all of us, then you no longer fear the pain of life. You know you can manage it when you know how to access compassion and comfort, and also how to reach out to others for comfort when the pain is too great.

When you consistently practice Inner Bonding and learn to connect with your spiritual guidance and learn to take loving care of yourself, you will find that you no longer fear the pain of life, and therefore no longer fear happiness – or the loss of happiness when life happens.

I love this quote by Epictetus, a Greek sage and philosopher who lived from AD 55 to AD 135: (quote)“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”(Unquote) 

It’s hard for me to imagine that Epictetus, who was born a slave in what is currently known as Turkey, knew what many people are still trying to grasp – that (quote) “Suffering occurs from trying to control what is uncontrollable, or from neglecting what is within our power.”(Unquote)  (from Wikipedia, quoting Epictetus).

I guess it’s true that ”there is nothing new under the sun,” and that we just keep having to learn the same lessons over and over.

I know his teaching to be completely true, because I used to worry about all kinds of things I couldn’t control, and I suffered with much anxiety. When I finally let go of the illusion of trying to control others and outcomes, and focused instead on what I can control – which is me – that’s when life became so much easier and happier.

Control is such a big issue with most people. We want to convince ourselves that if only we say things right, do things right, pray right, judge ourselves enough, achieve enough, earn enough, acquire enough, say enough affirmations – then we can control how people feel about us and the outcome of things… and then we will be happy.

What is within our power? Primarily, it is within our power to determine our own intention – either to learn about loving ourselves and others, or to protect ourselves against pain with some form of controlling behavior.

This is such a paradox! Our controlling behaviors, designed to protect us from pain, are actually what cause much of our pain. When we try to control – by being perfect, by judging ourselves, by getting angry, by giving ourselves up – we make ourselves miserable. When we choose the intention to learn about loving ourselves and others, then we learn to behave in ways that create happiness.

Given that this knowledge was available in AD 100, why are we still struggling with this?

There is a very good reason.

One of the hardest feelings for any of us to feel is helpless. It’s a really tough feeling. Most people will do anything to avoid feeling helpless over how other people feel about them, and over the outcome of things. So they avoid the feeling with a myriad of controlling behaviors. And the controlling behaviors do seem to work – not by affecting how other people feel about them or controlling the outcome of things, but by temporarily protecting them from the intolerable feeling of helplessness. Do you feel helpless when you get angry and blame someone? Generally not. It’s likely that you convince yourself that getting angry and blaming is powerful – even though the other person may resist you, or walk away, or get angry back. While you are angry and blaming, you are successfully avoiding the feeling of helplessness, so this behavior appears to work to control a feeling that you are afraid to feel.

Other controlling behaviors also work to block out the painful feelings of life – feelings such as loneliness, heartbreak and grief. Many people are so afraid of these painful feelings of life that they will behave in the self-abandoning ways that create misery, rather than risk feeling these feelings. As long as their controlling behaviors work to cover over their helplessness, heartbreak, loneliness, and grief, they believe these behaviors are working for them – even though, in truth, it is causing them to feel anxious, depressed, shamed, or angry. They are willing to sacrifice their happiness to avoid their deeper pain.

As Epictetus stated, happiness lies in letting go of trying to control what we can’t control and controlling what we can. One of the things we can control is whether or not we learn to manage the existential painful feelings of life. We all have this choice, and the Inner Bonding process is an amazing way of learning this. Once you are no longer afraid of these feelings, then you will be able to let go of controlling what you can’t…and you will likely find your happiness.

All of us have met people who just seem to be happy most of the time. Perhaps you have assumed that these people are just naturally happy, or that they are the lucky people who have an easy life, or they had really loving parents. Most of the time, nothing could be farther from the truth.

Happy people are making specific choices regarding their thinking and behavior. Happy people consciously choose to think and behave in ways that result in happiness. Unhappy people are unconsciously thinking and behaving in ways that create unhappiness.

Happy people are optimistic. They see the glass as half full, while unhappy people choose to be pessimistic – to see the glass as half empty. Optimistic thinking does not just happen – it’s a choice regarding how you see life. Optimistic people are optimistic because they choose to be optimistic. Instead of allowing their ego wounded self to be in charge with all its doom and gloom, happy people put their loving adult in charge and open to the wonderful possibilities that life has to offer. 

Happy people choose to be kind and compassionate toward themselves and others. Happy people have learned that how they treat themselves and others determines much of how they feel. Happy people do not wait to be happy before being kind to themselves and others. They realize that their happiness is the result of their caring behavior, not the cause of it. They are kind, caring, and compassionate whether or not they feel like it. They have chosen this way of being, and their happiness is the result.

Happy people do not harbor resentment toward others, even others who have been mean and hurtful toward them. They realize that resentment makes them unhappy, so they choose to allow people their humanness and forgive them their hurtful behavior. Because happy people tend not to take personally others’ uncaring behavior, they don’t get their feelings hurt in the same way that people do who take others’ behavior personally. Happy people recognize that another’s behavior is about that other person, so they move into compassion toward themselves and others rather than into judgment. If someone is often mean and hurtful, then happy people choose to care about the person from a distance rather than spend time with that person, because it isn’t loving to themselves to be around mean and uncaring people.

Happy people realize what they can control and what they can’t. They live by the Serenity Prayer, accepting the things they cannot change and changing the things they can. Unhappy people are constantly trying to change people and circumstances and do not accept their lack of control. As a result, they are constantly frustrated. Happy people realize they cannot control others and outcomes, so they focus on what they can control – their own thinking and behavior. Acceptance of what they can and cannot control leads to happiness and inner peace.

Happy people are consistently grateful for what they have, rather than complaining about what they don’t have. They notice the many gifts and blessings that come their way, and they frequently express gratitude for the everyday things in their lives – the beauty of nature, the food they eat, the smile on a friend’s face, their ability to see, hear, walk, talk. Even many disabled people who may not have the blessings of eyesight, hearing, speech or legs are often happy people because they focus on what they do have and what they can do, rather than focusing on what they are missing out on.

If you want to be happy, then you need to recognize that happiness is the result of your thinking and behavior, not the cause of it. If you choose to practice Inner Bonding and focus on becoming conscious of what thoughts and behavior make you feel happy, you can become a happy person – regardless of your present circumstances. Happiness does not just happen – it’s the result of the choices you make.

We are a pleasure seeking society. Most of us spend our energy seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. We hope that by doing this, we will feel happy. Yet deep, abiding happiness and joy elude many people.

There is a huge difference between happiness and pleasure. Pleasure is a momentary feeling that comes from something external – a good meal, our stock going up, making love, feeling validated, and so on. Pleasure has to do with the positive experiences of our senses and with good things happening. Pleasurable experiences can give us momentary feelings of happiness, but this happiness does not last long because it is dependent upon external events and experiences. We have to keep on having the good experiences – more food, more drugs or alcohol, more money, more sex, more attention, more things – in order to feel pleasure. As a result, many people become addicted to these external experiences, needing more and more to feel a short-lived feeling of happiness.

Thomas sought my help because he “had everything” – his own successful business, a lovely wife and children, a beautiful home, and time to enjoy life. Yet he was not happy. While he had momentary feelings of happiness while watching a ball game or socializing with his friends, he also felt anxious and depressed much of the time. In fact, the anxiety had become so bad that he was having almost constant stomach pain, which his doctor told him was from stress.

As we worked together, it became apparent that Thomas’s main desire in life was to have control over people and events. He wanted others to do things his way and to believe the way he believed. He was frequently judgmental with his employees, wife, children, and friends, believing that he was right and they were wrong and it was his job to straighten them out with his judgment and criticism. His energy would become hard and tough, and he would be like a steamroller in his efforts to get his point across and get others to do things his way. When it worked and others gave in, Thomas felt a momentary pang of pleasure. But the pain in his stomach kept getting worse and worse, which is why he decided to consult with me.

Thomas also wanted control over his own feelings and would often judge himself as harshly as he judged others in an effort to get himself to perform well and feel okay. He especially judged himself harshly when he felt rejected by others, frequently telling himself that he was an inadequate jerk.

As we worked together, Thomas began to see that happiness is the result of choosing to be a kind, caring, compassionate, and gentle person with himself and others – quite the opposite of the judgmental, controlling person he had chosen to be. Thomas learned that happiness is the natural result of being present in each moment with love and kindness toward himself and others, rather than with being attached to the outcome of things and trying to control the outcome regarding events and others’ behavior. He discovered that he felt deep joy whenever he let go of control and chose caring instead. The anxiety in his stomach went away whenever his intention was to be a kind and caring person rather than a controlling one.

When you practice Inner Bonding and shift your intention from controlling to becoming loving to yourself and others, your heart opens, and joy is the result. Deep and abiding happiness and joy are the natural result of practicing Inner Bonding – of operating from the spiritual values of caring, compassion, and kindness.

I invite you to join me for my bi-monthly masterclass and receive my live help, which you can learn about at https://innerbondinghub.com/membership. 

And, I invite you to join me for my 30-Day home study Course that teaches Inner Bonding: “Love Yourself: An Inner Bonding Experience to Heal Anxiety, Depression, Shame, Addictions and Relationships.”

And you can learn so much about loving yourself and creating loving relationships from all of our books and courses and from our website at https://www.innerbonding.com.

I’m sending you my love and my blessings.