Happiness Starts on the Inside

We are so fortunate to live in a time of such amazing technological advances, a time when social media can connect us to our fellow brothers and sisters on the other side of the globe. For me personally, Facebook has largely been a gift. I have reconnected with old friends, I have discovered new ones, and I have uncovered priceless opportunities waiting around every turn…and all because we are connected.

But while Facebook has proven itself to offer many wonderful benefits, there are also of course some negative attributes. One is the “instant gratification” factor; the fact that we can vent, moan or complain about our woes in an instant, at just the touch of a button.

There are times when we all need to vent, and I’m sure we’ve all posted our fair share of complaints onto our status updates. (Believe me, for me it only takes encountering a bad driver!) But where this instant communication effect can be negative, and in fact harmful to ourselves, is when it is abused to the point where people are incessantly complaining about their lives, airing their dirty laundry, or dwelling on their woes, publicly. I have seen a sad number of people posting about how dreadful their lives are, about all of the bad things that they perceive to be happening to them, and blaming the world for their problems. I have seen so many people desperately seeking happiness outside of themselves, in external factors.

I’m sure you’ve all seen this and many of us have probably been guilty of it at one time of another: we post a scathing comment about the evil ex-boyfriend who broke our heart, we hold our boss accountable for making our lives miserable, we blame the betrayal of a friend for ruining our lives. You name it. If you’ve been on Facebook for any decent amount of time, I’m sure you’ve seen these kinds of comments and many, many more where those came from. And I’m sure you’ve also seen the comments where people post what they need to be happy: “If only the right guy would come along, I will then be truly happy,” “When I get my dream job, then my life will be perfect,” “If only I could have a baby, then I will feel fulfilled.”

Here’s the thing: All of those statements are tragically flawed. When we blame someone or something outside of ourselves for our problems, it is a mistake because we are giving someone else power over ourselves and we are refusing to take responsibility for our own lives and our own choices. And when we state that we need x, y or z in order to be happy, we are refusing to live in the present, we are refusing to look inside of ourselves and realize that true happiness resides only there, within us. Happiness will never come from outside of us.

I do not care if you find the dream job, if you make millions of dollars and if you find the dreamiest guy (or girl) that ever walked the Earth; if you are not truly happy within yourself, those external factors will never truly make you happy. And not only will they not bring you happiness, but until you do the necessary inner work within you, all that “appears” to be good in your life, will eventually itself disappear or fall into ruin.

Our internal state entirely affects our external state. If we are unhappy, afraid of being alone, terrified of life, riddled with guilt or hating ourselves on the inside, then our outside life is always going to reflect that. Always, without exception. You see, we attract back what we put out. And if we are unhappy on the inside, then we are putting out negative vibes on the outside, regardless of how much we might try to put on a happy face or a false front. We cannot trick the Universe.

If you yourself are in a negative place, and if you continue to blame the world for your problems, you will continue to attract more negativity into your life. And you will continue to be unhappy. And as long as you continue to desperately seek happiness in external factors, it will continue to elude you. This I state to you as Universal truth.

To change the world around us, we must first change the world within us. We must face our demons. We must resolve the unresolved pain, anger, and fear that dwell in the darkness deep inside of us. We must face loneliness. And not only must we face it, but we must walk through it, however painful, and truly conquer it. We must take responsibility for our own feelings, our own actions and especially our own mistakes. We must see where we went wrong, learn the valuable lesson from it, and make the necessary mid-course correction to ensure that we don’t repeat the same mistake, over and over. We must admit our flaws to ourselves, uncover what we need to work on in ourselves, and truly commit to working on it and improving ourselves as human beings.

And most importantly we must learn to change our thoughts. In the same way that our muscles have “muscle memory” and we can condition our physical bodies, we can do the same with our brains and our mental/emotional bodies. We all have periods in our lives where we feel unhappy or even dreadfully depressed and miserable. And during those times it can feel impossible to change anything. I have lived many of those moments. But the truth is that we hold 100% of the power within us to do just that.

When we can force ourselves to focus on the positive in our lives, to find one simple thing for which we are grateful in any given moment, we have the power to create powerful magnetic shifts in our lives. All it takes is one tiny positive thought, and as we can continue to make the effort to focus on such positive thoughts, it becomes easier and easier and they become more and more magnetic until suddenly we begin to see subtle and then eventually dramatic shifts in our lives.

So when you are scrolling through your Facebook status updates and you see a friend expressing negativity and blaming the world for their problems, make the choice to not enable them. Instead of encouraging them to further steep in their negativity and create a downward spiral,  instead take the time to remind them of what they have to be grateful for. Post something positive and encouraging. Challenge them to focus on the positive instead of dwelling on the negative.

And when you find yourself on the verge of posting a negative status update, pause for a moment and ask yourself the following: Are you about to blame the world or something outside of yourself for your problems? Are you about to vent negativity which really serves no positive purpose? If so, then use that opportunity to create an internal shift. In that moment think of something positive that happened to you that day: think of the dog wagging its tail, think of the smile of your child, think of the sweet taste of the chocolate that melted in your mouth. Think about something for which you are grateful, even if only one small thing. And instead of posting the negative comment, choose to post a positive one. And always remember that happiness is never outside of you, it is only within you. You hold the power in your hands.

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The REAL Secret

Have you ever known the person who thinks that they have it worse than everyone else? No matter what tragedies may have befallen your own life, their situation is somehow always more tragic. Whenever you talk to them they have that dreadful “woe is me” tone that makes you roll your eyes and want to hang up the phone. And even when you try to be a good friend and offer words of encouragement they find ways to pooh-pooh anything you say. The person who seems to pride themselves on spouting off nothing but negativity, that somehow if they can drag you into their negative web that they will feel better about themselves.

We’ve all known these people.  Heck, perhaps at one time or another we’ve even been that person. Come on people, let’s be honest. I know I’ve definitely been there at one dark time or another. I’m sure many of you have too.

Here’s the thing that those people (or we) do not realize. By allowing themselves (or ourselves) to wallow in their (or our) own angst and fester in their (or our) own negativity, they (or we) are actually poisoning themselves (or ourselves). Here’s why: our thoughts have power. Yes folks, you heard right and I can’t say it loudly enough. Our thoughts have power. Now many of you naysayers who have heard about the Law of Attraction and watched or read The Secret will now be rolling your eyes and think that this is new-agey horseshit. Allow me to clear some things up for you. I have studied the Law of Attraction for the past several years and I have seen proof positive of its validity in my own life: for both good and bad.

You know those days when you wake up and stub your toe and then the whole day spirals downhill from there? That is the simplest example of the Law of Attraction. You started with a negative thought and you focused your energy on it, and because of that you attracted more negative things into your life that day. You become like a magnet. I have seen my negative thoughts perpetuate more negativity and create drama in my life, and on the flip side I have seen how harnessing the positive thoughts can truly change your life in brilliant and magical ways.

Let me talk about The Secret for a second. While the underlying premise of this book and film resides in Universal truth, their portrayal of the Universal Law of Attraction is actually a bit too literal and oversimplified. The Law of Attraction does not mean that you can focus all of your attention on a new bike and then “poof” a new bike will appear. It does not even mean that you can focus on your dream job, and that if you put it on your vision board that you will one day manifest it. That is a false and very misleading teaching. Here’s why: All the Law of Attraction truly states is that like attracts like, meaning that if you focus on the negative, you will attract more negativity into your life; and alternatively if you focus on the positive, you will attract more positivity into your life. It does not allow you to focus on one specific thing that you really want and then allow that thing to come to you, all wrapped up in a pretty bow. No siree!

And the reason is because that thing which you may be trying to manifest may in fact not be meant for you. You may be trying to manifest the return of an old lover. But if there is another lover in your future that you are meant to find, that is a better fit for you, the Universe is never going to allow the return of the old lover. The same is true of the dream job. I use my own life for this example. I was trying to manifest success in the .com world, but instead the Universe pulled one of its famous tricks on me and got me fired and now on the path to being a writer. We often do not know what is best for us, therefore the Law of Attraction is not as simple as we focus on something that we really want and then we get it.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s get back to the main point, that our thoughts do have power. You don’t just have to believe me and my experiences about the power of thought. In this age when we as human beings are starting to become more aware of our consciousness and its power, quantum physics is no longer an occult subject for the airy-fairy hippies.  It has now moved to the forefront of major research institutions like Stanford, Harvard and Princeton. There have been loads of scientific studies performed about the power of the mind. As Lynne McTaggart points out in her book The Intention Experiment, the most comprehensive body of research has been amassed by William Braud, a psychologist and the research director of the Mind Science Foundation in San Antonio, Texas, and later, the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology.

If you wish to learn more about the science of the mind, I recommend Lynne’s book as well as works published by the scientists on her team. In recent years I have also seen a plethora of articles published in major scientific journals about the power of meditation to actually change the chemistry of the brain. It is no longer just a fanciful theory. Modern science has finally caught up to the ideas that ancient mystics, scientists and philosophers have known for centuries: our thoughts do have power.

“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make our world.”
~Buddha~

“Our life is what our thoughts make it.”
~Marcus Aurelius~

“The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings
can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.”
~William James~

“Outer changes always begin with an inner change of attitude.”
~Albert Einstein~

Ok, so if it’s true that our thoughts can change our lives, how then do we implement that? I’ve discovered that the reason why so many people discount the teachings of The Secret is because they think “if it were that easy, everyone would be doing it.” We all know that when we are stuck in that dark and negative place, it can be extremely difficult to change our thoughts to something positive. It is our human nature that when we feel miserable and defeated, that just like the person I mentioned in the beginning, all too often we feel that nothing could ever improve our situation. We dwell on the negative. And in that situation the Law of Attraction IS actually working, but it is working on the negative side and against your favor. You are a magnet for more negativity to come into your life. To get it to work IN your favor, you have to change your thoughts. It is not an easy thing to do, but it is wrong to believe that it does not work. It takes a truly committed Spiritual Warrior to force themselves to change their thoughts, even when they are at their darkest.

There’s the old saying “fake it ’till you make it.” This couldn’t be more true when it comes to changing your thoughts. I’ve learned that even if you are feeling down in the dumps, if you can force yourself to focus on the positive, you can change your life. This is exactly what I have done in my own life. Because I have had such radically life-altering success by practicing the Law of Attraction and by choosing to focus on the positive, I want to share with you exactly how I did it.

Many of you who have read my prior pieces know that I have lived through what I can only aptly describe as a “dark night of the  soul” in recent years. There were many times when I did not want to get out of bed, when I felt completely alone, abandoned and unloved, when I felt that things couldn’t get any darker. I had reached my rock bottom. It was during that time that I began to study and practice the Law of Attraction, really as an act of desperation. I took a course about the Law of Attraction and I learned about the concept of a Gratitude Journal, a concept with which I’m sure many of you are familiar. By writing down that for which we are grateful, we are focusing our thoughts, our energies on the positive. I took this lesson one step further.

Every night before I would go to bed, I would make two lists: 1. First I would make a list of ALL of the good things that happened that day, no matter how small, no matter how seemingly insignificant. Even if it was something as small as the store clerk smiled at me, I wrote it down. I searched through my memory banks trying to find any possible positive thing that occurred in that day, and I wrote them all down. 2. Secondly, I would make a list of all that I was grateful for in that day. Some things would remain constant, others would change from day to day. But by writing these two lists, everyday, by actually writing down the words, I was giving them more power and energy. By forcing myself to focus on the positive, even though I felt deep sadness, I was beginning to shift my energetic vibration, and the energy in my life began to shift. I began to attract more positivity and magic into my life. As I forced myself to do these exercises everyday for months on end, I began to notice that more and more unexpected and beautiful things began flowing into my life. And the positive energy compounded upon itself. The longer I did it, the more powerful the energy became, and the more magical synchronicity came into my life.

I have shared these exercises with each beautiful soul that has reached out to me from a place of darkness asking for help. And one person after the next has told me that by doing these simple exercises, they too have started to see positive shifts in their lives. I am never surprised by this of course, because I know for myself that it truly works. So what’s the REAL Secret then? It is not simply to focus on a specific, tangible thing that you want in your life. It is instead to focus on every positive, beautiful thing that occurs in your day, to force yourself to change your negative thoughts instead to positive ones. It is to view the glass as half full, always. The REAL Secret is to continue focusing on the positive and then to simply allow, to be open to whatever beauty may come, and not pigeon-hole yourself into a specific outcome. If you do this, every day, if you truly make a conscious effort to look for the good in each day, to write it down and focus on it, I promise you that you too will change your life for the better.

For great resources on how to practice the Law of Attraction, I can recommend the following books, in addition to Lynne McTaggert’s book mentioned above: The Power of Intention, by Wayne Dyer and The Law of Attraction, by Esther & Jerry Hicks.

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