I’m sitting here drinking my delicious cup of dark roast with a couple of splashes of vanilla oat milk creamer, a homemade vanilla latte if you will, and this feeling of happiness and peace came over me. I then had the thought that happiness is waiting for us daily, we just haven’t answered the door it’s been knocking on. Happiness lies in our hearts and that’s where it knocks every day. It shows up like a friend who wants to get to know you, yet your ego tells it to go away. The ego thinks it knows best, after-all its “job” is to protect us from danger, and letting our hearts be open is vulnerable which is a potential threat. At least to the ego's logic it is. The ego believes if the heart expresses itself through vulnerability it will die. Literally. Because feeling pain hurts. It just does. So, in a sense our ego does die because we won’t be living from pain, we’ll be living from peace.
The truth is our hearts are where our true wisdom lies and where happiness wants to meet us. We’ve been conditioned to believe living from ego gets you what you want— the house, the money, the family, the dog, etc., which are all slapped with a happiness sticker. I can attest you will gain happiness for a little while from having these things, yet you still won’t feel the sense of happiness you long for. I’ve tried for so long to find it outside of myself and never found it. I’m finding it right here as I drink my cup of joe because I’ve worked my ass off (quite frankly) to feel how I want to feel.
It’s a choice to sit in the pain of the past or it’s a choice to sit with the pain and heal from it. Sitting with it to understand and love it is the essence of where you’ll start feeling more at peace. You begin to see that the past doesn’t need to be played out in the present. The fragments of yourself that were left in pain can be liberated and brought with you to the next adventure of your life. It takes courage to be with your pain because you have to feel the anger, shame, fear, guilt. We can’t fully live in the present when these parts of ourselves are stuck in their pain. We can’t let in happiness if our hearts our shackled in pain. We won’t even hear the knocks if we can’t even feel its presence. This is why sitting with what’s uncomfortable and unfamiliar is where we start to let happiness in. It’s in our vulnerability that we find ourselves, and our happiness. Once you go within, you’ll never be without.
My invitation is for you to get curious about the heaviness your ego is grasping onto. Ask questions to this part of you and get to know it. Allow this dialogue to happen between the heart and the ego. Your heart has the wisdom it needs to comfort the ego. Allow your heart to be the one to remind your ego it won’t die completely, it will get to do its actual job— keep you alive from real danger, like from a bear coming at you! It doesn’t need to keep fighting through life and keep you away from answering the door of happiness, love, joy, or peace. Vulnerability is the pathway to the heart. May your next adventure be the one where you take that pathway and find yourself on the doorstep of the knock to happiness.