Resolve To Be Happy #22

Resolve To Be Happy    #22                                                          January 1, 2018

The arrival of a new year often signals resolutions.  Generally they revolve around releasing something old and embracing something new or at least old in the sense that it is unwanted and new in the sense that it is desired.

The success rate of New Year’s resolutions is abysmal even with the best and strongest of intentions and dedication.  Why is this so?  It is not merely a matter of will power or talent or skill, though all play a part.

Attachment, say the Eastern texts, is the root of all suffering.  Humans seem to cling quite naturally.  Perhaps it has something to do with our evolution, all that swinging in trees.  Joking aside, we naturally come by our attachments from a deep place.

Life brings experience of every sort.  Every single experience we have in life, good, bad and neutral, is stored in our very DNA waiting to pop again at the right trigger.  This is the birth of our patterns.  It is the work of deep meditation to burn the negative kernels and give will power a big assist.

Of course, if we have nothing we care deeply about, then we are not likely to suffer it’s loss.  But then again, if we have nothing we care deeply about, we are marooned on the surface, stuck in the shallow end of life.  So, do we care deeply and take the risk of continually being deeply hurt?  Or do we skim the surface, with a thin veneer of protection that keeps us from feeling, knowing deeply?

The truth is humans crave depth.  It is this longing that sets us on the path of relationships of every kind.  We want to fill that hole that exists inside, the one nothing seems to truly satisfy.  No matter the quality of relationship, it is based on other and as such, destined to disappoint if we are not first whole inside.  We want to go deep but are not sure how.

Meditation teaches us innocently and effortlessly how to go deep into our own heart, to the source of our individuality and in doing so, we learn how to go deep into everything.

There is the image of the bow and arrow that illustrates this beautifully.  In meditation we take the arrow of awareness deep, deep into the vibrating silence that is the source of all possibility.  When we emerge, anywhere we place our attention, our arrow, it will be profoundly, deeply released.  It will hit it’s target with potent accuracy and depth every single time.  Once recovered, recognized, the pathway to deeply knowing anything and everything is forged
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Yes, attachment does cause suffering, but this does not mean we must be indifferent in order to go unscathed through life.  Even if we could wall ourselves off, think how much we would miss!

Yoga is the invitation to learn to be skillful; to celebrate and fully embody the joys of life without clinging to what will inevitably end, as all on the surface must.  Skillful also implies the means to handle life’s challenges without becoming imprisoned by it’s sorrow.  Neither condition indicates unfeeling, or uncaring, in fact, quite the opposite.  Life is precious, too precious to be lived on the surface.  We want to go deep, we want to be whole, full, complete.  What is the method that will permit this sort of depth and skill?

We are human and as such limited.  We all have an expiration date stamped, as it were, on our backs.  We all instinctively search to be made whole before that date arrives   Yoga, meditation, is the journey inward, the trajectory of growth in consciousness that brings access to that wholeness permitting the fullest knowing of our human capacity.   

Why is it we resolve to do anything at all?  To feel of purpose, to be happy, to be more fully who we are, these are found inside self.   ‘Happiness lies within’ say the great masters. Once discovered, its celebration can then be fully realized and shared.  
​Resolve to be happy, meditate.