Seeking happiness involves making proactive choices to honour yourself and your feelings. By consistently taking small steps to happiness, you'll keep the momentum going in the right direction.
When we endure difficult times, we may wonder if experiencing happiness is truly possible. It may feel like happiness is only for the lucky few, as we sit feeling lost and broken - like something's missing or something's wrong with us.
Shifting from feeling broken to feeling whole is where we find inner happiness, and is what healing is really all about.
The Healing Journey
The word "healing" comes from an Old English word meaning "to make whole". Healing is about making ourselves whole again.
Healing is a return of the memory of wholeness.
Deepak Chopra
Deepak Chopra explains that healing, health and holy all mean inclusiveness - so we can't exclude any part of ourselves, or our life, if we want to truly heal and experience lasting happiness.
The journey to wholeness brings our lost and broken parts into the light of our awareness so they can be integrated fully. While fear, embarrassment or past trauma may cause us to try and lone wolf it, the truth is that it's an emotionally difficult time so having a network of support is essential.
I've personally found immense comfort in the loving energy of Reiki Healing as I've healed from my own childhood trauma. Reiki is a Japanese healing art that harnesses the energy of unconditional love for healing.
If you'd like to feel seen and heard without judgement while you heal, I offer Trauma Informed Reiki Healing sessions and I'd love to support you in this way.
When Broken is Beautiful
A beautiful symbol of returning to wholeness and healing is found in another practice from Japan called Kintsugi.
This artistic practice involves repairing broken pottery with highly visible streaks of gold to restore the broken pieces together in unity. It doesn't try to hide the broken areas, instead it creates beautiful golden "scars" where the cracks once were, and makes the repaired piece look even more stunning and precious than the original.
It teaches us that broken doesn't mean ugly or useless, that we needn't hide our imperfections because cracks are an opportunity for our light to shine brighter, and that sometimes our world needs to shatter into pieces in order for true healing to occur.
As we begin to recover our lost parts and compassionately embrace the broken pieces of ourselves and our lives, we discover that unconditional love is the gold that unites our broken pieces into one whole. We learn the value of loving ourselves, and how unconditionally loving others offers them healing too.
Like a broken bowl that's been repaired with gold, as we pick ourselves up and put ourselves back together with love, we become stronger, more beautiful and can hold more than when we were a broken mess.
With love holding us together, we find that we can hold more happiness, more love, and even more pain without breaking. We develop resilience and can move through the highs and lows of life more gracefully.
Healing is actually the capacity to hold pain.
Gabor Maté
Experiencing Happiness from Within
We all experience times of pain and sadness, where things are tough, stress runs high and life feels hard. Finding compassion and love for ourselves is essential in these times, and recognising that happiness is a state of being that exists within us, empowers us with the knowledge it can never be permanently taken away from us by external factors.
To live from a state of happiness we must realise that changing our outer world to THEN feel happy will only ever bring a temporary and conditional moment of happiness. These moments are certainly enjoyable, but we’ll find that we’re forever searching for the next thing that will ‘make’ us happy. When taking steps towards lasting happiness it's more effective to remember our inner happiness.
Remembering our inherent state of joy is worth the effort. As we practice embodying a better feeling, we strengthen the neural pathways to happiness making them more dominant and more easily accessible in future. We develop resilience to stress, experience more peace, become more accepting of ourselves and whatever shows up in our life.
Let's look at how to get in touch with our inner essence of happiness.
Taking Steps To Happiness
Experiencing happiness more frequently can feel like a far-fetched dream at times, but if we can remember that happiness is the essence of our soul, we can find ways to reconnect with this feeling.
Taking steps in the direction of what ignites our joy, no matter how small, will inevitably get us there so keep walking!
Here are some suggestions:
Get to Know what Happiness is for You
Trauma or ongoing stress can cause us to live from a place of anxiety and overwhelm. These states rewire our brain, become our new normal and we forget what our inner happiness feels like. When this happens we must rewire our brain to strengthen the neural pathways to joy, and this takes repeated practice and effort.
We can begin by recalling times we have felt the most happy and joyful. Play them out in our mind and remember them in as much detail as possible.
What are you doing?
Who are you with?
What does it feel like in your body?
What's amazing is that just imagining these happy memories begins to strengthen the pathways to feeling happy! And now that we have some awareness of what lights us up, we can make a conscious effort to add more of these moments to our life.
Honour your Feelings
All emotions are valid and should be honoured, even the so-called ‘negative’ ones. In fact, judging them as bad just drives them deeper into hiding and they'll find more covert ways of expressing themselves.
Feelings are our guidance system. They let us know when our boundaries have been breached, when we're in possible danger, when we are being true to our values and when we are being authentic.
When uncomfortable feelings arise, take a moment to first acknowledge, then accept them. Locating the feeling in your body, place your hand there and ask this feeling what it's trying to communicate.
You may then communicate it's message in a safe and appropriate way. Rather than exploding with rage it could mean that you simply state "I feel really angry right now." You could talk to a trusted friend or counsellor, find emotional release through tears, creatively express it through art, write about it and explore it in a journal entry etc.
Once our uncomfortable feelings have been acknowledged, heard and safely expressed we often feel much better. We can then cultivate more joyful feelings in our body.
Love and Accept Yourself
Accepting who we are is a huge step towards feeling our inner happiness, but it can be hard if we've struggled to be accepted by our parents or others. It takes practice.
We can start to be more accepting of ourselves by accepting our uncomfortable feelings. As we compassionately accept more of our parts, our inner conflict reduces, our sense of happiness becomes clearer, and we feel a stronger sense of our loving essence.
The final and only act of healing is to accept that there is nothing wrong with you.
Robert Holden
We can also practice speaking to ourselves in ways we wish others had spoken to us, telling ourselves the words we needed to hear in the past. Bringing compassion to our inner dialogue.
Tell a Different ‘Story’Â
It's very healing if we can extract meaning from painful experiences, and find the positive ways that it shaped us and our direction in life. While it doesn't change what happened, it can redefine our relationship to the event. It can turn a disempowering event into something empowering, and it can even put us on the path of our life purpose. Remaining open to the possibility that good can come from this can help us access our inner happiness.
Spend Quiet Time with Yourself
Time spent going within - either through meditation or something as simple as a relaxing bath or walk in nature, opens space for epiphanies and self-awareness to appear.
Quiet time alone presents opportunities to practice self acceptance and compassion. We get to know our thoughts, behaviours and patterns better. We learn what's keeping us stuck and we get a feel for where we want to go. We also begin to sense the ‘real’ us, the infinite self that is limitless, and with this comes peace, acceptance and happiness.
Reconnect to Happiness Through your Soul
When we feel lost and broken, like something's missing, Reiki can help us retrieve those missing pieces so we can feel happy and whole.
Reiki Healing wraps us in the energy of unconditional love, gently supporting us to reconnect with our soul whose natural essence is happiness. With the flame of happiness reignited, it's much easier to experience our natural state of happiness even during challenging times.
Experiencing happiness may be difficult at times, but if we honour ourselves and our feelings, happiness will always be an option. I hope that you can enjoy taking these steps to happiness so that you may feel more whole, more happy, and can share your joy with others.
With love and gratitude,
Charisse
