Happiness - Is it Too much to ask for?

We promise you, if you pay the price of happiness... if you are willing to change your thoughts, even though the current reality doesn't justify the happy thought, it is our promise to you that, if you are able to direct your thought and sustain more positive emotions, that the manifestations you have been seeking must come. And they must come fast! It is Law. It is our absolute promise to you.

Abraham-Hicks, 1/16/10

In the first moment, it sounds strange that someone would even ask us if we were willing to pay the price of being happy. Seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it?

 

But as we look at it more closely, it starts to make more sense. Actually, the question is justified: are we willing to let go and be happy anyway, even though we don’t have what we want yet? Asked like that, the question is not so quickly and easily answered with a wholehearted ”yes!”. The best answer we can get for this one would be a “Maybe” or a “It depends on what it is that’s missing”.

 

Most people are like little kids in their reactions: they want something and if they don’t get it, they pout. And the pouting feels to them as if (in the end) it would bring on the solution, if only we do it long enough. After all, it worked with their parents, more often than not. If they didn’t react right, we’d pout and when we were good at it, changes were high that in the end we would get what we wanted, because they would just be too tired to fight against us.

 

And so, we see people around us obsessively pout about something, like working conditions or the neighbours or the economy. They pout and they feel as if they should have it better and they complain constantly about not having it or not living it.

What is it that we really want?

Let’s take the example of living conditions: many people are not happy with theirs and think they should have it better. So, what do they really want? They want a place they like, they want enough money to do whatever they want to, they want perhaps nicer furniture, they want to feel better when they come home.

 

They could, just as an idea, talk themselves into feeling better right now, by telling themselves that this doesn’t have to stay that way, that what they have is not so bad in the end, that it doesn’t really take very much to make it nicer, that they actually have a few things in their life they really like and even if they had more money or the bigger house, they wouldn’t even get rid of those. They could start to decorate what they have in a really nice way, they could cover up what they don’t like so much and direct the spotlight on the things they like, and they could really have what they want (feeling better when they come home) in a very short time.

 

And the fun thing is, that when they’d do that for a while, things would get better right away, and whatever they had asked for, would just start to stream into their experience.

 

But most people don’t do that. Even though we all have seen pictures or had friends who were able to make a small palace out of nothing and to change a non-descript flat into a really nice and cozy home without a lot of means to do it, most people think that as soon as they start to make the best out of what they have, they have somehow given in to the status quo. And they really don’t want that. They want what they asked for, and they don’t recognize that they not only asked for things, material objects, but also for a state of being.

 

And the state of being could be reached a lot easier as if they wait for the physical manifestation to occur first. And once the state of being is reached, the physical conditions have to follow, that’s the basic tenet of the Law of Attraction. 

 

Whatever it is that we want, we only want it because we think that we will feel better in the having of it. We never sit at home and think, oh, I want this big house and I want to feel really overwhelmed because of all the responsibility that comes with it. No, we want it because we think it will feel wonderful to get out of your car and into this house and that it will make us feel really special.

Unfortunately, nothing we buy, no matter how nice and expensive it is, can give us this feeling of being special for any prolonged period. Sure, we can feel great, when a long hedged dream becomes true. We can feel special for a while and enjoy this feeling. And yet, many people only learn with the time that no physical manifestation has the power to really make us happy consistently.

For once, we get used to it pretty quick. In the first few weeks, the new car feels just so wonderful, the new house gives us such a kick. But after some time, this feeling fades and we start to see the backside of it. We see the lawn, which needs constant attention, we see the garden, which grows faster as we can keep up with it, we see the first signs of usage in our car, we get used to it.

And after a short time, we’re in for the next kick. We just loved this feeling, and we want it again. Many people have had this problem, they buy a lot of superfluous things, because it makes them feel special for a little while (especially when other parts of their life are less desirable). After some time, they nearly drown in all their stuff, and they feel worse then before.

What we really want, is to feel good about ourselves. And for that, we don’t need all that stuff, we just need to find ways to appreciate our strengths and to be more loving and benevolent about our weaknesses.

To get what we want, we have to love what we have and in order to do that, we have to look for every positive aspect we can find in what we are currently living and we have to let go of our criticism, which holds us in our position endlessly.

The interesting aspect is that once we get happy without the stuff, the stuff must come, and it must come really fast. Haven’t we all had that happen in our lives? We wanted something for years, like a new car or a relationship, and we worked on it diligently and unsuccessfully, and finally, we got fed up with it and let go of it. And now it suddenly happened, and it happened really quickly.

For many people, wanting is only about what we do not have. But that keeps us our whole life in a state of yearning and blocks our view for the many things we want and have in our lifes.

Our most important question is for all the things we do not yet have in our life:

Am I willing to pay the price of being happy anyway in order to get what I want?

© Dorothee Geray 2011

Thank you for reading the whole article. Whether you liked it or not, I'd very much appreciate to hear from you, so please leave a comment or give me some feedback so that I know what you're interested in and can write more about those topics. If you liked what you read, share it with your friends! Many thanks!