Being Happy: The Safe Place

So far, we have seen how emotional pain is a signal to leave a place of hurt and pain. We have seen this place is our own thoughts and mostly our imagination. In our imagination, we have the capacity (the machinery) to produce scenes, stories, images and fantasies which are partially based in truth, but mostly made up. We have seen how these images lead to emotional responses and the emotions are usually painful. Finally, we have seen how if we want to end the emotional pain, all we need to do is stop inventing with our imaginations and leave the theater of our mind.

The next question is: Where else can I go and what else can I do? Instead of inventing thoughts with my imagination and then living deep inside them and the painful emotions that come as a result, where else and what else can I go and do? There is only one choice.

You can step out of thought and in to reality: the present moment: NOW!

Experience this distinction. This might be very new to you. It is to most of us. Don't try to understand it, just experience it.

Look outside yourself. Look at whatever is around you right now. Look at it without thought. What I mean is: resist the urge to say the name of a thing you're looking at as a spoken word in your mind. If you're looking at a lamp, resist the urge to say, "Lamp" as a thought in your mind. Just let the thing exist as it is.

Remember my first post? I said there would be several things you need to do. Each of them requiring a level of courage. One of those things was to accept everything as it is. Accepting means no judgements. Even simple judgements: hot, cold, bright, ugly, pretty, old, new, etc. Just accept things as they are and then look at them: experience them. Experience them without thinking about them.

When you experience the world around you without thoughts (past, present or future), you're "in the NOW!"; you're fully in the present moment. Once you arrive in the present moment, start to observe what the present moment is like.

The present moment is not painful. Sit where you are. Breathe. Feel your body living and breathing. Experience the world around you without thinking about it and notice and observe how there is no pain at all.

Once your in the present moment, the emotions that have been coming from your own thoughts go away quickly, effortlessly and simply. Notice and become aware of how the emotions evaporate to almost nothing. You remember them from the past, but they are not in the present.

Here (the present moment: NOW) is where you can come to and leave the place of pain: your own thoughts. This place is the alternative you have to going inside your own thoughts. You have another place to live now. Here there is substantially less pain. Yet, there is something else here as well. Something that will replace your pain with happiness and joy, peace and serenity. I will talk about this something else in my next post.