My Story or,
How I Went from Forcing Myself to Feel Happy, to Actually Experiencing Happiness
by Joanne Rodasta Wilshin, The Happiness Path

First there was Elizabeth . . . .

Then the crazy making began.

But grace stepped in.

And the pieces started fitting together.

I asked a question; the answer found me.

  My story arose when I was seeing a well-meaning therapist in Laguna Beach. Let’s call her Elizabeth. Some major irritations had interrupted my life, and I needed help sorting them out.  Elizabeth’s strategy focused on me seeing my situation from a different perspective: The people abandoning me weren’t really abandoning me, they just had different priorities.

    I thought: Okay, I can do this. And so I began following her instructions. When I felt dissed or marginalized, I told myself this wasn’t really happening. Unfortunately, doing this eventually triggered my fall into a deep depression.

    Here’s why:  No matter how I talked myself out of my feelings, I still felt abandoned because the people who said they supported me didn’t act like it. Didn’t Gandhi say something like happiness is when what’s being said and what’s happening actually match?   

    Since I couldn’t change these people, I figured my best response would be to cut ties with them.  But Elizabeth said I shouldn’t. 

    I felt trapped.

    Then I became borderline suicidal.

    All my alarms were telling me I was in a bad situation, but the people I was counting on, like Elizabeth, told me my situation was just fine. I just needed to see it in a different way.

    To me, it was crazy making. (In fact, I’ve come to realize that any situation where what’s being said and what’s going on don’t match, is basically crazy making.)

    To survive, I needed to self-heal. I needed to trust someone or something new.

    And that was when grace stepped into my life. Out of the blue it dawned on me that my emotional pain was not something to be ignored or something to be diverted. The truth was that my emotional pain was my psyche’s way of telling me I had a wound that needed healing. It’s just like the pain I’d feel if someone kicked my leg. The pain I’d feel from the kick tells me to get out of the way and tend to my wound. The pain shouldn’t be ignored so you can endure more abuse. And what if someone kicked a bruise on my leg? It’d hurt even worse. That’s  why sometimes people do little things to us, but we seem to over-react. Someone’s kicked an emotional bruise, and now it hurts worse than ever.

    This was all a big breakthrough for me. Pain, physical or emotional, is your body’s and psyche’s way of telling you something’s wrong that needs to be fixed. Duh!

    IF physical pain, I reasoned, tells you what your body thinks, THEN emotional pain must tell you what your mind thinks.

    A rush of energy coursed through me. I must be onto something. But what? I wanted to know.

    Like most times when I want to know something, the answer wants to be found. Which is why Nietzsche’s writings about hate came to my awareness (I’d been teaching Jack London’s Call of the Wild at the time). Nietzsche thought anger signaled fear or jealousy. The more I thought about it, the more I realized jealousy is also fear. And so are sadness, anger, rage, and the whole lot of uncomfortable emotions we feel on a daily basis.

    But what did this have to do with anything?

    By asking that question, the answer soon found me.

    If we fear something bad is possible, we also think and believe something bad is possible. And, being a person who believed in the value of positive thinking, I realized that our fears (i.e., thoughts and beliefs) have a way of becoming themselves in real life. Thus, if I can neutralize and replace my fear, I can alter the course of my life.
  
    Aha!

    I found my way out of my depression. My emotions told me I feared I’d be abandoned, which I didn’t want to experience. I had to figure out a way to believe I was embraced, loved and supported, which I did want to experience. And I did figure out how to do that (read The Happiness Path!), and I did change what I was experiencing (instead of ignoring those pesky emotions). When I experienced being embraced, supported, and loved, gone was the depression.

    And so I say to you, it’s important for you to have experiences that genuinely make you feel happy. It’s important to me that you have them. It’s important to me that your friends and family and community and organizations and countries experience them. Read The Happiness Path. Practice it. Share it with others. Start a support group or sangha. Share your successes on this blog. Create happiness for yourself and others. Creating is GENIUS!