What if Happiness is Just the Absence of Resistance?
Here’s something I keep seeing over and over about human beings: we don’t bother to search for something in places we’ve convinced ourselves we won’t find it.
It’s easy to see the truth of this in the way we look for happiness. We look outside of ourselves to our partner, to our job, to getting a new car, or a new house. In other words, we look to do, or get, or be something different from what we think we are or think we have.
How many times have you looked within yourself to find happiness?
How many times have you looked within yourself to find happiness, without any of the external factors we assume contain happiness?
Probably not very often because that’s not where we expect to find it.
Here’s a question you might want to ask yourself: What if happiness is just the absence of resistance?
More and more, I’m noticing that if I’m not resisting whatever experience I’m having at the moment, happiness isn’t an issue, because I don’t feel a lack of it. That’s because it’s in our nature as humans to be happy.
I understand that may strike you as a challenging statement, but stay with me for a bit. That feeling of “missing happiness” is born when we resist whatever experience we’re having at any given moment.
Do any of the following statements sound familiar? I don’t want to be here right now. I don’t want to be doing this right now. I wish I didn’t have to sit in traffic. I wish I were on vacation. I wish I didn’t have to spend time with this person. I wish my life were different.
In my personal experience, and in my work with clients, I hear these cries of, “I don’t want to do this/be here/live here/have this job” with such frequency, it can be difficult to hear them for what they are.
Thoughts and statements like these are the roadblocks we unknowingly put in place that seem to keep happiness at arm’s length. Without these thoughts and statements, we experience happiness without thinking about it.
Can you notice times when you’re happy, without wanting circumstances to be other than what they are? Because happiness is such a loaded word, and we have such a lot of associations with what we think it has to mean, let’s replace it for the moment with the word contentment.
Now we can set aside the ridiculously delirious state of mind we probably associate with happiness. Contentment is a less fraught condition. If there’s nothing we have to fix or change, in other words, if we’re not in a resistant state, we’re content.
Almost sounds too simple to be true, doesn’t it?
Almost sounds too simple to be true, doesn’t it? I keep discovering over and over that the simplest answers often come closer to the truth than the complicated answers we humans tend to prefer.
Instead of automatically rejecting the simple answer I’m proposing, let yourself sit with it for a while. Notice the times when you’re engaged in an activity without resistance. (Don’t worry if it takes a while for you to find a situation you’re not resisting.) Does it feel like happiness is missing?
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