Inner happiness

​​Lets just be blunt and acknowledge that sometimes life just sucks! Wait … what? I thought this blog was titled “Inner Happiness”?

Don’t worry, there are still pearls of wisdom buried within this message, but first lets just be real. Life can sometimes feel really hard. We may be facing external circumstances beyond our control that throw hurdles and challenges at us, or it might be simply directed from within as a form of self sabotage.

Self sabotage is a story I know all to well. In fact it is so familiar to me that I usually take it out of the closet and try in on like a beaten up sweater, ugly to everyone else, but a weird sort of comfort to me. This sweater of self sabotage has been so carefully woven together my entire life. I know exactly where to find all the holes and locate the stitches where it has been patched together time after time. The color is so faded, but yet I still know the image it carries. This sweater is pitiful and that’s exactly what I want it to be. It’s a poor me sweater, and I’m willing to bet that we all have one.

My poor me sweater reeks of limiting self belief .. afraid to love too deeply because sooner or later that must end, right? Trying to hard to please everyone else because of a false need to feel accepted … the list truly goes on. Many of us spend our entire lives searching desperately for outward acceptance and never feeling like it is ever fully achieved because something is missing.

I finally had a moment of absolute clarity the other day when I realized that everything I have ever been searching for in the form of acceptance and unconditional love was already inside of me. My soul was literally yelling at my mind to be silent and go within, and in that silence came a peace like no other I have ever experienced. There was no judgement, no pain, no limiting beliefs, no mind chatter … just love. It dawned on me that the true meaning of life is simply just to find inner happiness. There is no magic formula, no life changing event that happens overnight to “wake you up” and bring you into a higher state of consciousness. It is just simply a state of being where you live your life with the intention to find your own bliss and beat to your own drum.

Inner happiness is achieved when we allow ourselves to heal from the inside out. Its understanding that you can’t receive acceptance from your external environment if you haven’t yet learned to accept yourself. It’s knowing that the law of attraction is based on the frequency of thoughts and feelings so if we want to be loved, well then that needs to start by loving ourselves so that the energy we are transmitting matches the feeling we wish to receive. Its taking the poor me sweater, unraveling the fabric and truly looking at it as the self created item it is.

Huh….so I guess if its self created then that must mean that we also have the ability to weave it into something new, something that makes us feel good and empowers us to wear it proudly. I’m thankful for the lessons I’ve learned in closely examining my poor me sweater, for understanding the old stories and limiting beliefs that I have been carrying for far to long.

Today I turned a new page in the story, and set the intention to go inward in seeking my own inner happiness. It wasn’t too hard to find moments of joy .. gratitude for a hot cup of coffee, peace in the stillness of the morning, comfort in connecting simply with my breath and knowing that I am in control of writing this next chapter. I get to decide where the story goes from here, just like you do with yours. Do what makes you happy, for no one else can do it for you.
​
Lots of Love,
Lisa Richard

---