18 Oct Authentic happiness…and equanimity
We are so attached to the concept of happiness. It’s ingrained into our culture as the ultimate and honorable American goal. For many, happiness is equated with financial, romantic and material success, or with being thin and healthy. For others, the concept of happiness is manifested as a more internal, emotion-centered ideology.
Regardless of your definition of happy, the constant striving for it can lead to an eternally upwardly-mobile spiral of “never enough”. Wherever we’re at now, there is always a better place to be. Thus the success of such New Age doctrines as The Secret and The Law of Attraction. These philosophies are all about acquisition and the yearning for things to be better.
But here’s the catch: the emotion many of us think of as happiness (or joy) is actually more akin to excitement_ã”a feeling that is a subtly-veiled form of anxiety. Think of the jittery feeling you may have gotten as a child around Christmas, with the anticipation of Santa’s arrival and the expectation of lots of presents. Chances are, that feeling was far from a comfortable one. In reality, the waiting and the expectation were somewhat torturous, weren’t they?
To read more about equanimity and happiness – click here