45 - Easy and Happy

This week our practice is Being rather than doing.  So often we are afraid to connect to life and ourselves because we don't know what to do once we do connect.  How do we act with others?  What do we say? How do we deal with our own stories?  With our guilt, fear, shame, anger, hurt, etc.?  So, we dissociate from life, from others and from our selves.  When we walk on the beach, we just are....there is nothing to figure out.  So, we experience our Happy Being easily.  In this practice we explore connecting to life fully from our Happy Being without feeling that we have to do anything more than connect.  No skillset required.  So, we can be freed to enjoy our Selves and our connections without worry.  

These podcasts are here to support your personal path of awakening whatever that might be. I feel they are most powerful when listened to in sequence from podcast one forward because each is built on the last. Though they, also, all stand on their own. If anything does not resonate, please disregard it and follow your heart. All my podcasts and website are free. Enjoy!

Though I am a psychotherapist, and these podcasts are offered to be spiritually helpful, they are not psychotherapy. If psychotherapy is ever needed, please reach out to a psychotherapist.

www.williamecooper.wordpress.com for more support. You may, especially, enjoy the short contemplations and the resource page which gives you some supportive material.

Transcript

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Hello, this is William Cooper. Welcome to Awakening Together, Relaxing Into Happiness. I trust you're doing well. Today, I'd like to talk about your happy self. Doesn't it feel good to just let go? Let go of all of your problems, things that are troubling you, maybe old feelings of guilt, the effects of past behaviors, shame, hurt, anger, fear. I like to get up early in the morning, maybe 5.30, and go for a walk. Sometimes I like to walk on the beach. It's so beautiful nobody's out, the sounds of the ocean, walking on the crystal, powdery, sugar, snowy, white sand, fragrant smells of the ocean, stars, the moon. It's expansive. And I just let go, let go of all of my problems, my troubles, thoughts, concerns, until after a while, all there is, is happiness, well-being. I've slowly disengaged from everything that's captured my attention, and all that's left is me, without distractions, without hidden agendas. Without hurts, fears, angers, etc. It's beautiful walking without being engaged, therefore, deeply connected, one with all things. That's true of all of us, you and me, everybody. We're free, we're happy when we're not snared up and caught up in trying to figure out what to do, how to do it, what we should have done, what we didn't do, all those kind of things. So, this week, here's something for you to consider. You can connect to everything and be completely free and happy as long as you relieve yourself of the obligation to figure out how to interact with that thing, what to do, what didn't you do, what should you do. That's when we get caught up, that's when we get snared up, when we try to figure out how to grapple with life. And that's simply a skill set, isn't it? Over time, we learn better ways of doing things, better ways of expressing ourselves, better ways of listening to others. But we learn these things and they don't really have anything to do with us. They're simply skills. We are fine, whether we know a skill or not. If I'm not a good carpenter, I can still be happy. Maybe I turn into an electrician or an engineer or a cook, but I can still be happy. I just have different skills. I'm not defined by my skill set. So let's stop and let all those things go for a moment that have to do with skill sets. What if we just woke up in the morning and like me walking on the beach, we just disconnected from all the doings. For a moment, we quit being a human doing and we revert back to our true nature, a human being. We just are. We can connect to the tree and we don't have to know how to connect. We just connect. We could connect to the bird or to the ocean. That's what we like about nature. It doesn't demand us to know how to do something. We just do it. The way our world has gone lately is we define things mostly on our skill sets. So we're afraid to connect to people because what if I don't do it right? What if I do it wrong? Maybe I'll be embarrassed. Maybe I'll be tongue-tied. Why would I be tongue-tied? Because I don't know what to say. I don't know the right skill set. Isn't that true with everything? Isn't that how our society teaches us? We go to school. We have to remember this and remember that and do this and do that. And after a while, we're so snarled up and twisted off from ourselves. We're lost. Well, let's stop that. Skill sets are good to have. It's good to learn things, but not at the expense of living our life from our center, your life. Because when you center back within yourself, you're whole, you're free and you're happy, innately happy. There's nothing you have to do. When I walk on that beach, I'm happy. There's nothing I have to do. I'm just happy. I disconnect from all of the distractions and I'm happy. Now, as I walk down the beach, it's 5 30 in the morning. And maybe as I continue to walk at 6, 6 30 and I can see dimly, the sun is maybe not even quite up, but I can start to see dimly. And maybe I see a person way out on the horizon. And as I continue to walk, I clutch up. I previously was free, but the moment I start to get into my head, Oh, here comes a person. How do I engage with them? Uh, what do I say? Do I say anything? Do I just turn around and go the other way? Cause I want to be free and alone and happy. What do I do? Well, I start to think I start to getting into my own head and imagine things. I start to hallucinate things. And that some of those things are based on old histories and old wounds and old hurts. And next thing I know I'm snarled up. You know what I do because I meditate I've learned just relax and watch these feelings. They have nothing to do with the person approaching. They have nothing to do with me. These are just feelings. They're not realities. They're feelings. Their thoughts and thoughts and feelings are hallucinations, right? We hallucinate them. Sometimes we hallucinate productively. Often we hallucinate unproductively based on fear, hurt, and anger. So as I approach the person, I just don't get engaged. I just feel my feelings as they come up the effects of my hallucinations. They're old things. Many of them have been stuck in my system for decades and they start to bubble up and they start to release. It's the same thing that happens in meditation. As I watch my thoughts and watch my feelings, experience my feelings, but don't get caught up or engaged in them. And as I approach the person, more and more things are burning off and releasing and I'm freer and freer. And nine out of 10 times when I come up to the person, you know what? It turns out that person is simply an umbrella stuck into the sand. There is no person. I'm hallucinating crazy stuff, but it does give me a nice workout. So here's our thought for this week. You know, you can just be yourself and you can relieve yourself from the obligation to have to know what to do. Just feel what it's like to exist and be. To be a human being without engaging the doing. That's what happens when I walk on the beach before I get engaged with umbrellas. I'm just a human being. So what if for five minutes, three minutes, two minutes, 10 minutes, whatever you want to do, you relieve yourself of having to know what to do. You can connect to something without having to know what to do. Try it with a tree or a bird or a cat. And if you see a person, you know, that's a little more complicated, but you still don't have to know what to do. You don't have to have a skillset. You can just connect to them energetically practice with somebody at the supermarket that you don't even have to respond to maybe across the room or somewhere else. But you can connect to that person without feeling that you have to do anything. You can do this with all of life. One of the reasons we retreat into our shell is we've been taught and we've accepted the teaching. We did it to ourselves. Ultimately, we accepted a teaching that says that when we connect to somebody or something, we have to know what to do, how to act. And so we just avoid the whole situation. I don't even want to connect to anybody because it's too complicated. Well, instead, don't give yourself up. Stay with your happy self and don't feel that you have to do anything. If you want to learn a skillset, the very first one would be, I don't know, just say, I don't know. Somebody asked you a question. I don't know. Or let me think about it. Think of your very first skillset would be something that doesn't commit you to doing anything. So you can connect, but not have to engage, not have to figure out anything. Tell somebody, hey, that's above my pay grade. Let somebody else figure that out. I'm just being happy today. I'm just happy. The point of all of this is practice being happy because you are happy. Let me say it another way. Practice not covering up your happiness by feeling that you have to be a human doing. You don't. There's no law. And when we get so caught up in being a human doing, we get disconnected from ourselves. We lose all confidence and happiness because being cut off from ourselves, we feel terrible. We feel in the dark. Existentially, we feel in deep blackness, even if it's way underneath the surface. So we just become a network of reactions and trying to learn skills and getting further and further away from ourselves and further and further cut off. So we lose our confidence and we become terrorized. And even though we've learned a lot of skills and we're competent, perhaps in a certain field, we're not happy. Well, let's stop that. Let's start with ourselves and don't leave ourselves. Let's do it the other way around. Wake up in the morning and just be with yourself. There's nothing you have to do. You know, another thing we get caught up with, we get caught up with our own thoughts. We get lost in our thoughts and we feel like we have to figure them out. Sometimes we have a whole story, a whole lifetime of story, and we feel like we have to figure all that out. But remember, our lifetime stories are based on our thoughts and our emotions and thoughts and emotions are simply hallucinations. That's what memories are. We hallucinate them. Emotions give them 3D, three-dimensional. They make them seem very real. But these are our hallucinations. If I watch a horror movie on TV, I feel scared because I'm hallucinating. I'm being guided. It's like a guided meditation, but I'm being, my hallucinations are being guided in a horrible way. So I become scared. Some people like to do that for fun. I don't. I get scared. I don't like it. So I don't watch them. I could, but my own mind, I can be, I can have my own horror movies. I don't need extra help. I let them go. That's the process of awakening. We can choose not to watch particular shows on TV and in our head because often we get lost in our own thoughts, our own horror show. And sometimes we get in the midst of our own thoughts, our own storyline, and we're trying to fix everything. If I would have said that, then this would have happened, or this person shouldn't have done that. And if they would have only done that, and I need to talk to them next time I see them and get them to do this or get them to do that. That's a movie. That's a story. I can just let the whole thing go. At least for now, why not let it go? Don't get involved in it. Because once I get into the story, I get caught up in the parts. And all day long, I'm thinking, what if this, what if that, I'm all caught up in the story and I'm burning off my energy and I'm not happy. Rather than trying to fix how to do this or how to do that within the story, just don't even get in the story. Turn off the TV. Don't even get into the horror show. Then you don't have to figure out how to get away from each zombie. Turn off the show in our head. Well, I know it's not so easy sometimes. Why isn't it easy? Because underneath it all is usually the symptoms of separation, hurt, fear, or anger. And we haven't approached those. That's what happens in meditation. You know, when I'm walking down the beach and I start to clutch up because I see the umbrella, I think it's people, but it's really an umbrella. All those thoughts and feelings, as I just watch them and let them go, I melt back into oneness. The same in meditation, as I watch my thoughts and feelings, I melt back into oneness, happiness. That's me without being engaged because they're not capturing my attention. If I wouldn't do that, the thoughts, the feelings, the hurt, fear, and anger would generate hallucinations, which would be my fantasy, my storyline. And I would get so involved in that and it would influence my whole life. So that's the value of meditation. And we've talked so much about that. So I'll leave that alone. If you want to go back to some earlier podcasts, we've talked about that a lot. But today let's just not do that. Let's just not enter those stories. I have a friend, every time we go to the beach, when she was a child, she saw the movie Jaws. I never saw that movie. Uh, it's about sharks eating people, some giant white shark eating people. Scary. It was the rage at the time. I mean, everybody was scared out of their mind. I never saw it at my beach. Nobody has ever been bitten by a shark. And over a hundred years that my family has been here over a hundred years, but she's scared to get into the water because she's seeing that movie in her head. Jaws. So this is what we all do in our own form, in our own way. We make our stories and they influence us and they have little to do with reality. Or they're based on things that happened long ago that no longer exist. Awakening, that's letting it all go. So here's your practice again this week, maybe for five minutes or 10 minutes or whatever you feel like it. But here and there, just be and don't get involved with your stories or a feeling like you need to do something or you need to know what to do. Connect, connect to everything. You're one with everything. So let your connection spread to everything in the room, everything that you see, but don't feel like you have to know what to do with any of it. Practice on easy things like nature and then maybe a little more complex, like let a dog walk by or a person that you don't know from across the street. And don't feel like you even have to wave, but you can if you want. Just let it be happy and free. Learn to live in your happy and free self. That is awakening. And then that can spread through slowly and baby steps, knowing more skillfully how to let your being flow through your walk through life, your skills and your interactions. But you never leave your being even if you're short on a skill. It doesn't matter, right? Okay. I've enjoyed our talk and I look forward to talking to you again. I hope you have a great week. Take care. Bye.