32 - Relaxing into Happiness

In the realm of awakening there are only two things, our Being and our blocks.  Being in touch with our Being and our blocks are equally important.  Awakening is Relaxing into Happiness.  The path of awakening is one of opening up and relaxing into our ever-present Being.  That is felt as the joy of release and relaxation.  Our use of yoga or any other techniques should always open us up and feel joyful.  If we use a technique in a way that causes us tension, then that technique is closing us to awakening in that moment.

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

0:00

Hello, this is William Cooper. Welcome to Awakening Together, Relaxing into Happiness. Relaxing into Happiness. Why that title? Well, we are happiness. We're like a light bulb and the electricity that flows through us is happiness. We just emanate happiness all the time, 100% of the time, while we're awake, while we're sleeping. All the time. Why don't we feel that? Well, because we cover ourselves up with tension. We block ourselves. And to the degree that we block ourselves, we don't feel the happiness that we are. So let's relax and release those blocks until all there is, is happiness. So back to the title, Relaxing into Happiness. What are we relaxing about? Well, when we relax, we let go of the tension that's blocking us. There's only two things in our life, really. There's the happiness, which we always are. And then there's the tension which we create to cover ourselves up. So relaxing is letting that tension go. In fact, the word relax comes from the Latin word laxus. That means to let go, to be free of tension. Relaxus means to go back to that state, no longer covering yourself up, just shining through so that you can feel and enjoy the happiness that you are all the time, 100% of the time. That's the same as awakening because in total relaxation and total letting go, there are no boundaries. Therefore, there's total oneness. And you find that everything is made of happiness and you are one with everything. There is no difference between you and everything around you. And in that total oneness is total trust because you trust yourself and you are everything. In that total trust is deep relaxation because when you totally trust, you totally relax. So we are the happiness and in the process of awakening, we're letting go of the tension that covers us up. Why would we have tension covering us up if we're happy all the time? That doesn't make any sense. Well, there's a number of reasons. When we're shocked by something or attached to something else, we separate from ourselves. When we separate from ourselves, we've talked about this in previous podcasts, but in separation, we feel separation anxiety. We feel hurt and abandonment and we feel anger. We're angry that we're separated. These are the building blocks for what we've come to call the human emotions. They're simply the symptoms of separation, but we're used to them, so we think they're normal. And that's what we call them. Underneath all of these quote unquote human emotions, hurt, fear, and anger is a tension. That's the tension of separation. You'll notice, for instance, that when you're thinking psychologically, which is probably 95% of our thoughts, these are thoughts motivated by hurt, fear, and anger. You'll notice if you don't think, if you just don't jump into it, suddenly or after a while, you'll start to feel the emotion that's motivating all these thoughts, and that will be hurt, fear, or anger or some combination of these. You'll notice if you put your awareness on this hurt, fear, or anger that it'll start to melt. Over time, it'll release like a bad odor going out of your system. You've opened the windows and it's leaving. It will start to leave and dissolve and melt. As it dissolves and melts, underneath it, you're going to notice another tension, likely. So, you put your attention on that tension and it also melts, relaxes, and releases because everything relaxes into what it's made of. And ultimately, there is only one thing in consciousness or in life, and that's happiness and love and peace. These are just different aspects of the same thing, the infinite. So, everything will melt back into peace, bliss, wellness, and happiness. That's your original state. Awakening is just letting everything melt back into that. As we've discussed earlier, meditation is very helpful for this because it's a good starting place. You just sit still and the part of you that's watching everything else that's happening is the happy part of you, which, by the way, is watching everything all the time, whether you're meditating or not, because you're there all the time and awareness is infinite and never stops. It's not something that just turns on during meditation. So, you sit back and enjoy and you watch and feel all that's happening. You'll feel emotions. You'll feel thoughts. You'll see thoughts. You'll experience thoughts as you watch them and experience them. It's like the sun, which is you, the happiness, radiating on the ice cubes of your personality and they begin to melt away. When enough melt away and release their energy, things start to slow down because all of the cacophony, all of the discord of your personality winds down because it melts out and it expends its energy like a twisting rubber band. Once you let it go, it just expends its energy and now it's slack and limp. Relaxed. That's what lax is. Limp and slack. Now you're relaxed and it feels good. And of course, meditation is helpful because it's easy and it allows you to focus, but you can do the same thing in life itself. As you go through life, you can just observe things and let them unwind and don't get too involved in them. Participate in life fully. Connect fully because oneness is connection, but you let go of dramas. You let life flow in meditation. For instance, you have a thought comes by, you don't hold onto it. You don't get involved into it and enmeshed in the thoughts and the emotions. You just let them go. You let them flow. You let life flow. When life flows, it unwinds like that rubber band. It unwinds and it becomes very vibrant because anything that you let flow and be free and expand as it's melting, it releases tremendous pent up energy like an atomic bomb almost because it's condensed happiness. All pain in your body is condensed frozen happiness. Your emotions are condensed frozen happiness. That's why blocks, if you try to push them away, that doesn't serve you because the block itself is an immense amount of light and energy and you don't want to separate that out of your body even if you could, but you can't because if you try to push something away, it will just become very strong and obstinate and it won't leave. You just have to be with it and let it have its freedom. Let it unwind. Watch and feel it, but don't control it. You don't go under a program by willpower. You're trying to make something go or visualize it away or yoga it away or meditate it away. That's not going to work. I remember once I was with Tony Parsons, an awakened English man, and he was giving a seminar and I was there and another man raised his hand and he was an older man and he was almost crying. Maybe he was and he said, Tony, all my life I've worked so hard at my meditation and I've stilled my mind. I don't have any thoughts, but I'm miserable. It's like a dry desert inside. Have I done something wrong? What's going on? I've done what they say to do. And Tony, with great compassion, says, yes, you've done something wrong. You're using your willpower to try to still your mind and the mind isn't stilled that way. It's like a dry desert inside of you. Indeed. Sometimes people meditate and they're like dried prunes. You look at their faces and they're just grim. It's their grim duty. That's not. They went off on the wrong foot. That's not how you do it. People also have the mistaken thought of, oh, I have to still my mind or meditation isn't working because I have so many thoughts and emotions and pain and problems. No, that's how meditation is supposed to be. Because you sit down and again, imagine a rubber band wound very, very tightly, very tightly. That's you. That's your mind. That's what that's the tension that you've created. It's wound tightly. You're wound tightly. When you let go of one end, the rubber band wildly twists and turns. Well, that's your mind. When you sit down to meditate, you're not a distracting yourself or doing other things. You're just sitting there. So your mind is releasing. It's unwinding wildly. Those are all the thoughts and feelings, but flow is being reestablished. It's quite painful, but it's being reestablished. So after some time, the rubber band becomes loose and limp and very slack. And now you don't have thoughts. You don't have psychological emotions because they've melted out of your system. They've released. If you have any that are buried, life is very good at finding them. So you don't have to go looking for them. They vibrate at a certain frequency and life responds to that frequency. So life will do something to bring that vibration to the surface so that you can release it. A car will cut you off in traffic or your girlfriend will leave you or a dog will look at you funny or somebody will jump in front of you at the grocery store line. Whatever it takes to bring that to the surface. What do you do? You do what you do in meditation. You just watch it and feel it, which allows it to exude and release its energy. Let it expend its energy. If you get too involved in it, you just refreeze it and make it stronger again. That's why working with willpower or all sorts of techniques, that's you getting involved usually and doesn't really help. Have you noticed over a lifetime, the stuff is still there? That's why. Okay. I remember one monk told me, he said he was talking to a group of us and he says, to do anything is to do too much. Think about it. You are the radiant light. You are bliss. That's your nature. 100% of the time. Don't do anything. And it takes some courage to stop, sit still and feel your suffering. Let your attention shine on your suffering. That takes some courage. And yes, everything else will melt away. And it's like that light bulb is crusted over with a cover. So you can't feel the light, nor can other people see that you're radiating beautiful light. The beautiful light that is you is so powerful. It's what dissolves the crust, the happiness, the peace, the wellbeing, the complete silence is so powerful. Whatever it's aware of begins to melt, relax, release, and the flow is restored over time. The feeling of relaxation is the feeling of opening and the joy that pokes through when you relax, it feels good. You start to feel good. That is the joy of you shining through. So you could, in a way say that relaxation is the symptom or sign of the crust melting and opening to let your joy flow through. So it's very helpful as the melting and opening is happening is to just enjoy it because that means the crust itself begins to absorb the joy and the joy melts the crust. Have you noticed that relaxation melts tension and further relaxation melts deeper tension? And every time the tension melts, joy and happiness, wellbeing of good feeling appears and you exude good feelings. That's the process of awakening. You can use many tools and techniques to help you. Life itself, you can do this in every moment, just absorb all the good feelings. Sometimes to keep focus, people even have gratitude journals where every day or every evening they write down one or two things that happened during the day that they felt good about and they take it in. They feel it. Well, one study says that when you focus on this joy, you begin to feel happier and actually your happiness increases by 25% in your life simply by writing at the end of every day or spending 15 minutes a day to feel gratitude. Now, what does that do? As you feel gratitude, that feels good, right? You relax and enjoy that. As you relax and enjoy that, you open up and as you open up, those holes open in that light bulb is revealed. And of course you're going to feel happy all the time because you are happy all the time. You're just exposing that absolute fact. You are happiness itself. That's called awakening. So since you're the happiness, that is you all of the time. Radiant, explosive happiness. Anything that's not that is a block. And how do you help let that happiness begin to radiate more strongly through your body and melt some of that crust? Well, I've given you some ideas, but here's another. When you do something, let's say you're stretching yoga or you're just stretching, you're bending over to touch your toes. Just do it to the level that it feels good because that's enjoyment and that's who you are. You are enjoyment and just soak it up. Let it just bend over a little bit and notice, Oh, that feels good. You're not in gym class trying to do a gym program or you're not working out for the Olympics. 1, 2, 3, 4. You have to be vigorous and build giant muscles. That's not the point. You're awakening and it's a different process. In awakening, you just stretch to the level that feels good and just stop and enjoy it. If you just did one stretch in your whole yoga program and just stopped there and felt good and received all of it, that would be a great day. How about your breathing? Sometimes people think they have to breathe deeply or quickly. Yes, that gets physiological results, but have you noticed a half hour later, you're right back to your old self. Instead, learn to breathe for enjoyment. What if you just want a shallow breath and it feels good? Enjoy it. What if you want a deep breath and it feels good? Enjoy it. What would happen if you enjoyed everything? Well, you'd be awake because there wouldn't be any crust blocking you and you would feel enjoyment all the time, right? That's how you do it. If awakening is being completely open, if all the crust has relaxed and your innate happiness is shining through, then any technique that's used in a way to create tension and closeness isn't going to be helpful. And any technique or the way that it's used in a way to relax and open you is going to open you into awakening. That is awakening, just continual opening into the bliss and beyond, which you always are. All techniques are designed to help dissolve these blocks. They're designed to connect what is blocking to this infinite happiness and let them melt into that. So if you use the techniques that people teach you in a good way, like I'm describing, using them in a process of enjoyment and in a process of opening and restoring flow, you'll do just fine. Trust yourself as you relax into the happiness that you are. Oh, I remember a story. You know, there was a famous bird illustrator. Oh, I think he was at the turn of the century. I'm not sure, but a long time ago named Audubon. And he would look at birds. He would go in the wildlife, find birds, and he would paint the birds. It was before they had documents of all the birds. He would paint them and draw them. And he came up with these beautiful paintings, tons of them. And he documented lots of birds. Well, one day somebody came up to him and said, Dr. Audubon, I saw a bird, but it didn't look exactly like the bird in the book. And he said, whenever there's a discrepancy between the bird and the book, go with the bird every time. Well, it's same in awakening. Listen to yourself. And if I tell you something that doesn't match up or doesn't work for you, go with you. Make your own program and own path. You've got the idea. Relax into your happiness. It's your awakening. Well, I've enjoyed it and I look forward to talking to you next time. Take care.