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Happiness Is Always In Us


There’s something about life teaching you the same lesson over and over again until you finally internalize it. That’s actually a core teaching of yoga – we are not just learning the same lesson over and over in this life, we actually keep at it lifetime after lifetime until all the lessons are internalized, and then we ascend to a higher plane. But it’s funny to see the written record and realize that I’m cycling through the same lesson every couple of months.

I’m learning something about trying to find happiness inside, trying not to let the overarching political situation determine my state of mind. As I started to write this blog, I had an eerie feeling of déjà vu and then I saw that I wrote something about joy as an act of resistance back in January. So here we are again.

I haven’t been writing as much this last month or so. I have felt a little busy and a little blocked. It’s only been a couple of months in this brave new world, but like many people around me, I feel completely overwhelmed with the pace of events on the ground. I don’t want to normalize what is happening, but it seems impossible to summon outrage in proportion to the day to day news. The Gorsuch confirmation – a stolen Supreme Court seat that validates the abrogation of our democracy. Syria – a human rights travesty compounded by stupidity and the rush to assert military solutions to a political, diplomatic humanitarian crisis. Not to mention the hypocrisy of bombing a country in the name of children our very country has thrown away. The Russia investigation. The detentions and deportation. Everywhere you look is pain.

When I started this blog, I wanted to use it as a space to figure out how to cope, but what if coping means denial? So far I have found myself tending toward two mental states – rage/despair and disconnection/numbness. I want to be living in the moment, but right now numbness is my default setting.

And I don’t want this entire blog to be about my mental health challenges. I struggle to be optimistic, happy, carefree even in good times. It’s not my natural outlook. But right now there is a deeper layer. I don’t want to dwell there. I sort of don’t want people to know how much I am struggling with it.

So here we are.

As always, any engagement with yoga offers insights that can help. Yesterday I went to John Schumacher’s class and it was the kind of demanding, all-out workout that banishes anything else from your mind. A long headstand followed by at least an hour of long holds of standing poses. I felt completely wrung out after, but also so grateful to be alive. Grateful to be in this body, that can have that experience. Grateful to have found yoga. Grateful for the Iyengar family who have developed and refined this path for me, and grateful to the universe for bringing me to it. Sometimes I reflect on all the different directions my life could have taken, the possibility that I might never have made it here. Despite everything terrible and terrifying around us, I have this uplifting, true, beautiful thing.

And here’s a passage from the Swami Satchidananda commentary on the Bhagavad Gita chapter 7. Chapter 7 is basically about delusion, and how yoga is the path for us to get past it. How delusion makes us misunderstand god and the nature of life and even the nature of our own selves. Towards the end:

The absolute truth is happiness, peace. When we are deluded we forget that we already have happiness, that we have peace already. Then we look for peace from things outside. If we think certain things will make us happy, we like those things. When we think certain things will disturb our peace or happiness, those we dislike. Likes and dislikes are caused either by wanting to get happiness or not wanting our happiness disturbed. But both of these attitudes are caused by the lack of knowledge that we have happiness always and it need not come from outside. Nobody can make us happy; nobody can make us unhappy. Happiness is always in us. The moment we forget the truth of our own true Self, we are deluded and begin to look for it from outside.

Time to focus on finding the happiness within, loosening the connection to the chaos without. Meditation, yoga, other daily practices create space for that true happiness to come out. Three months ago I wrote that joy is an act of resistance. Still true. I’m going to try, again, to learn the lesson.

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