Tag: joyfulness

The Lesson of the Red Rain Boots

On By Just StephIn Metaphysical MussingsLeave a comment

“Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby”

~ Langston Hughes

When my daughters were small, I remember a day when I had taken them out for lunch.  While we were inside eating it started to rain.  This wasn’t just a pleasant summer afternoon rain shower, but a full-on wash-the-skies-clean kind of torrential rain; the kind that leaves everything soggy for hours afterwards; even the air.

It was still raining (though not quite so hard) by the time we left the restaurant and both of my girls were squealing in delight at the sheer number of puddles in the parking lot.  Some of the puddles, I noticed, were as large as small ponds, and probably just as deep.

Pausing to open my umbrella after a warning to both of the girls about keeping their feet dry, I let go of my youngest daughter’s hand for an instant, and a moment later she was knee deep in a puddle, giggling madly and splashing like a duck.  With a cry of warning I snatched her out; wrung out her dress as you would a washcloth and, after admonishing both of them (again) to stay out of the puddles because we had a long ride in the car ahead of us, we slowly made our way to the car; navigating around puddles and trying for the dry spots. Or rather I was trying for the dry spots.  Both of my daughters were angling for the puddles and my shoulders were starting to get sore from pulling them back.

We were about halfway across the parking lot when I noticed a brightly colored figure headed in our direction.  It was a woman; an old woman.  With her pure white nimbus of hair and a face lined in a thousand wrinkles, she looked like one of those dried apple head dolls that the pioneers used to make.  But it wasn’t her age that caught my attention, nor was it her attire (she was dressed in a bright yellow rain slicker, red rain boots, a purple rain hat).  What caught my attention was that she was making a point not to avoid the puddles, but to jump in them.

I stood there – stunned; unable to tear my eyes away, though I could see from the corner of my eye that both of my girls were watching her with absolute awe and rapture.

Finally, when her puddle jumping brought her to within a few feet of where I stood, she realized that there was someone in front of her and paused in her puddle jumping long enough to look up and meet my eye.  The stunned expression on my face must have amused her, because she grinned from ear to ear and then threw her head back and laughed like a loon.

“Aw sweetie,” she said to me finally – a grin still in her voice – it’s not as bad as all that.  Really, I’ve been waiting all my life to do this!  You’ll see.  One day you’ll jump in the puddles too.”  And then, with another grin for me and a wave for the girls, she had passed us, and life went back to normal. Well, almost normal.  I didn’t have the heart to keep the girls out of the puddles after that, and it was a long and soggy trip home.

But even now, years later I can’t get that woman and her bright red rain boots out of my mind, for how far do most of us go to avoid what we perceive as the negative things in our lives?

Honestly, I know that dealing with negative people and negative situations is unpleasant – and something most of us will avoid like the plague if given the chance, but how do we know that those puddles of negativity haven’t been put in our way for a reason? How do we know that we aren’t supposed to go through them instead of around them?

Who knows, those puddles might not even have been put in our way for our own experience.  Maybe, just maybe, someone on the other side of the parking lot is watching us; someone who has been avoiding negative situations of their own because they don’t have the courage to face them.

And maybe, just maybe, when they see you splashing through those problems in your red rain boots and laughing like a loon, they’ll find the courage to do something that they’ve never thought possible.

Authentic Living 101: Rediscovering Your Joy

On By Just StephIn Authentic Living SeriesLeave a comment

In today’s world living authentically is quite the challenge.  Part of the challenge – indeed a good bit of it – is in dealing with a society that encourages conformity almost to the point of worshipfulness.

Oh don’t get me wrong, we have plenty of choices when it comes to purchases; to styles and entertainments; to political ideologies and religions and genres of reading material.  We can choose from a plethora of car models or types of furniture or computer software or talk radio stations every day but the point is that if you don’t choose one at all; if you choose not to choose or (heaven forbid) choose something that is not on society’s ‘acceptable’ or ‘recommended’ list; if you don’t toe the line when it comes to society’s expectations for what you should be doing, you run the chance of being ostracized.

It’s an interesting conundrum.  You get plenty of encouragement to express your individuality, but if you don’t choose correctly you run the risk of being ostracized, and heaven only knows that people have a fear of being considered different; of being shunned or ignored by others; of not being accepted, and so they will do anything to fit in; to feel as if they belong.

Worse yet, this is not something that is only put on us by our society.  There are layers of conformity laid down all throughout our culture.  We are subjected to the expectations of our governments, our educational systems, our religions and even our families.  Everyone, it seems, is expecting something from us.

Indeed, the idea of being exactly who and what you really are is not only discouraged by society in general, but most people can’t even begin to tell you where the real ‘them’ begins, because they have immersed themselves so completely in the expectations of others that they have lost track of their authentic self years ago.  The trick comes in rediscovering who and what you really are.

The First Step to Living an Authentic Life

Living an authentic life is living a real life; a genuine life; a life where your physical reality and your soul purpose are in alignment.  It means living the life you were born to live, and even if you have buried that authentic self under layers of expectations and commitments, you can rest assured that your authentic self is still there, just waiting for you to rediscover it, and the first step is simpler than you might expect; it comes from rediscovering your joy.

Do you remember joy?  I’m not talking about happiness here.  Happiness is a choice.  You can choose to be happy in spite of your circumstances, you can also allow outside circumstances to increase (or decrease) your happiness.  Joy is something else altogether.

Pure, unadulterated joy is what you experience when you are doing something that completely and totally engages every part of your being.  It is what happens when you are free of constraints and restrictions and are able to fully experience everything that is happening at this exact moment in time.  It is what happens when you are able to open yourself up completely; so completely that time actually ceases to exist and you find yourself suspended in one absolute and perfect moment of now.

You can see true joy in the face of a small child who has brushed off the restraining hands of an adult and is doing exactly what they wanted to do.

You can see pure joy in the face of an athlete as they hit that moment where everything drops away and where they are completely and totally aware of every cell and fiber in their body working in synchronization with every other cell and fiber.

You can see unadulterated joy in the face of an artist or writer as they become one with their work; in the face of the monk who has slipped into a pure state of awareness during meditation and in the face of a lover as the world around them dissolves into heat and light.

It is in rediscovering your joy that you will take your first step towards living an authentic life, for those things that bring us joy are directly connected to our higher self; to our soul purpose, and by pursing them; by engaging in those activities you will reconnect with who and what you really are.  But how do you begin to find what it is that brings you joy?

Rediscovering Your Joy

The problem is, of course, that everyone is different, and the activity or object that instills joy in one person may not be what triggers it for another, which means that no one can tell you what it is that brings you joy, they can only explain how to find joy for yourself.

It’s actually far simpler than you might imagine rediscovering your joy is simply a matter of remembering those things; those activities; those ideas that completely engaged your attention.  Mind you this may involve go back to when you were young; to when you had fewer obligations and responsibilities; to when you acted spontaneously and without consideration of the feelings of others.  Keep a pen nearby when you are thinking about this and write down those things that come to mind.

Did singing in the choir raise your spirit through the roof?  Did you get chills when you stood on stage and said your lines to spontaneous applause and laughter?  Was it laying on the warm grass on a summer afternoon that touched your heart?  Or maybe it was the wind blowing through your hair as you ran pell-mell down a hill or through a field, or maybe it was the colors of a spectacular sunset that took your breath away.

Write them down.  Write them all down.

Chances are that with some thought you will be able to list a number of things that you can remember brought you joy.  But it is not enough simply to remember those things that brought you joy.  In order to live an authentic life, you have to be able to live your joy.  You have to be able to act from your heart without fear of censure or criticism. Then and only then will you have taken the first step towards living an authentic life.

 

Rediscovering Your Personal Power

On By Just StephIn Authentic Living Series1 Comment

We are all have personal power; we were born with it. It is our right, our heritage as spiritual beings; as individuals with a direct connection to our divine self. So why is it that so many of us suffer from a lack of personal power?

First, let’s get something clear, by personal power I am not talking about the amount of charisma you have; the amount of power you can exert over others in getting them to do what you want them to do or in any sort of position or social standing that you can hold up and use as a guideline or definition of power.

By personal power I am talking about the power within; the power that dominates and controls your will; the power that motivates you to continue to learn and grow and become; the power that fuels the knowledge of your right to exist; that reinforces the fact that you deserve to be heard and, most importantly of all, the understanding that you deserve to be happy.

Ha! Caught you out with that last one, didn’t I? No, I don’t want to hear it; I don’t want to hear your excuses about happiness being dependent on the happiness of others or what you can do for someone else or your current situation.

By happiness I’m talking about YOUR happiness; doing those things that make you grin from ear to ear, listening to the music that makes you want to dance, using the colors that make you warm inside, reading those things that fill your heart with joy and being with those people who make you feel expansive inside.
You can know that you have the right to exist, you can understand the fact that you have the right to be heard, but how many people truly believe that they have the right to be happy?

Think about it. I’m not talking about content people here; calm people; people who have come to grips with their lives. When I talk about happiness I’m talking about those people who glow; whose happiness is such an intrinsic part of their lives that you can hear it in their voices and see it in their eyes. Their vibrancy; their love of life comes through in every aspect of their being.

Chances are you can count the truly happy people you know on one hand. But why is that? Could it be that we live in a society where it is a standard part of our culture to use self-sacrifice and powerlessness as a means of fostering social cooperation?

In fact, a person who believes that they have the right to exist and that they have the right to be heard can fit in with others in a society with absolutely no problem whatsoever, but the moment that individuals attempt to follow their own definition of happiness, they become deviants; social outcasts who are looked on with a general distaste because they do not fit with societal norms of what is acceptable and pleasant.
Every time that we ‘give in’ to family expectations, societal demands or religious dogma simply to keep the peace and make things more pleasant for everyone, we are signing away a piece of our own happiness and, more importantly, a piece of our own personal power.

Think about it, every two year old understands their right to existence, their right to be heard, and their right to be happy. They not only understand it, they demand it. Unfortunately the acceptable response is to train the child into submission and docility in order for them to become “acceptable” to society in general. We are taught to “submit” to the demands of our families, our communities, our churches, our governments regardless of whether those things that we are expected to do fit in with our definition of happiness or not.

For over two decades we are taught to put aside our own hopes and dreams and instead to give in to the expectations of society and, while some of us may have our bouts of adolescent rebellion, chances are by the time we hit our mid-twenties we have learned our lessons all too well and one morning wake up to find ourselves in a dead-end relationship with a job we hate and are saddled with beliefs that we no longer can claim as our own.

Unfortunately, by the time we wake up to the pointlessness of our lives and to just how we’ve been manipulated by our system the chains are firmly in place. We have children, bills, obligations and responsibilities all of which are tapped deeply into our reserve of personal power and that serve as tethers or anchors keeping us firmly in place; that keep us doing the ‘right’ thing out of fearing of losing everything that we have built up.

So how do you break the cycle? How do you regain your personal power; admitting not only the right to exist and to have your voice heard, but the right to pursue your own happiness and, even more importantly, to live your own happiness? It starts with one word – acceptance.

When I speak of acceptance I am not talking about submission; about giving in to the demands on your personal power. By acceptance I am talking of acknowledgement.

In order to regain the full-strength of your personal power, the first thing that you need to do is accept or acknowledge the fact that you are NOT happy.

That’s a hard one, because we have been taught that our happiness is dependent on our status or social position or what other people think of us or how much we own or are able to produce or what job position we hold. We’ve forgotten all about those things that bring us joy; those experiences that leave us full to bursting with wonder and mystery and a feeling of rightness deep inside your soul.

Once you have accepted the fact that you are not happy the second step to reclaiming your personal power is in getting back in touch with what it is that makes you happy; the things that you do that you do with passion; those experiences that make you joyful and those people that touch the very core of your soul.

Of course it is not enough to simply admit that you are unhappy and to get back in touch with those things that stir up the happiness inside of you, you then have to reclaim your personal power by putting it to work in your life; by living authentically and bringing your life into alignment with your soul purpose. Then and only then will you have rediscovered your true personal power and will be able to take your first step into the life that you were always meant to live.