After your goal is reached, the one that you were positively certain would bring you happiness, then what? For nearly 10 years, the American people, and, in particular, politicians, have sworn themselves to victory over terrorism with the take-down of Osama bin Laden. On the personal level, during this same period, untold numbers of individuals have set and met goals for themselves, achievements that they believed would bring certainty, liberation and ease into their lives, they who know what it is to strive to improve their conditions. Despite challenges to the economy, people have juggled, returned to school, obtained education and training, received degrees, found partners for life, had babies, established homes.
And yet so often, the aftermath of all that striving for certainty fails to bring about that state of inner peace and ease so desperately desired. What happens here? What is it that really brings happiness, joy, peace that sustains, regardless of whether we are up or down on life's roller coaster? The harder we cling to what we thought would bring happiness, the more we tend toward disappointment.
Just the other day, one such woman, Jayzee, 38 years old, uttered words that illustrate this point:
OK, so I knew things were not going to get better anytime soon after September 11. Most of us sensed it, I think. All you needed to do was pay attention to all the changes through Homeland Security, to name one. I decided not to let it get to me, not to climb into the "fear vat." I kept working, went to school at night, met my future husband. We got married, had twins. That was what I always wanted: a degree, career, marriage, a home, babies. That was supposed to be bliss. After the economy toileted, I lost my job, found another. But the amount I made was canceled out by the cost of childcare and insurance. We decided to take stock, lower our expenses by moving. No sooner had I unpacked the boxes when I realized this was not the answer to the stress, either. We were under so much pressure, from uncertainty, that everything we were doing seemed to be an attempt to bar the door from the wolf getting inside.
Jayzee's "wolf" is known by the name "fear of uncertainty." How about you? The mistake we make is believing that our salvation lies outside ourselves. We have this way of believing that if we can just change our world from the outside, it will settle the unquiet on the inside. The problem with that thinking is that it puts us in a holding cell. Imprisoned by the notion that salvation is an outside job, we cling harder and harder to our identities, achievements and collections, which only end up separating us from what restores a sense of peace, reconnection and happiness.
Ram Dass said it long ago: striving in the outer removes us from flow. The remedy for that sense of disappointment that can follow an accomplishment lies in cultivating a relationship with who you are that runs deeper than your résumé, who you know or who you have been. The remedy comes with an increasing awakening to who you are beyond attachments, and resistance to surrendering to them when the time comes. It comes when we let anxiety go, let it wash through us like a wave and rejoin the flow of being in the moment. Happiness is not about a mechanism to "get there" but the discovery of who you are where you are, from surrendering and embracing what is without the immediate need to change it. Sounds un-American, I know. There is a world even beyond happiness.
What we are seeking is relief from our racing mind, with all its fears, self-doubts and mistrust, mostly of who we really are beneath our striving and clinging to false ideas of who and how we must be to be loved, to be free. Consider the mother and father whose child suffers, and they take on the suffering as if it were their personal failure; the grown son and daughter who are stressed over feelings of impotence in dealing with their parents' aging and decline; the unemployed spouse who insists that there are no jobs out there, while his or her partner carries the load on their own back, feeling overwhelmed by the hopelessness that populates the atmosphere at home. Each of these and more are very real examples of how our mind can get off track, leaving us winded in the aftermath of arriving at what promised the certainty of happiness, only to be unraveled by the unexpected.
The Antidote
Now and then come moments of relief, when we are transported from this prison cell, free again to roam the landscape of simply being in the flow, the connectedness of all things. In these brief moments we are alive once more, awakening to a sense of belonging to the universe, where all is well. Recall your own? I asked Jayzee to reflect upon hers; she recalled that "this splashing around with the neighborhood kids makes me happy. We were just hanging out. There was no place to 'get to.' We just were there with each other, playing, laughing, teasing , being kids. I remember the simplicity of it. There were no goals. There was this kind of natural trust in the world, where all was already all right."
The Prescription: Saving Questions That Need Asking
After prescribing the exercise of revisiting this memory for 30 to 60 seconds whenever she feels anxious, and tracking her results on paper over the next 28 days, I asked Jayzee two questions I would ask you the next time you notice happiness flying out the window.
Question 1: How do you rob yourself from such a gorgeous memory?
Consider your answer. With courageous honesty, Jayzee replied, "I tell myself the story that these moments were only in the past; that I can't be a responsible adult and expect to feel like that."
"Who made that up?" I asked.
"That part of me that wants to always be in control, get it right; the part that is terrified of letting go and trusting that life can come again without any particular goal. My parents were very big on goals. They said nothing important ever happens without them. They failed to mention, however, what happens when you meet them and you can't figure out why you aren't happy for long."
Question 2: What does your highest self want you to notice and appreciate right now, through taking enough deep breaths until an answer arises from within you?
After she did so, here's what came: "I did not notice before just now how the sunlight is sparkling on the wall up there by the vaulted ceiling. The way the shape shimmers, reminds me of a white dove hovering over us. I don't know why, but I feel better, like somehow allowing the me that needs to feel so important dissolve into the breathing allows me to lay down what keeps me racing to 'Nowheresville.' Right now, one part of me isn't fighting the other. Right now, it's like being open, where there's nothing to adjust, no stand I need. Uncertainty is OK."
A few weeks back, a Huffington Post reader by the name of BeautyAmerican put it so well:
[We're] all striving for the same thing. Peace, enlightenment, soul-filled lives. The older I get, the less I 'know' for sure, and that is quite all right with me. You are most likely familiar with ... Jung's ... quotes:
"There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions -- not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation of something I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidarity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being."
I am not a student of Jung, or anything other than life. I see what works and what doesn't...
The older we get, when traveling the path to live authentically, the need for striving diminishes as wisdom enters the walk back home.
Your turn: What works to help you let go of the need for certainty? What helps and hinders your endeavor to de-stress? I'm listening and learning from you, my teachers.
For more, see carabarker.net. For updates, contact me at carabarker.net or dr.carabarker@gmail. To receive email notices when I post new blogs on The Huffington Post, click "Fan" at the top of this page. Stay tuned for upcoming developments with The Love Project, including "Practicing Love," as well as "The Feel Good Factor," at press. Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/DrCaraBarker.
Follow Dr. Cara Barker on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DrCaraBarker
be thankful for what you have because it could be always worse....the mind is a powerful thing!
use it or let it control you....you have the choice....
And, of course, if all else fails ... a walk barefoot in the grass and a candle lit bubble bath with good music can switch my channel. My psychology background would say Gestalt with whatever is coming up for me usually turns out to be a great dialogue of insight, and release. And above all ... go in search of my pretty much always there sense of humor. Giant hugs, Cara.
I can lie in bed, SAVORING the feel of the sheets against my bare legs. And it's not as though I have silk sheets, or 900-count Egyptian cotton, or the like! :) I just have extremely sensitive skin. The downside of this can be very uncomfortable--the Princess and her Pea had nothing on me. And the sensitivity combined with fibro can make life Too Interesting.
But I can absolutely *wallow* in sensation, lapping it up like a cat. However, I can't just continue to lie there. Actually, the problem is that I COULD, all too easily. I fear my own tendency to laziness, my own fear of effort, more than I fear change.
I used an ocean metaphor with Bill a few minutes and several messages ago. I'll offer another. When I'm lying in bed, savoring those sheets, or diving headlong into a book that moves me to a different world and into another person's head for hours at a time, I'm like one of the old sailing ships stranded in the horse latitudes. I am becalmed. That sounds lovely. Great weather, clear skies, peace and quiet. But if you've ever read about those ships, you know that being becalmed could be fatal.
So I know I *can't* just live in my moments and float. I need to set a course.
Forgive my delay, as I just got back to town. As for me, I do believe, increasingly, that where I get myself in trouble is in that old kneejerk habit that you coin as the 'achieve' effort. Savoring is, most definately where it's at for me. Ah, the wallowing of it all, the sweet purrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, is simply the best! Why fear such a brilliant natural gift, writerkate? You could be quite the Master Sensai of this, and I am most serious.
You are right: the trick is in the 'and' between the two states, heaven on earth. At least, that is what I call it, especially this one day post 'rapture.' Hey, what if we all 'raptured' and landed here where it's heaven after all!
Love, your way, as I'm off to savor my sheets,
Cara
I call it "the gift of enjoyment" and I've thanked her for sharing it. Lately I've come to see it may be the foundation for what I've learned is called mindfulness.
But sometimes I need to prune and water the roses, as well as smelling them. :) Your latest column spoke to that, and I've commented on it as well because it will help me do so.
To see more about what CPC's really do, visit this link: http://www.prochoice.org/pubs_research/publications/downloads/public_policy/cpc_report.pdf
Not an apocalyptic event but still, did not mean to sully your article with other stuff. Feel free to delete. I tried to comment on your last article and it never posted at all. I'm going to accept these as 'signs from the universe'. To stay off computers :)
Sweet dreams,
Cara
Look up at the trees, and marvel that they are oblivious to human concerns. Smell the flowers in bloom; they don't care that the world may end tomorrow. Listen to the trickling of water as it gushes past over-watered lawns through the drain pipes, into the streams and rivers as it makes its way to the ocean, completely unaware of our impending last day. Breathe the air as if it were the last, because if it IS, then ... it is. This has been a glorious existence, and a wretched one, and strife-filled and peaceful - at times, all at once. If this is truly my last day on earth, I have done all I could to enjoy this life. That's all it's for, really. Stress is completely optional.
Some people have truly terrible experiences, and it has been true for me too. There is no excuse for man's inhumanity to man, nor is there a reasonable explanation for it. In the end, love is all that matters. To de-stress, I wrap myself in love, and find forgiveness for others.
Now I'm going to enjoy the rays of the last sunset on earth :)
(((everyone)))
Although I'm off to catch the ferry, I simply had to stop here and bless you for this masterful piece. Will be back later, probably much later to respond in total. But, should this be the last, (wink, wink) know that I am with you, oh, so big-time.
Much love,
Cara
So much love,
Cara
Somewhere back there I traded the fear of uncertainty for Love of the Mystery.
I think there is some confusion about happiness. I'm not sure it is all that well understood.
For example, "this splashing around with the neighborhood kids makes me happy." One could consider that a "socially engineered" statement. Nothing makes people happy. They open a channel to a chamber of their heart or they don't. I would say real happiness is the feeling humans have when Bliss circulates between hearts. Much of the other so called states of "happiness" are delusional, illusionary and/or errors in thinking. (aka/D.I.E.)
The splashing series of moments could be described as "reciprocating Bliss." Bliss could well be considered a pure experience of Love. That is what I see she shared – something children are more attuned to and radiate effectively, even effortlessly.
I like the American thing of – "Life and Liberty", but the "pursuit of happiness" could be another example of social engineering.
Any pursuit of anything spinning on a wheel of duality with bring both aspects, all shades of said aspects and all transitions in and out of each opposite.
Now, if that "pursuit of happiness" had a Capital H – the whole journey would be changed, of that I Am Certain that I Am Certain.
Visiting with you, Gems, is like sitting at the Well, where the water is clear and refreshing to Spirit. Bless you.
Cara
The "specific" subject this touches is my contact with Louis. Of course I'd LOVE to have certainty, to have some incontrovertible proof - but I'm not going to. It doesn't work that way. I know it, he knows it. What I do have is trust and a lot of happiness, contentment and anticipation. I just need to remind myself that certainty isn't essential.
I also wonder at times if it isn't partly a cultural default, almost a pandering to the materialistic, "scientism" mindset that says only that which is scientifically verifiable is worthy of consideration.
And of course, those who buy into the current scientific verification concept are living within a bubble of current realization and limiting themselves to the boundaries of knowledge and understanding so far; it makes them feel safe. We should live in the moment, but not with the belief that now is the end of the journey for knowledge; believing that all that we can now prove is all there is to ever prove. If we did not delve into that which we cannot as of yet prove and verify, then we might as well close all of the universities, and libraries and just sit, because there is no more to learn: all the truths have been revealed.
To believe our current knowledge and understanding is more than a drop in the pond of reality is to assume a position born from ignorance and expressed in arrogance.
The only certainty for me is the certainty of uncertainty, and that's fine because I believe all progress, knowledge, growth, and even gratitude and love spring from our response to the swing of the pendulum, the potholes in the road, and even our trips and falls... I am certain or it! :)
Lawson
Those potholes are right up there with death and taxes. Oh, and Feline Perversity. That's a certainty.
Louise :)
So much love your way,
Cara
When I saw the title about uncertainty, it made me think first of a very specific subject where it's an ongoing matter. More of that in a minute; first I want to mention the more "worldly" or everyday uncertainty your article really addresses.
Yes, I'd love certainty - I'd love to know my job wasn't going to disappear, or my income become inadequate for whatever reason. I'd love financial security. But I've never really had it. I started work in the 80s, in the public service. Every department I was in was closed, one after the other, during the recession and savage undermining of the very idea of public service by the government in the 90s. So I've never known what it was to feel safe in that way, and I was unemployed for two solid years a decade ago. It's been the norm, the default, to be uneasy about money and all that flows from that. I don't expect that to change unless I suddenly make a fortune, which is highly unlikely!
I'll post the "in a minute" subject separately, no room here!
And, having said this, fq, I just must salute you. What you have undergone seems to have drawn through the eye of it's needle, very real wisdom. It is a Wisdom, however, that exacts great payment, one that those who have not been there, cannot imagine.
One little sidebar, my friend: consider that it might be liberating to let that pen go which connects the dots between the past and the present. Something unexpected which liberates just might be on it's way. We just never know. I say, clear the clutter from the hallways, open the windows wide, and prepare a place for a most welcome 'uninvited guest' to lend a hand. We just never know.
My love and admiration are with you, today and always,
Cara
Laughter is the best medicine, and take joy in the simple things of life, and try to have hope that it's always darkest before the dawn - I've always found these thing to be true most of the time.. sending you sunbeams!!!
As for those sunbeams, I am catching them with gratitude! So, it is you behind this stunningly beautiful sunshine in Seattle! How grateful we are. The frizbees are flying everywhere!
So much gratitude your way,
Cara
You do not hate people....;)
Sunbeams and moonbeams, too, your way,
Cara
I missed you last week.
My highest self wants me to notice and appreciate right now that I have really good friends and a fabulous family, that I live in a safe and plentiful part of the world and that I have opportunities that my forefathers could only dream of.
For years I've been saying to anyone who happens to trigger the thought that "Control is an illusion." We have will and the ability to impact or influence, but we don't really control anything. I get anxious about unknown outcomes and fret and obsess about it until either time has answered the question or I remember to let go once I no longer can influence the outcome. I wouldn't even reach the worry stage if I'd just remember "control is an illusion."
Sometimes when I meditate I like to imagine that I see myself from outside and that I am gradually getting further and further away. I see a speck that represents me as I look at Earth from a lunar perspective. Then Earth becomes the speck as I look at our solar system from outside. But I don't see it as though I'm beyond the planets, rather I see it perpendicularly as if I'm looking downward. From there I picture our sun as a speck in the galaxy. I came up with this from a poster of a spiral galaxy with a little arrow pointing and saying, "You Are Here".
Have a happy,
little brother
Yes, the trick is in the remembering that any sense of control is an illusion. Of course, monkey mind hates that thought, and runs/sends us screeching to the hills in horror.
For the record, I love your image for meditation. Tonight I shall take it on including the "You are Here." Love it. What I want to share with you is that the first time I meditated, back in 1973, this was the experience I had! (minus the sign) At the time, it both comforted and scared the cr-p out of me. Since then, it much more pure comfort, (except for bad hair days!).
All I know is that I am so glad you are here, I am here, and what is beyond us, is here, too.
Hugs and love,
Cara
Laughter your way,
Cara
The knowledge that the only things certain are those that I know after I understood a joke.
It's also how I de-stress. And I am 100% positive that this is how logic and mathematics were invented.
No small wonder that primo mathematicians describe equations as 'elegant.' So are you,my friend, so are you.
Here's to many jokes coming both our way,
Cara
First know that here you are never 'off subject,' but your Voice is always welcome, all ways. Actually, I do not disagree at all. What all this did, in the Depths, is throw the collective, and individual into the realm of uncertainty, which we fight, tooth and nail, so to speak. Whenever we count on certainty, we can expect the abyss is near at hand. Whatever mechanism it takes, NAFTA, or any political party, or whatever form, we are challenged with a perpetual task of letting go, for this is the way of life. Whenever the pot is stirred, chaos drives us into the beyond.
Many thanks, CAELadyJane, for a thought-provoking conversation. I am most grateful, and wishing you the very best,
Cara
It isn't 'right' or 'wrong' bad or good. It just is the way today will unfold, and it is my duty to work within today's parameters.
I do what I can, and allow myself to stop when I can go no further.
I'm not saying I'm always successful- just that when I keep this in mind it does give me a better perspective and releases me from the stress of 'I didn't do enough' or 'I must be able to do more for myself'.
Know that I am so grateful for you, and appreciative that you've paused in your busy day to contribute.
Peace and joy your way, jkkFL,
Cara
But you have been My rock for a long, long time! Anything I can contribute has, no doubt, been given to me from you!
I will sneak in one more thought;
Sometimes it's ok to do nothing- when the bills have been addressed, and the other junk is cleared,(or if it isn't- but can be filed away,) steal some time and sit outside in a rocking chair and chill! That's my favorite! ;)
I'm concerned about Cara - she's usually responding to comments to her articles right away - moreso than she was yesterday, and to not see any responses this morning is disconcerting!
I do note that you didn't respond to my comment(s) either! -smile-
Hope you are well, Cara, hope you are too, Gypsy!
Lion
I'm so sorry you were concerned, but, secretly delighted that you noticed the absence. My preference is always to respond as promptly as I can to readers like yourself. However, here's the truth: after the slam of yesterday, coupled with the time challenge of not knowing just where my post was with the unexpected reorganization of the page, I simply didn't have a moment to figure it out in time to do what I'd hoped. My wish is to get to all these comments and conversations this evening, after I finish work, (or maybe a few minutes between sessions?) after the ferry ride back home.
So much appreciation for your support and care, Lion. A great big purrrrrrrrrrrr your way,
Til later,
Cara
Good morning back your way, my dear. All is well with me; just an onslaught of sessions and people's unscheduled emergencies, after which I went out with husband and friends for a celebration of our good friends return to America. By the time I got to the hotel, I was too pooped to open the computer. I will be back later, though, and am so touched by your concern.
Love,
Cara