The key to your happiness

I read words by the poet Jane Kenyon this morning and found in them the key to everyone’s happiness...

"Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook."

She is right. After all the running I've done in my life, chasing another result, another success, another goal, I am deeply aware that true satisfaction and happiness in life are related to how much you focus on yourself instead of focusing outside yourself.

Your balance and serenity depend on how clearly you know who you are and what is truly important to you and whether you are able to honour that instead of being confused by all the chatter and noise around you.

Never stronger than now, we need to return to ourselves. The avalanche of distractions, information and input we are subject to are leading us all over the place without direction. We are drowning in, blinded by the desire to have more and more and we feel constantly late and in trouble.

We are desperately trying to stay afloat, but we have lost our point of reference. And how tired are we? How much do we want to stop this frantic and destructive pace? But we feel we can’t because we fear being left behind, being cut out of the game, we fear losing something, being excluded. Isn’t that true? It is fear that keeps us going, fear of losing opportunities or not having enough, fear of being left alone.

We are living lives full of fear and this is the main filter, the colour that prevents us from perceiving and living our joy and happiness.

Fear will always win over you in many ways and at all levels if you give it power. Fear is able to keep you away from true love; have you noticed this? When you are scared you are contracting and diminishing yourself, you are closing down, you are protecting yourself; the exact opposite of what you do when you really love. This really seems too high a price to pay. I simply can’t conceive a life without love, without a deep passion. I simply can’t conceive a life in which I am losing touch with myself to just stay afloat. 

So it’s simple: go back to listen to your music; the one that comes from within.

Are you afraid of not having that music? This is your fear speaking up again. We all have our own music inside, but to be able to listen to it you have to tune into the right frequency; a very different frequency from the cacophony outside of you.

I know the melodies of the heart. I listen to them every time someone asks me for help in finding their balance and they gave me chills of happiness for the strength, the colour and the passion they contain. Your music is always inside of you; it has been there since you were born. Jane Kenyon simply worked out how to create the right space to listen to it again.

Her words today are my gift to you, to help you to tune in.

(Photo Courtesy Flickr - Cindee Snider Re)