I am a HUGE fan of Eckhart Tolle. If I had my way he would be required reading in schools. 🙂 And if you have not read either A New Earth or The Power of Now I cannot recommend them enough when it comes to learning how to live happier. And while I could write a blog on how much I love Eckhart, I want to write about something he said in one of the videos I listened to recently.
He brought up the unconscious belief that unhappiness will make things in our life change. Now this may sound a bit counter intuitive, because if we want to be happy in life it sure doesn’t make sense to sit in unhappiness does it?? And my answer to that would be that no, it does not in fact make any sense. However, we all spend our lives running many, many unconscious “tapes” in our minds of very limiting and false beliefs. And this can be one of them.
It is my belief that one of the biggest keys to living a happy life is to become a student of our own thought processes and patterns. And that once we are able to view and catch these thought forms from a state of awareness, we bring them into the light to begin to heal them.
What do I mean by this? I will answer that by way of diving deeper into Eckhart’s statement. I can remember being upset as a kid because I didn’t get my way. In our underdeveloped days we are all ego and think the world revolves around us and all of our wants. And should they not be met with instant gratification, we become very angry, upset and unhappy. And I can recall when I would feel this way, I would withdraw. I would think “I will show them, they will be sorry when they see how very unhappy I am and then they will give me what I want. ”
And “they” can be anyone. Our parents, our teachers, our friends, even God. This is the place where guilt trips stem from. “I will use my unhappiness as a playing card to make someone else feel guilty that I am so miserable and thus get what I want.” I watch my son do this now when he doesn’t get his way. And I am sure it makes all the sense in the world to him to just sit  as far down in his unhappiness as possible so that I will feel bad for him and not want to see him that way and thus give him what he wants.
And at that point I am at a cross roads. Because I can be a real sucker sometimes as a mommy as of course it hurts my heart to see my child upset. And sometimes I give in. But I weigh it. I want him to know that life doesn’t always gives us exactly what we want when and how we want it, and that bringing our energy down to a low vibration will in the long run only bring us more of the same in life.
Like attracts like. We attract into our experiences and co-create our reality via our energetic state. So when we feel like we will get our way if we are unhappy about something by becoming even more unhappy, we are doing ourselves a disservice. These unconscious patterns that get created when are young are the basis of our belief systems. We created many of our belief systems from this underdeveloped place and then are never taught how to work on uncovering them or about the importance of examining our beliefs to root out what is false and is creating things that we don’t want in our lives.
So the first step is working on awareness. This can be done through meditation and/or journaling and/or talking with a life coach or a therapist. And then it’s about observing what we think about and the actions we choose. And this is of course very oversimplified in 2 sentences, Â but explaining that process it is not the goal of this blog. The goal now is to raise awareness of this unconscious belief because the reality is that the more unhappy we are, the more unhappy we become.
Choosing victimhood in any way is disempowering. And using emotional manipulation is not love and is a lower energetic vibration. So making our self as unhappy as possible to get what we want is NOT synonymous with bringing good vibes into our relationships. When we behave this way it teaches our children this behavior. We may not even realize we are doing it when we might feel like we are not getting what we want from our spouse or significant other and we think we can change that by being unhappy.
If we want happiness in our relationships and lives we manifest that by being happy. This is not to say that if you are upset with someone that you should not speak up about how you feel. Sharing how you feel in a non combative way is an action step towards conflict resolution. I am talking about really being deliberate in regards to the way we choose to feel. And as our emotional state takes its cues from our thoughts, it very much serves us to examine our thoughts. Because again, what we attract into our lives…the people, the experiences, etc….matches where we are within.
So going forward I invite you to examine this inner mechanism. When you are feeling an overall sense of unhappiness, ask yourself how that may be serving you. And set an intention to be honest with yourself no matter what. Get quiet and listen for the answer. And if that emotional state seems to serve you because you think you will get something from someone else, go further within and explore other ways we can give ourselves what we had been looking to others to give us or perhaps accept that things may not play out exactly as we are attached to them playing out. And then open up to welcoming that that is ok.
If you have noticed this happening in your life and are looking to make a change please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below!
