by Ana Stoian | Feb 4, 2022 | Consciousness, Leadership, Relationships
Usually, we associate success with doing or achieving what we think we want. Very often we spend little, or no time at all, on finding out if there are more appropriate goals for us in the world, or if what we are already engaged in is actually what we truly need or want. This is a common issue for many people.
I’ve seen situations many times where someone achieves something good and yet there is no happiness in it for them, no satisfaction, and if they look carefully they realise that even from the beginning they didn’t actually want it. Of course a question arises: “But why did you work to achieve that?”. The answer is usually something like: “You see, in the beginning I thought I wanted it”.
What do we really want?
We feel some superficial impulses, we allow ourselves to be impressed and influenced by others’ successes, dreams or wishes and so build our own goals following suit. When we start an important action, how much time did we spend to clarify it? Usually, I dare say, it is very little.
Many of these wishes are based on conjuncture, superficial choices, and don’t find a deep and sustainable support in our being. This is the reason we find ourselves pushing and forcing ourselves towards this kind of (wrongful) success, usually ruining all the other aspects of our life in the process.
In other situations, one might have a very good idea, for example, to do some work for the benefit of others. It can be an honest desire and he goes for it, full engines on. But on the way, the person can become awfully busy doing this work, after a while finding that he has become an unhappy character in his ruined personal life. In this situation, it is difficult to find enough strength to finish the wonderful project he started initially. He achieves a partial success but with a lot of extra costs, ones that are sometimes so ‘expensive’ they can even cancel the benefit of that partial success.
Following our heart’s desire
To avoid these tragic situations, it is worth questioning what we truly aim for. This is valid for short-term goals as well as for the long-term ones. Always finding deeper aspirations and aiming to follow them, instead of picking up something that very often comes from the ‘environment’, allows us to choose our rightful goals by listening to our heart and thus correctly start the journey towards rightful success.
by Ana Stoian | Feb 4, 2022 | Consciousness, Leadership, Relationships
The first part of this article concluded by demonstrating the need to disrupt our deep-seated illusion that success is what brings us happiness, by successfully silencing the inner agitation of the reasoning process – the so-called mind. Which apparently brings us back to the same old paradigm, that success comes before happiness, which proved already to be an error. How do we unlock this?
The key to this dilemma is to simultaneously enter a state of deep relaxation, whilst holding a perfectly controlled attention. This, by default, dispels inner agitation and allows our inherent happiness to freely flood into every experience of our life.
What does that mean practically?
If you carefully look inside, you will discover something very peculiar: when you try to focus your attention intensely to solve a problem or complete a task, you become more and more tensed, eventually getting exhausted by the effort. While when you want to relax, in fact you end up choosing to drift into a semi-conscious, or even totally unconscious state – such as watching tv, drinking alcohol etc. – as a way of trying to run from the tension that otherwise appears. This is the reason why we cannot stay focused for a long time and yet, we relax very ineffectively, unable to regenerate or fully enjoy.
These two faces of the coin are valid for most people today: we get tense when we pay attention, and we associate relaxation with a state of unconsciousness.
The vicious circle
I’ve heard people saying: “I’m so stressed I cannot even enjoy my holidays or my weekends”, “I come back from holiday more tired than when I left.” It is a vicious circle that perpetually amplifies today, and referred to as burnout syndrome. A syndrome that is nothing but the expression of a wrong correlation between relaxation and unconsciousness, and between attentiveness and tension.
by Mayavin | Dec 29, 2021 | Consciousness, Leadership, Relationships
No matter if rich or poor, educated or unread, no matter religion or nationality, people actively pursue happiness throughout their adult life. We all want to be happy and we try so hard to get there. It is the most common goal on the planet throughout history.
The Pursuit of Happiness
Today we have become used to thinking, “I will be happy when I reach this or that position at work. I will be happy when I have more money. I will be happy when I get married to this or that person.” And we strive to fulfill these goals, performing the necessary actions, but as time passes the flavor of happiness in our lives becomes even vaguer. Even if we feel happy for a moment, the state fades away like a ghost, and we once again start chasing the next achievement in order to feel happy again. We habitually race for success in order to (eventually) become happy.
Success, therefore, has become one of the most talked about subjects these days because we believe that it brings happiness. We have assigned a lot of importance to success, yet reality shows that, in fact, success in itself doesn’t hold much real value for us. Studies regarding our physiology show that it has very little impact on our lives when compared with that of happiness.
The Engine of Life
In my studies of ancient spiritual systems, I discovered a common and united perspective; they all say that the inherent state of each and every person is one of overwhelming and deeply fulfilling happiness. The engine of life, they say, IS happiness. And the one that is able to discover this secret that is embedded in the foundation of his being, will always be successful in life.
I was wondering, could it really be that we are looking at these aspects of life upside down? Because, if the causality is actually the other way around, we are going against the flow of life itself, the immediate consequence of this error being that the more we try to push towards success, the more we dry out the happiness. The close resemblance of this scenario to our experience of striving for success in order to be happy, is clear.
