Choose Unconditional Happiness

I read a post the other day on Facebook from someone I do not know. She had gotten into a fight with a guy at a bar because he told her she could just choose to be happy. She was so infuriated he suggested that her pain and suffering she was experiencing in her life could just go away if she only chose to be happy. She knew there was no way it could just be that easy.

It is that easy. 

Well, it’s easy once we let go of the belief that we don’t have control over our own happiness and we are able to understand that external situations do not have to influence our internal state.

That and we have to choose it. We have to choose it every second of every day no matter what happens. 

Why do we put conditions on our own happiness? Conditions like: I’ll be happy when I get that promotion or I’ll be happy when my spouse pays more attention to me or I can be happy again once I forget what that person did to me. For one, these conditions give us a sense of “control”. But the reality is we do not have control of anything that already happened or might happen in the future. Second, these conditions are rooted in deeply engrained desires that get in the way. 

Stuff is going to happen that will test our choice to be happy. Our car might break down or we might fail at something we worked hard on. The thing is, those things will happen no matter what and we can choose to be upset about them or choose to stay happy despite them happening. You gain nothing by allowing yourself to become upset but gain a lot if you choose to remain happy. Either way, they’re still going to happen. 

Choosing unconditional happiness forces us to let go of aspects of ourselves that do not align with unconditional happiness. We must let go of the parts of ourselves that create conditions on our happiness. We make space for things that allow us to awaken to the higher pieces of ourself. This is what leads us to enlightenment, to become a better version of ourselves and we get to be happy doing it. 

We did not come into this life to suffer. We came to learn and grow and experience happiness. The Universe has our backs. It wants us to be happy- we just have to choose it.