Happiness is an inside job

ÁINE TUBRIDY
Two things came to mind when I was asked how am I going live this year any better than I did last year. One was the word ‘lifetime’. One aspect of that is the ‘life’ part – I really want to take care of my life-force this year. When your life-force is diminished, your spiritual journey is seriously compromised. So I want to take care of my health this year and start minding my energy, minding my sleep. I do so many more things when I have energy up. Once it’s down, you’re a whole different person. You’re not yourself – you’re just your average negative, irritable, ratty person. And everybody’s the same when they’re like that. They’re definitely not living themselves to the full.
We’ve been doing a lot of yoga lately, really trying to get into it. And the mother and the father of all poses is the headstand and the shoulderstand. But every time I do either of those I get neck problems. And I found that Argos has an inversion machine. You step into it and you flick it and wooops! Your feet are up in the air and your head is down, but it’s not actually leaning against the ground, so your neck is grand.
You get all the benefits of inversion with no pull and strain. It’s amazingly energising. It keeps your brain really, really sharp, and all those organs hanging upside-down has great beneficial effects. So that’s what I did for my life-force today – bought an inversion machine!
The other thing in ‘lifetime’ is the ‘time’ side of it. I’ve really decided this year to pay attention to who owns my time. How much time is given to supporting other people’s lifetimes – without sounding selfish – or supporting mine.
The second thought I had was the notion that whatever’s happening in the present is the effect of your past. Of your past choices. And the future is the effect of your present choices. So I’m trying to be really careful this year of the choices I make, moment to moment. People talk about living in the now. The now is a lovely place to hang out if you’ve actually created a nice now in the past.
From now on whenever I regret something, I’m going to say that this is the life that I’ve created. I’ve created this moment. I can’t blame anybody else and I can’t whinge about it. Because I created it. So if I’m doing that, then I have to create the future moments as well.
I keep thinking oh, I wish I was a full-time writer. I wish I didn’t have to do one-to-one therapy to make my living. Yeah, but then I asked, what steps do I actually take on a day-to-day basis to make that happen? And the answer is none! The last bit of writing I did was August! Where’d that go? But if that’s the future I want, I have to create it. It’s not going to happen by magic.

MICHAEL CORRY
I live my life by poetry and by slogans and by the words and quotations from the wonderful people we have in history, from Lao Tzu to Buddha right down through Christ, Einstein…
I subscribe to the slogan, ‘Happiness is an inside job’ – and all the responsibility that comes with that. You have to take control of yourself, of this bubble, and fly it through life. And hopefully strive towards an atmosphere that’s a happy one, that’s calm and peaceful. Why not? We deserve it.
We came in here without a manual. You get a bigger manual with a mobile phone. We aren’t taught a very simple, practical way to live. To really and truly love yourself. Genuinely love yourself, and genuinely be at peace with yourself. The results of that are awesome, because as you love yourself, so do you love your neighbour. So it’s a formula for hope. We’ve gotta love each other, and we can only love each other on the basis of how much we love ourselves. If you judge yourself, you judge other people.
So for me personally, I know which port I’m sailing towards, and I live very much to Gandhi’s words: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Instead of complaining and grumbling and giving out about the way things are not working in society and not working in your life, if you subscribe to the idea that you are a spiritual being having a human experience, then there’s a much deeper level to the happiness scenario. There’s now the whole realm of the witness, the higher self, the spiritual self that looks on in a first-person/third-person relationship as to how things are going in our thoughts and in our feelings and in our behaviours and in our contexts.
It’s an inside-job. If I had to be pinned down to one thing I live by, it’s a quote from Goethe, the German poet. I’m really quite shy about this, because it’s so important to me. It makes me feel like crying. It’s: “Whatever you can do and dream, you can. Begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.”
We all have an inner wise being. It’s working physiologically all the time, the city that never sleeps, just keeping us alive. But there’s also another inner wise being that services our feelings, that is our spirit, that is in every cell, that is our karma, the totality of all our causes. It’s all in there. That’s the inner wise being. And it doesn’t have to be in the domain of another life or an afterlife; it’s now. It’s actually now. Heaven is within. If you could construct your belief systems to develop the psychology of optimism, then anything is possible. We’re talking about heart consciousness here.
That’s the thing that I would wish for 2008, that this country of ours, which has a special energy and a special vortex within it for good and creativity, would actually grow into it what is awaiting it. And that’s heart consciousness. Ireland is the nation and the country and the place of heart consciousness, and we don’t know it yet.
Heart consciousness is beyond duality. There is no duality in heart consciousness, there’s only oneness. For example, you can’t have a good or bad love; you can’t have a good or bad peace. There’s only peace. You can’t have good or bad compassion, good or bad harmony… These are the qualities of the heart. Compassion and love and peace and stillness and joy… they’re beyond dualism.
We can reside in our heart as our home, and still have our mind as an intelligent working mind. The mind has within it essential data, but you have to edit, because that mind of yours is actually plugged into the group mind, and every day new information is being flooded in which has nothing to do with you at all. So you have to edit, and you can only edit when you’re in your heart. It’s too difficult if you’re trying to sort things from your mind, because your mind is already in the flow of the thought-stream that you’re trying to transcend. And it can only really be transcended by the heart… not by the spirit, because you can’t get to spirit unless you go through the heart. You can’t be spiritual unless you have an open heart.
But so many of us are in our minds; we’re asking now, can we come into our hearts and reside there. In order to expand the heart, first is the awareness that that’s actually a possibility. Then start doing very simple exercises of just breathing into the heart, as if the heart were the lungs. So you’re breathing in and you’re breathing out, and as you’re breathing in and you’re breathing out, if you can say some beautiful affirmations. Like “May I discover love” as you draw in, and as you breathe out, “May other people discover love”. Anything you like… you can breathe in poetry and breathe out poetry…. You can breathe your favourite personal wisdom chips into your heart.
And that opens the heart; we know that, because we owe our existence to the breath. If you don’t breathe, you die. So if you re-direct the breath in this clear way… when you hold the intention that there is a possibility that heart consciousness can actually expand, it does expand.
It can be very spontaneous. How you know you’re in heart consciousness is when you know you’ve done a good thing to yourself or you’ve done a good thing to other people and you haven’t even thought about it.
The heart says anything is possible.