My Happiness Project
Below is the talk or sermon I gave at the Unitarian Congregation of West Chester on February 19, 2017.
About 5 years ago, I read Gretchen Rubin’s “The Happiness Project” and I thought this would be an interesting topic for a sermon. If you are not familiar with the book, Rubin decided to take a year and embark on a happiness project. She’d pick a different area every month and engage in some sort of self-help like project around that topic. January was Boost Energy (think new year’s resolution), February was Remember Love with a focus on her marriage, April Aim Higher with a focus on her career and so on.
I was intrigued.
You see, when I read Rubin’s book, I was about as far from happy as one could be though no one knew it. I slapped on a smile every day, spoke of my happy marriage, wonderful husband while literally starving for something more. I loved the idea of the Happiness Project – focus on a new habit or resolution every month, build new habits and presto-chango, I’d be happy, right? I mean, that seemed to be how it had worked for Rubin. Or so I thought so when I first read her book.
I proposed the idea to the Religious Services committee that I’d do a service on this topic and it was well received but it just never made it to the schedule until well….today.
However, as I began to prepare for this service, I found that my thoughts on the topic, on the book I wanted to discuss had changed – because I had changed.
I am truly one of the luckiest people I know and I know that because I have this amazing group of people in my life. My closest friends are the women I met in 9th and 10th grade. Coming up on cough 30 years now. We have been through a lot together, marriages, divorces, new babies, miscarriages, loss of parents, illness. One of the greatest sources of happiness in my life is that there is this group of people to whom I don’t have to explain a thing. They just know. These are relationships that truly make me happy. But I digress, the point of discussing this is that a group of us decided to go away for our 40th birthdays and we spent 4 days in Punta Cana. While it was a wonderful trip, what I remember most is lying on the beach on the early morning of our last day and thinking to myself
“Come hell or high water, the next 40 years of your life will not be like the first. You’re going to figure out how to be happy if it’s the last thing that you do. “
About a month before this trip, I had found myself at a day long retreat. How and why I got there isn't important but suffice to say, the universe put me in the exactly right room at the exact moment I needed it – whether I knew it or not. So there I was, a month after what I look back now to as my rock bottom moment trying to figure out how to make myself happy.
In that rock bottom moment, in a friend’s parents dining room I had figured out that thing for which I had been starving for when I read Rubin’s book….and in truth, I had been starving for since I even knew what hunger was. In the words of e.e. cummings for me what was that the root of the root and the bud of the bud was that I was starving to be truly known and truly loved.
Saying these words aloud was in some ways the best and worst moment of my life. The best in that I had finally put words to this bubbling desire that had lived in my heart since I was a small child and the worst in that I had no flipping clue what to do next. It felt like I had realized what I wanted more than anything in the world was to be an astronaut and I had no idea how to add 2+2.
Fake it ‘til you make it. How many times have you heard that or said it to yourself? I will admit, it had been a mantra for me for a large part of my life. However, I knew that for once – faking it in any way wasn’t going to cut it. What I wanted wasn’t a band aid. It wasn’t a Facebook meme of flowers in a meadow with some pretty font saying across it. I wanted something real. Something profound and something long lasting. I wanted something real. I needed something real and so I began a journey with an unknown destination.
What did real look like in this scenario? Well, for me it meant being willing to wade into the deep end of the pool of life and feelings. It meant I no longer slapped a happy smile on my face and pretended things were good in hopes that the world would catch up. It meant not pretending anymore. It meant learning to be ok with NOT being happy. For those of you playing at home, I realize what I said seems to be counterintuitive to my goal. I realized the only way I could learn to be happy was to learn to be unhappy.
Ick.
We all like to feel good. Most people do not like feeling bad. There aren’t very many Eeyores in life and most people on the surface would much prefer to be Tigger. However, emotions like so many other things in life are a spectrum and you can’t experience the whole spectrum if you only live on one side of it. I had spent so much time focusing on the happy side of the spectrum, trying like a crazed person to ignore the other side. Humans are incredibly resilient and they will find the tools they need to survive. For me it was learning at 4 that the way to cope with the devastation of my parents divorce wasn’t to feel that devastation but to eat a cookie and pretend that everything was ok. While I learned a coping mechanism that worked well for 4 year old me, 40 year old me was left without the ability to be authentic. I had spent so much energy tamping down every bad feeling that I not only didn’t know how to feel bad. I didn’t know how to feel good. I barely knew how to feel at all. I wanted and needed something different.
I knew happiness wasn’t to be found in a multitude of self-help books – though I read a few and these books most certainly guided me on my journey.
One book that had a profound impact on me was Elizabeth Lesser’s “Broken Open”. In her book, Lesser uses the story of her life and others to describe what she calls “the Phoenix Process”. She uses the words and works of people like Pema Chodron, Ram Dass and Joseph Campbell to describe how we can take situations that may break us apart and use them to break us open instead thus allowing something new, something profound to enter the space.
Lesser writes:
“May you listen to the voice within the beat even when you are tired. When you feel yourself breaking down, may you break open instead. May every experience in life be a door that opens your heart, expands your understanding, and leads you to freedom. If you are weary, may you be aroused by passion and purpose. If you are blameful and bitter, may you be sweetened by hope and humor. If you are frightened, may you be emboldened by a big consciousness far wiser than your fear. If you are lonely, may you find love, may you find friendship. If you are lost, may you understand that we are all lost, and still we are guided—by Strange Angels and Sleeping Giants, by our better and kinder natures, by the vibrant voice within the beat. May you follow that voice, for This is the way—the hero’s journey, the life worth living, the reason we are here. ”
I remember reading those words on an airplane on my way home from a business trip and I sat there in awe. This was it. This was the key. With each experience, may my heart be open to…..it. The experience. Whatever that experience may be.
Sometimes that is super easy. New love? A wonderful vacation? A sweet night’s sleep? These are easy experiences to open ourselves to. Or are they? How often have we found ourselves in deep pleasure and ecstasy and questioned if we should be THIS happy. Let ourselves feel this good. If you’ve never had that moment, bless your heart! I know that I certainly have. What I realized though is that the questioning of that, for me, came from the fact that I wouldn’t wade deep into the waters of sadness. I wouldn’t allow myself to hurt, to grieve because I had this misguided belief that if I let those feelings slip in even a little bit then they would take over. They’d consume me in a way from which I would never recover.
Another book that really resonated with me was Augusten Burroughs’ “This is How: Surviving what you think you can’t”. Yes, the same Augusten Burroughs who wrote “Running with Scissors”. This is the most irreverent self-help book you will ever read but I will argue that it is truly one of the very best in its no nonsense approach to a multitude of life’s challenges.
Burroughs writes
“This is how you survive the unsurvivable, this is how you lose that which you cannot bear to lose, this is how you reinvent yourself, overcome your abusers, fulfill your ambitions and meet the love of your life: by following what is true, no matter where it leads you.”
It was with these keys that I began my journey. I often joke that over the next 2 years, I bought a decent mid-size sedan of therapy and coaching but at the end, I didn’t have a car but I had a capacity I had never known before. I had the capacity to feel joy and feel pain in equal measure. I had learned the most valuable lesson of all – you can’t have one without the other. You have to be willing wade deep in the waters of sadness and loss before you can float among the sweet joys and happiness that life can provide.
However, much like the astronaut, while I may have learned to add 2+2, I hadn’t tested that yet….was I really as strong as I thought I was? Was I really prepared to dive deeply into the painful emotions? In September of 2015, I was tested when the relationship that I thought was “it” came crashing down upon me. In the days and weeks that followed, I knew that the only way through this, the only way to survive this was to experience it. ALL OF IT. I joked with a few friends “man, this emotionally healthy thing is really for the birds! Skimming over pain is a hell of a lot more fun than feeling it.” However, I knew in order to work through my own happiness project, I needed to put all of my learning into action and I did.
No one likes pain. No one likes losing the things that are important to them. However, learning that you can not only survive the trials of life but also grow and thrive because of them is a powerful lesson. Learning and being willing to look within yourself is a journey worth taking.
Throughout this journey, I often thought of a movie called “What Dreams May Come”. The film stars Robin Williams and in it he has to go through hell, literally through hell to find his wife after they had both died. He thought the way to save her would be simply to find her and remind her of the good in their love but what he learns is that wasn’t enough. Sharing his love for her wasn’t enough. The only way to save her was his willingness to go to the deepest and darkest place and to be present to that with her. He had to experience literal hell in order to eventually find his way to paradise.
While undertaking a Happiness Project is not a wasted pursuit. I believe that all of us are deserving of discovering that which will make us happy. What I don’t believe is that the lone path to happiness is a check list of self-help suggestions or a litany of platitudes that paint a happy picture without being present to the reality of the world. The world is a difficult place sometimes.
I will close with the words of Burroughs, “The most valuable moments and experiences that life has to offer are found only along its most treacherous paths.”
Be not afraid of the treacherous path. Be not afraid of the difficult moments of life. Open your heart to them – because it is through them that something new and beautiful can be born.
