Read the book: «Secrets About Life Every Woman Should Know: Ten principles for spiritual and emotional fulfillment»
SECRETS ABOUT LIFE EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW
TEN PRINCIPLES FOR TOTAL SPIRITUAL
AND EMOTIONAL FULFILMENT
Barbara De Angelis, PH.D.
DEDICATION
I offer these words to you, my Beloved One, who has opened the most secret doorway in my heart and taught me the meaning of true bliss, true peace, and true love.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
1. Everything You Need to Be Happy Is Inside of You
2. The Purpose of Life Is for You to Grow into the Best Human Being You Can Be
3. Change Is Inevitable, So Stop Resisting and Surrender to Life’s Flow
4. All Obstacles Are Lessons in Disguise—Honor Them and Learn from Them
5. Your Mind Creates Your Experience of Reality, So Learn to Make Your Mind Your Friend
6. Fear Will Steal Your Aliveness—Make Your Courage Bigger than Your Fear
7. You Must Love Yourself Before You Can Truly Give Love or Receive Love from Anyone Else
8. All Relationships Are Your Mirrors and All People Are Your Teachers
9. True Freedom Comes from How You Respond to Life and Not from What Life Does to You
10. Whatever the Question, Love Is the Answer
Acknowledgments
Also by the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
The most auspicious moment of your life is when you make the commitment to know the Truth, a commitment so firm there is no turning back.
GURUMAYI CHIDVILASANANDA
Imagine a life in which you woke up every morning excited about the day ahead and certain that, when you went to sleep at night, you would be able to say, “This was a great day!” …
Imagine knowing that no matter what challenges you faced in your relationships, your work, or your family, you would always remain centered, calm, and clear …
Imagine having a source of confidence and wisdom inside yourself that you could count on to be a constant wellspring of strength and inspiration …
Imagine what it would be like if you knew exactly what you needed to do to make each and every moment of your life one of great happiness, great contentment, and great peace …
The experiences I describe here aren’t simply impossible dreams—they are possible, very attainable realities. They paint a picture of a life that, perhaps, has only existed as a dream you’re sure could never come true. But it can. I wrote this book to help you create that kind of life for yourself, a life that feels like it is working, like it makes sense, and, most importantly, a life in which you are living and loving as the powerful, fulfilled person you’ve always wanted to be.
This book is about something every one of us seeks in our heart—true freedom, inner freedom, the kind that saints and mystics have written about throughout the ages. This kind of freedom is not the freedom to acquire more of what you can eventually lose, or to experience more of what will eventually change, or to do more of what will eventually not matter. Instead, it’s the freedom that comes from knowing how to discover your own state of joy and contentment and protect it from all of life’s ups and downs. It’s the freedom that comes from knowing how to build a center of emotional and spiritual self-reliance on the inside, a center that will allow you to live every day with greater joy, greater strength, and greater peace. Most of all, it’s the freedom that comes from finding a source of security and happiness inside yourself, happiness that nothing and no one can ever take away from you.
Ever since I can remember, I have been a seeker of this inner freedom. I’ve been on a conscious and committed journey trying to discover the truths about life that would help me make sense of my existence and get the most out of my time here on earth. At the age of eighteen, I found my first spiritual guide and since then, I’ve had the privilege of studying with many great and revered teachers and immersing myself in the knowledge and practices of the world’s most ancient spiritual traditions.
Secrets About Life Every Woman Should Know contains the most important lessons about life that I have learned during my own profoundly transformative emotional and spiritual odyssey of the last thirty years. And even though the information in this book has been growing patiently and persistently inside of me for all this time, I couldn’t have written it ten years ago, five years ago, even two years ago. Like a soup that you know still needs to simmer just a little bit more, this book needed these last twenty-four months of my life to add the final flavor. Now it’s ready, and it is my privilege and great joy to be able to offer it to you.
All of us spend our lives searching, consciously or unconsciously, for lasting fulfillment. We make hundreds of decisions every day, from what to eat for breakfast to what CD to listen to in the car to how hard to work on a project to whom we fall in love with, based on what we think will make us happier, what will create a greater sense of security, what will provide us with more of the things we tell ourselves we need to feel successful and complete. Most of these decisions are an attempt to master, or at least cope with, the outer world. This is where we put our energies—trying to get what we want and keep everything under control.
In spite of our best efforts, in spite of how hard we try to get everything to turn out the way we want it to, a strange things happens: our hopes and dreams keep bumping into reality. We have a picture of how we always thought our lives should be, but if we are really honest with ourselves, we have to admit that our lives look very different from that picture. And so we suffer, because what is happening is different from what we think should be happening, because we are feeling something different from what we think we should be feeling. Reality lets us down, not just once, but over and over again.
At some point in our lives, usually by the time we reach our thirties or forties, we face the difficult realization that no matter what we acquire or achieve, we can’t completely control what happens on the outside. This conclusion often fills our hearts with a deep sensation of emotional and spiritual uneasiness, and haunts our minds with challenging and perhaps disturbing questions: What is the purpose of my life? What am I supposed to be doing here? Why is it so difficult for me to experience true happiness, true inner peace?
Have you ever seen one of those circus acts where someone has ten or twelve china plates spinning on top of thin sticks? The performer comes out and starts a few plates spinning and then adds a few more and a few more, until, hopefully, all his plates are spinning at once. At least, that’s the idea. We all know what happens—just when he has the plates at one end of the table spinning right, a plate at the other end starts to wobble, so he runs down and gets it going faster. Suddenly, two plates in the middle look like they are about to topple off, and as soon as he sets them right, two others in separate spots are on the verge of crashing down. Back and forth he frantically races, the audience laughing with delight and cheering him on if he gets all of his plates to spin properly without disaster.
Why do we find this feat so fascinating? Why do we shriek with a kind of perverse delight when a plate drops? Because this display mirrors our own lives perfectly. The truth is, most of us live just like this. We have all these “plates”—our relationship plate, our work plate, our family plate, our money plate, our health plate, and so many others—and our goal is to keep them all spinning at once. You know what you did first this morning when you woke up? You mentally checked your plates!! “O.K., the relationship plate … well, things with my husband are pretty good. How about the kids plate? Hmm … a little shaky.… Jennifer is having trouble in school but it’s not that bad yet. Let me look at this work plate. OH NO! It’s wobbling pretty badly—I am really behind on that project at the office, and look down there at the money plate … Oh gosh, our credit card bills are way too high this month, that plate’s about to crash …”
And so you spend the rest of the day running around trying to get the shaky plates stabilized, and hoping that too many plates don’t start to fall at once. Your idea of a “good day” is when all of your plates are spinning, no mishaps. And a bad day? Well, we all know what that’s like: it seems like some devious, invisible hand is knocking one plate after another off the sticks, and no matter how hard you try, you just can’t keep them up in the air where they belong.
This is the battle you face each day, the battle for control of your life. You have your picture of how things “should” be, how your relationship “should” feel, how much money you “should” be earning, how your kids “should” behave, how people “should” treat you fairly, how it all “should” turn out. And when something happens that doesn’t fit this picture, which it inevitably does, you feel like something is going “wrong”; you feel out of control. One of your plates has dropped. You may have been happy ten minutes before, but suddenly you’re angry, or frightened, or depressed. You have lost your state of equanimity.
Like most people, I spent much of my life collecting what I thought were beautiful “plates”—the perfect career, the perfect relationship, the perfect home—then trying desperately to keep them all spinning, and praying none of them would crash to the floor. And of course I failed, because as we’ll see later on, part of the purpose of life is for those plates to fall, and for us to learn the lessons that inevitably come when we are staring at the pieces of our egos scattered all over the ground. For me, each time a plate toppled over, I would feel as if somehow I’d done something wrong, and my inner state of peace and contentment would be shaken. “If only I can get all my plates to stay up,” I would tell myself, “then I would finally be happy.”
It was my own fervent spiritual search for the truth that ultimately led me to a series of profound realizations. For over twenty years, I’d been teaching and writing about how to create loving relationships with the people in your life. There are emotional principles, I would explain, that make love work or not work, and if you take the time to learn about these principles, you will be able to experience more intimacy, more connection, more fulfillment. Eventually, I reached an even deeper level of understanding: the most important relationship I have, that we all have, is with life itself. I had patterns of relating to life—accepting it or resisting it, surrendering to it or misunderstanding it, approaching it courageously or approaching it fearfully, paying attention or ignoring its messages, being grateful for it or not appreciating its gifts—just as I had patterns in my human relationships. How I chose to interpret events that happened to me, the attitude I brought to each day when I woke up in the morning, the way I responded to difficulty, how much I listened to what my life was trying to tell me, all these habits were determining the quality of my relationship with life. And my relationship with life was affecting my relationship with everything else. It all started inside of me.
I knew the principles that made relationships work. I knew the principles that made communication work between two people. So what were the principles that could make my relationship with life work?
The Ten Secrets About Life
Secrets About Life Every Woman Should Know shares the answers I’ve discovered to these questions in the form of ten important principles, or secrets, about life. These basic, universal principles have been taught and written about for thousands of years in all of the great philosophical and spiritual traditions of the world. Why do I call these underlying principles of life “secrets”? The English word secret is a word that comes from the Latin secretus, which means “hidden.” These ten secrets aren’t mysterious or hard to comprehend, but they are ways of understanding life that have, indeed, been hidden from our awareness, and therefore whose wisdom we haven’t had access to. And as long as this wisdom remains a secret to us, we cannot benefit from it, and we go on living our lives feeling as if something essential is missing, yet not quite knowing what that is.
When you don’t have the information about how to make something work, that thing becomes a source of frustration to you. For instance, no matter how wonderful your car is, if you didn’t know how to start it, how to get it to move forward or to turn, you wouldn’t be able to drive anywhere. If you bought an expensive, highly advanced computer but never read the manual or had someone show you how to operate it, the computer would just sit there on your desk, completely useless. A musical instrument like a piano or a guitar or a violin is worthless by itself—unless you know how to make it produce the sounds you want and then, it’s magic.
This same understanding applies to your life. Like the car or the computer or the piano, your life will work or not work depending on whether or not you learn about the underlying principles or secrets that make life work. When we discover these principles and put them into action, it’s as if we have suddenly pushed all the correct keys on the computer, or figured out how to put the car into the right gear. Everything begins to run more smoothly. Everything, finally, begins to make sense.
Here are the ten principles or secrets about life that this book introduces:
Secrets About Life
1. Everything you need to be happy is inside of you.
2. The purpose of life is for you to grow into the best human being you can be.
3. Change is inevitable, so stop resisting and surrender to life’s flow.
4. All obstacles are lessons in disguise—honor them and learn from them.
5. Your mind creates your experience of reality, so learn to make your mind your friend.
6. Fear will steal your Aliveness—make your courage bigger than your fear.
7. You must love yourself before you can truly give love or receive love from anyone else.
8. All relationships are your mirrors and all people are your teachers.
9. True freedom comes from how you respond to life and not from what life does to you.
10. Whatever the question, love is the answer.
Understanding these ten secrets has radically transformed my own life and the lives of many people with whom I’ve shared them. What I found is that, if at any moment I am unhappy, if I am upset or not feeling centered, if I have lost my sense of inner contentment and safety, it’s because I’m violating one of these ten principles. I’m sabotaging my own happiness. And on the other hand, when I remember these secrets and put their lessons into practice, I feel powerful. I feel peaceful. I feel free.
What’s exciting about the ten secrets is the astonishing revelation that you already have everything you need right now to be happy. There is nothing wrong with you that needs to be fixed; there is nothing missing in you that you need to find and replace. You actually don’t need to add anything to who you are, but rather, to get in touch with what you already have inside of you. That’s why this isn’t a book about self-improvement—it’s about self-discovery.
This is the essential message of Secrets About Life: that true emotional security cannot be found in hoping that our plates will keep spinning correctly, or hoping the sea of our lives will remain calm and no big waves will come and capsize our boats. The security we seek, the protection we long for, comes from creating an inner anchor, an inner self-reliance, so that no matter what happens on the outside, we remain firmly connected to a source of unlimited strength and peace on the inside. No matter what happens, we do not drown.
When the vision of Reality comes, the veil of ignorance is completely removed. As long as we perceive things falsely, our false perception distracts and makes us miserable. When our false perception is corrected, misery ends also.
SHANKARA
There are times in our lives when we really are ripe for growth.
There are times when you are so ready to make a shift, that if you don’t make it you become very uncomfortable. There are times when, if you stay where you are, you’re going to suffer because you’re not moving to where you need to be. If you’re lucky, just when you start to feel you really do need to make a change, God, or the universe of Divine Intelligence, or whatever you want to call that greater power, places something in your path that is exactly what you need in order to take the next step. Maybe it’s a person who inspires you to reevaluate yourself, or an experience that forces you to change, or a book that says just what you need to hear. These are magical moments when everything is in place, as if someone has arranged for you to see the picture of your life as it truly is, and suddenly the curtain goes up. And you look and you exclaim: “Oh, my gosh, I didn’t see this before.” The truth you see about yourself takes you to a new level of strength and power, a new depth of love and passion.
You’re holding this book in your hands and reading these words because, whether you knew it or not, whether you expected it or not, this is one of those magical times for you. You are scheduled for a profound shift in your consciousness. Something wonderful is about to happen to you! Can’t you feel it?
As we enter this new millennium, we are living in the midst of a very potent time ripe with opportunitites for tremendous growth, tremendous awakening. It’s as if a big wind is suddenly blowing through our lives, and that wind is the force of change, a benevolent, unstoppable force the purpose of which is to remove all those patterns and attitudes and old beliefs that are holding us back, and elevate all of us to a new, more expanded, and less fearful way of living. Have you noticed that wind beginning to blow on the inside and the outside of your own life? It has certainly been blowing strongly in mine, and I’ve also noticed this same process happening to almost everyone I know who is really sincere about becoming a more conscious human being. It’s as if you have all the details of your life, your relationship, and your career all neatly and nicely stacked like an orderly pile of papers, and then, without warning, this huge breeze appears and blows all the papers up into the air. And you run around trying to pick up the flying papers and put them back where they belong, but the wind just keeps coming.
If you suspect that something has been stirring up your life, it has. It is the wind of change, the wind of grace. And if you listen carefully, you will hear it whispering to you: “It’s time for more joy and less suffering; it’s time for more freedom and less fear; it’s time to remember who you really are.”
This book is written in a woman’s voice. It’s not that these secrets about life aren’t universal, or don’t apply to men, for they do. But I wanted to offer this book as an invitation particularly to women, to my sisters in spirit, to invite you to share in the fruits of my own years of seeking and discovering. I believe that it is essential for us as women to teach each other, for when we honor the teacher in each other, we are then able to recognize the teacher in ourselves. I had so few female role models growing up, and my first guides, gurus, seminar leaders, mentors, and counselors were all men, which is the way it has been for so many of us. I feel honored that, in my work, I have been able to be a female guide for men and women alike, for I believe that something unique and magical comes through women when we teach others, and something is received that one cannot receive from a man—not something better, just something different. And yet, of course, this book is for men, too, and you will know just the ones with whom you need to share it …
Finally, Secrets About Life is a gift, not from me to you, but from you to yourself. You may believe you are reading this book because you think it might be interesting, or because a friend gave it to you, but I will tell you a secret: you are holding this book in your hand because it is time for you to receive a gift, a gift from God or whatever force of grace you believe in. Have you been asking for help in the silence of your own heart lately? Have you been praying for guidance? Have you been feeling you are ready to make a breakthrough? Perhaps the gift of information contained in these pages is what you’re finally ready to hear. As the writer, I am just the person passing on the gift, as it was passed on to me. I invite you to read not only with an open mind, but with an open heart, and with the intention of receiving the messages that are meant just for you. Let the words penetrate deep into your being. Let them speak to your hungry spirit.
The great philosopher Plato once said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” The truth is, there’s no greater gift you could give yourself than the time and the space to look within. There’s no greater gift you could give to anybody else in your life—your partner, your children, your friends, your family, and even strangers. When you really look within, you will not be the same person when you bring your awareness back out again. Inside, there are such mysteries, there are such wonders, there is so much waiting to reveal itself to you. When you understand and work with these secrets, your ordinary moments can be filled with profound awakening and you can begin to live a life that gives you back all you hope for.
I invite you to walk with me and take the most important journey of all, the journey that will lead you back to the core of your self, the journey whose destination is an inner source of untouchable joy and contentment, the journey whose ultimate gift to you will be a state of true and lasting freedom. This kind of freedom is available to you right now, if you will only give yourself permission to experience it.
My dear one, are you ready to start living the kind of life you always knew was possible?
Offered with great love,
BARBARA DE ANGELIS
SECRET NUMBER ONE Everything You Need to Be Happy Is Inside of You
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Let me tell you a story whose origins are from ancient India about the search for happiness:
In the beginning, God created the universe and all the people in it so that everyone was aware of his or her true oneness with God, and the great love within themselves. These were the secrets of life, and, after all, God loved everyone, so why not give them the greatest gift He could think of? Then God sat back and watched the play of life with all of its dramas unfold.
But as He watched, He soon realized something was very wrong. Whenever a human being met with a challenge, or went through tough times, the person would say to himself, “This is awful. Why should I go through this? I am one with God, so I will just drop this human form and merge back into Him.” And that is exactly what happened. One by one, each human would remember his true self, and be unwilling to play the game of life.
God was very disturbed by this dilemma. The purpose of life was for these beings to learn and grow, not to bail out when the going got rough. So He called an emergency meeting of all the divine beings.
“After much consideration,” God began, “I have decided that we are going to have to hide the secret of life, the secret of happiness from these humans. If they remember it, they have no interest in living an earthly life.”
“But where will we hide it?” one divine being asked.
“Let’s hide it at the top of the highest mountain on earth,” someone suggested.
“No, that won’t work,” God replied, shaking His head. “Human beings are resourceful. They will find ways to climb up there and discover it.”
“What about at the bottom of the ocean? They’ll never go there,” another offered.
“Oh, yes they will,” God interjected. “They’ll invent submarines. The bottom of the ocean won’t do.”
“I’ve got it!” said a divine being. “Let’s hide the secret of happiness in outer space. Surely then it will be impossible for the humans to locate.”
“But they will create spaceships and fly there,” God sighed. “None of these suggestions will work. Still, there must be somewhere we can hide the secrets about true happiness.”
“I know where you can hide it,” a soft voice replied. God looked up and saw a young, female angelic being He hadn’t noticed before.
“Yes, my dear?” God asked. “Where do you think we should hide the secret?”
“Hide it deep within the human heart. They’ll never look for it there.”
God smiled, for He knew He’d found the answer. And then He made it so. And that’s the way it has been ever since.
All of us spend our time here on earth searching for happiness, longing to discover the secrets for living a fulfilled and peaceful life. From our very first moments of existence as an infant until the day we die, we are motivated by the search for what we believe will make us happy:
“I want to be fed … I want to be held … I want to crawl over and look in that cabinet … I want that toy … I want to go to the amusement park … I want to stay up and watch TV … I want to get on the cheerleading squad … I want those kids to like me … I want that guy to be my boyfriend … I want to go to the mall and buy that outfit … I want to get into a good college … I want to lose these extra ten pounds …”
“I want him to ask me to marry him … I want to have a fancy wedding … I want to find the perfect apartment … I want to find the perfect job … I want to get pregnant … I want my husband to be more intimate … I want to find a career that leaves me time for my children … I want to move into a bigger house … I want the kids to do well in school…”
“I want to have sex with my husband more often … I want the kids to go to college … I want my daughter to marry a nice boy … I want my son to stay in the family business … I want to take that trip to Europe we’ve always talked about … I want the kids to live close enough so we can visit the grandchildren often …”
“I want my husband to take better care of himself … I want to buy a condo in Florida for when we retire … I want to be well enough to attend my granddaughter’s graduation … I want our investments to do well so I have enough money to live on if my husband passes away before me … I want to be able to have enough strength today to take a little walk … I want to see the ocean once more before I die …”
These are all lovely things to wish for. There is nothing wrong with these desires, or with the list you could write of what you believe would make you happy. But what happens inside of you when the things on your list don’t come true? What happens in your heart when what you hope for in life doesn’t happen?
You and I both know the answer to these questions: When we don’t get what we want, we suffer. We feel disappointed, or angry, or hurt, or anxious, or insecure, or confused, or betrayed, and definitely not happy. We have our list of expectations about life, about love, and we decide we are happy or not from moment to moment based on how many of those expectations are being met and how many are not.
We go through this silent but deadly process of evaluating our happiness hundreds of times a day, perhaps dozens of times before we even leave the house in the morning. For instance:
Your alarm goes off and you are awakened from sleep. Another day has begun. So far, the day is neutral, neither a good day nor a bad day—just a blank slate. You open one eye to glance over at the window and see what the weather is like. It’s raining. “Darn,” you think. “Traffic is going to be terrible.” This is your first thought of the day. You have already decided that you aren’t happy about something—the weather has not met your expectations and thus has disappointed you.
You roll out of bed and shuffle into the kitchen for your morning cup of coffee. Then you notice that your husband forgot to turn the automatic coffee machine on the night before, so there’s no coffee ready. You sigh with annoyance. Expectation number two has not been met. You hear the kids stirring in their rooms, then determine that they are squabbling over who will use the bathroom first. Sigh again, this time with more irritation. “Hey, cut it out kids—you only have a half hour to get dressed and eat before the bus comes, so move it!” Good-bye to expectation number three, that your kids will calmly and quietly get ready for school without creating a fuss.
Back to your bedroom. Your husband is at the sink brushing his teeth. “Good morning, honey,” you say cheerfully, kissing him on the cheek. “Morning,” he mumbles back distractedly. You feel a painful tug in your heart, wishing he had greeted you with more affection, and as you wonder if something’s wrong between you, your sense of well-being shrinks some more. You shower and dress. As you pull on your pants you notice that they seem tighter than you remember. “Oh no, I have gained a few pounds again,” you lament. Another expectation crashes down as it collides with reality. It hasn’t even been an hour since you woke, and already you have collected enough evidence to make yourself feel some degree of discontent and unhappiness.
I am sure you have your own version of this scenario, your own list of unmet expectations which build up during a typical day or a typical week and put you into a less than happy state of mind. You think: “If these things occur, I’ll feel happy. But if these other things occur, I will feel unhappy.” I know I have an unconscious list like this; most people do.
The problem with these lists of expectations is that they set us up for inevitable disappointment. Why? Because life is unpredictable. No matter how hard we try to control people and events and circumstances, we fail. People don’t behave as we want them to. Circumstances change that we’d hoped would stay the same. Events occur that are not in our control. As I wrote in the introduction, our spinning plates drop. Or, as a popular bumper sticker says, “Shit happens.” And we all know it does.
What I’ve been describing is probably the most fundamental way you may be sabotaging your happiness in this life:
When you go through each day expecting what is happening outside of yourself to make you happy, you are setting yourself up for failure. You are setting yourself up for misery. You make yourself a victim of circumstances you cannot control and become dependent upon others for your own state of joy and contentment.
Why is basing your happiness on what’s happening in your outer life such a spiritual and emotional dead end? Because, ironically, when you count on the events of your outer life to make you happy, you are trying to create stability by clinging to that which is always changing! By nature, everything in life is in constant motion. Nothing stays the same for long. So hoping to create peace and tranquility by getting everything in your life to fall perfectly into place is as futile as jumping into a turbulent ocean and somehow hoping you will stay still.
The ancient scriptures of many religions have pointed out this dilemma for thousands of years: All pain and suffering comes from attachment to that which is inevitably always changing. When we spend our time and energy trying to get it all perfect on the outside, we are focusing our attention in the wrong direction.
So if what’s outside is always changing, if your plates are always going to drop, if some of your expectations are always going to be disappointed, how can you create a sense of happiness and contentment in life? The answer is to go in the opposite direction from the one we’re used to going in, to make a shift from trying to create stability on the outside to creating it on the inside.
This is the first secret about life I want to share with you:
SECRET NUMBER ONE:
EVERYTHING YOU NEED
TO BE HAPPY IS INSIDE OF YOU
What does this statement actually mean? It means that you already have the key to your own happiness inside of you. It’s your own inner state that determines whether or not you’re happy, and not what happens to you on the outside. Maybe you didn’t realize that, but it’s true. And you’re already experiencing this amazing phenomenon every day.
Think back to a time in your life when you were doing something that “should” have made you happy, such as going out to eat at a wonderful restaurant, or attending a concert you’d been waiting to see, or traveling to an exciting vacation spot you’d looked forward to visiting, BUT … you couldn’t enjoy what you were doing on the outside because you were feeling terrible on the inside. Maybe you were sitting all dressed up at the fabulous restaurant, but knew that someone you loved, such as one of your children or a family member, was ill, so you just couldn’t enjoy the food or the atmosphere. Maybe you were in the audience at the concert you’d been waiting months to attend, but you just had a terrible day at work and were so angry about a situation there that you couldn’t get excited about the show at all. Or maybe you were on an exotic vacation with your partner in one of the most beautiful places in the world, but he was being very cold, distant, and unromantic with you, and you felt so hurt that it didn’t matter where you were.
What was making you unhappy in these situations? The restaurant? The concert? Being on vacation? No … in fact, these are the very things you thought would make you happy.
You know just how this works. It always starts with a simple desire: “If I could just take a few weeks and go to Hawaii, I’d be so happy,” you tell yourself. And you finally decide to do it. And you announce to all your friends that you are going, and you can’t wait. And you think about it for months. “Only three more weeks, and we’ll be in Hawaii!” “Only one more week, and I’ll be lying on the beach drinking a piña colada!” Then finally you’re there, and your husband isn’t paying much attention to you, and you’re feeling unloved, and you’re lying on the beach feeling absolutely miserable. And suddenly, the same things that were supposed to make you happy are driving you crazy: it’s too hot and the couple in the adjacent lounge chair is bugging you and you can’t stand the hotel and you’re having a crummy time and wish you’d never come in the first place.
Why isn’t Hawaii making you happy when you were so sure it would? Because Hawaii doesn’t have the power to make you happy. If it did, you’d be lying there thinking, “To hell with the fact that my husband is acting like a slug—I’m in Hawaii!! Who cares if my marriage is on the rocks? Look at those gorgeous palm trees!! Gosh, I’m happy!”
Hasn’t this happened to you? Haven’t you finally gone somewhere or done something you thought would make you feel wonderful, only it doesn’t, and you wonder to yourself, “Gee, I paid a lot of money for this. I should be enjoying it. I should be having a good time. What’s wrong?”
What’s wrong is that nothing on the outside is ever going to be more powerful than your own inner state of consciousness. You could be in the most beautiful spot on the planet, but if your heart is hurting, or your mind is anxious, you’ll be miserable. And the opposite is true as well—you could be in the most unappealing place, but if your inner state is joyous and contented, you will feel happy where you are. You will create your own paradise.
Living Life from the Inside Out
This is an amazing and radical revelation about one of the secrets of life:
Life happens from the inside out. If you are happy, it is because of what is going on inside of you. If you are sad, it is because of what is going on inside of you. Your world is all happening inside of you.
The world itself is a neutral place. Nothing that happens to you is inherently positive or negative. It is your interpretation of it that makes it a positive or negative experience. It is what you do with it inside yourself that makes it positive or negative. In fact, nothing really happens to your true self on the outside. All of your reactions to life take place on the inside. That’s why, whether you have understood it this way or not, you are already living life from the inside out.
Here are some examples of this principle:
Let’s say you are in a relationship with a man. He comes to you one day and announces, “I don’t want to be with you anymore. I am leaving.” Is his leaving you a positive or negative event? The answer is: It is neither. His leaving is neutral. It is just an action. He is walking out. What is positive or negative is how you react inside to his leaving. If you are madly in love with him and think you are meant to be together, you will react with sorrow and conclude that his leaving is negative. If you were tired of him anyway, and trying to figure out a way to break it off yourself, you will react with relief, and conclude that his leaving is positive. Do you see how the same event can be experienced as producing happiness or sadness when in fact, the event isn’t doing anything—it’s your inner state that is producing those emotions, those reactions?
Here’s another example: You are in a car accident and are seriously injured. You end up having to take a month off from work to stay at home and recover, and your mother, with whom you don’t get along very well, comes to stay and take care of you. “This one is definitely not neutral!” you may be thinking. But look more closely. If you focus on how awful it is that you had the accident, that you are missing work, and that you have to put up with your mother, you will be unhappy and conclude that the accident was a negative event. But what if you take that time to contemplate your life and how fast you’ve been moving, and see that this month was a “forced vacation,” so to speak, in which some higher power is insisting you slow down? And what if you realize that your mother is again able to feel useful in caring for you, in a way she hasn’t for years, and that you are able to receive her love in this form, which is a great gift to her? And what if you allow yourself to feel vulnerable and out of control for the first time in a long while, and notice the harshness of your hard-driving personality softening in a way that is undeniably healthy? Then, in spite of your injury, you might feel a deep sense of well-being, and conclude that the accident was a very positive and, indeed, even necessary event.
Happiness is a decision you make to experience a situation in a particular way. It is not something that is bestowed upon you from the outside. It comes from the inside out. In the same way, unhappiness isn’t something that is inflicted upon you from the outside—it, too, is a choice you make.
You are the person with the most power to affect your life. You are the one who decides to be happy or unhappy about what you are experiencing.
Isn’t this a mind-bending discovery? Isn’t this great news? The happiness you have been looking for is available at any time! It is right here, right now. You have been waiting for something on the outside to trigger your happiness, so you could give yourself permission to experience it, but the ability to be happy has been inside you all along. In fact, happiness can only be attained from within.
Nothing can make you happy without your permission.
Nothing can make you unhappy without your permission.
This is the meaning of Secret Number One: Everything You Need to Be Happy Is Inside of You—that you already possess the power to decide to be happy or unhappy. In this way, you create your own heaven or your own hell, your own contentment or your own misery, from moment to moment.
Understanding this principle is the first step in becoming emotionally and spiritually free, because you begin to see that what you feel and experience at any time is ultimately up to you. This kind of freedom isn’t something anyone else can give you—it’s the freedom only you can bestow on yourself by living each day from the inside out. Then you start to have true control over your life and your destiny, not by trying to make everything perfect on the outside, but by learning how to tap into your own source of happiness and peace on the inside.
Who Robs You of Your Ecstasy?
One of the reasons I made a serious commitment to my spiritual growth when I was still a teenager was that I was fed up with watching my state of well-being go up and down, up and down, depending upon what was happening in my life. No wonder I was so miserable—I felt like a boat without an anchor, or even a rudder, being tossed around by the stormy seas of circumstance. By the time I turned eighteen, I began formally practicing meditation, and I have continued this and other spiritual disciplines for the past thirty years. And at a certain point after I reached the age of forty-five, I thought I’d achieved a pretty steady state of consciousness. I was spending each summer on a spiritual retreat, where I would dive deep into my own inner silence and experience great tranquillity and contentment.
It was following a summer like this several years ago when suddenly, out of the blue, my life was bombarded by one painful challenge after another, professionally, personally, financially, you name it. It all seemed to hit me at once, like a cosmic hurricane, and no area of my world was left untouched. I remember waking up each morning, my stomach in knots, my heart hurting, not wanting to get out of bed, and thinking, “What happened? Everything was going so well. Where did my peace of mind go?”
In this state of emotional panic, I called someone very dear to me who is a female monk and meditation teacher. Tears fell from my eyes as I listed all of my personal dramas, tragedies, and dilemmas, each one sounding worse than the one before. She patiently and silently listened on the other end of the phone, and when I was finished, there was a long pause in the conversation. Then, in a very gentle but strong voice she said, “Barbara, who is robbing you of your ecstasy?”
“Finally,” I thought to myself, “someone who understands what a terrible time I am going through!” and I began reciting names as an answer to her question: “This person is doing this to me, and this business associate did this to me, and this situation is doing this to me.…”
Again, and more firmly, she asked: “But Barbara, who is robbing you of your ecstasy?”
Suddenly, I felt as if someone had just thrown a bucket of cold water on my face and woken me up from a deep sleep. “Who is robbing you of your ecstasy?” All at once, I realized the profound truth that lay hidden in what she was asking. I did know how to contact my own happiness, my own ecstasy. Just a few months before, this woman had seen me in such a high, peaceful state, a state based on my own inner joy. Then I’d returned home to a turbulent time in my life, and had allowed people and circumstances to rob me of that experience. In fact, no one was really doing anything to me—I was doing it to myself by deciding that I couldn’t be happy anymore if I had these problems or these situations. I was the cause of my own pain. I was robbing myself of my own ecstasy.
That phone call had a profound impact on me. In the days and weeks that followed, I looked carefully at my life “story,” and realized that I had been allowing others to rob me of my ecstasy and personal happiness for as long as I could remember. Even though I had never been the victim type who actively and angrily blamed people or situations for my suffering, I did secretly feel that others were the cause of my pain. “If you hadn’t broken up with me, I would still be happy … if you hadn’t tried to cheat me in business, I would still be happy … if this hadn’t happened to me, I would still be happy.”
Somehow, the words my wise friend had used created a huge shift in my awareness. I was stunned to realize how much power I had been giving others over me without their even knowing it! And that was the key—that I was the one giving away that power, I was the one giving away my own happiness.
No one else ever robs you of your happiness, your ecstasy. You rob yourself by making your ecstasy dependent upon others.
Since that powerful conversation with my friend, I have incorporated her question as a part of my own inner process of contemplation. Whenever I notice myself feeling unhappy, I stop and ask: “Barbara, who is robbing you of your ecstasy right now?” Of course, I ultimately arrive at the same answer: “I am.” And that begins to point me back in the right direction, and reminds me that everything I need to be happy is, indeed, inside of me.
This is what’s so exciting about Secret Number One:
The only thing wrong with you is that you don’t understand that there is nothing wrong with you, that there is nothing essential missing.
Nothing is going to make you more perfect or more whole than you already are now. You could finally find the right partner or get the right job or lose the right amount of weight or make the right amount of money, but it still wouldn’t add to your perfection. It still wouldn’t improve the essence of your soul. Who you really are inside doesn’t need any improvement—it just needs to be recognized and understood.
So what is this place inside of you that is the source of happiness, of contentment, of your own ecstasy? Every religious and spiritual tradition in the world refers to this Perfect Self within us, that which is beyond our personality, our actions, our thoughts, and feelings. The Bible calls it the Kingdom of Heaven. In Eastern traditions, it is called the atman or the Buddha Nature. It is the essential, unchanging core within you. It is your consciousness, the part that knows you exist, and identifies you as you, and not someone else. It is your goodness, it is your passion, it is your peace, it is your love.
You already are familiar with this part of yourself. You have moments when you experience it, when you’re in touch with yourself in a deep and meaningful way. Perhaps you’re watching a breathtaking sunset, or giving a hug to a friend or family member, or doing a simple task like arranging flowers in a vase or making a salad, when suddenly you feel a surge of love rise up in your heart, and you’re overcome with a recognition of rightness about the moment, as if everything is as it should be, as if everything makes sense.
What is it that you are feeling in these magical moments? Your own love. Your own self. Your own source of happiness. It’s already and always there inside of you. In fact, it is the real you, the you underneath all of your fears and patterns and emotional wounds and forgetfulness.
Secret Number One says that when you learn how to drink from your own well of quiet inner joy, you will begin to experience a self-reliance that you could never achieve through any outer accomplishment or circumstance. It’s not that you don’t enjoy what comes to you on the outside in the form of your relationships and your daily pleasures. But you are no longer dependent on these to make you happy. You are no longer a prisoner of circumstances. You know that, ultimately, you are your own source of fulfillment And this is when you become really free as a human being.
The free sample has ended.
