When I find happiness I find love in my heart. Neither happiness nor love presuppose comfort. Much like the duality between Yin and Yang, light and dark, we ourselves experience a duality in our happiness. When we are truly happy, we feel safe, connected to our authentic self and at ease with the people around us. However, it doesn’t always presuppose comfort in our own body or harmony with external influences.

What does it mean to you to be at ease with discomfort?

A favorite teacher of mine, Parry Moe, teaching out of Yoga Tree Studios, says we might as well name our discomfort, since we live with it daily. We have to sit with it, sleep with it and love with it so we might as well get comfortable with it.

That’s right – we are talking about getting comfortable with your innate discomfort to find happiness.

Let’s accept it. Happiness isn’t what is sold to us in the media, by our family or friends but instead something we make ourselves. Happiness isn’t laughing publicly, or financial luxury. It’s not the perfect lover or the soul to your mate. Happiness isn’t good food or a glass of red wine. While these things all add to our feeling out happiness…

Happiness is a safe space we create in our minds. It is the projection of our intention of who we WANT to be in this world and the understanding that we belong in this world – free from judgement, or condemnation.

Jim Carey did a great talk in which he was inspired by Eckhart Tolle touching on thought as an illusory thing. He says thought is responsible for most of the suffering in our experience. He asks himself, and the viewer the question “who is it that is aware that I am thinking?”

He describes a feeling of freedom from both himself and his problems, something akin to happiness, upon the recognition that he is aware of his own thoughts.

Carey describes the death of the personality mind or the ego upon realizing he is greater than his thoughts.

I feel very deeply that this recognition, greater only to the practice of gratitude, is the greatest tool for crafting happiness; The realization that we can set the intention of our own lives  – t0 be the creator or artist of our own canvas.

Sometimes we loose sight of what we want the intention of our lives to be simply because we get lost in ego concerns of the personality mind. Oprah talks about this in a similar fashion – also noting that when we let go of the worried personality mind we can achieve anything.

Loss is there to wake us up. Discomfort is there to wake us up. Failure is there to wake us up – in many cases to wake us up to our happiness.

Nothing can be accomplished without intention and so we have to set the intention to create happiness in our own lives as well as in our body and mind.

When we decide to face our happiness we have to also decide to face our discomfort. We have to ask ourselves: Do you love yourself enough to bare with your discomfort to achieve your happiness?

In truth, my happiness has always come from my pain. I have found happiness laying on the floor broken because there was no other choice but to pick myself up again and find a way. To be real – acknowledges we have endured. To find happiness acknowledges we have experienced pain.

When we find strength we feel safe in our body and in our mind. Through boundaries, emotional recognition and the practice of mindfulness we start to craft happiness from the ground up.

We craft happiness by tending to our own garden and weeding out what no longer serves us.

We craft happiness through forgiveness, compassion and acceptance both of others and of ourselves.

We craft happiness by being true to our authentic self, and recognizing through all our faults we have our own specific magic to offer.

We craft happiness by speaking our truth and by accepting we have the right to be heard.

We craft happiness by surrounding ourselves with what makes us grateful, and loving unconditionally.

We craft happiness by finding the courage to be real even if it means others balk at us in misunderstanding.

We craft happiness by loving our authentic self unconditionally, both light and dark, comfortable and uncomfortable, every single freaking day.