Happiness is More than a Feeling

If you can't be content no matter how you feel, you will always be a victim of circumstance. At some level you will always feel like your wellbeing is at cause and effect to life. Your contentment will always be dependent on the existence of certain conditions and you will find yourself constantly working to shape the right circumstances in your life in order to be content.
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But we all know that circumstances change and can never be completely controlled. At some point we entered spiritual life because we knew that trying to maintain wellbeing by controlling circumstances was a losing proposition. Even if we create the perfect circumstance, something will always happen next that changes things.
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We realize that we are never going to be able to hold life in the shape we want, so we start to want something else. We want to be free. We want to discover a source of contentment that is not dependent on anything. We’ve all heard that real happiness is found on the inside, but that doesn’t mean being happy on the inside will make us happy on the outside. It means finding a contentment that's not dependent on anything except us.
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Let’s look at this a little more closely. We are taught that happiness is a feeling, a sensation we feel in our nervous system. We all know what happiness feels like. When we pursue happiness through optimizing circumstances we try to create circumstances that give us more of that feeling. Our culture teaches us to be unendingly preoccupied with the continual effort to manipulate circumstances to increase the feeling of happiness inside us.
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What some of us eventually discover is that beneath the place where we feel happy, there is a contentment that is always present. This contentment is deeper than our feelings. Our feelings come and go in a continuous fluctuation of emotion, but beneath those lies a contentment that was with you before you were born and will remain after you die. This level of being is not dependent on how you feel, it is the essential nature of existence itself.
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Despite all the bad and terrible things that happen in the world, despite our unending cycling through pleasant and unpleasant emotions, the experience of being alive is always peaceful, calm and relaxed. It is important to realize that I am not talking about feeling peaceful, calm and relaxed, I am talking about being peaceful, calm and relaxed. And there’s a big difference.
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You can be peaceful, even if you do not feel peaceful. You can be calm, even when you don’t feel calm. And you can be relaxed, even if you don’t feel relaxed. This more than anything else is what I call the miracle of meditation. It is the discovery of an ease of being that life always rests on.

​But here is the trick, Jeff’s personal self cannot find this contentment. Why? Because this contentment is the deepest core of what Jeff is. You cannot separate yourself from it to see it because you are it. I am going to tell you something that might seem a bit shocking, you are contentment incarnate. You are a physical manifestation of contentment.
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I know this might sound impossible, but it only sounds impossible to the separate sense of self, the person called, in my case, Jeff. Jeff is not contentment incarnate. Jeff is a sense of self that was formed around a set of fears and desires about life on Earth. But that is not all that I am. The separate self is a set of ideas about who Jeff is, what he is afraid of, what he wants and what he’s doing about it all. The sense of being Jeff is purely conceptual.
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I am not those concepts. I am the one who is aware of those concepts and who often believes they are me. Beneath all of those ideas, who am I? The way the Buddha said it was, “I am awake.” Or as I often say, “I am the awareness that is aware.” Or if we look toward the Christian face it was stated simply as, “I AM.”
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We are not separate from life itself. We are a unique incarnation of spirit in human form, but we are not defined by the ideas we hold about ourselves. We are life incarnate in human form that then developed an identity as a particular person with a name. Liberation is found when we stop identifying with any of the ideas about us, and begin to experience who we truly are.
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Existence is a miracle, incarnating as a unique individual is a miracle. An identity is a tool that allows us to act in the world in wondrous ways. Unfortunately it also creates an inherent sense of separation. We feel as if we are something that is alive, rather than life itself. We are a living expression of the life principle. Before we feel pain, before we want happiness, before everything else, WE ARE. When we realize what a miracle it is to have been born in the first place, to have been brought into a form that can recognize its own existence, we have discovered the inherent contentment that life rests on. This discovery is the miracle of meditation.