What does feeling good have to do with your overall level of happiness?
After all, isn’t happiness something we experience after successfully achieving an important goal, or attaining a more favorable position in life? And aren’t those things built on working hard, not on feeling good?
The fact is, it’s the other way around. Feeling good is not only the key to your happiness but the key to manifesting everything your heart desires.
The path to happiness begins with feeling good.
Bring to mind an image of a newborn baby, and you’ll gain your first important insight about how natural feeling good is to us. Human beings naturally seek out experiences that feel good, while seeking to minimize or avoid those that don’t. Biologically, our bodies are wired to return to homeostasis, to maintain stability and equilibrium, even in the presence of constantly changing conditions.
Inherently, we know what feels good and what doesn’t, and before we’re socialized into self-consciousness, we express our desires and preferences freely.
And then – at some point in our development as human beings – we’re taught to disregard our natural instinct toward feeling good.
Somewhere around our second birthday, we learn that feeling good is not something we’re entitled to, but something we have to earn. We stop paying attention to the natural happiness that we’re always capable of connecting to, and seek praise from making others happy. Gradually we’re taught to believe that this outside-in approach will result in us being happy, too.
And with this one shift in priorities, we fall into a self-sabotaging mindset that may persist throughout our lives.
Beware of the “I’ll Be Happy When…” trap.
The “I’ll be happy when…” trap is a mindset that many of us have unknowingly slipped into. And this mindset disconnects us from our innate ability to feel good. Basically, we prioritize external sources of validation over feeling good inside. And in so doing, we set ourselves on a never-ending treadmill, believing that happiness is at the end.
“What I need is a new boyfriend,” we decide, “and then I’ll be happy.” Or, “If only I made more money (or had a baby, or lost 10 pounds, or could travel again…” This is the internal banter of the “I’ll be happy when” trap.
This fallacy in our thinking – what I call an “outside-in” approach to happiness – sets us on a lifelong journey toward a destination that we can never reach. It creates a perpetual state of dissatisfaction and striving – the exact opposite of feeling good.
Here are 3 steps to a happier life – not through seeking external validation, but through reclaiming your innate ability to feel good:
Step #1: Identify an external object or condition that you believe would make you feel good right now.
To override the “I’ll be happy when” trap, we first have to expose the ways we’re ensnared in it.
Give yourself permission to acknowledge something that you desire. Something that, if you manifested it, you believe would make you happy.
This could be something tangible, like buying a house or receiving a promotion. Or it could be something intangible, such as improving the quality of an important relationship. Once you’ve identified something, you’re ready to move to Step #2.
Step #2: See if you can pinpoint why you believe manifesting this outcome will enhance your happiness.
Underlying every single desire is the desire to feel good. But often, we don’t realize that feeling good is a state of being that we can access in any moment. Instead, we equate feeling good with the attainment of a certain goal.
The road to a happier life begins when you identify why you believe achieving this goal will make you happy.
For example, if you desire more money, it’s probably not because you enjoy the feeling of paper between your fingers. You want it because you are longing to experience a deep, essential feeling that you believe the money will bring. It might be a feeling of worthiness, of empowerment, of self-love, of freedom…
This feeling is the essence of your desire. No matter what you want to create in the outer world, what you are really seeking is the feeling of this internal “essence.”
Learning to connect with and vibrate in energetic resonance with the essence of what you want to manifest is the key to attracting it into your life.
Step #3: Begin feeling good right now by connecting with the energetic essence of your desire.
Bring to mind the object or circumstance that you believe will make you happy, then imagine that it’s already a part of your experience.
What specific emotion do you associate with happiness in this area of your life? Is it a feeling of joy? Abundance? Freedom? Love?
In whatever ways you define what feeling good is for you, allow yourself to connect with this energy at an emotional level. Breathe into its essence in your heart. Feel it in your belly (your power center). Allow the vibration of this energy to permeate your entire body and radiate out through every cell of your being. The moment you redirect your attention from desiring something external to feeling its internal essence within you, you shift your feeling state from wanting to having, from becoming to being, and from striving to allowing…and you change our point of attraction.
Christy Whitman is an energy healer, Master Certified Law of Attraction Coach, and the New York Times bestselling author of The Art of Having It All: A Woman’s Guide to Unlimited Abundance. Her forthcoming book The Desire Factor: How to Embrace Your Materialistic Nature to Reclaim Your Full Spiritual Power is available for pre-order now at www.thedesirefactor.com. She communicates with, and for, The Quantum Council, a collection of non-physical ascended masters who desire to help humanity understand that we are divinely designed for well-being, abundance, success, and loving relationships. You can take the first step in alignment and creating your desires by a free 30 day program called Watch Your Words by going here: www.watchyourwords.com.
