Happiness Or Joy

How are you currently feeling about your life? Is it really really good, just tolerable or terrible? Do you feel you're using some, all, or none of your abilities in most aspects of your life? Do you move through life with the routine regimen of an automaton droning out just another day? Are you happy or are you joy?

Our lives are meant to be lived in joy. That doesn't mean the feeling many call elation or happiness. The way you feel when you've just bought a new wardrobe or a new home. It's not the jump up and down feeling you had when you were ten and came down Christmas morning and found a bebe gun under the tree. If you recognize that reference then you know that I'm guilty of being sentimental , I watch "A Christmas Story" every Christmas....in fact I watch it several times.....it makes me happy, for the moment, but that's not true joy. Yet if I connect that happiness to the deeper feeling I have inside that there is actual truth revealed within that story, I transition into my foundation of joy.

Elation isn't sustainable, it's not meant to be, if it were we wouldn't come to joy. Joy is an underlying sense of trust in goodness. It's a foundational principle that abides within us. Joy is the knowing that despite outer circumstances, we are always safe beneath the whims of personality's cravings. There lies within something greater. Call it God or any name you choose, it's our connection to a greater love. It's beyond words, deeper than our normal experience. It transcends daily life yet infuses it with meaning. Joy motivates us to challenge ourselves, appear to fail and try again. To realize that what we may call failure is really an opportunity to grow.

We've all heard happiness is a choice, it is. That's why so many of us are in debt, because we make the choice consistently to feed ourselves the fleeting experience of happiness of the new and improved, and then we wonder why we feel so empty. We think the elation of happiness will fill us up, we eat, drink and purchase our way to happiness and it's still not enough, so we do it some more. Instead let's choose to delve deeper to uncover the joy that already lies within us.

If we look more deeply into ourselves and ask "What is the feeling I want to achieve here, why am I trying to fill myself up? What is it I really want to feel? Worthiness, purpose, appreciation, love? We discover the feeling we're trying so desperately to achieve is one we can give ourselves. We can feel the essence of these, we can grant this to ourselves.

We must come to the realization that we're not empty vessels. We don't need to add anything. It's already there. I'm not saying we shouldn't strive to improve aspects of our personality but that's a natural byproduct of aligning with our soul, this is where we find our joy.

When our personality is urging us on like a horse running wild, we need to rein it in and remember who we really are. We are unlimited radiant courageous divine souls. Joy is our natural state of being.

I'm not discouraging those occasional flights of fancy called happiness, neither am I minimizing the unhappiness and suffering we sometimes endure. Yet if we can remember how amazing we truly are, remember where we come from, we can return to the arms of joy.

In Light.....Christie
Christie Pennington
http://www.thelightspeakers.com/
christie@thelightspeakers.com

Reality Constructs & Manifestation

A reality construct is a belief system which serves as a kind of filter for us in life. We block or filter out certain things, we include others. This then forms our perception of our limitations and abilities. The more we examine different constructs the more we understand the role we play within a construct. We expand or contract within different constructs/belief systems.



Within some it's unlikely we would explore some of the goals that we would if we were operating from a different system. Taking on a new construct can open us up to previously unexplored potential within.



Reality seems very different when viewed from the perspective of a different context. If you've ever switched belief systems you know what I mean. For instance if you were to change your belief from that of a fundamentalist to say a Buddhist or Taoist, you would then include many options formerly unavailable to you.



Some of us realize we've assumed a construct that is disempowering for us because we realize that our ability to tackle certain challenges is severely hampered or we find we have no motivation to even pursue them. Our reality systems are the framework upon which we build our lives, our basic spiritual and philosophical beliefs are the foundation upon which our values are based. Our goals are then erected upon our values.



What is valuable to us is what we will choose to pursue as a goal. In essence then, one reality construct would lead us to pursue one set of goals while another construct might have us pursue some quite different.



If we want to manifest a particular goal or desire and have been unable to do so, it's likely that our reality construct hasn't shifted completely enough. It may filter out certain information necessary for us to access those desires. Despite positive thinking and the repetition of affirmations, if our basic construct isn't in sync with our desires, they will remain unfulfilled.



For example, if unknowingly you carry vestiges of a construct which includes a belief that most of what happens to you is beyond your control, that God/the Universe is a puppet master, you will have difficulty realizing results. If you view yourself within your reality as basically flawed, defective in some way, whether because of original sin or childhood experiences you must let go of those aspects of your former paradigm to live fully within a new one. Living within the new one fully allows your desires to manifest.



So it's essential we investigate our construct deeply. We have the choice to remain within a former one and so perhaps reorient our desires. Or we can choose another construct and move into it so completely that we allow our desires to manifest.