Dancing Geek

Not sure what I’m talking about?

Earlier I posted my new Happiness Hypothesis (because alliteration is important) and this is where I look at where I am today to see if I can really test this out.  I mean, it’s not like I just made this stuff up, you know.

Current situation: bottleneck in Step 1

For me, balance is the largest dominating factor.  I feel restricted by the current quality of my fuel: of my current diet, relationships and quality of sleep.  (Which isn’t to say I don’t have some great friends, but that I want stronger relationships with them.)  I also feel that part of the reason for my weaker relationships is my ineffective approach to them due to my emotional intelligence.

I’m going to take a moment right now, however, to be massively grateful that I do not feel a lack in regards to the amount of food, sleep, or friends; in my fitness or mental agility; or in my warmth, safety and comfort.  I am truly fortunate.

For me, I believe this means that the best approach going forward is to continue the repetition of inquiry that my current energy levels allow but ensure a reasonable proportion of energy is used to work on my emotional intelligence and the quality of my diet, sleep and relationships.

The work required includes the inquiry about various thoughts, and as such the changing of various mental models. Therefore this work should not detract from my progress, but rather provide a specific focus to it in the short term.

Over the medium term this will hopefully lead to an increase in overall available energy, as well as requiring less energy to maintain these improvements, and as such allow for my focus to be returned to working directly on allowing greater happiness into my life.

I believe that this is a situation that may recur: as each improvement in the quality of my energy will allow a new peak in effort and stamina, then I will need to return to working on the quality of my fuel if I wish to achieve higher and higher peaks.  At some point I may decide that I am content with the level I have reached, however I can see at this point the potential for a cycle of working on my energy and then working on my blocks.

Further hypothesis: A three pronged approach

While my current focus is looking to include an indirect approach to happiness, in order to allow me to augment my abilities in the direct approach, I have found a pattern in the way that I have made the direct approach and include this here.

I have looked at this work through three different lenses, inquiring about my thoughts in each area:

• Self-acceptance
• Rewarding work
• Calm being

Self-acceptance is about how I think about myself.  It is within my control, I can work on it in private and the results are gratifying.  As such, I currently find this one the easiest path to follow.  The reflection to acceptance of the external is simply the application of any new skills and mental models to other things, and is almost automatic.  Indeed the converse is also true.

Rewarding work was my first route into this journey, and I hope in the future to return to that path and enjoy giving value to others, just as I have received so much from them in recent months and before.

‘Calm being’ is perhaps the hardest for me.  I can now meditate for 20 minutes without totally freaking out, an achievement which gives me great pleasure, but to change a habit engrained over nearly three decades, and supported by my home culture, of ‘frantic doing’ will be, I believe, the hardest and the most challenging.

Since all three are interlinked, I wonder if perhaps I will be lucky enough that working on the other two will allow me to make headway in this third path. Still, I suspect that they may well form the legs of a 3-legged stool, and I would not want my happiness to fall to the floor because of one weak leg.  Here I am uncertain, and open it to folk further down this path than I to speak.

The what now?

The Wisdom of the Ages written as a school science report.

Yeah, exactly, but that’s what happens when you live inside my head.  I’ve broken it up with lots of pictures because a) that’s what school kids do these days, and b) it’s kinda long and chock full of goodness, so you don’t want to skip too much text.

Hypothesis

I will be truly happy all the time if I shed my negative mental models.

Happiness

• freedom to act from my truest best intentions for myself and others
• freedom to enjoy others company, giving value & being still
• freedom to accept all of what is, including myself

Negative mental models

• fear
• limiting beliefs
• negative prejudice & assumptions

(Take a moment to think about that while you look at this picture.)

Proof

Happiness is subjective, no objective proof can be given.  But if it is true for me then I can prove it to myself by trying it and testing the results.

Corollaries

• There is nothing one can receive to make one happy (wealth, love, respect)
• Happiness is not the result of an action
• Unhappiness is the result of certain thoughts
• There is nothing I can do to be happy except stop doing that which makes me unhappy

Methodology

The simple (but not necessarily easy) breakdown of steps to happiness.

• To be happy more often I need only change my thoughts.
• To change my thoughts I need only be aware of them and inquire about them.
• For the change to become lasting and effortless I need only do this repeatedly until I create a new pattern.
• To sustain this repetition I need only motivation and energy.

If I follow this reasoning in reverse I get the way to greater happiness:

1. Motivation and energy, which supports
2. Repetition of inquiry about thoughts

This leads to new mental models and if the hypothesis is subjectively correct, then I will be happier.  If I am not happier, it is subjectively false.

Step 1: Motivation and energy

My motivation

If I can truly yearn for the freedoms I listed under happiness I will have my motivation.  If I remember them, I yearn for them.

Energy

I need to balance the expenditure and replenishment of my mental, physical & emotional energies.  As well as refuelling these energies, greater efficiency in their use can improve performance, as can the quality of the fuel.

Refuelling: Food, sleep and the support of friends*

Efficiency: (reduce losses) Warmth, safety & comfort.
(more effective burning) Fitness, mental agility & emotional intelligence.

Quality of fuel: Quality of food (diet), quality of sleep and quality of friends and your relationship with them.

*Friends can include family and partners

Step 2: Repetition of inquiry about thoughts

Bringing awareness to my thoughts

• Shiva Nata
• Conversations with myself
• Mindfulness & witnessing

Inquiring about my thoughts

• Byron Katie
• Conversations with myself
• Exploring alternative mental models (e.g. the benevolent Universe)

Example thoughts to inquire about

• There is something that will make me happier if I get more of it
• That was bad and shouldn’t have happened
• People will not like me because I am selfish
• I should do things for others to be happy
• I’m incomplete, unfinished or broken

Notes

It is a practice, not a goal

I do not complete tasks so that when I have finished them & completed 100% I will be happy, but until then I am not.  Rather, the more I repeat these tasks the happier I will be overall.  There is no end point, except possibly death, and, as the small print goes, my happiness may go down as well as up, so I must keep my investment working over the long term if I seek the best returns.

Photo credits:

• Student in Class by foundphotoslj
• freedom by Guille
• Where thoughts are legible in the eye… by carf
• Resurrection by Untitled blue
• Pebble Art by pshutterbug
• I’m thinking of… by gutter
• Minimal perfection by Yago1.com

My pasta is boiling over

So I had a bit of a holiday, because I needed one, because I’d been working through lots of thoughts and ideas and learning and changing and my brain and body needed a rest.

Only problem is, that after that I started to get that bubbling feeling, where I can tell there’s something under the surface starting to build up, like when I cook pasta on our annoying electric hob and because I can’t get the temperature right it’s constantly bubbling up under the lid.

Well, the starchy bubbles have started to pop out of the top of the pan, and they are spilling everywhere, making a mess, and generally unwelcome.  In the analogyverse the obvious thing to do is to take the lid off the pan.  However, that’s drastic, results in the pan then going completely off the boil and annoying to have to keep doing.

What I really want to do is get the temperature right so that I’ve got my pasta simmering away but the pan doesn’t spill over.

Balance

What I need is a balance so that I’ve got space for the stuff to come out, but that it’s not so much that I’m overwhelmed.  And in my mind I should be able to find a way for that to happen where I stay in a blissful state of balance the whole time, but I’m suddenly thinking, right now, that maybe that’s not going to happen.  That life doesn’t work like that and that it’s more a case of letting a little steam out every so often.  Little and often, my second rule for testing if something is true.

So if the method is more about little and often, about making it a practice rather than a state of being, what would that involve?

• Time to reflect
• Time to do
• Time to rest

So yeah, my holiday has interupted by Alternative MA, and that’s what it was supposed to do, but it’s also telling me that something wasn’t working.  Despite all my best intentions there apparently still wasn’t enough rest time.  Which is just horrifying, because I really tried to give myself lots of time out, more than I was necessarily comfortable with, and it looks like I need more.

Still, there’s a few things I can start back on now, including my practice for releasing a bit of the steam (Dance of Shiva, and writing here – you know, that 30 day trial thing I did a while back and haven’t wrapped up any lovely tidy conclusion from, before your mind starts wondering).

Time to do is things like the garden and cooking, both being things that are bringing me massive joy at the moment.  And lots of reading.

Rest?  That’s where I get stuck I think.  How to rest.  How to rejuvinate?  I’m so used to doing, I’m struggling to find ways of being that aren’t so far removed from the familiar that there’s no chance they’ll stick.  Add to that the fact that the second I ‘do something to relax’ it becomes another task on my list and brings all kinds of effort and expectations which are basically what I’m trying to rest from anyway.

Wise self: Dear James, you have permission to just chill out for a bit, ok?

Me: Ummm, how do I do that without ‘doing’ it?