It was during one of the toughest times; up to my pits in debt, self-employed but physically and emotionally injured - no disability insurance, single mother, and battles raging everywhere, that I gained one of my most helpful understandings.

The spiritual community around me had been saying, "God is within you", and their words,  given to me in an attempt to offer comfort, were pretty but they meant nothing to me in the real world. Until the day during my pinnacle of pain that I uncovered something that seemed to make sense.  I thought perhaps what they meant was that God has place love within all of us and that this love, or at least the chemical reaction and feelings that we associate with love, was available to us at all times. 

Injured and lying on my couch, unable to move, dealing with the overwhelming physical and emotional pain - I gave up and I gave in. My thoughts echoed my broken heart.  My will to control the events around me faded. "I am never going to smile again." "I can't do this anymore." 

I heard the words flow through my mind. "I just don't care!" 

Because I did not care and because I let go of the control, I closed my eyes and I began to relax. No longer tense and released from the struggle and worry, my mind began to wander back in time and remembered the passion of young love.  It was a time of great emotion and deep seated joy.   I remembered my high school boyfriend and his image filled my mind. I began to feel my whole body tingle with the love I felt for him and I closed my eyes. I wanted to stay there, where his arms embraced me and his love encompassed my world. For that moment I felt safe, I felt loved and I loved. I did not want it to end. Within a few moments, the vision of the boy faded and the feelings linked to the image began to diminish. Having found this joyous feeling in time of despair I did not want the feeling to end. 

I held tight to that moment in time allowing the boy's image to disappear but allowing the intense feeling of love to remain - and it did. There, alone, without external stimuli to interfere, I had created the duplicate feelings. I had mixed the emotional chemistry without anyone else in the room! I needed no other trigger - just the desire to create the emotion. Every cell in my body energized with the same emotions of new love.

What I was experiencing was the internal body reactions to love, the physical response triggered  by the desperate desire to feel and maintain love. 

So many times we believe that it is the person in our lives that made us feel the wondrous emotions of love, when in fact, the person may be the trigger to the emotion but we are the ones releasing the love chemistry within our brains. 

It was through that experience that I really learned the lesson that God is within you.. It is the lesson that; what I choose to feel is exactly what I will feel regardless of what is going on around me. My past emotional habits had allowed external events to trigger whatever emotion arrived with absolutely no control on my part.  It was emotional conditioning.

I had been conditioned to feel bad during times of bad events and feel good in times of abundance and love. For 40 years I reacted, exactly as I had been conditioned and and these reactions had occurred without my conscious approval. I realized then, that what I believed in my subconscious as the right reaction to any given situation was triggering a predetermined and expected type of behavior and that this preprogrammed perception of the world around me was killing my spirit. I also realized that by altering what I chose to believe and how I chose to react that I could heal my aching heart.

I decided to make a conscious effort to react as I choose to each event that occurred in my life. 

Deciding to control what emotions I would have, did not give me instant control over how I choose to feel each day. As with each new thing that we learn, occasionally we will fall. Old habits can be hard to break. When I allowed myself to schedule my time into a hectic frenzy - I reacted rather than chose my emotions. When something did not work exactly as I wanted it to I became angry...a knee jerk reaction. 

I did manage to master and reprogram some of my emotional conditioning.  

When foreclosure occurred - I managed a smile - they thought I was crazy. When the bills were higher than the income - I laughed - though they thought I had really lost my focus on reality.

Preconditioned people could not understand that I had a choice.  I was not avoiding the issues, but rather was choosing to enjoy life throughout even the difficult times.  I now knew that my previous decisions to create inner pain as a solution to my problems was not helping, but that choosing laughter allowed my mind and body to heal long enough to get back out there and build again.

While financial turmoil surrounded me, I managed to smile and to find happy feelings but my happy emotions soon turned to guilt. At first I was okay with laughing through disaster but emotional conditioning is a strong enemy. 

Soon,  I began to feel guilty because I SHOULD NOT smile when I owe people money. 

Didn't they know my tears were not cashable commodities and did not help me to pay the bills.  Did they not realize that my depression, would only work to eat away at any possible ability that I might have to fix problems.  I knew that only a strong mind and body would be able to correct the situation but I also knew that you are not supposed to be happy when bad things happen- Society deems that unnatural.

Eventually, I managed to categorize guilt in my pile of emotional time wasters and moved on with attempting to view problems as opportunities to learn something new and mistakes as just the occasional cost of learning.  No need to put myself down; just learn and do better next time.

The fact is, that we do have a choice. We can choose each day how we will feel. Good or Bad, Happy or Sad. Being happy does not mean that you do not care that bills are unpaid.

I realized that reacting with sadness and anger at others and myself was destroying me and preventing any real solutions to my problems from surfacing. 

I chose to turn "you idiot" into "I have done my best," and  "I will pay as soon as I possibly can" By accepting the situation, I became calmer and more capable of thinking clearly.

The alternative to this... the deep sadness and depression would only result in me crawling into the deepest recesses of my closet and staying there, arms wrapped tightly around my knees and my head bowed down. No bills would be paid. 

It is the bill collector's job to keep asking, just in case you are sitting on a pile of money, and it is your job to keep them informed. No one said you had to beat yourself unconscious because you made a mistake, suffered a downfall or overextended yourself. . Face the situation and deal with it directly. Learn from it and move on.

Once you have decided to focus on solutions you may want to see if you have created this situation by the choices, (see article pi54 Jan. 2003 newsletter) that you made along the way but you can choose today to break old habits, cut costs, increase your income, and stop spending or whatever is needed to change the current situation. Your situation today, is your current reality, created from past choices. Your future will be created from choices you will make today. Your first choice will be to live with it and love it or change it. The choice is clear. Self-pity, sadness and depression are not going to solve your problems. No "White Knight will rescue you. No miracle will happen until you choose to change and learn from your past without harsh judgment on yourself or others.

With your intent clear (pi55 Feb.2003 newsletter) and with sheer determination things will change, and miracles will happen. Your decision to sit in sadness wastes your time and your energy. If you feel the need to be sad, angry, fearful, depressed then choose it consciously. Choose to sit and feel it, to wallow in it, to cry, to scream, to pout and to get it out then get it over with! Don't just push it down and carry it around like a badge of who you are. 

The truth is that right now you can choose to feel joy. Why don't you? 

You may see it as almost immoral to choose happiness in your situation, you may be too tired to put in the effort, you may have a chemical deficiency that is prevents you from having the desire to choose happiness. You may have learned this behavior by example, at an early age and don't know any other type of behavior. 

If you do have a chemical deficiency and have been diagnosed with depression and/or bipolar disorder or you simply have noticed that you are prone to surges of high energy and periods of extreme sadness... there are answers!  Many readers of The Wave Riders newsletter have also read the book but some have not. For those that have not, you may wish to read through my book TheWaveRiders (http://www.thewaveriders.com) as many of us have found our way out of depression using TheWaveRider philosophies and techniques found in the book.  

Sadness, depression, exhaustion, illness and poverty are all real and these are all real reasons that we have decided to use to justify our sadness. They are good enough reasons not to change how you feel, but it does not change the facts... We have within us the capability to choose how we feel each moment of our life regardless of what is going on around us. I have found it takes a lot of practice and a clear intention to change the automatic way we react each day, but it can be done.

Will choosing happiness pay the bills? 

Joy, peace, happiness and laughter create more energy and more solutions than tension and panicked worry. Will it bring someone back? No, but neither will your sorrow and your sorrow in time will eat away at your core, your stomach lining and your hope. 

Will choosing to feel joy in the moment make you a happier person? 

Yes, in time.

We are students, always learning new lessons. Sometimes we fail, we fall, we give into self pity.  It is our conscious choice to get back up and choose joy consistently, that we can create who we will become.

It is a new habit.
It is a conscious decision.
It is a new you.

Thank you for letting me share my thoughts with you,
Indigo Irwin Kennedy