If you’re happy and you know it…

Last week’s post opened up Pandora’s Box of limiting beliefs for me. I was exploring all the ways I make things harder than they actually are and hit the mother lode of cultural conditioning buried in my subconscious. Later that day, I was chatting with a friend and it really helped to expose the depth and breadth of unconscious agreements I have about what is acceptable and what is not.

I made a list of all the beliefs I secretly hold about how happy I can be and what I’m allowed to enjoy. Mind you, I break the rules (with gusto!) every day, but mostly undercover. That’s the compromise I unconsciously made when going rogue: do it, but don’t flaunt it. Don’t rock the boat or upset anyone. Ever.

Be small and invisible.

Well I’m about to blow all of that up! But first I needed to excavate all the hidden rules I never agreed to in the first place. Hiding my joy is crimping the flow of life force and will eventually affect my vitality and health. It probably already has.

Here we go:

1.        Mornings are not to be enjoyed. They’re for nursing hangovers, wrangling kids onto the school bus, finishing yesterday’s overflow of tasks, rushing to work, chugging coffee, watching pharmaceutical commercials courtesy of news programs, eating junk food labeled as breakfast, and deep regret.

2.        Mondays are never to be enjoyed. They are reserved for the misery of commencing the workweek. Sunday evenings are reserved for anxiety about the coming of Mondays.

3.        Work is not to be enjoyed. Only endured. If you do enjoy your work, it’s best to work long hours, nights and weekends, and have very little income to balance it all out. Starving artists are the exception. Oy, this one has deep roots!

4.        Meals are not to be enjoyed (except on the weekend with your friends or family and must be documented for IG or FB). Just stuff it all in on the go; there are much more important things to be done than nourishing yourself.

5.        Exercise is not to be enjoyed. At best it is to be tolerated, but better if there’s some suffering involved. Walking the dog gets a pass on this.

6.        Don’t be too happy being single; the poorly matched couples will be upset.

7.        Don’t be too happy with a new boyfriend; the couples and the singles will all be upset.

8.        Don’t be too happy about having down time, free time, time to prepare meals that you sit down and enjoy, time to read, time to paint, time to sit in nature and breathe. Time is to be spent working for money, running around spending money and sitting on the couch in a stupor.

9.        Don’t feel too energized, healthy or heaven-forbid, chipper. That’s a luxury most people can’t afford.

10.  Don’t get adequate rest. It’s better to be jolted from a fitful sleep hours before you’ve had enough. Unless you’re retired. It’s ok to get enough sleep when you’ve earned it over 50+ years in the workplace.

11.  Don’t work fewer than 40 hours per week. That’s the bare minimum of appropriate suffering in the workplace. Anything else is heresy unless you’re also a FT student, FT caregiver of children or elders, or massively disabled or unwell. To be respectable and important, consider working at least 60 hours consistently each and every week.

12.  Don’t enjoy writing satirical analyses of the culture you live in. That can only lead to trouble. 😉

These are the messages I was raised with. They subtly and not-so-subtly infiltrated my consciousness, becoming the barometer of who and how I can be without risking alienation. Now that I see it clearly, I can change it.

I talk about how limiting beliefs A LOT. How they impair our wellness and happiness, often from the shadows. I wanted to share this little exploration here as the perfect example of what I mean. Part of me thinks it’s not safe to live my life the way I do, so I keep myself constrained and invisible, which inhibits the amount of life-force available to me, which in turn diminishes my capacity for health and joy.

I’m simultaneously seeking something and pushing it away out of a fear that lurks beneath the surface of my awareness. It’s like hitting the gas and the brakes together- unproductive at best, dangerous in the long run. I’m leaking energy all over the place and setting myself up for procrastination and self-sabotage due to conflicting goals.

In order to expand, I need to go through the discomfort of dismantling the programming that does not fit my values and current worldview. I need to stop hiding myself to keep other people comfortable.

Why? It’s not my job to keep other people comfortable. It’s highly questionable if my degree of happiness even has any effect on anyone else. That’s another thing about limiting beliefs- they are often inherited from times long past and social constructs that are no longer true.

Isn’t it funny that it’s so much easier to share here about the trials and tribulations than the joys and successes? (I have my fair share of both, btw. My life is hardly idyllic. But I have done a lot of hard work to sprinkle my days with simple pleasures which make the challenges more manageable.)

This is a huge turning point for me. I’ve seen the results of aligning conscious and unconscious desires towards a unified goal in my life and also in many of my clients’. I’m really excited to see where this will take me over time.

Here’s a photo of me out in the park on a Tuesday (which is the equivalent of a Monday in my wonky schedule), happily enjoying the outdoors before going to my fulfilling job. Plus two of my favorite reading benches. And another of the scrumptious frozen yogurt I savored with a dear friend for a belated birthday celebration. Three cherries, because why not?! I’m done hiding the joy and restricting the pleasure in my life.

Who’s with me on challenging the rules about what we’re allowed to (publicly) enjoy? How happy will you allow yourself to be? Who wants to help me rock the boat?