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“To attain wealth, the lasting kind, the kind that gives your life meaning, value and sustenance, base your daily existence on the generosity of spirit. Everything else you desire will follow of its own accord.” —Deepak Chopra, Abundance: The Inner Path to Wealth
To experience great joy in our everydays is to experience bliss.
If ever you find yourself smiling in the middle of your everydays just because, if you are me anyway, you are experiencing a bliss-filled moment.
We may find it surprising or difficult at first to imagine the possibility to experience such a natural state going about a life routine that happens nearly everyday, but that is exactly the point to living consciously. This is exactly why choosing to understand what true contentment is makes all the difference.
The culture that surrounds us often extols that everyday living must be grueling, busy, stress-filled, chaotic, loud, full of drama and gamesmanship and constant competition and comparison, and that the only way to escape such a ‘real’ life is to choose unnatural means or substances outside of our body or go to extremes in our celebrations and ‘play-time/free time/weekends’ to bring us calm, or ‘bliss’. Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a glass of wine with my meals and I enjoy traveling to see and be immersed in cultures that capture my fascination, but I have never been one to need anything beyond consciously and intentionally living a life of true contentment to feel true bliss in my everydays, because when you experience what true bliss is, when you have created a life you love living every day, and have let go of trying to please the culture, let go of holding on and refraining from controlling things and people and their actions that can never be in our control, that is when you open your life to the potential to feel an abundance of bliss.
Deepak Chopra in his new book Abundance: The Inner Path to Wealth speaks to what many other authors that have been discussed here on the blog, the podcast and in TSLL’s books have shared about finding peace within ourselves, and thus living a most fulfilling life – dharma. From Jay Shetty to Martha Beck to David Whyte and so many others, Chopra as well speaks to the gift we give our lives when we find the focus/purpose that marries what (1) contributes positively to the world (giving it something it needs, not what we think it needs or forcing our idea upon society) with (2) what we have a deep passion and unique ability to give to the world.
“Dharma is constantly showing the way forward.” —Deepak Chopra
And you see, it takes time to know exactly what this is, and while others who have good intentions may notice and nudge us in a direction that leads us to discovering our dharma, only we can discover it with certainty. And in order to be certain, we must be present, and live, as Chopra describes it, in Simple Awareness.
Sharing that simple awareness is the “most powerful engine for change”, your simple awareness already exists within you and always has, but often we live the purported life outlined above by a ‘bustling and harried culture’, errantly seen as the only way to really live and find supposed bliss, in constant pursuit of something more and supposed happiness, that we drown out what our simple awareness is trying to show us, trying to teach us about where to find our dharma.
“You can glimpse [simple awareness] after finishing a great dinner or when appreciating a great work of art, while listening to Bach or listening to your child at play.”
Simple awareness is the space between the thoughts, a gap, and it is through meditation that we strengthen our ability to go deeper. “The mind naturally seeks its source. It will connect to your soul, or true self, if given an opening. Your mind doesn’t have to be coaxed to go there, much less forced.”
Reading Chopra’s words was encouraging to me and validated so much of what I have experienced in my own life journey. So often, because we let society tells us what we need, should be doing, should pursuit, etc., we stand in the way of the true knowledge that sits within us and always will. Our life’s purpose is to shed the societal ‘guidance’ and go within. That is where our truth and where the book of our true self resides, and it will change our lives in all the most wonderful ways.
Once we go within, we understand, but most importantly, we experience, a deep inner peace, and then when we bring that knowledge to the world, we begin to figure out, much like finding the home for our puzzle piece (that is us), where we can contribute. We then begin to ask, What does the world need that I can help fulfill, even though it may not be screaming for it (often it doesn’t, because if it knew it needed it, it would heal itself). Again, it is imperative that we check ourselves and our intent of giving – are we trying to control the world? Because if we are, then it is not our dharma because a dharma would never imprison or limit the path for others to find their own dharma and live on this path which sets us each free. If our pursuit is only for self-gain, consciously or unconsciously, we have not found our dharma.
Living our dharma we find it far easier to let go of outcomes and live in the present. What to the outside world may seem confusing and ‘wrong’ is often coming from those who aren’t living their dharma because when you find the marriage of what you can give with joy and what the world needs, your peace creates an abundance of bliss in your everydays, and you no more want to control others than you want to control the weather (someone who is at peace with what they cannot control finds something to savor – rain brings growth, wind blows out the old and brings a new beauty, snow gives us time to be still – in other words, you create rituals to celebrate what you cannot control and what will always have beauty if we would look for it, as Mother Nature is always trying to strengthen our awareness). You savor what is, you trust yourself more completely than you have ever thought possible, considering you cannot foresee the future, and your old self would be gobsmacked by how settled and contented you are holding yourself in the present with no promise as to what tomorrow will bring.
This all may sound a bit, for lack of a better actual word, whohooey and all together illogical, but let me ask you this? Are you able to be still, physically and mentally in your life regularly without feeling pulled or anxious that you aren’t doing something? I intentionally included the word regularly because when you live your dharma, you will feel regularly a deep resting state of contentment, and tomorrow won’t matter, yesterday won’t bug you and you will be at peace. This is an everyday way of being no matter what is going on in the world, and it is possible. So if you haven’t experienced this, yep, you may think what I am sharing is a bit ‘out there’ and unrealistic. But in fact, it is possible, and it is amazing, and it has brought a peace to my days that I for so long only wished for and sometimes thought might be impossible.
I too stood on the other side and said, how is this possible? A glimpse, or a taste of abundant bliss all started to unfold when I found what I could give that the world needed. And it wasn’t what the over-arching society understood; it didn’t align with the ‘right’ way to live for a woman in patriarchal America, but once I found the courage to honor what I found within, it made all the difference.
There will be a time of limbo when you have found your dharma, you are trying to make sense of it, and cannot quite explain it, but you become radiant and light up whenever you are engaged in it or talking about it. Keep trusting this guidance. There will be pushback as we have talked about many times here on TSLL, but the pushback only works if you are not truly rooted. And if it is your dharma, it cannot be uprooted because it is who you are. It is part of you and always will be.
A life of abundant bliss most likely won’t receive great acclaim or great applause; in other words, the society won’t see your bliss, or recognize it as such because its definition doesn’t align. But again, if you have found your dharma, you will pay no mind, and simply be overjoyed you have found what brings you to life fully.
Abundance: The Inner Path to Wealth by Deepak Chopra (2022)
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Shannon I too find myself smiling often in my everyday. It could be when I hear the kettle whistling or when I watch my cat in hunting mode trying to catch a fly! It’s very entertaining. I’ve experienced both living in the moment as a young person and then the almost frantic way of living when I moved to England. Everyone rushed about. I felt I had to do the same but I was not contented. I had to stop myself getting caught up in doing the same. I explored many different ways to slow down and centre myself. It took a little while. Growing up we had daily rituals based on our religion which were grounding and kept us in the present moment. I missed that . Oriental religions have rituals incorporated into daily living which centres you and keeps you in the present. In Western society it’s different .You have to break out of the ‘ norm’ to seek this out. You have shown that there is a choice by following your heart and it can be achieved with doing the necessary ‘work’. xx
Oh goodness, this one hit me hard! I’ve been struggling lately, trying to get back to the ‘Everyday Contentedness’ that I so strongly claim to live by. The last few months have been a blur of busy. That sentence about creating rituals to celebrate what I cannot control almost brought me to tears. This entire post was written just for me, I’m sure of it!?. Thank you once again,Shannon for the good you are putting out in the world?.
This podcast was awesome! I listened to this the day after I discovered the show Julia on HBO. I have read the books and watched measly every episode of the French Chef. The HBO show has not disappointed. And I ordered the Deepak Chopra book and that has been my Easter morning listen. I love that your podcast has offered me some amazing new things in my life. Thank you!
Sharine, Thank you for tuning into the show and happy to hear you are enjoying what is shared!
Loved this. It tied in with an amazing book I have just read called “If Women Rose Rooted”. Life changing. We all so need to move away from this toxic patriarchal society to a more thoughtful and considered way of life. Thanks so much for the podcast.
Sian, Thank you so much for your sharing and recommending Sharon Blackie’s book. I had heard reference to it previously, but would like to explore it. Your comment belies a truth for all people to explore deeper into why certain ‘ways of life’ are as they are and go unchanged or unchallenged. Thank you. 🙂