Shakti Sutriasa 9/9/14 Shakti Sutriasa 9/9/14

Happiness Is...

After spending the first 8 months of 2011 grieving and trying to get my life back together after losing both my sister and father in 3 months, I realized it was time for me to focus on me. Having been a pleaser and caretaker most of my life, this task felt daunting and I didn’t even know where to begin.

But as most things go, the Universe helped me out. A friend lent me a book about happiness by Dr. Robert Holden and immediately I knew I wanted to learn not only more about his ideas BUT also how to facilitate this work. Next thing, I was signing up to attend his happiness coaching certification in New York. I was ready finally to learn precisely how to be happy.

Turns out that there are different kinds of happiness (who knew?)

But as most things go, the Universe helped me out. A friend lent me a book about happiness by Dr. Robert Holden and immediately I knew I wanted to learn not only more about his ideas BUT also how to facilitate this work. Next thing, I was signing up to attend his happiness coaching certification in New York. I was finally ready to learn precisely how to be happy.

There are different kinds of happiness (who knew?)

Robert defined happiness as pleasure, satisfaction and joy.

What’s pleasure?

Pleasure is a great piece of chocolate, a superb glass of wine. It’s what we enjoy through our senses, our bodies. And it feels good!

However, pleasure relies on a stimulus. I need to drink my coffee in order to feel pleasure and then when my coffee's gone, so is that pleasurable experience. It’s also exclusive to me. For example, I like dark chocolate but my daughter likes milk chocolate. Pleasure exists in duality too meaning that it has an opposite… pain.

We’ve all experienced pleasure, right? And pain…

The second kind of happiness we experience is satisfaction.

Satisfaction is the type of happiness most researched. So for you what’s satisfaction? Is it a job well done? A task completed? That feeling after you’ve finished a work out?

Satisfaction again is a result of something else. It’s causal like pleasure. "I am happy because…I ran 2 miles, got an A on that paper, have great friends…”

The cool thing about satisfaction is that it feels good AND it increases our ability to access gratification helping us be receptive to more satisfaction. We also experience it emotionally and mentally.

Satisfaction has a few problems though. Again, it’s short lived and exists in duality with its opposite being dissatisfaction. It can also be influenced by expectation and comparison and is largely based on our emotions.

The third definition or kind of happiness is joy.

What does joy mean to you? I like to think of joy as happy for no reason. It shares some attributes with pleasure since we feel joy physically. We can also experience it mentally and emotionally like satisfaction. But it’s more than any of those things in fact joy is simply bigger that our bodies, our egos, our personalities.

It’s pretty hard to define joy but we sure can describe it!

It’s happiness that bubbles out of us effortlessly. It’s the smile you can’t take off. And joy has specific qualities to it.

The first one is constancy.

Joy never goes away. WE wander away from joy when our attention and awareness strays but joy is always there for us to access.

Joy is the source of creativity.

It's the fountain. For those of us who grew up with the idea of the tortured artist, this is a big reversal. Turns out that joy feeds our creativity way more, hmmmm.

Joy is unreasonable.

That’s the “I’m happy for no reason.” Simply because. I'm choosing to tune into joy because it feels so good.

Joy has no opposite nor is it subject to mood swings or the craziness of the world.

Joy has a twin, which is love.

There are people who describe experiencing true joy or love in the midst of terrible suffering. People like Victor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist imprisoned in concentration camps during WWII and a holocaust survivor. He writes in Man's Search for Meaning:

“For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”

Joy is enough.

We can experience a fall out from pleasure or satisfaction because they are temporary. But this never happens with joy. It's constant and completely fulfilling.

Turns out that true happiness is JOY.

The good news is, we can still appreciate and embrace pleasure and satisfaction, and joy. We can have it all!

But if we don’t work on connecting to joy, no matter how much pleasure or satisfaction we have, we’ll never feel happy. And if we fixate on pleasure or satisfaction, it can turn on us- making us into workaholics, addicts or create other excessive behaviors. Why? Because both pleasure and satisfaction are temporary.

If we tune into JOY it will enable us to have even more healthy pleasure and worldly satisfaction.

Here’s a quick video to re-enforce these concepts.

What do you think of these 3 definitions?

And if you haven't yet, join our community today!

Shakti Sutriasa 11/10/13 Shakti Sutriasa 11/10/13

I Am Here To Be Seen

In 2011, I signed up to attend a 5-day professional training called "Coaching Happiness" with Dr. Robert Holden. I arrived in New York City in November, a year after my father had died there. A year of grieving that had left me pretty vulnerable. It was time for some happiness in my life after so much sadness. I was excited about the workshop but nervous too. I had been reading Robert's book, Be Happy and knew right away that his message was for me.

In 2011, I signed up to attend a 5-day professional training called "Coaching Happiness" with Dr. Robert Holden. I arrived in New York City in November, a year after my father and younger sister had died. A year of grieving that had left me emotionally spent. It was time for some happiness in my life after so much sadness. I was excited about the workshop but nervous too. I had been reading Robert's book, Be Happy and knew right away that his message was for me. My husband had bugged me to sign up for the workshop. "It's gonna sell out." They were only taking 100 people. So instead of procrastinating like I usually do, I went onto Hay House and booked it.

The workshop was held in a hotel in Times Square, not exactly my normal hang out when in New York. But I was reminded of something my friend Jeff had said to me a year or two earlier. His office is in Times Square. When I asked him how he coped with all the annoying tourists he smiled. "I like it actually, it's invigorating. Sometimes I just come out and walk around, breathe it all in."

Okay, I thought, I will try to channel my inner enthusiast instead of donning my grouchy New Yorker face. Almost immediately, I made friends. The seminar had a relaxed and festive atmosphere and the audience, 90% women, were clearly excited to be there. One of the activities we did as a group, one we did every day was a greeting. It's of African (Bantu) origin and the concept is that we bring each other into existence by seeing one another. Two people participate by holding hands, facing each other, and looking into one another's eyes. One person starts by saying, "I am here to be seen." The person listening then responds, "I see you."

So we began. I was initially nervous and tended to allow my partner to go first, taking the lead. It was easy for me to see my partner and hold a space of patience and loving kindness but it was harder for me to utter the words, "I am here to be seen." Sometimes they felt like they got caught in my throat and my eyes all almost got watery. Nevertheless, I participated, repeating the exercise 5-6 times every morning with different partners.

By the fourth day, heading into the seminar, I was feeling tired and emotionally raw. Sitting on the bus watching the gray streets go by, my mind was already anticipating the upcoming seminar. "I don't want to do that exercise this morning," I heard my inner brat whining, "I don't want to be 'seen' today. I just want to be left alone."

Then my wise self, observing the mental commotion reflected, "isn't that interesting, what you said, you don't want to be seen." Well, that started a whole internal dialog and a realization of how I have spent a good part of my life hiding in the wings, afraid to go on stage and "be seen."

Gretchen Laporta, Valentina Savelyeva and Louisa Nedkov from November, 2011

At the workshop, I participated in the morning greeting (I am here to be seen) after which we were asked to make groups of 4 and share how we were feeling and what we were experiencing. I decided to out myself. So I told everyone in my group the story of my ride into the seminar. My self disclosure seemed to surprise some of the listeners (maybe because I had acted my part so well) but everyone was loving and supportive. It was a cathartic moment for me, to realize consciously that I have been hiding.

I decided it was time to come out. Not just to that group at the workshop but in my life.

This week Brene Brown tweeted, "So excited to finally launch The Daring Way™ - it's all about showing up, being seen, and living brave! And that got me thinking again about being seen. I'd been reading her book, Daring Greatly, in which she says "Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen."

In September I launched my own coaching and therapy business, Decide Differently. I watched how the fear arose as I transitioned from being an educator, which I had been for over two decades, to a new field, where I felt like a fledgling. The mind chatter of "who are you to tell people what to do" and "why would anyone listen to what you have to say?" haunted me but I did it anyway and am even outing myself more with this blog!

Because the truth is that I have a lot to say and to share, we all do. I agree with Brene. When we "out ourselves" when we allow ourselves to be seen, when we invite ourselves to show vulnerability, we are alive. We are pushing beyond the comfort, beyond the known, we are allowing people to see all of us, the parts we like and the parts we like not so much. And this, too, also comes back to the happiness course I did two years ago. As Robert says, "Happiness is when we dare show people our original face."

Even though sometimes I don’t want to be seen and I still want to hide, I am recognizing it more and more and working with myself lovingly, gently, and encouragingly, just exactly as I would a small child in one of my classrooms. "You can do this, there's nothing to be scared of. We are all here to support and love you." And what I realize is the power that being seen has. It gives us the gift of feeling alive and connected, experiencing the love and joy that are all around us and within us.

So thank you Robert and thank you to all of the brave men and women who shared that 5-day coaching happiness workshop with me. I am a different person because of all of you and I know you see me.