Soulful Satisfaction

SOULFUL SATISFACTIONBy Bill Cottringer

“It is not the things in life that bother us but rather our opinions about these things.”~ Epictetus

Without a doubt, the above quote is my all time favorite, because day by day it keeps growing in meaning and value in my own life and adding to the appreciative attitude I have towards everything in life. When anything happens we can interpret the event as good which makes us happy, or bad which makes us unhappy. And whenever we do something we expect to get right results, which increases our comfort rather than get wrong results, which increases our discomfort.

Stop! What are we doing wrong here? In a few words—making an artificial judgment one way or the other, being certain we are correct, and feeling worse than we want to, at least half the time. So, if we want to double our happiness , contentment and satisfaction all we have to do is one thing. That one thing is questioning the correctness of our interpretations and judgments—especially the bad, negative ones that make us unhappy and unsatisfied.

Is it possible for us to be happy all the time? Yes, if we work on decreasing the power of our mind’s thinking in good and bad terms and start experiencing soulful satisfaction. Admittedly though, that might not be so easy, given the reality than much of our thinking is unconscious. In the meantime, what is soulful satisfaction? It is the peace of understanding the full truth, which will set you free from mindful turmoil of going back and forth between happiness and unhappiness and always wanting what you don’t seem to have.

The beginning of soulful satisfaction is in taking a more tentative, wait-and-see attitude towards the things that happen to us and unfixing the results we expect from the choices we make. And the best way to do this is to focus more on what we are doing right now and become more aware of what our real intent or main purpose is for what we are doing. If my purpose is to write about a simple way to have more satisfaction, then I need to keep it as simple as I can, in the most satisfying way I can.

Increasing your happiness really is a simple thing—all it takes is a slight shift in perspective from making quick good-bad judgments of what happens and what we get from our choices, to accepting life as it comes moment by moment, without adding our own artificial perception flavors. What could be easier than that? I know, easier said than done.

Maybe the main problem is in our thinking about “happiness.” I can remember when I used to actively seek out what would appear to others as depression , sadness and utter aloneness with my weekend trips to the dark, damp and dreary rain forests prevalent in the Pacific Northwest. I didn’t do this because I was getting bored with happiness, or just wanted to value my happiness more by experiencing its opposite for more stimulating contrast. I really didn’t have a good reason other than wanting to take some interesting photographs and experience life directly without the normal okay-not okay judgment.

In looking back on my own pilgrimage to soulful happiness, I can now see it all began when I first started to look for some positive and beneficial meaning in events that mostly evoked negative reactions in other people. The more I began to just accept something for being the way it was without adding the unnecessary negative judgments, the more I enjoyed everything. The outcome seems to have led me to devaluing “happiness” as something I wanted or needed and oddly, the same was true for not even not wanting unhappiness. Was this easy? Of course not.

My suspicion is that we all really want to experience soulful satisfaction, which is really just a matter of putting aside these words that keep increasing the soft safe space in our minds between the imagining us and real living of life. This is what we are all really doing at our own pace; and when we shift from our mind’s competitiveness and control drives to our soul’s accepting and understanding drives, something strange happens. The whole truth that we have been searching for suddenly appears. And it brings us the only thing that is truly satisfying—soulful satisfaction. As it turns out, we get more by doing less, which finally sets of free from wanting. Life is funny that way.

“The quickest way to enjoy something more is to judge it less as being un-enjoyable.”~ The Author.