14/06/2018
HOW TO STOP GIVING F***S ... AND HEAL
Be happy, be good, be positive, be optimistic, be successful, be woke, be spiritually enlightened. Consume the perfect diet. Attract a million followers on Instagram. Live your best life. Rise up the career ladder. Be fit and healthy. Be your greatest self. Manifest your life’s purpose. Optimise your body's functioning. Release your pain, fear, anger and sadness. Free yourself from doubt. Fall in love with the man and woman of your dreams and live happily ever after and never feel lonely again.
This dream is beautiful but it is literally killing us.
The eternal soul has no interest in living up to any ideal of happiness, however beautiful.
Its terrible and sacred rage boils underneath the entire self-help project. Its cry for authenticity, for Truth at any cost.
F**k the lie of the ‘perfect life’; it only makes us depressed, anxious, addicted, and actually feeds our shame and self-loathing and feelings of failure. The constant striving eventually exhausts us, brings us to our knees. It’s too much work for the poor organism, to be ‘positive’ all the time.
The Unconscious is enraged by the lie. And it wants to fu***ng rest.
But in our exhausted state, afraid even to touch our exhaustion, we turn to medication, energy drinks, drugs, mantras, the gym, more positivity. Or we simply lose ourselves in thought. Or we create a new identity as ‘the depressed one’ or ‘the failure’. Or we simply ‘push through’ the exhaustion and just keep busy, and numb. Keep moving at any cost. Never stop.
Happiness literally makes us unhappy.
F**k this kind of false happiness. It’s vitally important to make room for the darkness too.
To create space in your life for the grief, the rage, the shame, the fear and the loneliness. To bring these poor, misunderstood creatures out of hiding and into the Light.
If you do not, they will drain your lifeblood like vampires.
Until you listen.
Be willing to expose your unhappiness, too. Give a voice to the sorrow, the anger, the fear, the deep loneliness at the core. Break some taboos. Say the ‘wrong’ thing. Shatter the false image. You may lose followers. You may lose friends. You may lose your job. You will certainly lose your mask.
Change may scare the s**t out of you. Good. It’s supposed to.
You may lose everything and you may have to begin life again. But the soul will rejoice. It has been through myriad deaths and rebirths. It couldn’t give a f**k about protecting itself from change. It finds change thrilling, life-giving, erotic even.
There is a bigger Happiness that actually embraces even our deepest unhappiness and does not shame it. This is the Happiness you have always longed for. The Happiness that strips off the mask, destroys our protections, sees our flaws, our vulnerabilities, our deepest sorrows… and accepts and loves us just as we are.
Okay. Here is your new spiritual mantra…
F**k (the mind’s concept of) happiness. F**k ‘Namaste’. F**k trying to be good. F**k spirituality. F**k perfection. F**k fitting in. F**k all the gods and gurus and guides who fuel the filthy lie of happiness as a destination and a goal. F**k this narcissistic, self-absorbed, shame-based culture that suppresses the feminine and our gorgeous vulnerability.
Accept it all and f**k it all. Bless it all and f**k it all and love it all. Open your heart to it all. Bless this silly human mind with its conditioned ideas and impossible standards and its never-ending attempts to tell us how we ‘should’ be, or what the ‘right’ thoughts and feelings are.
F**k the lie of happiness that sends so many to an early grave.
Protect the inner child, the one who feels unhappy, lonely, sad, disconnected, sometimes. Stop telling her to be happy, connected, peaceful, spiritual and blissed-out today. She couldn’t give a f**k. She just wants your love.
Drench the sad and lonely inner one with curiosity, understanding. Breathe into her.
F**k all the forces of the world that would seek to harm her or silence her.
And when she asks,
“Mommy, Daddy, do I have to be happy and perfect for you to love me?”
You can reply:
“Of course not my love. I love you exactly as you are. I love your flaws and imperfections and your vulnerable heart. They are all so beautiful to me. It’s okay to not feel peaceful. You don’t have to be happy right now. Let’s be unhappy together…”
Now THAT is fu***ng Happiness.
- Jeff Foster
