One of my colleages at work is a very spiritual Brahma Kumari. I’ve always been interested in asking her more about what she believes in, but keeping my spiritual interests on the low and the fact that I find her relentlessly chipper attitude a bit annoying sometimes, I have not. However, the other day we were talking about something, and she said she was sad that she missed a talk at her Kumari-center. She was looking forward to the next one about being happy all the time.
Happy all the time? All the Time? Wow, I’d like some of that.
I asked her about being happy all the time, and she said that the Brahma Kumari’s believe that Happiness is part of your inner being, it’s an inner thing, and as such, it does not need to be influenced by the outside world. You either let stuff take your happiness away, or you don’t.
Wow, I thought. Happy all the time? I wish I could be like that. So on the way home, I was thinking, “I’m not happy all the time, is there something, I’m not getting, am I running up the wrong spiritual tree etc” in the way you secretly do in your brain, so I picked up a handy copy of Franchesca De Grandis’ Be A Goddess! I had stashed in my bag and opened a random page. She says:
“Folks tend to see spirituality as joy, revelation, love, healing, and personal achievement. But a legitimate spiritual journey is equally about setback, disillusionment, fear, personal shortcomings that are ruining your life yet seem eradicable, and sometimes not seeing that you have made a lot of headway. Anyone whose so-called spiritual journey is all joy and freedom is either a far better person than I or a liar to themselves and others. OK, maybe liar is a bit harsh. How about delusionally psychotic?”
Cheers Franchesca. I deeply believe we are here to live and love our incarnation on this planet, and focus on our presence in this very material, earthy, sometimes difficult world, which sometimes come with real, earthy difficult feelings. Emotions are a part of life – they are inescapable. To follow a spiritual path is to jump down into the crappy emotions sometimes, to come out stronger and more able to be ourselves, live our truth and change our lives to how in our hearts soul we want them to be. A dive to the bad bits to remove what keeps you fully experiencing the happy bits, if you will.
Be that as it may, I’m going to try and get down to that talk. Perpetual happiness hell yeah.