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What You Want is Not What You Need

Updated: Jan 29

What you want is not what you need. Read that again. Let me explain...


You think that you want to be happy. Happiness is fleeting, transient, and ephemeral. Happiness comes from outside of you and you have no control over it: It is an illusion, conditioned into you by society and your parents. Happiness is the result of external validation and external definitions of who you are, fake superficial beauty, and a total ignorance of how the world really works. Happiness always comes with regret and a hangover. We all choose wants and that’s why we are all so miserable. When was the last time you saw someone happy on the Underground or at work? Happiness is trying to get high. Happiness is the external layer of an emotion that you experience as it happens to you.


Joy is more than just an emotion and comes from within you. What you need is joy: This core value, that underpins all other positive core values, is unconditional, lasting, enduring, abiding, and lifelong once you step into your new way of BEing. Joy is the soul of happiness. Joy is clarity and true inner beauty, which manifests in an unmistakable, effulgent aura, and radiance. Joy is a lasting sense of bliss that gets higher and higher - there is no comedown from joy. Joy is BEing high.


Adela Rogers puts it beautifully “Joy seems to me a step beyond happiness - happiness is a sort of atmosphere you can live in sometimes when you’re lucky. Joy is a light that fills you with hope and Faith and love.” Mother Theresa concurred “Joy is prayer; joy is strength: joy is love; joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.” Prayer, yoga, mindfulness, and also meditation, as Amit Ray wrote is “A way for nourishing and blossoming the divinity within you.” This is the spiritual path.


Always choose needs over wants. It's the only path to joy.


So how do we meet our needs and choose joy? There are four pillars to joy.


The four pillars of joy

3. Peace and equanimity

4. A passionate life, which is a life fully lived


Out of these come joy. How to realise these four pillars and thus joy are what spiritual practice and yoga are all about. Yoga means union: It is the union of your mind, body, and spirit. Yoga is a philosophy of life and a state of mind .


Ram Dass, the Harvard Clinical Psychologist turned spiritual Master encapsulated these concepts beautifully in his offering called ‘Equanimity and Peace.’ Which explains how to live your life with sufficient clarity and perspective to get all you need for a life full of joy, not what your unruly, traumatised, spoilt, self-obsessed, infantile "Me, me, me" 'King Baby' ego wants but will never achieve in any lasting way.


'Equanimity and Peace' by Ram Dass


As the Rolling Stones sang in 'You Can't Always Get What You Want':


"I saw her today at the reception

A glass of wine in her hand

I knew she would meet her connection

At her feet was her footloose man


You can't always get what you want

But if you try sometimes you just might find

You just might find

You get what you need


I saw her today at the reception

In her glass was a bleeding man

She was practiced at the art of deception

Well, I could tell by her blood-stained hands, sing it


You can't always get what you want

But if you try sometimes you just might find

You just might find

You get what you need


I went down to the Chelsea drugstore

To get your prescription filled

I was standing in line with Mr. Jimmy

And, man, did he look pretty ill

We decided that we would have a soda

My favorite flavor, cherry red

I sung my song to Mr. Jimmy

Yeah, and he said one word to me, and that was "Dead"


I said to him

You can't always get what you want

But if you try sometimes you just might find

You just might find

You get what you need"


If you only go for what you want, you will likely end up miserable or even dead. If you build the four pillars of what you need, you will end up full of permanent joy, regardless of what is going around you in our conflict-ridden, dysfunctional, Dystopian, hateful, broken world.


Happiness is conditional, transient, and fleeting. Joy on the other hand is unconditional, constant and transcending. Joy never leaves you. Joy doesn’t come and go – but our awareness of it can. Happiness is for the moment, whereas joy is in the moment, and experienced in true deep presence. Joy is a state of BEing. Happiness is ‘because of’. Joy is ‘in spite of’. People pursue happiness but go within to find joy. Happiness reacts. Joy endures hardship and trials and connects with meaning and purpose.


Eckhart Tolle wrote “To know yourself as the BEing underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, Enlightenment.” In the Bible James (1:2-4) wrote “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds.” One does not need to follow any religion to be inspired by joy during adversity. Like love, joy is fearless and untroubled by the world. It is as if nothing in the world can tarnish or diminish the essence of joy. As such, it is free, and is your key to freedom.


We all have the capacity to look within. It’s possible to experience joy in difficult times., whereas happiness isn’t present in darkness and difficulty. In its truest expression, joy transforms difficult times into blessings, obstacles into lessons, and turns heartache into gratitude. Rumi, the poet and philosopher wrote “Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take its place.”


Joseph Campbell, the author of “The Hero’s Journey” said “Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.” In choosing joy, there is hope. With joy, hardship offers growth and opportunity. Carlos Santana said “If you carry joy in your heart, you can heal at any moment.” William Blake wrote so eloquently “He who binds to himself to joy, does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in eternity's sun rise.” Buddha said “We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.” Perhaps the Buddha could have used the word sunshine. So, joy flows from the inside out.


Therefore, joy is a fundamental pillar of transformation, it is our constant companion, our inspiration, and our source of hope and love. Joy underpins all the other positive core values, such as love, service, authenticity, zest, compassion, peace, personal growth, and creativity: These are my core values. Joy is the energetic serenity that fuels our artistic drive and our drive to succeed in line with our core values. True joy is a limitless, life-defining, transformative reservoir waiting to be tapped into. Upon discovering joy, many people experience a greater sense of clarity and creativity that rushes through them. Joy can be the author of your life if you allow it to be. The key to transformation is to awaken as your adult Self, the real author of your true story, to be the main protagonist, and to step into that role, become present. Say “I know who I am”. Be full of love, joy, and compassion. Leave the Drama Triangle.


In one of the Upanishads, the classic texts of Indian literature, it is written: “From joy springs all creation; By joy it is sustained. Towards joy it proceeds; and to joy it returns.” Something inside you bubbles up and it flows and erupts out of your heart. It needs nothing external to sustain it. Rumi wrote “When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.” Bring joy to every communication and obstacle. Try it. You will be creative, fearless, limitless, and at peace. Deepak Chopra said “According to Vedanta, there are only two symptoms of Enlightenment, just two indications that a transformation is taking place within you toward a higher consciousness. The first symptom is that you stop worrying. Things don't bother you anymore. You become light-hearted and full of joy. The second symptom is that you encounter more and more meaningful coincidences in your life, more and more synchronicities. And this accelerates to the point where you actually experience the miraculous.”


While your happiness is accountable to your wishes, desires, and goals, joy is, has and always will live within you. With joy, self-esteem and self-respect are indestructible. Helen Keller wrote “One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar… Your success and happiness lies in you. Your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.” Because of this, aiming for joy is infinitely more beneficial in life, as it is less transitory than happiness and is not tied to external circumstances, judgements, or opinions. Happiness may be caused by luck, egocentric pleasures, dwells on the materialistic, and is not reliable. Bertrand Russell said “A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.” I call this place of presence 'energetic serenity'. Eckhart Tolle calls this 'alert stillness'. Happiness tends to be externally triggered and is based on other things, people, places, events, and the intrusive thoughts that are triggered by them. Most people overemphasise the attractiveness of happiness and expect it to happen in the most grand way with fireworks and fairytales, especially in 'romantic' relationships. That is the basis of addiction – seeking a neurochemical dopamine high. With joy there is no craving for more, as it is enough. Percy Shelley said “I have drunken deep of joy, And I will taste no other wine tonight.” Joy is happiness without a reason – it doesn’t need a cause to exist. It comes when you make peace with who you are, why you are and how you are. When you need nothing more than your truth and the unconditional love of your Higher Self to bring peace and compassion then you have settled into the abiding joy that is not rocked by relationships or anything external to your Self.


So, happiness is a destination, whereas joy is an attitude. Happiness is future-oriented and it puts all its eggs in someone else's basket: This is never a good idea. Joy does needs you to connect though – this connection is often with other people or things in your lives, such as pets, hobbies, creative pursuits, and so on. So, it’s a connection, not an attachment. Think of your body as a world where happiness is like breezes, delightful, and inevitably pleasing, but joy is the ever-present oxygen, regardless of the wind.


Happiness weighs heavily on our subconscious: When we don’t meet the expectations that we set for ourselves, it effects our happiness in the different areas of our lives. Joy carries no burden or expectations. The truth is, you are never going to experience true happiness unless you practice joy.


So, be kind to your Self: Give your Self what you need, and not want you 'want'. And remember that when you meet another soul, see and hear their soul. That is how you will serve and be free.


Namaste.


Sending you love, light, and blessings brothers.


Olly



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Hello,

I am delighted and enchanted to meet you. I coach men with 'Deep Coaching', 'Supercoaching', and Transformative Life Coaching (TLC). Thank you for reading this far. I very much look forward to connecting with the highest version of you, to seeing your highest possibility, and to our conversations. Please do contact me via my email for a free connection call and a free experience of coaching on Zoom or in person. 


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