Success and happiness- Are they mutually exclusive?

I was watching the other night a documentary on the legendary broadcaster Anthony Bourdain on CNN. The show was focusing on his lifestyle, his relationships or absence of them, his difficulty achieving self-love and his reliance on opioids to fill his inner emptiness, choosing to escape from reality rather than confront the demons which led him to his suicide/alleged overdose from heroin; an addiction which he talked about openly if not reluctantly.

Addiction is a sensitive topic to discuss because it reveals our fragility, vulnerability, weaknesses of character, and choices we make to avoid life’s hardships and struggles.

There seems to a connection between addiction and creative expression, impulsive or compulsive behaviours, and Attention-deficit–hyper disorder. The penchant for continuous travel and working long hours lends itself to dependency on substances which then assist one in escaping the down time of being a celebrity.

Getting back to the title of this blog: is Happiness and Success mutually exclusive or can one be successful and happy?

I would think that happiness would automatically be a requisite for being successful or at least a major attribute to feeling one had accomplished or achieved some measure of self-fulfillment.

Being fulfilled: satisfied with one’s station in life may be considered as being the yardstick by which we measure success. Recognition of one’s achievements by others seems to be, for me, to be a measure of my success. Earlier this year I received an email advising me that I’d reached the milestone of 10,000 views of my blog: Spiritual enrichment-Ways to be Well.

I have to admit that at the moment in time that I received this accolade I thought it was pretty significant and that I could give myself credit for some measure of achievement as a writer(Broadly defined).

However one might say that success would be measured by the commercial or financial success which would be accompanying an achievement of publishing by the $$dollars attached to the achievement or even emotionally by the number of comments and replies to the blogs which gave some measure of substantial meaning to the enlightenment of spirit.

By my yardstick, I didn’t achieve success from this achievement. I didn’t make any money from it, directly or indirectly that I noticed; I didn’t get any illuminating comments or number of forwards which would make me think that others thought as I did about what I wrote and deemed the words or wisdom worthy of being shared and distributed.

Was I happy? Am I happy? Yes, of course. Happy is a state of being in the absence of doing.

Because I don’t measure my happiness by what I do or achieve. I measure my happiness by the absence of pain and suffering in my life. The opposite of pain and suffering, for me, is peacefulness and joy.

I feel that I have a modest amount of peace and joy in my soul. I am a recovered addict/substance overuser of tobacco and alcohol over a period of 22 years, and am now 32 years free of dependency.

This is a measure of personal success and inner celebrity-dom. I am pleased with who I am since starting on the journey of freeing myself from addiction when I was 37 years old. I promised myself that I would live life one day at at time, re-committing to myself every day and doing the best I could to maintain my sobriety. After 12 years of total abstinence from alcohol I came to a realization that I could indulge in consuming alcohol beverages with moderation and that I didn’t have to drink till I passed out or got drunk. I had the realization that I was no longer the man who was the addict 12 years before.

I am now celebrating 32 years of sobriety, as I call it, free of the need to consume alcohol, and aware that I am not dependent on it to be well.

yet also free to indulge or consume alcohol daily, if desired, to maintain health, inner peace, and joy.

Is alcohol necessary to be well…. of course not, it’s just been my path to keep it in my diet without judgment.

How I feel about myself at any moment in time is my measure of success. Whether I am happy is not a question I ask myself anymore because I’m living every moment in life as it occurs and feeling joy in its presence.

Peace and joy live in absolute absence of doing or achieving any act of performance for oneself or others. Yes I sometimes allow myself to feel joy in the assistance to someone else as an act of service. The joy comes from having the freedom to help someone else, not from the satisfaction of the ego, but of the heart. The heart is bigger when we help someone else through an act of service or donation of a part of our acquired wealth .

Successful as a musician, singer, songwriter and performer/recording engineer.

I decided in 2002 when I was 50 years old that I wanted to sing, compose songs with lyrics and melodies, record them and then share them with the public and friends. This year is my 20 year anniversary and it coincides with my 20th anniversary of being a self-employed registered massage therapist operating a private healing clinic. But I digress.

The musical achievement has resulted in my purchasing two keyboards, and other miscellaneous recording equipment and accessories and perfecting the art. I have composed and recorded approx. 110 songs and shared them on various platforms: myspace, reverbnation, soundcloud, instagram, and facebook from 2007-2022. In 2013 I took my best 45 songs and built up three sets which i performed at a coffeehouse cafe in Transcona Winnipeg for friends and guests of l’Arche Tovacafé. I had a tip-hat on a stool and got $80.00 one night out of the three performances. I had the opportunity to be joined by Ross McCoomb, a friend of over 47 years who is a self-taught percussionist adept at the spoons. That to me was a successful event at the time and will always be one of fond memories.

I was able , in 2007, after taking a week workshop at Hollyhock Retreat Resort with Michael Waters, to get the assistance from new friends at Etched in Sound music studio to arrange and produce one of my songs °Tear the Barriers Down° with added drum track and background vocals .

Over the years I uploaded my compositions on http://www.soundcloud.com/RogerRFontaine

and on: https://soundcloud.com/pranicroger

What is happiness, joy, inner peace?

What is happiness and joy? Where does it reside? Can it be purchased like fuel for your car?

Can you store it in your body for future times when you may be experiencing a difficult time?

What does it feel like to be happy and joyful? What do we want to do when we are experiencing this inner reality?
These are all questions which form the basis for this blog. I will attempt to formulate answers to these above questions with sensitivity.

Aristotle stated happiness this way: ‘Any element which comprises happiness must be attainable by all of humanity‘.

And yet he included elements which were based on accumulation over a lifetime and which were only afforded to free men: health, wealth, and honour. Greek society equated happiness with physical accumulation. There was no concept of universal equality amongst humans as demonstrated by their treatment of slaves and women treated as chattel or possessions. Happiness only belonged to virtuous  ‘freemen’. And the morality and virtue of Greek elites is no model for a  contemporary cooperative post- modern society.

Universal happiness and joy can be described two ways: as an absence of suffering and pain comprising its absence,  and as the presence of inner peace and serenity expressed positively as love and kindness.

The achievement of inner peace and serenity is realized by removing the mental and emotional clutter or impediments which prevents the inner space from being still. This emotional and mental clutter is composed of mental forms such as thoughts, thought forms and when an emotion or craving is attached to a thought the result is a thought entity. These thought entities actually have energetic substance and affect our mental state, emotional state, speech, and actions.

Happiness and joy resides in the aura and in the heart chakra. Activating the heart chakra through meditation on the heart and its qualities increases the inner stillness and motivation to perform acts of service: increasing the person’s goodwill and the will to do good.

The heart chakra is connected with the subtle energy body or aura through invisible energetic connections between the subtle energy body and the physical, mental, and emotional bodies.

It may sound strange to hear that we have four bodies: physical, emotional, mental, and energetic or spiritual. The reality is that our physical body is integrated with our mind, our emotions, and our soul.

The only body which we can see is the physical body, however, it is possible through pranic healing scanning to feel the energetic body. This modern pranic healing method, developed by Grand Master Choa Kok Sui, makes it possible for everyone, who wants to, to learn how to scan, cleanse, and energize their personal body and perform self-healing. These techniques also prepare the pranic healing student to heal others.

Prana or life-force resides in our aura or energetic body and interacts with our other three bodies.  It is not important to understand the mechanism by which these bodies interact in order to achieve healing results. Prana doesn’t need to be purchased and it is abundantly available around us in the suns’ energy and in the air and ground and in every living being on earth. The planet is a reservoir of prana.

The practice of pranic healing allows the practitioner to firstly cleanse one’s personal  aura and energy centers or chakras through meditation. The meditation which has been developed by MCKS is the twin hearts meditation, also called ‘Planetary Peace Meditation’. The twin hearts are the physical heart and the crown. http://www.ppmaudiostream.org

Divine or spiritual energy enters the human body and aura through the crown chakra which is situated at the top of the head. Prana or life-force energy can be absorbed and passed through the body by mindfulness of the energetic force which surrounds us and which is connected to the spiritual plane of  being. Prana has cleansing qualities and energizing qualities. Our body can be compared to a component in a circuit with the spiritual plane above us contacting us through our crown chakra with the energy going through our body, contacting our eleven major chakras, and then continuing down through our base chakra into the ground through our grounding cord. By driving prana through this circuit we are able to join the pure divine spiritual energies through our upper chakras and connect with the kundalini energy of the lower chakras which are connected to Mother Earth. In this way the incarnated soul is able to control the wild emotions and thoughts which can be strongly influenced by the kundalini energy source.

Happiness and joy reside in our energy body and in our emotional, mental and physical bodies.

When the heart, ajna, and crown chakras are connected with the ‘higher soul’ which is the source of all happiness and  inner peace the lower emotional body can be brought under control of the mind, which is a tool of the soul. As Grand Master would say: ‘the computer user is not the computer’.

When we realize that we are not the body, not the mind, not the thoughts or the emotions, that we are principally the ‘soul’, then we can control our emotions and thoughts and sustain inner peace, happiness and joy.

There are however ways to increase our inner peace, happiness, and joy, and that is by giving it away.

Giving love and happiness to others through acts of unconditional service is the quickest and purest way to increase our own inner peace and happiness reservoir.

By decreasing our own inner suffering and filling our reservoir with joy and happiness we can then share it with others whose reservoir is empty and whose suffering doesn’t allow them to be open to the love which is given. A reservoir which is filled with suffering makes no room for adding any joy or happiness. One must first remove the suffering to make space for love and inner peace.

By forgiving those who have hurt us, by offering to make amends to those whom we’ve hurt, we can begin to open our heart reservoir to receive the offerings of love, inner peace, stillness, happiness and joy which are available to all.

Learning the nature of suffering also is a pre-requisite for becoming an open channel for love and inner peace. Suffering is composed of self-absorption, ignorance, and attachment to cravings and desires which are not wholesome. Right thought, right speech, right action. This makes up the trinity of Buddhist philosophy.

Acceptance and detachment are the tools for obtaining the trinity and for sustaining our inner peace and for transforming ourselves and those whom we touch with our practice.

Change is one of the five certainties, along with illness, aging, grieving, and dying.