Nothing can make you happy without your permission.
Nothing can make you unhappy without your permission.
This is the meaning of Secret Number One: Everything You Need to Be Happy Is Inside of You—that you already possess the power to decide to be happy or unhappy. In this way, you create your own heaven or your own hell, your own contentment or your own misery, from moment to moment.
Understanding this principle is the first step in becoming emotionally and spiritually free, because you begin to see that what you feel and experience at any time is ultimately up to you. This kind of freedom isn’t something anyone else can give you—it’s the freedom only you can bestow on yourself by living each day from the inside out. Then you start to have true control over your life and your destiny, not by trying to make everything perfect on the outside, but by learning how to tap into your own source of happiness and peace on the inside.
Who Robs You of Your Ecstasy?
One of the reasons I made a serious commitment to my spiritual growth when I was still a teenager was that I was fed up with watching my state of well-being go up and down, up and down, depending upon what was happening in my life. No wonder I was so miserable—I felt like a boat without an anchor, or even a rudder, being tossed around by the stormy seas of circumstance. By the time I turned eighteen, I began formally practicing meditation, and I have continued this and other spiritual disciplines for the past thirty years. And at a certain point after I reached the age of forty-five, I thought I’d achieved a pretty steady state of consciousness. I was spending each summer on a spiritual retreat, where I would dive deep into my own inner silence and experience great tranquillity and contentment.
It was following a summer like this several years ago when suddenly, out of the blue, my life was bombarded by one painful challenge after another, professionally, personally, financially, you name it. It all seemed to hit me at once, like a cosmic hurricane, and no area of my world was left untouched. I remember waking up each morning, my stomach in knots, my heart hurting, not wanting to get out of bed, and thinking, “What happened? Everything was going so well. Where did my peace of mind go?”
In this state of emotional panic, I called someone very dear to me who is a female monk and meditation teacher. Tears fell from my eyes as I listed all of my personal dramas, tragedies, and dilemmas, each one sounding worse than the one before. She patiently and silently listened on the other end of the phone, and when I was finished, there was a long pause in the conversation. Then, in a very gentle but strong voice she said, “Barbara, who is robbing you of your ecstasy?”
“Finally,” I thought to myself, “someone who understands what a terrible time I am going through!” and I began reciting names as an answer to her question: “This person is doing this to me, and this business associate did this to me, and this situation is doing this to me.…”
Again, and more firmly, she asked: “But Barbara, who is robbing you of your ecstasy?”
Suddenly, I felt as if someone had just thrown a bucket of cold water on my face and woken me up from a deep sleep. “Who is robbing you of your ecstasy?” All at once, I realized the profound truth that lay hidden in what she was asking. I did know how to contact my own happiness, my own ecstasy. Just a few months before, this woman had seen me in such a high, peaceful state, a state based on my own inner joy. Then I’d returned home to a turbulent time in my life, and had allowed people and circumstances to rob me of that experience. In fact, no one was really doing anything to me—I was doing it to myself by deciding that I couldn’t be happy anymore if I had these problems or these situations. I was the cause of my own pain. I was robbing myself of my own ecstasy.
That phone call had a profound impact on me. In the days and weeks that followed, I looked carefully at my life “story,” and realized that I had been allowing others to rob me of my ecstasy and personal happiness for as long as I could remember. Even though I had never been the victim type who actively and angrily blamed people or situations for my suffering, I did secretly feel that others were the cause of my pain. “If you hadn’t broken up with me, I would still be happy … if you hadn’t tried to cheat me in business, I would still be happy … if this hadn’t happened to me, I would still be happy.”
Somehow, the words my wise friend had used created a huge shift in my awareness. I was stunned to realize how much power I had been giving others over me without their even knowing it! And that was the key—that I was the one giving away that power, I was the one giving away my own happiness.
No one else ever robs you of your happiness, your ecstasy. You rob yourself by making your ecstasy dependent upon others.
Since that powerful conversation with my friend, I have incorporated her question as a part of my own inner process of contemplation. Whenever I notice myself feeling unhappy, I stop and ask: “Barbara, who is robbing you of your ecstasy right now?” Of course, I ultimately arrive at the same answer: “I am.” And that begins to point me back in the right direction, and reminds me that everything I need to be happy is, indeed, inside of me.
This is what’s so exciting about Secret Number One:
The only thing wrong with you is that you don’t understand that there is nothing wrong with you, that there is nothing essential missing.
Nothing is going to make you more perfect or more whole than you already are now. You could finally find the right partner or get the right job or lose the right amount of weight or make the right amount of money, but it still wouldn’t add to your perfection. It still wouldn’t improve the essence of your soul. Who you really are inside doesn’t need any improvement—it just needs to be recognized and understood.
So what is this place inside of you that is the source of happiness, of contentment, of your own ecstasy? Every religious and spiritual tradition in the world refers to this Perfect Self within us, that which is beyond our personality, our actions, our thoughts, and feelings. The Bible calls it the Kingdom of Heaven. In Eastern traditions, it is called the atman or the Buddha Nature. It is the essential, unchanging core within you. It is your consciousness, the part that knows you exist, and identifies you as you, and not someone else. It is your goodness, it is your passion, it is your peace, it is your love.
You already are familiar with this part of yourself. You have moments when you experience it, when you’re in touch with yourself in a deep and meaningful way. Perhaps you’re watching a breathtaking sunset, or giving a hug to a friend or family member, or doing a simple task like arranging flowers in a vase or making a salad, when suddenly you feel a surge of love rise up in your heart, and you’re overcome with a recognition of rightness about the moment, as if everything is as it should be, as if everything makes sense.
What is it that you are feeling in these magical moments? Your own love. Your own self. Your own source of happiness. It’s already and always there inside of you. In fact, it is the real you, the you underneath all of your fears and patterns and emotional wounds and forgetfulness.
Secret Number One says that when you learn how to drink from your own well of quiet inner joy, you will begin to experience a self-reliance that you could never achieve through any outer accomplishment or circumstance. It’s not that you don’t enjoy what comes to you on the outside in the form of your relationships and your daily pleasures. But you are no longer dependent on these to make you happy. You are no longer a prisoner of circumstances. You know that, ultimately, you are your own source of fulfillment And this is when you become really free as a human being.
You Can’t Prevent