Reorienting Myself in Happiness

Recently, I have had a new experience with happiness—not for me but for others. Each time it came with such quickness as not to be contained, but floated around my body like a split milkweed’s pod suddenly filling the air with downy seed-carriers. I have come to think of this happy feeling as emerging from a deeper, more genuine place within me—a presence apart from thought. Each freeing of happiness for another has created an uplift of mine, with its rewarding insight of this being a new me, and how happiness might appear from now on.

About 2000, in an inner child group that I was leading, I made a drawing of colored markers for the suggested topic of, “Letting Your Child Out to Play.”* I kept it for my wonder at its surprising expression of happiness. Having brought it to India, I now took it out and pinned it to the kitchen corkboard.

Relating my drawing to my recent experiences of happiness, I now feel more clearly aware of happiness being within me, with its own vitality, and recognize that I have not frequently been in touch with it living here. Appreciation and gratitude are my bywords, but happiness has not been. Passing by the corkboard throughout the day, a glance at my drawing brings a smile—for the girl and her clown almost lift upward under soaring balloons.

My realization is, “Taking out what we have put away as a treasure, we may discover that a forgotten vitality freshens us in a new way, adding to who we are now.”

*Lucia Capacchione, Recovery of Your Inner Child (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1991).