The Magic of Well-Being Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
The odds of being born are very, very small. It’s impossible to conceive of all the factors that came together throughout history so that we could be here. All of the people who found each other, the challenges they overcame, the timing of big events.
To be gifted life is, quite literally, a miracle. Magic, even.
And yet, despite our great fortune, many of us are unhappy.
Not an obvious unhappiness. It’s subtle. A feeling that things aren’t as they should be. A low-level malaise that leads us to wonder if the next best thing is just around the corner, when life is different, or better. When we are different, or better.
For a long time, this was my experience. I felt like a victim of life. Things happened “to me”—or didn’t happen to me—and my self-worth was dependent on external events going a certain way.
If I receive this award, then I’ll feel confident. If I get a boyfriend, I’ll finally feel attractive.
But no matter how many outward goals I achieved, there was always something else, another bargain I tried making with life. Another reason why I couldn’t be happy with things as they were.
In 2011, I reached a turning point. After experiencing a shattering tragedy, I finally woke up to how I was living. I didn’t like what I saw. I wasn’t kind to myself. My thoughts were often negative, and I purposefully played small, feeling unworthy of happiness and love.
Sometimes tragedy flips our world on its head, and from that vantage point, we see the things we were once blind to. We see a fundamental pain that we finally want to address. Not because we feel brave and strong, but because we don’t think we can keep living the way we have been.
This different vantage point—and a touch of desperation—fostered a new curiosity about my life. Did I want to continue playing small when my heart longed to do things that frightened me, like write books? Why did I think I was unworthy of love when I would never think that about someone else?
Could I actually find a way to be the person I wanted to be, someone who was resilient, who supported herself, and who didn’t wish to be different?
My curiosity opened doors. I began meditating and going on silent retreats. I read books about mindfulness and yoga, becoming a student of my heart, mind, and body. In many ways, I committed my life to exploring what it means to be human. Slowly, I felt my perspective shift. I started to see a way to be happy without making bargains with life. I started to see choices where I had thought none existed.
The deeper I dove, the more life lessons popped up in meditation settings and traditional wisdom teachings, but also in more contemporary sources, like Harry Potter and fashion icons. Uncovering a different way of living was magical. Not because it transported me to a fanciful place where life finally went the way I wanted, but because it drew me deeper into the life I was living and asked me to see the magic that was already there.
I wrote this book because sometimes life is hard. We feel challenged, and we don’t know what to do, or where to turn. I get it. I feel it, too. Inside this book are the most powerful tools and insights I’ve discovered on my journey. They help me feel a little more stable when my world is rocked. They soothe my heart when I’m overwhelmed. Most importantly, they’ve helped me craft a life where happiness isn’t fleeting—it’s lasting.
I don’t own this wisdom. It is age-old and threaded through many ancient traditions. The challenging thing with wisdom is it can feel inaccessible at times, so I put a modern spin on it. I believe that, more than ever, we need to look backwards to mindfully move forwards. We need ancient wisdom to find lasting happiness in our modern world.
I want to share these insights with you so that you can walk this journey with me, gently. These are learned skills. Ease and happiness are possible, if we’re willing to do the work. If we’re willing to practice again and again, and forgive ourselves for our mistakes along the way.
I believe well-being is the most magical thing on the planet. Once you start looking, you’ll see magic everywhere. In big life events, like marriage or promotions or the arrival of a baby, but also in small moments that only we see. There’s magic in forgiving yourself. There’s magic in pausing to watch a flock of birds soar through the sky in their instinctive formation. There’s magic in saying yes to your life, even when it’s hard. Because even our challenges can be a doorway into appreciating all that we have.
There is magic in each moment, if we’re open to it. I hope you are. I hope we can explore the magic of well-being together as we learn how to embrace life fully, starting now.
THE BATTLE
Without knowing it, we walk around armed. Each morning, as we don our clothes for the day and make coffee, we prepare other, invisible things.
Weapons.
The purpose of our weapons: to resist life.
How we use them: any way we can.
We attack, edit, bury, and ambush. We threaten and cajole, seeking to manipulate life into being exactly what we want. Some unconscious part of us believes that if we put up enough resistance, life will finally provide the things we’ve determined will bring us happiness.
Money. Relationships. Status. Balance. Perfection. Success.
Only when our requests have been fulfilled will be put down our weapons and just live.
But life hasn’t complied yet, so we release another battle cry and charge back onto the field. Never truly able to rest. Never truly satisfied with things as they are.
It’s not our fault. This battle rages unconsciously. But it’s critical that we bring it to our attention, because there’s a problem with this approach—a flaw in the premise, and it will always prevent us from achieving the lasting happiness we desire.
Life isn’t meant to be fought. It is meant to be lived, as if it were the greatest gift we’ve ever been handed.
ANOTHER WAY
When we resist life, we never feel whole. We don’t trust that our existence is meaningful and worthy, just as it is. We think we need to be different, better, or more.
This is a trap. There is no such thing as different or better or more. There is only here, now.
There is only us in this moment. If we don’t learn how to embrace our life fully, no amount of yoga pants or Brené Brown talks will recover the wholeness we believe has been lost.
But it hasn’t been lost. We are already whole, we are already worthy. And nothing in the expansive universe can take that away.
We just need to learn how to see it.
WELL-BEING
There is another option. A way to bypass the battle completely and finally experience lasting happiness.
It’s called well-being.
Well-being isn’t related to physical fitness or optimized nutrition. It is a state of being; a way to live the life we want now, without equivocation.
In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo laments to Gandalf that he wishes his life had been different.
“I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened,” he says.
Gandalf responds, “So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”
When we live in well-being, our happiness isn’t dependent on external circumstances. We put down our weapons and start embracing life not as we think it should be, but as it is. We start deciding what to do with the time that is given to us.