How To Find Happiness In The Face Of Adversity (Personal Development Wisdom Snippets) | #619

[Agi Keramidas]
Welcome to Personal Development Mastery Podcast and this is another snippet of wisdom where I select my favorite most insightful moments from previous episodes. Let's dive right in.

[Matt O'Neill]
Here's the reality. Change is the only constant. And what is adversity?

But change. We don't want the world to change. We want the people we love to stay alive.

They won't. We don't want our to age and get sick. It's going to.

We don't want our money to be disturbed. It's going to be disturbed. We don't want things to come into our business and hurt it.

They are going to happen. Change is a constant. So adversity is life.

Until we learn how to be happy through adversity, we will never ever be happy because adversity is the only constant. And that question is the crux of conscious happiness. All of a sudden you start.

So this was me. I said my path to happiness was through suffering. I was suffering through money loss, business problems, too much work, too much on my plate.

It was just this overwhelming suffering. I was cracking under pressure. It was all self-created.

But I thought that all this adversity shouldn't be happening, that I shouldn't have to go through it, that it was unfair. And that's when I started to seek how can I be happy with this adversity. And this is the truth.

The only suffering is from the story you tell yourself. The only thing that can ever hurt you is your own negative story. Nothing can actually hurt you other than your story.

That's a bold statement. I'm sure everyone listening, the person listening is going to try to poke holes in it, absolutely try to poke holes in it. It is tried and true.

There is no way to actually poke holes in this on a grand scheme of things. There's a few things that are absolutely true that I've learned. The universe is looking out for you in your highest good.

You can call it God, the universe, whatever word you want to say. It is always looking out for your highest good. And your highest good is always leading you to a amount of surrender and love.

So that means everything that happens to you is happening for your growth, surrender, and is happening in a very beautiful, loving way to urge you to be more free and more happy in the midst of adversity and change. When you have this knowing, all of a sudden the thing that totally upsets you, you know, let's say I had somebody that betrayed me. And it was such a deep betrayal.

I worked with them for 10 years. And then they went and opened up a new company and then called everyone in my company. And it felt like they were just stealing everything that I had worked so hard to build after all I had done was love them.

It was like a true betrayal, you know? And I'm like, and I couldn't understand it. The pain was crazy.

I couldn't understand why someone I love so much would want to hurt me to help themselves. And that's when I had to learn and I had to grow. And I had to say, this isn't happening to me.

This is happening for me. My own emotions about this are telling me that I'm not free yet. Until I can figure out how to love this person and love this situation, I'm not where I need to be.

And it's not easy. This is where Eckhart Tolle says the path to enlightenment is not a rosy path. It's like, if you want, if you really want this, you're going to be tested with some super hard stuff, right?

Like crazy hard. At the exact same time, my stepfather passed from cancer. I was in the cancer ward with him every week talking to the doctors.

You know, my mom's heart is broken. My heart is broken. They live a mile from us.

This is grandfather to my children. They were at our house every week. You know, it's, you know, I'm going through both of these adversities at the same time.

And what it is, is the world urging me to see the beauty in all of life, even in death. Because, you know, and this is where, this is where eternal soul and God has to be part of happiness. The truth is we are eternal.

The truth is, is that when we die, we just shed the body and we continue. That's the truth. Until we know that truth, we are extremely fearful all the time.

We're fearful of everyone we know dying. We're fearful of our own death. And then anything that would threaten life in the slightest becomes a master catastrophe and we fall apart and we can never find peace and happiness until we find this absolute truth.

How do you find that truth? You study. Like you go, you go with people who've already walked this path and then you find it within yourself.

You find your own connection to that eternal peace. And this is, we've talked about this with prayer, with meditation. All of a sudden you start to see all these synchronicities and the magic in your own life.

And that's how you prove it to yourself that this is what I'm saying right now is absolutely true. So yeah. So how do we do, how do we find happiness in the face of this adversity?

Well, you know, let's, let's use both of these examples. I'm just going to go into my real life. We, we affectionately called John Opa and Opa's passing, you know, so sad, such a sad emotion, you know, tears.

And how are we going to figure out how to move on from this? And then why would God take him when life was so beautiful with him here? Well, when, when we lose someone we love, it shows us how much we appreciate the people who are still here.

It also shows us that we probably are taking things for granted. I started to love everyone I was around at a deeper level at that loss. I started to show people I worked with that I loved them even more because I started to notice they could be gone tomorrow too.

I started to cherish every moment I got with my mom, with my wife, with my children. You know, these are the gifts that loss can show us because there are countless other people in our life that are still here after we lose someone we love dearly. And now we have an opportunity to love them more fiercely than ever before.

That's the gift and loss. The betrayal. What was the gift in the betrayal?

What, where is this leading me? Well, of course, an opportunity to learn how to have compassion because I've betrayed people in my life. And this betrayal was just an opportunity for me to forgive and have compassion for someone who's doing the best that they can.

And it was a, it had to be that real. It had to feel that hurtful in order for me to actually get to work on myself. If it wasn't that hurtful, if it was comfortable to go through, I wouldn't have had to work as hard, but because it was so uncomfortable, I had to learn new ways of seeing people to say, and now at this point, people do things.

And I'll like just yesterday, I was talking to a friend of mine who's going through a divorce and he calls me and he said, Matt, I was cheated on. She was having an affair with somebody at work and I've got all these recordings and I'm going to get her in court. And my new view is that's not the way to happiness.

Doesn't matter if someone did you wrong. The only thing that will ultimately make you happy is compassion and love for this person. Yes, she hurts you.

Your heart is absolutely broken and you won't be happy and you won't have peace until you find absolute compassion and understanding for the mistake that she made. And this was exactly what I said to my friend yesterday. He may or may not take my advice.

That's not up to me. It's his path to learn, but he will suffer until he makes that choice. And I only learned that by going through the betrayal and hating and wanting revenge and finding that I was unhappy until I came to the point of seeing this person is doing the very best they can.

Yes, their actions felt hurtful, but I can totally see how they did it and they're not awful and they're not evil. In fact, if they were working with me today, I would just love them to pieces.

[Agi Keramidas]
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