why you can be happy | Cherie Roe Dirksen

The Slippery Slope of Getting Stuck in More

On my life’s journey, I’ve dedicated most of what I do to the creative arts. When I felt I hadn’t ‘succeeded’ in becoming the world famous artist or writer my ego wanted me to be — I created more. And more.

I painted more paintings to add to the collection (sitting gathering dust) or I wrote more content because maybe ‘this’ one would be the one to go viral.

Now don’t get me wrong — I actually enjoyed doing most of these activities but, in the same breath, felt like I was drowning myself in product and content. Do, do, do instead of be, be, be.

Human Doing vs Human Being

All of what I’ve achieved to this point has made me who I am, and I’m totally cool with that. The thing I want to stress in this blurb is the ‘auto-pilot’ I was on. I’m in awe of how much one can learn about oneself and the deeper the rabbit hole gets, the more funk comes floating on by.

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

I recently outed this auto-pilot program and it’s insatiable thirst for ‘more’ and the penny dropped.

Less is more. Quality over quantity.

Just stop ‘doing’ and you will see that what you want is already there — it’s inside you waiting to be revealed.

But here was my trap:

I thought (and this could apply to any given trade) that when I didn’t sell one of my paintings — fresh off the easel — that the next one would be ‘the one’. I would grind over whether I was choosing the right subject matter, style, mediums, whatever! Now, I was selling my art but not nearly as many as I desired to sell.
I thought that perhaps my art wasn’t flying off the shelf because I had self worth issues but that just didn’t resonate with how I felt inside. I liked what I was doing and I enjoyed doing it. Where’s the problem?
I thought ‘the problem’ lay in point no. 1 (not hitting the ‘sweet spot’) — hence, I started going around in circles creating more stuff and more stuff to market. I created more work for myself as each piece needed to be loaded onto my online stores, online galleries, sent to art licensing agents and/or taken to physical galleries. Life wasn’t getting simple (desire), it was getting complicated (nightmare) and this was not my intention at all. So, where was it all going so wrong? Read related article: How to Stop Monkey Mind Manifesting

Here’s my solution:

I had a conversation with HQ (Head Quarters/Higher Self — read related article: How to Communicate Instantly with Your Higher Self for Speedy Manifesting) and simply asked for what I wanted. Boom. Within 24 hours there was a sale from a site that I had yet to sell on and had been a member for over 4 years!
I got a ‘download’ (we are in a matrix/hologram/construct after all) that I was a scatterbrain. I was stretching myself out in so many directions that I couldn’t concentrate on one thing at a time. This left me with little quality time to spend on each thing I was trying to manifest. Trying to do them all at once was leaving me tired, confused and unfocused.
The solution was to focus on one thing at a time — giving quality of attention to each unique thing, taking it slow and methodically. Then when I achieved what I was after, I could focus on the next thing instead of attempting it all and feeling overwhelmed.
The BIGGEST a-ha moment came when HQ started sending the most profound synchronicities my way to try and show me that all I had to do was get quiet and ask — I had to get out of my own way. I knew this intrinsically but with the fast pace of life, I’m sure you feel the same way sometimes, I can get swept away in all the ‘junk’ I think I have to do that really turned out to be time wasting BS.

Learning is great — it’s the journey we take — but sometimes different perspective is sorely needed. I don’t regret the journey but welcome this new viewpoint with relish and relief.

Go Talk to the Flower, it Knows

I even started to notice this ‘pattern’ in my garden (I love my garden as it is the macrocosm to my microcosm — the hologram reflecting the whole). I have a rather large garden with a lot going on. I’ve got sections of vegetable and fruit patches, sections of flower beds, entertainment areas, indigenous garden beds, etc. — you get the picture.

“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better” — Albert Einstein

When I moved here in 2014 the garden was bland and pretty lifeless. I had a vision of creating a wonderland and I mapped it out and started the work.

However, the climate here in the South African Karoo is severe — winter brings frost and sometimes snow and summer brings heat-waves that kill off plants in one fell swoop.

To say the least, it’s been a learning curve for hubby and me.

After my HQ dialogue, I began to see that because I was scattering myself all over my garden — trying to do everything at once — it wasn’t quite looking the way I had envisioned.

Can’t See the Forest For the Trees

Again, this was because (notice the same pattern at work as with the art):

When a plant didn’t ‘take off’ — I went out and bought other plants that I thought would. When these didn’t ‘take off’, I continued to buy more and more and more for the garden.
Instead of focusing on getting one patch to work, I spread myself all over trying to make it all work at once to little avail.
When things weren’t looking good, I decided it was because I had to create another ‘section’ of the garden to work on thus creating more work for myself and little attention to what was already there. I can be such an arsehole sometimes, I mean really! But when life is happening, one seldom takes time to reflect or to truly look at what you’re doing — it’s that damn auto-pilot again!

Crashing the Plane and Starting Again

I decided to crash the auto-pilot program and start anew. Now I pay attention to various sections of my garden. Give them a good soak with the sprinkler instead of dashing hither and thither with a hosepipe. Whilst the sprinkler is on, I can dead-head, weed and potter at my leisure.

My garden is already responding.

In my life, things are just falling into place. I have had miraculous turn of events and am very happy in my chosen careers and feel like, finally, I have regained control. The key was always to simplify and get the most quality out of my chosen experience and I now know how that feels: It feels good!

I was choking under all the fluff I was creating and realized that all I had to do was get clarity, awareness and a little bit of guidance from HQ. Now, in this place of calm, everything is just naturally falling into place.

I hope this helps those of you who are perhaps trying too hard to get where you want or what you want — let go and let your HQ guide you to your dreams in the quickest way possible.

Cherie Roe Dirksen is a self-empowerment author, multi-media artist and musician from South Africa.

To date, she has published 3 self-help and motivational books and brings out weekly inspirational blogs at her site www.cherieroedirksen.com. Get stuck into finding your passion, purpose and joy by downloading some of those books gratis when you click HERE.

Her ambition is to help you to connect with your innate gift of creativity and living the life you came here to experience by taking responsibility for your actions and becoming the co-creator of your reality. You can follow Cherie on Facebook (The Art of Empowerment — for article updates). She has an official art Facebookpage (Cherie Roe Dirksen – for new art updates). You can also check out her Facebook band page at Templeton Universe.

Cherie posts a new article on CLN every Thursday. To view her articles, click HERE.

This article (How to Avoid Quantitative Action Dissatisfaction) was originally written for and published byConscious Life News and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author Cherie Roe Dirksen

“Happiness is an inside job” — William Arthur Ward

“Be happy with what you have and are, be generous with both, and you won’t have to hunt for happiness” — William E. Gladstone

The one thing most humans have in common is the desire to be happy. Although most people seek it as either a future event or something that has passed, never to be recaptured.

Happiness or fulfillment is not something we should really be striving for in some up-and-coming event — it’s something we’ve got to grab right now.

We’re bogged down with the false sense of happiness through attainment — the idea that money and things can buy our bliss.

“Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.” — Denis Waitley

Let’s take a look at some of the prime aspects that I think are worth kicking to the curb in the pursuit of happiness:

Negative Self Talk — You simply cannot thrive on a negative inner dialogue. Masaru Emoto fluidly demonstrated the effects of positive, indifferent and negative emotion on water (see more HERE). We are made up of approximately 55-65% water (depending on your age and sex), so can you imagine what negative thoughts are doing to your body? If you’ve got nothing nice to say to yourself, say nothing at all. Stop yourself when you notice the negative gremlins popping up. Ask yourself if there’s something more encouraging to affirm. For example, say you’re thinking ‘I’m such a loser’. You can redirect that to, ‘I try my best’, or, ‘There are some things I get right’.
Self Loathing — There is no space for anything but self love if you want a fulfilling existence. The type of self love I’m referring to is anything but selfish or narcissistic — it’s necessary. You can’t expect other people to love you if you don’t have love, honour and respect for your self. This kind of love is cultivated from an innate knowing that you are a complete and divine piece of universal energy (or God/the Force/fill in the blank here). It doesn’t need to rehash the past or beat itself over the head a million times for past mistakes or inadequacies — it is the wholeness of self realization (your ‘I Am’ presence). For more on this topic, please read ‘3 Crucial Steps to Self Acceptance’.
Fear — There are things much more important than fear and we’ve got to wake up and walk through the fear to get to them. Fear is a grand threshold guardian — you can either sit at the gate, dig your heels in and go no further or you can cock your hat as you pass on through. As Jim Morrison so eloquently put it, ‘Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.’ Try to see fear as the rumblings of an earthquake that is about to shake you out of your comfort zone into an infinity of possibility. When you walk through your fears there is only space left to be — when you are in this state, happiness or fulfillment is all that is left to experience.
Service to Self — The greatest amount of happiness is achieved when we are not only seeing to our own joy but when we are helping others to find their well of happiness — service to others. Throw out the need to trample on others in indulgence of your own whims. We’re all in this life together — we should work in symbiosis with each other. What affects one affects us all.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” — Marianne Williamson

And in parting, here are some beautiful words from John Lennon that wrap this up nicely:

“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.”