The story as I remember it is that the Chinese peasant had an ox. He needed that ox to plough his field so that he could grow food for himself and his family.
One day he went out and the ox was nowhere to be seen. He looked everywhere. He walked up and down the small village where he lived, asking all his neighbours if they had seen his ox. Nothing. Nowhere.
He decided that as he couldn’t manage without his ox, he had better go and look for it. So he left his village and went to the next village. Another blank. And the next village. Still no ox.
However, he wasn’t a man to give up easily. So he crossed rivers, questioned strangers, climbed mountains, traversed plains … After many months of searching and having to explain his search to many others, enlisting their help as best he could, still no ox.
Sadly, he decided to return home. And there, placidly chewing grass beside his house, was his ox, patiently awaiting his return.
I don’t remember ever hearing the sequel but I imagine that the man was greatly changed by his search and that life was never quite the same afterwards.
Life is a journey, a journey with inward and outward facing paths. As we journey on the outward path, sometimes it seems we are always searching for something and we go through many painful experiences – Dark Nights of the Soul – on the way. When we decide to return home, like the Chinese peasant, and look inside to our hearts, we find the treasure we have been searching for waiting for us.
Inviting happiness is this journey of learning to be in both places at once: in the place of journeying through the unknown, sometimes hospitable, often hard, regions of life and being in the inward place of our heart. When we can experience the outward journey as the ‘path of the heart’ that we have chosen, then in the midst of suffering we can experience a measure of happiness.
There is another similar more contemporary story in the movie/DVD, The Living Matrix: The Science of Healing (http://thelivingmatrixthemovie.com .
Arielle, an osteopath and NLP Master Practitioner, recounts how she discovered that she had a brain tumour that was not only giving her massive headaches but had also made her infertile when the one thing in life she thought she wanted was to have children.
After much self-searching, she was able to realize that there was a part of herself that did not want to be a parent and that it was this part of herself that had created the tumour that made her infertile.
Still, she continued to fight the tumour and try to get rid of it until one day she suddenly ‘heard’ herself speaking about the tumour and the headaches. She was shocked at the level of violence in her voice! Her reaction was that this level of violence could not be the way to healing …
At that point she started to reflect on the journey her life had taken over the many years since she had been diagnosed with the tumour. The tumour had taken her to many places she would never have visited; had lead her to meet many people she would never have met otherwise; and her life was richer for it. So she decided that if she had to live with the tumour for the rest of her life, that was OK. I won’t spoil the story for you completely by telling you the ending.
In my own life, like most of us, I have endured many unpleasant, painful and sometimes personally devastating experiences. There have been times when I have wished myself dead. I count myself blessed that in all of these experiences I have been able to find something that has carried me through in the darkest hours and enabled me to make something meaningful to me of all the pain.
The phrase, Inviting Happiness, has, for the last few years, summed up for me where I am at and that is why I adopted, ‘Inviting happiness …’ as my business tagline. For me, the opposite of happiness is despair and that is not a road I want to go down again. I would rather take the ‘path of the heart’, which I believe invites happiness.
This phrase, ‘inviting happiness’, is a quote from Dr Usui, who brought Reiki to the world and in one of his writings described Reiki as ‘the secret art of inviting happiness.’ I have found the practice and teaching of Reiki to be one of the ways I can invite my own happiness.
You will have noticed that the phrase is ‘inviting happiness’. An invitation is an invitation. It is not a command or an entreaty or a search. An invitation can be accepted or rejected. An invitation is the beginning of a dialogue, the start of a relationship, if you like.
When I talk with myself about ‘inviting happiness’ what I have in mind is that I am – to the best of my ability – allowing myself to be open to new ways of living my life that bring interest, stimulation, enjoyment, and a greater sense of meaning to my everyday activities.
I believe that inviting happiness can be an ongoing practice that develops and varies as life develops and evolves. Writing this is a part of my own practice of inviting happiness.
I invite you to consider whether you might invite more happiness into your own life. If this resonates with you, what might you do as the next step?
For the Chinese peasant in the story earlier, his ox represented his happiness and he was compelled to go in search of it when he noticed that it was missing. Eventually, the ox was found by his own home.
There is a lovely story about the psychotherapist, Milton Erickson, in his youth. Milton Erickson grew up in the country. A horse was wandering loose on the highway and no one knew who it belonged to. Milton mounted the horse and rode it back to its owner.
The owner was astonished. How did you know where I lived? It was easy, replied Milton. I didn’t know, but the horse did. I just guided the horse until he found his own way home.
Our hearts know what is right for each of us. We just need the guiding reins of ‘inviting happiness’ to allow our hearts to find their own way home.
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