On this New Year’s Eve, many people the world over will be joining in a chorus of “Happy New Year!” And I imagine just as many are asking how happiness might be revitalized once again. In this new year’s dawning light, I invite you to join me in exploring the nature of happiness, its foundation, and its furtherance.

I imagine most would agree that the happiness we wish for one another is a pleasing state, one of contentment, fullness of being, and even joy. Whatever its degree, from ease to elation, I propose that happiness is founded upon sufficiency, not lack.

It is a core orientation to lack, in oneself or in others, that perpetuates dissatisfaction. Habitually rejecting what is within us, or before us, and seeking “more, better, and different” perpetuates struggle, opposition, and the sense that life is inherently problematic.

When I first heard Adya speak of the nature of egoic seeking, my ears perked up. He conveyed that when a seeker obtains the object of their search, they are only temporarily happy. He proposed that such happiness is due to the absence of seeking in the moment of finding, and not due to the object gained.

The point is to question the dynamics of seeking as well as one’s identity as a seeker. You may find that happiness is fundamentally linked to an absence of the seeker-identity, as well as to an absence of egoic identities in general. Seeing these workings clearly brings new possibilities for responding in moments of resistance and seeking.

Within seeing itself is awareness free of struggle. To reside in freedom from struggle, one must stop. Let personal thoughts, feelings, and the circumstances be, and open to the inherent allowance of pure awareness, which is already free of wrongness and lack.

Return again and again to commune with the sense of what remains, free of unconscious patterns and notions of self. The initial doorway is awareness, free of struggle. At first awareness may appear overly simple. Over time, its allowance and freedom register more and more fully in your mind, heart, and body—your whole being. Embodied awareness is the ground of true satisfaction and, yes, even happiness.

I hope you hear my good news. You are not the seeker. Your true identity and happiness are not bound by the temporal world of gain and loss. Your essential nature is not bound in wrongness and lack. The ground of being, your being, is ever-present, just behind your thoughts, feelings and struggles. It is eternally open, allowing, free, sufficient, and whole. Your communing in and as your eternal nature is my unceasing wish for you, my wish for your happiness.

© Mukti Gray 2023