Peter Fairfield - Deep Happy: How to Get There and Always Find Your Way Back

Many words have been written about happiness, that elusive state of mind and body that most people desire but often find beyond their grasp. Dr. Peter Fairfield presents a unique approach that delves into those blocks to happiness that keep too many people from appreciating the pleasure and fulfillment that each moment of their lives has to offer. He presents activities and humor along with insights from meditation, the martial arts, Chinese medicine, and quantum physics. After I finished reading this splendid book I felt happier and I think that most of his readers will have a similar experience.

Stanley Krippner, PhD, professor of Psychology, Saybrook University, co-author, Personal Mythology

Written by an author who has over forty years in the healing profession, Deep Happy explores the journey towards spiritual peace and inner contentment. Peter Fairfield offers his extensive experience, study of many ancient philosophies and his intuitive knowing, to show that true happiness comes from a deepening connection to our own inner being. Deep Happy is filled with many helpful practices and the author's personal experiences encouraging the reader to relinquish redundant beliefs and find true happiness.

Christine Page, MD, speaker and author of Frontiers of Health

Through the years, Peter Fairfield has found the secret of happiness for his own life and has shared it with thousands of people. Now he brings it to us in this delightful book so we can find our own inner peace and happiness.

Gladys T. McGarey, MD, MD[H]

Deep Happy takes us to the place within each of us that is already happy and connected. Fairfield describes a journey that can be easy, fascinating, and even inspiring.

Ken Dychtwald, PhD, author of A New Purpose: Redefining Money, Family, Work, Retirement, and Success and Gideon's Dream: A Tale of New Beginnings

For people reaching out for deeper levels of happiness, here is an inspired tutorial offering a surprising and practical path. The wit and wisdom of Deep Happy is arrayed in 15 enlightening chapters that can easily become a two-week adventure of self-transformation where you wake up each day entertaining different ideas about yourself and practicing new habitsall under the rare genius of a gentle giant named Peter. How lucky they are who find this book!

David B. Chamberlain, PhD, DHL, Psychologist, and author of the international best seller, The Mind of Your Newborn Baby

In today's world there is so much that disempowers us; we forget we have the capacity to make a real difference by bringing joy to others and to all that we do. For this reason, finding a book that affirms us as joyful, creative, empowered persons can be life-changing. Deep Happy offers all these things and more, a road map to be all that we can be.

David Spangler, author of The Laws of Manifestation and Apprenticed to Spirit

First published in 2012 by Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

With offices at:

665 Third Street, Suite 400

San Francisco, CA 94107

www.redwheelweiser.com

Copyright 2012 by Peter Fairfield

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages.

ISBN: 978-1-57863-511-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Data available upon request

Cover design by Jim Warner

Cover photograph Exactostock / SuperStock

Interior by Frame25 Productions

Printed in the United States of America

MAL

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I WISH TO THANK a few people for helping me be here with something real and useful to offer.

First, I offer my deepest appreciation to my heart teacher Dabsang Rinpoche, who showed me that there was no box unless I wanted one. Even after his passing he has continued to love and assist me in the most tangible and unimaginable ways. To Glen Gerhardt, my high school creative writing teacher, who helped me to get the frequency of writingalthough he would never have thought to call it that. I thank Michael Broffman for opening my windows to Chinese medicine, and also because he was the one who, in December 1979, first took my pulse and described my life in a way that I could understand. The work I have been so fortunate to do is directly related to his influence. I thank Karen Joiner for healing beyond my wildest imagination. To my wonderful son Namkai Michael Fairfield, who has taught me more than I will ever teach him. And to Conde Freeman Fairfield, who loves and supports in a way I had never thought possible, and who has shown me the reality of Deep Happy.

Last but not least, I must thank Jan Johnson of Red Wheel/Weiser, who recognized something and coerced me with love and creative allowances and then bounced it and wacked it in such a pleasant way that I enjoyed finishing a book that has been working its way out of me for a long time.

Names and in some cases identifying personal details have been changed, but all of the stories are true and represent experiences that are not only possible, but likely if we just open to the possibility of them.

This book is dedicated to the benefit of all beings.

THIS BOOK IS NOT about happinessit is about Deep Happy. It is not really about positive thinking, getting what we want, or abundance, though with Deep Happy you will access all of these and, more importantly, the places where you resist them. Deep Happy is about dropping beneath the fray to a place within each of us that is already very much alive and well. Deep Happy is nothing we have to buy or get. We already have it! We just have to remember where it is, make friends with it, and invite it out to play.

Our quick-fix culture is used to popping a pill or an attitude against anything that is at all uncomfortable. We are unaccustomed to finding comfort in the parts of us that we have learned to push away, usually since our days in the womb. Culturally, we are an iconic mlange of neon and free offers pulling us every which way except for the way hometo ourselves.

We have reduced our understanding of enlightenment to something that describes perfume and political commentary, missing the deeper transcendent meaning: the union with and the acceptance of all that isfirst the light and the dark and then the infinite held in simple awareness.

In my sixty-plus years of trying to understand myself and other people, I have found that we all mostly want the same things, though the words might be different for each of us. We want to feel safe; we want an easy connection to life; we want vitality, energy, a healthy body and something meaningful and interesting to do with our time. The process of Deep Happy connects us to all of that, because these things are intrinsic to each of us and are in fact necessary for our fulfillment as evolving beings.

Vitality comes as we free the physical body, first from our patterns of trauma and emotional hurt, and then from the limits we have imposed on our senses of feeling and pleasure. Energy comes as we free our emotional and energetic hearts, allowing and opening our interactions with life in all its myriad forms. Intelligence and real wisdom come as the coherence of our bodies and hearts create a healed foundation for seeing things as they really are, from the finite to the infinite. And finally, real safety comes as we directly experience our timeless essence, untouched by the vagaries of life, death, and the calamities in between. This is the path of Deep Happy.