Chapian - How to be happy in an unhappy world

Have you ever started eating a banana and then without barely tasting it you realize its gone and youre holding the peel? Or have you ever been going somewhere and arrived at your destination only to realize you hardly noticed a thing along the way? This used to happen to me all the time. These are common examples of an awareness deficit. I surprise myself on a regular basis when I notice something thats been there all along but I never really saw it.

We can exist day in and day out without being present in our skin. To be happy, truly happy, a heaping balance of awareness is called for. When I talk about awareness, I mean more than simply being observant. Awareness for our purposes is seeing, hearing, touching, feeling, tasting, and sensing with the mind of Christ. Philippians 2:5 says, Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus. This is a verse to take seriously. God formed all creation into being with a thought from His holy mind before calling it into being with the words, Let there be... And His mind is in you.

The mind of Christ in us means we pay attention to what He pays attention to. It means feeling, tasting, touching, listening, seeing, and using all our senses to be aware through Him. I call this holy awareness.

Are you aware of the power of your thought life? Are you fully aware of the command to let the mind of Christ dwell (live, exist, thrive) in you? Weve built habits of thinking, evaluating, and judging with our human minds, not the mind of Christ. Without holy awareness, were victims of anxiety, fear, and worry. Theres no peace in us because we have no foundation in the mind of Christ.

When we cling to our old learned behaviors and thought patterns, we tend to see life in black-and-white termsgood/bad, righteous/sinful, honest/corrupt, ugly/beautiful, and so on. We live in a chaotic and troubled world, and we can complain all we want, but our complaints and tirades wont change anything or make us better people. Even our prayers can become a relentless cry for God to do something! If we want our prayers to reach the heart of God, we must pray with His mind and know His heart. We must be aware.

Its time to pause, breathe, and look at the world with an altogether new perspective.

Holy Awareness

Awareness of ourselves . If you experienced the two previous five-minute Quiet Prayer sessions, Im sure you recognized your wild, untamed self-talk and mind clutter. Sitting in stillness with God face-to-face makes you suddenly aware of the frantic swirl of your thought life. You pay attention and become aware of what is going on inside you. Holy awareness begins with self-awareness. From here you begin to make a change. You begin to formulate a new awareness of your need for the mind of Christ to prevail within your spirit.

Awareness of the atmosphere around us. We all have the ability to be present in the moment. By the words in the moment, I mean being right here right now without your mind wandering, daydreaming, tuning out, avoiding, or denying whats around you right where you are. Become aware of the sounds, movements, actions, sights, and atmosphere immediately surrounding you. The temptation is to look around and find whats wrong, whats missing, whats bad, whats not perfect, whats not right. We can too easily perceive the world around us as a necessary backdrop for a life that were indifferent to.

An ordinary workday morning for an unaware person might look like this. Get out of bed, shower, get dressed. Get in the car. Drive to work. Park the car. Walk to the coffee shop. Stand in line at the coffee shop and buy a Danish and a latte. Walk back to the office. Get on the elevator. Go to the sixth floor. Arrive at the office.

If someone were to ask if something interesting happened on the way to work, the answer would naturally be no. We can be too busy tuning out. We dont observe the world around us with any interest or appreciation because were buried inside the dark, dusty hallways of our own heads, and the world around us is only a backdrop.

What a difference it would make if we purposed to be aware of the world around us as we set out on our day! Imagine experiencing and taking mental note of the smells, sounds, and sights surrounding you. Imagine feeling yourself fully alive, appreciating each moment as you go about ordinary tasks. Heres an exercise to try now with this book in your hands. Close your eyes and listen to the sounds around you. Were you aware of them before?

Awareness of the world at large . Anyone can complain about the miserable state of the world. Anyone can rant about the atrocities of terrorism, political corruption, starving nations, evil leaders, media corruption, and rampant immorality, but its an entirely different thing to sit in stillness and learn from Christ to see with His eyes. Try seeing with eyes that find the good, the beautiful, the blessed.

Practicing Holy Awareness

I teach holy awareness in my happiness classes, and an important foundation session is on being grateful and at peace with all that is presently around us. We learn to accept interruptions and nuisances without judging, getting flustered, or being emotionally disturbed.