Invite sadness to dinner

The secret of being truly happy comes with the concept of self knowledge.  To know happiness you have to know sadness.  Not anyone else's sadness but your own. I spent a few years riding the depression bus to Sadville as a teenager, and anyone who has known depression, death, injury, or excessive suffering actually have a pretty detailed map of there own sadness, now its about learning to read the damn thing, which gets tricky. You have to know your sadness insides and out.  You have to invite sadness to a three course Turkey dinner and get to know what your sadness is, where it was born, who it hangs out with, and what feeds it, and how you can ask it to leave once the meal is over.

 To know happiness you must become friends with sadness, but you cant just stop there.  Then you have to invite fear to to Tea.  You have to know your fear, ask it what it ate for breakfast, why it hangs out so often and which gym it goes to.  Becoming friends with fear is even more difficult as it turns out, because it never wants to just stay for tea it wants to stay for the afternoon and sometimes for a week.  It bought a house next door and will annoy you the rest of your life if you don't know its patterns well enough. The trouble is once you get to know these guys then you have to invite doubt for coffee, greed for aperitif, anger for brunch, jealously for crumpets and laziness for nap time and so on an so forth until you have lifted ever rug and flipped the couch of yourself so that nothing can hide anymore.

This takes time, patience, meditation and breath, but once you know all the difficult things about yourself and allow that they are human, part of you but not what makes you you, then you can invited happiness and love to move in.  The others will still visit, they will come and go, come and go, some more than others, but after they all leave again you are left with love and happiness.  The truth of the matter is they are all teachers, when you are willing to look at them that way.  If you spend enough time with them they can become difficult friends, if not liked then appreciated for what they give us. Doubt as my worst/best companion always keeps me on my toes, and makes sure I am not slacking on the work I do, but he leaves most often now after a short time when asked.

These are strange requests to become friends with happiness, and most people will spend there lives in this process.  When you learn to trust that once you invite love and happiness into your house that they will stay, they will become your foundation and build a home with you, then you are on the right path, but first you have to call up sadness and ask what it wants for dinner.