Are you happy? I want to be.

I am listening to a presentation given by a man named Ram Dass.  In this presentation, he makes several statements I find very interesting.  The first that caught my attention is that a lot of people say things like I will be able to follow my dreams when…and this is followed by a statement which often involves the need for more money.  Interestingly, his statement goes on to insinuate that as people make more money, they apparently need even more money to follow their dreams.  This is followed by a statistic, which is that when you ask people if they have followed their dreams, 15% of people who make $15,000/year or less say that they have (they have written the books they say they are going to write, they work in ways that help people as legal aid or low cost therapy, they create art and/or write music), around 5% of people making more than $100,000/year have done anything to follow their dreams.  They say that they need just a little more money.

Where are you?  Are you in the “follow your dreams” category or the “I will follow my dreams when I have more money” category?

As I was listening to Ram Dass talk about this, I kept coming to back to all the things I have been telling myself since doing a meditation that led me to my calling as a holistic healer last July.  I keep returning to, “If I had the money, I could…” Instead of agreeing to follow through on my dream, instead of trusting that my needs and the needs of my family will be cared for, I find reasons to put off the dreams of my heart.

Has hearing Ram Dass changed my opinion?  Will I now run of and make a new start giving up the financial security I have with my job so that I can follow through on the call placed on my heart?  Nope.  I will likely still tell myself that I can follow my dream when I have money.  Or I could turn it around and try to figure out how to make my dream a reality based on what I do feel like I can feasibly do.  But even though I see the truth in what Ram Dass is saying, I will likely not turn around and just give in to following through on my dreams.  I suppose though, that I have started on that path with the interfaith seminary.

The next thing Ram Dass mentions that caught my attention, is that we as a culture have become caught in the mind.  I get the impression that this talk is from the mid 90’s based on the cultural references and the time of his stroke.  But he talks as though this cultural place we are in is a passing phase.  I think perhaps at that time, the pendulum was swinging toward more balance.  However, the pendulum quickly moved in the other direction and we are again hanging on the edge.

This has brought up a lot of stuff for me too.  I can sense that we are precariously balanced, jumping from one extreme to the other in order to shift the plate, rather than moving toward a common middle we can all live with, if not agree on.  However, Ram Dass’ statement that this is because right now we are so busy existing in the mind rather than finding the balance with our intuition really struck me as true.

I constantly find myself thinking when I need to be intuiting.  I find my heart giving me warnings, or good advice, and ignoring them for the more obvious intellectual brain talk.  It goes back to the happiness thing.  The issue of money is a mind game.  It is your brain that worries about money, but the truth is that the more money you make, the more stuff you have that you don’t really need.  You have a bunch of junk filling up a house that isn’t really useful or what you need.  A lot of it is what you want so that you feel like you are keeping up with everyone else around you.  Or at least that is how it feels for me.  Maybe no one else thinks that.  I should change all that to be only about me, but I will let it ride for now.

I do think it is true, that the original founders of the constitution did not anticipate the vast separation between mind and heart that has occurred in this country.  We are as a country determined to be #1 if it kills us.  And it will kill us.  It might take time, but we are a dying country.  I think we have a choice.  We can open ourselves to return to the mind-heart balance, or we can continue to shift the plate until we fall off.  I don’t know about everyone else, but I will start by working on me.  I will integrate my mind and heart and I will do my best to live that way.  Perhaps as others see the balance being reached in my life, they too will start to want to reach that balance in theirs.