How grasping for happiness leads to disappointment

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August 24, 2021


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Have you ever been envious of someone who always looks happy, filled with uplifting energy, and unshakable in the shadow of life’s curveballs? Most likely their mental filter is in sattva mode. 

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been exploring the Gunas. If you missed any of the previous posts, start here.

The key features of sattva are light, warm, pure, inspiring, and upward moving.

When we’re moving throughout our daily activities in sattva mode our mind feels clear, concentrated, and accepting. Emotionally we feel cheerful, love, detachment, peace, and humility. Energetically we might feel supple, light, and joyful. The foods we eat will be fresh, light, easily digested, and calming. We’re attached to knowledge and happiness. Our environment is clean, peaceful, uncontested, and harmonious.

We’re always striving to feel this way, right? However, most of the time when we’re grasping for bliss from an external input (e.g., job title, new car, new house), what we experience ultimately falls short of our expectations. Plus, it doesn’t last as long as we would like. What we’re experiencing are short-lived glimpses of bliss. And so we keep striving for happiness but end up mildly or extremely disappointed each time — until we learn differently and more importantly take action.

This is when things start to shift for us. Because our focus changes to placing higher importance on cultivating happiness from the inside out. When we move from this place, we experience greater periods of bliss (ah!). Once we’ve discovered what facilitates this balanced state of being, we strive to keep it going and going.

Knowing all of this and assuming you’re not feeling very sattvic right now, you’re probably wondering how to shift your lifestyle in this direction? We’ll cover that in our next blog post. Until then we recommend that you start with a daily mindfulness practice, which will help you examine what is working or not in all areas of your life.