” Grace Versus Happiness”

“Most of us confuse grace and happiness, but the former is profound and transformative, while the latter is fleeting and causal….we’re at the mercy of the alignment of favorable circumstances for happiness, which is far from the innate sense of well-being we know as grace. ….

Just as Chinese medicine looks upon an obese person as someone who’s actually starving to death, desperately trying to fill a hole in their being with food, we can also think of the compulsive spenders among us as frantically trying to purchase a cure for a psychological or spiritual void in our lives. By lacking a sense of inner peace, we stumble through the motions of life without ever truly living in the moment, and we try to satiate uncomfortable feelings by throwing money away, overeating, taking on serial sexual partners, or working obsessively. Or we may fall into substance abuse, which provides only fleeting moments of happiness that vanish quickly and leave us feeling more depleted.

People dabble in narcotics for the sensation of getting high, but when dependency sets in, that high is replaced by a pernicious sense of deprivation. We call an addiction “having a monkey on our back” for good reason: When humans fall prey to the instincts of the monkey brain-fear, feeding, fighting, and fornication-our existence becomes a fight for survival, making it impossible to live in grace. The two are mutually exclusive. In grace, you’re free to be like “the lilies of the field” who need nothing, or those who “walk in the valley of the shadow of death and fear no evil”…but momentary pleasures can’t and won’t bring us this state. After all, what better image of grace is there than a baby’s smile? Babies don’t strive for happiness or brace themselves against sadness, they just are. That’s grace.”

“Mending the Past and Healing the Future with Soul Retrieval”
by Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D.