A spiritual journey, in whatever modality you choose, is really a process of transforming into a truly happy being. Whether you like or not , over however many lifetimes it is going to take, you are becoming the kind of person who is going to be unaffected by circumstances and there to help out and love all
others.
But we don't want to own that happiness, we want it in the abstract, but when it comes down be being happy and peaceful every god damned day .. well who wants that ? We like to convince ourselves that it is better to suffer along, to keep it interesting with drama, needs, wants, pleasure, judgments ... all the stuff we know we are already good at. But, no matter how much we try to mystify our goodness with things like self sabotage.. our essential goodness refuses to leaves us.
I like this metaphor. We like to pave over our happiness and our Buddha nature, but no matter how hard we try, a plant of some kind of happiness finds a way to sprout up . Does your happiness look like this photo ?
I think mine does sometimes. I like to cover it with guilt or the feeling of unworthiness or judgment. And when I don't like the look of my happiness I will try to just pave it over a few more times with some bad habits I have,... then I don't have to face my goodness for a while. I can use the mask of clean pavement as some kind of temporary fulfillment.
We end up with all of these cracked layers of hard stuff trying to coat the beautiful Buddha that you actually are.
It is much better to stop the paving process and just let the plants grow. If we train ourselves to refrain from our destructive ways, (like craving and being critical) then the paving people eventually give up. In music or poetry a "refrain' is a repeated lyric or group of notes that is the reference point of the piece. Our "refrain" of practice are things like meditation, non-judgment , service to others, kindness, wisdom. If we engage in this kind of "refrain" we come to just let things be, we realize that though we thought we had to control the world, we could just witness it and care for it , as it is. By doing this we learn to own our happiness and we make real friends with that Buddha inside and our spiritual journey moves along towards it's goal of real joy.
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