Something Is Missing - Introduction (No. 1 in Series)

This is the first blog in a major series that will eventually be built into a book called 'Something Is Missing'. The blogs will show you how to find and develop your spirituality so you can bring more love and happiness into your life. I will publish the blog progressively so please subscribe at bottom of blog if you would like to follow all of them.

 

Many people in the more affluent and technologically developed parts of the world have a sense that ‘something is missing’ from their lives. They may be relatively successful and are materially comfortable, but they have still not found the contentment and inner peace that they crave. If you are reading this blog I assume that you are familiar with that nagging feeling. Or you might be searching for understanding and meaning following a difficult or challenging episode in your life. Although you might not be desperately unhappy, you have a feeling of emptiness inside and know that something critical is missing from your life.

Although these feelings are unpleasant, at least your intuition is working well and telling you that something is wrong with the way you are approaching life. This is useful in itself but there is much more to these feelings than this. For your intuition to warn you that something is missing, you must already know what that something is! In fact it's not missing,  it's just hidden within you at the moment. So the good news is that very thing that will bring you true happiness is lurking somewhere deep within your mind, and it is waiting to be discovered.

I hope that the fact that you already have everything you need to make you happy comes as a relief. It means you don’t need to learn anything new or strive to be anything or anybody that you are not already. You have all the gifts you need to find true and lasting happiness. You might not be aware of these things at the moment because they are largely hidden in your unconscious mind, but I will help you unearth them in these blogs.  

In order to do this I would like to take you through a process of self-discovery. It will dig down beneath the surface details and distractions of your life so you can find the real you. This will require quite a lot of personal honesty and courage because it is likely to bring up some difficult thoughts and feelings. Please don’t be put off by this. I am not trying to scare or disturb you, I am opening up these areas of your mind because by facing your fears and letting them go you will automatically reveal your underlying gifts of love and happiness.

So let’s begin with quite a challenging exercise. I want you to focus straight away on the things that matter most to you in life.

Imagine that today is the last day your life and you know that you have only a few hours left. What are you thinking and feeling? What matters most to you in these precious last few hours? What would you do? Spend a few minutes considering these questions.

How did you get on?  It’s not easy to think about these things. Most of us are not in the habit of dwelling about our own death because it brings up our deepest fears, but I hope you were able to put these aside and think about what you would want in your final hours. The worries and distractions of your daily life should have fallen away to reveal what really matters to you.

When I first asked myself these questions I was quite surprised at what came up. I didn’t think about myself at all – my mind went immediately to my children, parents, my wife and the rest of my family. Gone were all my daily concerns about money, work or health. These practical things just didn’t matter at the end of my life. All I could think about was my love for the people closest to me. Then came an aching desire for them to be by my side so I could tell them, and show them how much I loved them. I was soon overwhelmed by my emotions and am not ashamed to admit that I shed many tears.

I would guess that in your final hours you also focused on the love for the people close to you. Nothing else seems important when we face the ultimate and unavoidable conclusion to our lives. If you have ever lost somebody you love through death or faced the ending of a particularly significant relationship, you will know how painful this can be. Suddenly all the practical aspects of life fall away and you have a stark reminder that all that really matters is love and relationships.

I am always struck by how easy it is to identify the central importance of love in our lives when we face losing it. Few people would deny that it is through loving relationships that we find true happiness and success, and yet the truth is that we often struggle with this element of our lives. A vast majority of the problems that we face in life are relationship problems - at home, at work, in society, or internationally. Even our relationship with the planet we live on is out of balance and unsustainable.

So we must ask ourselves an important question. “Why if love is so important to us to do we lead our lives as if it wasn’t”? In answering this we are drawn to an inescapable and disturbing conclusion. We must be deliberately denying love and sabotaging our relationships. Dig even deeper and we discover that the only explanation for this is that we must be afraid of love.

At face-value it seems ridiculous that we could be afraid of love, something that is so beautiful and brings us so much joy. I certainly felt this way when I was first introduced to this idea, but as I have become more self-aware I have come to accept that I do indeed have this fear. I have also begun to understand where this fear comes from and how it is damaging my life and virtually everybody else’s life. It is hard to over-estimate the pain and misery that is created by this denial, and yet we are largely unaware that we are doing this to ourselves. 

In the blogs that follow I will explain where this denial comes from and how it is intimately related to our fear of love. In the next blog we will look at the process of falling in love and how this teaches us so much about love and the fears that surround it.

Next Blog: Falling In Love - What It Teaches Us About Love

This is the first blog in a major series that will eventually be built into a book called 'Something Is Missing'. The blogs will show you how to find and develop your spirituality so you can bring more love and happiness into your life. I will publish the blog progressively so please subscribe at bottom of blog if you would like to follow all of them.