{"id":206,"date":"2008-02-04T06:39:50","date_gmt":"2008-02-04T06:39:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/conversationswithgod\/2008\/02\/is-contentment-good.html"},"modified":"2008-02-04T06:39:50","modified_gmt":"2008-02-04T06:39:50","slug":"is-contentment-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/conversationswithgod\/2008\/02\/is-contentment-good.html","title":{"rendered":"Is ‘contentment’ good?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many people spend their entire lives striving to find contentment. I have had many conversations with people about this. I remember once, at a retreat that I was facilitating, a man spoke to me at length about this.
\n“I wonder,” he said, “if a lack <\/em>of contentment provides a motivation to seek Enlightenment. I mean, contentment sounds very static. Was the Budda content when he sat under the Bodhi Tree and decided he would meditate until enlightenment?”
\nI saw his point, and I offered that ‘contentment’ can, in a sense, be “a scary thing” if it stops us from moving on in our eternal process of becoming and experiencing Who We Really Are. I also see the other side of this coin. I understand that ‘contentment’ truly is the first step on the road to self-awakening, and it is a very holy place.
\nCententment is not the mountaintop, but a plateau. Yet it is a beautiful plateau, a wonderful resting place for the soul, and it can be a spiritually challenging place to reach.
\nMany people never get to this first stop on the Path to Self Awareness. Others arrive there, but do not remain. Not because they move on, but because they find themselves falling back. They return to abandonment, requirement, resentment, argument, or discernment.
\nLack of contentment is not a holy place to be if it is robbing us of our peace and our joy, or our ability to appreciate life and the Moment of Now that life is bringing us. The urge to “move on” spiritually is highest when it is motivated by a desire to create “more of the same, in even larger amounts,” not when it is motivated by an idea that we do not have “enough” of what we want.
\nThe very idea of “not enoughness” that at some level accompanies all lack of contentment only serves to reinforce the experience of insufficiency in our reality.
\nThe secret is being okay with exactly what is, right here, right now. When things seem to be getting very complicated or difficult in our lives, the only way that I know of to get to that place of “okayness” would be through the doorway of discernment — or knowing that all things are “perfect” exactly the way they are right this moment.
\nThey are perfect in the sense that they are leading us to our next opportunity to recreate ourselves anew in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever we held about Who We Are. They have created a context within which such a particular experience may be had.
\nIt takes a very high level of understanding and acceptance, a very deep comprehension and an unshakeable faith, to go to that place. Most of us allow life to rob us of our peace when difficult and unwanted and challenging things occur. Precisely when we need to hold more tightly to the hand of God, we let go. Precisely when we need to have more faith in the outcome, we have less.
\nThis is only human nature. Unless it is not. Unless we have become a New Human, creating a New Reality in our personal experience, in the experience of all those whose lives we touch, and ultimately, in the experience of the whole of humanity.
\nThere are people who have had that kind of impact on our world. Nelson Mandela is an example. Jailed in South Africa for years for opposing the system of apartheid, he refused to be angry over his circumstance or upset with his jailers. When he finally emerged from prison, having been released after more than a quarter of a century, he rose to become president of his nation — such was his peace and power under unfathomable and extraordinary pressure of circumstances.
\nOur own personal circumstance is nothing compared to this. How do people such as Nelson Mandela “keep their cool” when everything in their life is going “wrong”? I would submit that it is by understanding that nothing is going wrong at all, but that everything is going perfectly, allowing the right and perfect demonstration to occur. It is a demonstration TO ourselves ABOUT ourselves. It is a sublime experience of Who We Really Are.
\nAnd so we say, “Thank you, God — thanks and thanks again — for this present circumstance and condition, for this perfect moment in this perfect day, allowing us to perfectly create the experience of perfection itself, in us, through us, and as us. Thank you for giving us, once again, the opportunity to know You, to experience Your Presence, and to express that presence in every moment of our lives. For we live and breath and have our being not so that we may move through each day without challenge, but so that we might challenge ourselves each day to move closer and closer to Thee, in Whom we will find our True Identity and the glory and wonder of life itself.”
\nIn this clarity is found the kind of contentment that serves our movement to awareness and enlightenment, rather than blocking it by creating apathy or disinterest in further spiritual growth.
\n= = = = = = = = = = = = =
\nYou’ve been exposed to the concepts and principles from the Conversations with God <\/em>material. Now the time has come to integrate this New Spirituality into our daily lives.
\nCome to Portland, Oregon, Friday night, February 1<\/u> and be the first to experience how to turn these spiritual truths into a functional reality! Join me on this special evening as I speak from my new book, Happier Than God<\/em>, and engage in a lively dialogue with audience members in a “Q&A” session, followed by a book signing.
\nThat’s this coming Friday evening in Portland, Oregon<\/strong>.
\nYou may pre-register at:
\nwww.regonline.com\/SNSTakesFlight<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many people spend their entire lives striving to find contentment. I have had many conversations with people about this. I remember once, at a retreat that I was facilitating, a man spoke to me at length about this. “I wonder,” he said, “if a lack of contentment provides a motivation to seek Enlightenment. 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