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Recorded live at the Betty Ford Center in California.

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Mandy Evans Live at Interface.

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A Handbook for Happiness

Click to Order: Emotional Options

How to Recover from the Past by Changing your Beliefs

“Travelling Free gives insight into freedom from victimization through outworn memories–to use your memories without allowing your memories to use you.”  –Deepak Chopra

“A valuable tool for those seeking peace and direction.” –Bernie Siegel

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They set no goals. They require no discipline, adhere to no schedule. Fear of failure, regret, guilt for not practicing enough-these strategies play no part in their game plan or ultimate success.

They are babies. Using the strongest motivation known to human kind, they master the art of walking. How? Why? With what motivation? The answer to all 3 questions is the same. Desire-because they want to.

You want a master class in motivation? Watch babies. Every day they achieve something that was impossible the day before.

Yet all day every day intelligent, well educated people use everything but their natural desire to lead them to what they want. They use misery motivators instead. They withhold happiness from themselves, promising they will never feel good until they get that car or that job, or that first million dollars. They use guilt, regret, shame, anger, punishment, worry, fear and self-loathing to bash, beat and prod themselves and other people through life. Why? In order to achieve goals they hope will make them happy.

Misery motivators achieve miserable results. If that’s not self-defeating, please tell me what is?

Desire is an important element in my books “Emotional Options” and “Travelling Free: How to Recover From the Past by Changing Your Beliefs.” Desire is a strong focus of the “BREAKOUT!” workshop. I even taught a five day seminar, “Desire Marks the Path” in Holland and in Fairfield, IA. The results people get when they turn their attention away from what they are upset about toward what they would like to welcome into their lives thrill me-and them.

Add some might and joy to your motivation. Visit www.mandyevans.com for courses, free belief quizzes and the free article “A Kinder from of Motivation” by Jeffrey Pease.

Here is an excerpt about motivation from “Emotional Options: A Handbook for Happiness.” Use it to motivate yourself like a big baby.

“We can divide the ways to motivate yourself and others into two basic categories:

Desire and Happiness Need and Un-happiness Motivation with desire and happiness moves things about so quickly that you may not notice it happening.

When we use desire for our motivation, the difference between wanting and attachment becomes clear. Wanting is moving toward and can include happiness. Attachment is often static and requires the feelings of need and sometimes fear, for our very survival. Attachment appears to connect us to the object of our need-as if our fear, our sorrow, our guilt, our experience of need, will bring it to us or keep it escaping. But this does not work very well.

To believe that you need something requires, by definition, that you also believe that you cannot be okay without that something. It may be an experience that you believe you need to have or a material object or goal to achieve.

In this need filled view of reality, if you do not get what you want or reach your goal, that very not getting threatens your well-being, your hopes for happiness, and your ability to be okay. When you use “Need and Un-happiness” in order to help yourself to get what you want, you live in that need and un-happiness. That experience is life extinguishing. The very thing you do to help yourself cripples you. It chokes your life force and creativity.

In contrast, the experience of “Happiness and Desire” is life enhancing. It allows happiness now. It fosters a sense of being okay and feeling good. It simply acknowledges that something more or something different would be welcome.

Years ago, I visited a garden with a statue of a particularly jolly Buddha. Inscribed beneath it were the words, “Misunderstood desire is the cause of all suffering.” Misunderstood desire. At last it made sense!

We have all heard the familiar quote, “Desire is the cause of all suffering.” I had often wondered how someone as wise as Buddha could have thought that. How could desire ever cause suffering? Attachment and “misunderstood desire” do that. Perhaps some Puritan ethics got mixed up with Buddha’s wisdom.

Wanting something, coupled with the belief that you cannot have it, or that you are foolish to want it, can cause some powerful suffering. But not desire alone. Desire, imagination, creation, anticipation-that stuff is all fun.

Desire functions as an inner sense of direction. It may be all we will ever need to know to guide us through life-to learn all that we need to know, to show up where we need to be. At least I cannot think of a more reliable guide. What else is there-someone else’s desire? Somebody else’s idea about what you should do? Your desire, your awareness of what you welcome offers the best compass for finding your way through the mystery of life that I have found so far. This system of navigation pretty much eliminates regret and guilt. It also banishes the temptation to try to make anyone else suffer.

When you follow your conscious desire as an inner sense of direction, correcting your course as you go, all you have to do when you want a change is ask yourself, “What do I welcome now? Where shall I go from here?”

You can skip that part about feeling bad, worrying that you will never change, blaming someone else for your predicament. You can bypass the frantic search for a new game plan before you even know what game you want to play.”

From “Emotional Options” by Mandy Evans

As my friend success coach, Michael Neill says in his happily helpful book, “You Can Have What You Want” **Happiness Leads to Success more often that success leads to happiness.**

Wishing you mighty motivation, love, happiness and many blessings.

Love,
Mandy

Copyright Mandy Evans 2007
Permission granted to reprint with author credit and website link, www.MandyEvans.com
Speaker, Seminar Leader

Several years ago I accepted an offer from a New England camp and conference center to co-direct their first Recovery Camp for adults. The center had offered a series of different one-week summer camp experiences for young people and adults for many years, always keeping abreast of the needs of the times. This week pledged to offer adults who were recovering from abuse, addiction, alcoholic parents and traumas of all kinds a chance to finally have a wonderful time at summer camp.

My co-leader had directed other summer camp weeks there. I knew going in that it was really his baby with me serving more as an assistant. It sounded good when I signed on. With his reputation as a dynamic, innovative leader I figured I’d learn a lot and not have to work as hard as I did when I was in charge. We did not get along. Even though we both meant well, we strongly disagreed on important issues. It got harder and harder to find a way through our conflicting thoughts and feelings as the week went along. When I spoke up, our conflict escalated. He was furious with me. When I kept quiet, I felt like a hypocrite and a coward. The daily schedule was demanding. The format was new. The material our campers had brought with them proved intense. What a bunch of challenges for us all.

I am not wild about admitting this. After over thirty years of working on my own emotional independence, I lost the vision. Though I wrote two books on the subject, “Emotional Options” and “Travelling Free: How to Recover From the Past by Changing Your Beliefs” and had taught countless seminars on inner freedom, I was melting down. My whole body hurt. I knew a little kid who used to say to his Daddy, “You hurt all my feelings!” I knew what he meant. Most of my feelings hurt. I felt like I had in grade school when kids teased me about being fat.

As I approached the morning staff meeting my most fervent desire was to make it though without crying. One of our last events was a big 4th of July bonfire and talent show. I suggested that a Personal Declaration of Independence would be apt for our 65 campers as they reclaimed their lives from all sorts of troubled pasts. To my surprise, the man agreed. We decided that each camper who wanted to would make a declaration and add a stick to the fire as a symbol of new freedom.

I’m not sure how I would have made it to the bonfire without my guardian angel — really. One of the many delightful features at the Recovery Camp was our guardian angels. At the beginning of the week, we each drew a name. We became that person’s secret guardian angel for the duration of camp. The craft room buzzed with folks making treasures for the person they “guarded”. My angel was truly heaven-sent. Each day she left special messages or flowers or some other imaginative surprise in my cubby.

On the morning of the bonfire a large bunch of tied-together sticks rested on the floor below my cubby. It was much too large to fit in the cubicle. Someone had attached a note to it. A chill passed though me. My first thoughts were of “sticks and stones” and “switches and ashes” my grandfather said his brother got one Christmas morning. Was the staff conflict even worse than I thought? Hoping it wasn’t for me, I bent down and picked it up. The note said “These sticks are so I can see your beautiful face glow even more brightly at the campfire tonight when you declare your independence.” Surely the best angel a mortal ever had watched over me that week.

Night falls. As we file along the dark woodsy path, the bonfire lights up the clearing ahead. A staff member hands each of us a small twig, about six inches long, to throw on the fire as we make our declarations. I, of course, have brought my own wood, thank you. Not one piece, but a bundle. Not small, but large no-fooling-around firewood.

The show proceeds with a rich assortment of sublime and absurd performances. As it comes to an end with roaring applause, two desires dwell in my heart; I want to be somewhere else and I want to fit in, just like a million shy campers before me. Neither choice seems available. My bundle rests beside me. My big bunch of big branches. One by one people stand up. They step forward. They make heart touching declarations of independence and add their small twigs to the fire. The moment is magical.

Across the campfire, the leader and the loyal staff beam at the campers. They really like this guy. I am not the favorite camp leader’s favorite anything. In staff meetings, he has by now, accused me of undermining him and of betraying him like no other person in all of his long life.  I feel icily alone. But I know that somewhere in the circle a guardian angel who gathered branches just for tonight waits. Person after person adds a twig to the blaze. The last call comes. One or two stragglers summon the courage to share their declarations and burn their twigs. A silent pause follows.

I stand up. My voice trembles, “I have something to say.” The co-director and several of the staff members roll their eyes and make big “Oh, damn, now what?” faces. The director frowns at me and moves his hand in quick circles with that speed-it-up gesture. Gathering courage from the campers who went before me, I say, “I have always dreaded standing out in an inappropriate way.” I hear a murmur of recognition, of ‘me too.’ “But I have the most wonderful guardian angel in the world who gave me this big bunch of sticks to burn at the fire tonight.” I raise my bundle high and say, with tears in my voice, but loudly, “So I’m declaring my independence from fear of your judgments and I’m burning my big bunch of sticks that aren’t like anybody else’s. Thank you Guardian Angel!”

Cheers rang out from my fellow campers.

It was a good lesson for me. And like all good lessons, it kept on teaching. I’ve thought of my angel and that day often. Last year I sent a short version of this story out with the following suggestion: “As we approach this Independence Day celebration I encourage you to throw a declaration on the barbie or write one down and burn it with a candle, or just take a moment to consider freedom and independence. What do you declare your independence from?”

A surprising number of people, almost everyone, responded. Some were touched, some inspired, but just as many people wrote to say they couldn’t do it. They told me about things they knew they wanted to be free from. Then they explained what prevented them from doing it.

Remembering that night and my own fear, I wondered what the big deal was. It was just a campfire gathering at a wonderful place in the Berkshires. But my own inner tyrant had tied me up in knots, inflicted my muscles with tension and pain, filled my heart with dread and pretty much paralyzed me. I looked at my own fear again. I asked myself the breakout questions.

What about those judgments was scary? It wasn’t just any old judgments. The thought of impending ridicule and scorn sent those shivers down my spine.”What about ridicule and scorn involves fear?” I asked myself. The sound of my mother’s voice came to mind and a scathing kind of irritation she expressed when I “got in her way.” The way I seemed to be in the way that summer in the mountains. “What about that sound?” I asked. I followed that fear to see where it led. Then I knew; I dreaded total demoralization, succumbing to jeers and taunts and giving up. In order to avoid that final defeat, I had skirted many issues and pulled many a creative punch. I was afraid I would lose my will to live.

I had felt so unwanted as a child, so perpetually in the way that my desire for life was very weak for a long time. I dreaded a return to that feeling. I guarded against it in many, ways, most of them unconscious, all of them limiting.

If it were not for my guardian angel and that bonfire, indeed were it not for my co-director and every single person there that night would I have had the courage to declare my independence from that particular tyrant within, even for one moment? I don’t think so.

Our founding fathers did not know what it would take or how to gain independence from the British Empire. They eloquently and oh, so powerfully declared their independence from an oppressive tyrant and began. Then they fought for years to win their freedom and ours.

Imagine the courage! Today we celebrate the declaration, not the victory which came 7 long years later. We celebrate the vision and enjoy the freedom.

What is your Declaration of Independence today? Do you need to win your freedom from an oppressive employer, an addictive substance, an abusive relationship? Or is yours a tyrant within? Does a critical voice in your mind nag at you continually? Does explosive anger destroy important relationships?

As we celebrate our country’s Declaration of Independence please take some time to reflect on the state of your personal independence. Choose something to tackle and write it down. Toss a twig on the barbie with the burgers and send it into the cosmos. Or frame it to read every day. Keep it to yourself or share it with everyone you know.

I imagine a world filled with people independent and free from hate, violence, revenge and war. And I know I have more work to do on that scorn stuff because I just caught myself wondering if you’ll think this is too mushy.

To your happiness, and independence!

© Mandy Evans 2010. Permission to reprint granted with mention of author and link to this website, www.mandyevans.com

Reviewed by Jeffrey Pease

While many self-help books enable readers to identify a syndrome, Emotional Options by Mandy Evans gives the reader a method for becoming happier. This is not another cheer-up-and-think-positive book, but the how-to of a cutting edge technique for examining belief systems. Emotional Options tells the reader how to resolve self-defeating beliefs that can shape a whole life and never be addressed. It comes with the endorsement of Option Method founder, Bruce Di Marsico, PhD.

Asserting that only misunderstood desire causes suffering, Evans writes, “You can be happier now, even before you fix all the things you think are wrong with you and the world.” Evans regards happiness, not as a reward for spiritual or material attainment, but as something worthwhile in itself. Acceptance, she writes, “bears no resemblance to resignation.”

A leading practitioner of Option for nearly twenty years, Evans is also the author of Travelling Free. Those familiar with the writings of Barry Neil Kaufman, another Option practitioner, will find that Evans covers somewhat different ground; she concentrates on the nuts and bolts of how to use the method to become happier. Evans voice is warm and truthful throughout the book.

In contrast to many self-help books that quickly become bookshelf talismans, Emotional Options is a book that can be picked up repeatedly, just as one would take a hammer from the toolbox.