Awakening, Healing, and Becoming - The Road to Happiness?

by Giadha A. DeCarcer

Five years ago, I fell off the face of the earth – almost literally. I fled my life in DC, tore away my chains to New Frontier Data, and severed all links to those who knew me in the U.S.. At the time I had become an empty shell, a shadow of myself, running on fumes after years of urban toxicity, corporate pressure, and constantly running as fast as possible to seemingly nowhere in particular. If you are curious to the details, by all means read my manuscript, but what is of consequence here is that collapsing onto myself to almost complete destruction was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Why should this be of interest to you? Well, and don’t worry I’m not selling anything, it may save you time and grief – I sure wish someone had shared this with me a few years, no, a few decades ago…

So, let me start with a somewhat cliché, but relevant question – What is happiness to you? And I do not mean the feeling of euphoria or joy, I mean happiness as in that inner peace, and sense of grounding, security, balance, harmony, and satisfaction with life and oneself.

I bet your definition has changed over the years. Maybe because you have matured and evolved – someone say mid-life crisis? - Maybe because you have accepted and settled. Maybe because you have just changed.  Regardless of how you define it, have you ever felt like you have truly achieved it? I had not.

When I abandoned my old life, I traveled back to my birthplace, Italy, purchased eight 100-year-old acres of hillside land on the Southeastern Coast, and mostly hid away with my dog Lucie and five others I rescued along the way.  I slept. I ate. And I pondered. Yes, like the Tibetan monk on a journey of silence, I kept away from people, living mostly barefoot, in yoga pants, and outdoors with my pups, my pack. My only intention, if not need, was to fend off the overwhelming pain that threatened to end me every day of the week, and every hour of the day. I just wanted to stop feeling for as long as I could.

About two years ago, three years into my self-imposed isolation, I re-emerged – not intentionally, it was just time – and I was transformed. The body aches, hand tremors, outburst of anxiety-driven tears, and restless nights of waking up in cold sweats had finally stopped. I could see. I could breathe. I could hear my thoughts. I felt awake. I felt alive again.

What happened? Why did it happen? How did it happen?

Upon the conscious realization of this spontaneous, albeit long-enduring, transformation, and given that I still felt lost and disconnected from the only world I knew and had left behind three years earlier, I decided to intentionally push forward and see how much further I could take this ‘awakening’.   

I began to analyze – yes, old habits die hard – what I had actually done, or not done, and whether there may have been some pattern to my actions.  I documented my reflections, which led to more questions, which led to further reflections on my past, on my life in general, and finally became a journal of sorts. As the writing continued, my reflections began to turn into meditation, something I would never have thought to want or like - keeping still for more than one minute at a time in actual silence, nope, not for me thank you very much, or so I thought. The point is that I began to feel my thoughts clear, my mind open, my body unwind. I began to ‘flow’ somehow. I felt connected.

Feeling reconnected and healed, I decided to develop the land I serendipitously stumbled upon with no original purpose.  I wrote a book. I launched a yoga and nature retreat, Vere Vitae (Latin for ‘Spring of Life’), to help heal others, especially women, especially female entrepreneurs. And I am beginning to work on a summer academy for young girls. I had become who I believe I was always meant to be. I had found my purpose, my path to actual happiness. 

Happiness for me used to be being the best, which evolved into wanting to be uber-successful, then changed into finding true love -even recorded a docu-series about that! Eventually, no true love found, I went back to wanting to be uber-successful so that I could be ridiculously rich and have the ‘fuckoff factor’ as I like to call it. I got pretty close to achieving some of them, sure spent loads of time, 50 years of blood, sweat and tears, trying to, but ultimately none of them would have made me 'happy', in fact the path towards most of them made me utterly unhappy.

Turns out my path to happiness could have been much simpler. It entailed neither a thing nor a destination, and it was certainly not a moving target to be chased. It was more of a way of living, a way of thinking, the embracing of three profound, yet simple actions that really matter and have irreversible impact in all we do and in who we truly are –maybe this will be obvious to some of you, but it sure was not to me, so this is for the rest of you to whom it may not yet be:

Accept.

Be Grateful.

Have Purpose.

In that order. All the time. That’s pretty much it.

Accepting is about accepting oneself – liking yourself, loving yourself; it’s about accepting others – regardless of their differences, and accepting your circumstances – whether personal, professional, societal, or financial.  Acceptance is about seeing yourself, others and the world around you clearly, objectively, and completely, without judgement or expectation. Acceptance is not about settling, it’s simply about being honest with yourself before you can be honest with others. Acceptance is the necessary catalyst to awakeningand to be able feel gratitude.

Being grateful is about finding and truly seeing the positive in what you have already objectively seen and accepted, so that you can genuinely feel thankful for it. Because if you look, I promise you, we all, and I mean each and every one of us, have a multitude of reasons to be grateful. If you are reading this you already are likely someone who has had an education, who owns a computer, who likely has a roof over their head, running water, and clothes on their back. Seems extreme? Is it though? Being grateful is a stone on the road to forgiveness and thus the true path to healing, to letting go of low-frequency emotions such as envy, fear, anger, sadness and hate that inevitably manifest themselves in our physical reality whether that be our body or life.

Finally, having purpose, the trickiest one really, is about not giving into what society, your parents, or others think you should do or be, and rather finding that thing that inspires you, that makes you feel like you are special and are having an impact; that thing that no matter what, will drive you, and provide the level of gratification and satisfaction that feeds your soul, even when it does not always seem to fill your bank account. And no, making money and having purpose are not mutually exclusive by any means; in fact, I would venture that having purpose likely leads to financial wellness as well. I will also venture that having money alone does not lead to happiness... 

Once we find and live our purpose, we can become who we were always meant to be.  And once that happens, we begin to live and vibrate at a higher frequency that aligns with 'happiness'.

I admit the last one can indeed be quite complicated because we live in a material world, and believe me, I often still feel like a material girl. Society and family often weigh so heavily on who we should be and what we should do, it is often distracting and confusing, making finding our true purpose challenging and even scary. While this principle of living with purpose is a well-known and documented one, written about by hundreds throughout history, it is tragically now mostly forgotten, buried deep under the deafening cacophony of the world of information overload we live in today. And this principle is also often connected to a more spiritual path, which I will not dare step into here, even if my own journey certainly took me there.

So that’s it – this is all I wanted to say and share - my own modest anecdote of accepting myself, finding gratitude in my life, and discovering meaning and purpose in order to eventually stumble into what happiness is for me today. Maybe this will reach you, touch you, and possibly even save you the decades it took me to find this path. And with that, I wish you to awaken, heal, and become who you were always meant to be - if you have not already-  and to live in genuine happiness within yourself and in your life, emanating it to everyone and everything around you.