Sunflower Stance

Standing so tall and straight, sunflowers are unapologetic about claiming happy expression.

As humans, we struggle quite a lot with raising our proud faces to bask in the sun like that. We allow ourselves moments of great joy and radiance but it’s very unusual that we maintain it for any significant length of time. Often it’s patchy at best.

We’re not raised to relentlessly seek our brilliance and to live always from that place in the sunshine. We don’t allow our full shine from within and we often shy away from being lit up in the spotlight. We dim our brightness and we linger in the shadows.

Our conditioning tells us it’s impossible to live in the glow of happiness all the time. But just because it’s rare doesn’t mean it’s not possible. Duality gives us the false impression that there must always be something wrong to struggle against, that there must always be a downside in order to appreciate what’s good. It’s not true. If everyone always chose love then all the suffering would eventually be eradicated. Sure the world is in a pretty shabby condition but lets not be ruled and dictated to by it. Let’s not excuse ourselves from cleaning things up by suggesting that suffering is necessary. It’s a choice. Pure and simple – we either choose love or we don’t.

Love has a lot of depraved competition: money, ego, fear, hurt, addiction etc. But why is it often so deeply challenging for us to rise above and favour the happier alternatives?

I began my career as a naturopath/acupuncturist, guiding people to overcoming physical ailments. Now I’m more a holistic coach, assisting healthy people who seek to awaken their greatest expression of magnificence. Sometimes this is more difficult than healing physical problems. There can be a lot more inner resistance to activating our brilliance than recovering health. To overcome an illness is to return to a neutral baseline of wellbeing. The status quo is recovered. It doesn’t take too much energy to live at the level of normal or average. It does, however, take great fortitude to make a push for the highest peaks and be seen to do extraordinarily well in life. All sorts of resistance gets stirred up when we seek to forge ahead of the crowd.

There is an enormous drag of collective malaise that discourages anyone from making a breakaway. The undertow of this collective holding pattern almost has gravitational pull. It requires great thrusts of emotional determination to overcome it.

Encountering stand-out success in others can be very inspiring. But it can also stir many demons in us that lurk behind the scenes and criticise. There are uncomfortable feelings that stand between us and the things we desire, and when we see others achieving success our gremlins can get antagonised. Feelings of not being good enough, of jealousy, helplessness, disempowerment or impotence for example. The further one progresses on a successful path beyond the crowd that settles for average, the more likely we are to stir up that collective dust of discontent around us.

To persist, it takes clarity, determination and resolve. Sometimes the weight of opposition gets the better of us and we succumb. It can be as if we’re bound to the collective suffering by an elastic band, only progressing so far before we self-sabotage or take our eyes off the prize and lurch backwards to unwittingly fall in step once again with the masses.

Mostly I support other coaches who are used to taking the lead and encouraging others to also be their best. But still they often stumble when our collaboration supports progress that takes them suddenly into much brighter and more successful situations. Very often they regress in surprising ways upon attaining some significant milestone.

Prior to this, life has been oriented around contending with the struggles. Suffering has been normal and familiar. It plays out in varying degrees, but basically our agreed upon reality is that life is often difficult. With conscientious personal development, however, life does actually begin to open up and offer ever growing stretches of quite spectacular joy. Bursts of happiness for no obvious reason. Waking to start the day with irrational exuberance. Being readily moved to tears by overwhelming beauty. Riding rich waves of peace and contentment. These experiences of genuine happiness begin to get such a strong foothold that we’re no longer susceptible to the intrusion of struggles in the ways we were familiar with for so long.

But a state of happiness that genuinely grows greater every day can begin to become unnerving. The more progress that’s made, the more out of sync one is with the collective experience. Although the improvement is quite fantastic, it can simultaneously be disorienting to consistently feel so unusually good. Our lack of familiarity with the state of ongoing happiness can feel as if somehow there’s actually something wrong. Not at a conscious level of course, but more from an illogical tugging beneath the surface.

To live in a place that’s so far removed from the generally agreed upon reality of hardship, can become too much. The higher ground often brings a kind of altitude sickness. The self consciousness of unusual success can drive a downturn into self destruction. A big pay rise might make us suddenly doubt our abilities, a beautiful new home might have us feeling unworthy, and sudden recognition could surface feelings of insecurity. Emotional baggage we never knew we had suddenly screams for us to step back from the full enjoyment of new found success. People become stressed about things going well. All sorts of irrational objections surface: Good things don’t last. I’ll make others uncomfortable. I’ll lose friends. I’m not allowed to enjoy myself if others aren’t.

The collective pull to remain with the crowd makes itself heard in all manner of false assumptions: I can’t be happy when so many others aren’t. I mustn’t outdo my parents. Women can’t have more success than men. I can’t do what I love and make great money from it. Something is bound to go terribly wrong if I’m too happy. I can’t learn and grow if I don’t have hardships. I’ll lose connection with my friends if I make too much money. On and on with the fears of success.

So many people hide or downplay their joy. It’s not unusual to feel ashamed of doing well in life. We fear the backlash from those who are confronted. Or we feel self conscious around those who are less privileged. We want our parents to be proud but at the same time we often don’t want to outdo them. We want to help our friends but we won’t allow ourselves to surpass them to show them how it’s done. We discount our beauty or skill or opportunities for fear of highlighting what others deny in themselves.

If our joy makes someone feel bad about themselves, our response is commonly to shrink. We fail to appreciate the value of stirring up discomfort in others. This is the very best way to trigger people – not with upsets, but with outstanding behaviour that demonstrates the glory of what is actually possible.

Many people are mobilised by joy. Many others are disturbed by it but will never rally to shift towards choosing it without their anti-success demons being exposed and expelled. The best way to rouse both groups is via excellence.

Some healing requires the excavation of awful feelings from the past. But there is also extraordinary healing that comes from simply choosing to be wholehearted about pursuing great things - extending to challenge and stretch the upper limits of joy. Embracing the sunflower posture of eternal happiness will attract attention. Some positive, some negative. Do you drop your beaming face to dim your radiance and appease those who are disturbed, or do you embolden yourself to grow even higher to extend your reach?