Happiness Junkie: A 12 Step Program to Find Inner Peace and Change Your Life

The way out of our cage begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives, by embracing with wakefulness and care our moment-to-moment experience. By accepting absolutely everything, what I mean is that we are aware of what is happening within our body and mind in any given moment, without trying to control or judge or pull

When we get lost in our stories, we lose touch with our actual experience. Leaning into the future, or rehashing the past, we leave the living experience of the immediate moment. Our trance deepens as we move through the day driven by “I have to do more to be okay” or “I am incomplete; I need more to be happy.” These “mantras” reinforce the trance-

"The more you accept imperfection, the more joy you will give and receive. Your capacity for joy and happiness depends on your capacity to accept imperfection, not just intellectually, but as an emotional experience.

I inhabited a self-made prison that stopped me from living fully. Radical Acceptance of all my feelings and fears of imperfection was the only way I could free myself. By attending to the bandaged place—embracing the pain I had been running from—I began to trust myself and my life.