Your Guide to Contentment

6 Steps to Living Beyond Pain, Sadness, and

Suffocation

By JP Sears, Inner Coach

Welcome to Your Guide to Contentment! Youve likely encountered some

level of suffering throughout your life to motivate you to become a seeker of
contentment. Perhaps for you its been pain from past wounds, sadness about
a heartache, or suffocation from pressure. I know Ive experienced the whole
spectrum! If this is true for you as well, I would like to whole-heartedly thank
you for going through the pain and suffering that was necessary to wake you
up to the point where youre at! Your suffering matters so much that I would
dare say it is an essential north star to guide you into a meaningful life of
contentment.

This guide is an eclectic compilation for you based on my experiences
working with countless clients, workshop participants, and of course my own
healing and growth. As you journey through this guide, Id like to invite you
to consider contentment less as a state of mind and more as a state of being.
When embraced as a state of being, contentment becomes a more holistic
experience that integratively permeates you physically, emotionally,
mentally, and spiritually.

Id also like to ask you to consider why you are reading this. What are your
specific reasons for striving to blossom contentment in your life? If youre
looking for contentment so you can escape pain, you may meet an abrupt
dead end. If youre striving for contentment to bring more meaning and
peace of mind to your life experiences, both painful and pleasurable ones,
your journey will likely be a fruitful one!

In what follows, Section 1 asks you to consider the deeper meaning of what
contentment really is and why your suffering matters. Section 2 invites you
to consider how to remove the blocking factors of contentment with six
specific strategies. Section 3 is an invitation on how to integrate contentment
into the big picture of your life so that you can journey forward with its
intangible support and inspiration. As you entertain these insights on
discovering contentment, please feel free to meet them with a considerate
mind and a curious heart!

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Section 1: About Contentment

What does contentment mean? Could you consider that it is a place of
acceptance, peace of mind, and a sense of intrinsic support? We perhaps all
have an innate thirst for contentment whether we know it or not. Some of us
begin our journey by desiring happiness in order to escape sadness, which is
of course a powerful step.

After a while we consciously or unconsciously
For Your
realize that, though weve taken an important step
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forward, were still a slave to emotional
attachment if happiness is our focal point. We
Making happiness the realize that perhaps true peace of mind cannot be
aim is to live life achieved if were in a reactive mode moving away
confined by the control from pain (sadness) by seeking pleasure
of your ego, as it only (happiness). It may even dawn on us that a
seeks what it approves
mission of escaping sadness means we are
of.
controlled by sadness. We realize that the grace
of acceptance isnt possible if we resist our pain
Contentment is a place
of surrendering ego through our seeking of pleasure. Our realizations
control so that you may propel us to transcend happiness as our focus for
experience the grace of the sake of inviting the purity of contentment into
life that is beyond the our lives.

control of your ego.

Could contentment be space between
happiness and sadness, a state of non-
emotional attachment which gives birth to
genuine peace of mind? We are in a state of
acceptance as we embrace the polarities of
both sadness and happiness rather than
resisting either. Contentment allows us to
be at ease psychologically and physically as
we trade the hardness of resistance for the
suppleness of acceptance. Zen philosophy

suggests that we are in a place of
contentment when we accept things as they are without wanting them to be
otherwise. This great truth likely hits closest to home when we apply it to the
emotional spectrum in our inner life.


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Your Pain and Suffering

Its wisely been said throughout the ages that pain is necessary to motivate us
to seek enlightenment beyond wherever were stuck. Would you believe its
been important that youve lived through the significant pain that youve had?
Would you also believe that some of your most significant pain has been so
overwhelming that you had to go numb to it and
therefore still carry it around unconsciously? In
For Your
other words, as necessary as pain and suffering are,
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you perhaps dont need to go out and create more of
it. Waking up to your known and hidden pain is
Everyone experiences perhaps more appropriate and productive.
pain, wounding, and

trauma. There are
Where does your suffering come from? Childhood
those who know it
offers a wide potential for wounding. Some of us
and those who deny
became compromised, and still are, from the shame
it.
of not being able to meet other peoples expectations.
Denial significantly Some of us became suffocated in efforts to gain
displaces the potential approval. Some of us carry wounding about not
being enough to fulfill others or take care of them. Or
for contentment.
perhaps we carry visible or hidden pains of

abandonment from being disconnected from those
who we needed. Many of us also experienced trauma via the more
traditionally considered forms of abuse; sexual abuse, physical violence,
emotional violations, or the helplessness of witnessing others being abused.

The landscape of adolescence into adulthood is laced with inevitable pain as
well. Being bullied, going through heartbreaks, and not fitting in are common
pains in adolescence. Into adulthood we go where our wounding may involve
divorce, marriages with no intimacy,
money issues, feeling a loss of freedom
from having kids, loneliness from not
having kids, not feeling on purpose with
our careers, and the proverbial mid-life
crisis.

Contentment asks us to no longer deny
our suffering. It asks of us to embrace it,
process it, know that it was necessary to

awaken us, and to find a place of
gratitude for it, even though we may
never approve of what happened.

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Please consider noting a few challenging painful experiences from your life:

1)


2)


3)




For Your Contemplation

Wounding generates the greatest suffering comprehendible, a
sense of separation.
Healing old wounds is essential for transcending the
suffering of separation so that you can realize the sense of
unity within contentment.

What are the methods youve used in your life to create denial about your
pain?

1)


2)


3)

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Section 2: The Path to Contentment

Perhaps we can consider contentment to be an innate expression possible
within all of us. Therefore it isnt something we have to learn, rather it is
something we have to allow. If you were having trouble breathing you
wouldnt have to go learn how to breathe, because breathing is an innate
knowing. Instead, your efforts would need to focus on removing the block
that is preventing optimal breathing. Similarly, rather than impossibly
inventing contentment, perhaps our path is to remove what is blocking the
flow of it.

In the previous section you had a chance to peruse considerations on
wounding. Now we have the opportunity to realize that those very wounds
become the constrictor of contentment if relegated to under the rug status,
just as wounding in our cardiovascular system builds blockages in our
arteries. If you happen to believe that contentment can only be sourced
within self, then below youll find streamlined strategies that will help resolve
what clogs the flow of contentment within you.

Strategy 1: Embrace Your Shadow Self
As the name implies, our shadow side is the part of us typically not seen or
felt. Its anatomy is comprised of what threatens us most about our self,
therefore we alter our mind through blindness and numbness to avoid
perceiving these aspects of self we feel threatened by. Typically the
relationship we have with our shadow side is one where we abandon the fear
and shame contained within self,
therefore we also abandon the parts
of self that have the shame and fear.
A haunting question to consider is,
what if your shadow self is the
strongest influence on your life?

When we become aware of what we
were previously unaware of about
our self, the shadow all of a sudden
loses power over us. Weve shined
the light of our awareness to bring illumination to what was concealed in the
shadow. The controlling creatures of the night within lose their power once
their cover of darkness is dissolved. A powerful route of embracing our
shadow self is to learn things about self we never knew before, feel feelings
weve been numb to, remember memories that weve forgotten.

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Perhaps most powerfully, we intimately embrace our shadow self when we

love and accept the parts of self that dont feel lovable. It may be easy to love
what feels loveable and accept what feels acceptable, by implication our
shadow self is neither. Can you risk responding with love and acceptance
anyway? Its my experience that we all have some version of the inner critical
mantra that says, If people knew ________________ about me, they could never
love me. The validity of this critical belief may or may not be solid.
Regardless, it is maybe our calling to stop pretending that our truth isnt true
and work on loving ourselves in spite of our critical self-judgment.

Strategy 2: Discover the Story Under the Story
Unless we have deliberate conscious intent otherwise, our perceptions are
shaped by our ego for the primary purpose
of self-preservation and therefore to
minimize the experience of pain. These
delusional perceptions become our stories.
In other words, our egos create stories
around our pain to keep us deflected from
the true pain that were going through. The
price we pay for this delusion is being

disconnected from self. Not surprisingly,
the stories are reactively authored with the
biggest, boldest writing, and therefore seem the truest to us.

Think about when youve been in (or are in) a troubled relationship, what
was your story about it? Typically well notice our story is centered around
the other person. They ignore me, they dont care enough, they are afraid of
commitment, says our story. If we always react with
For Your
a story authored with the pen of illusion to minimize
Contemplation
pain, then we must ask what is the story under our
story?
If everything you
perceive is a story With the relationship trouble we may find a new
designed to deceive level of authenticity by realizing we created a story
you, what is the story about the other person so that we are distracted
under your story?
from the painful realization that the actual story is
that we feel inadequate that we cant get the other to
Can you respectfully love us and pay attention to us the way that we want.
question what seems The story of anger and resentment, as painful as it
true to you?
may be, is an anesthetizing alternative to the truer

story under the story of feeling inadequate.

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Nothing will constipate the flow of contentment like believing our own
stories. To find the freedom to realize the story under our story, is it a pre-
requisite to be willing to not believe everything we think? As you
introspectively tunnel into realizations deeper than your surface stories,
youll likely find that stories are usually created with the focus on other
people and secondary emotions. Tunneling deeper into truthfulness finds our
stories orbiting around our self and our core emotions.

Strategy 3: Practice Vulnerability
What is the price we pay for discounting our true feelings? The payoff is
perhaps we have a fleeting sense of strength forged when we dismiss our
insecure feelings. The expense is that we suffocate ourselves and become
more insecure while we buy into our own faade of security. When were
vulnerable we go through a soft, sensitive, and frightening birth canal where
we give ourselves permission to feel exactly how we feel.

We may feel overcome with joy and need to laugh when no one else is,
perhaps experience sadness and cry,
and certainly at times be engulfed in a
sense of shame and embarrassment that
leaves us certain that the world is
ending. No matter how intense, how
painful, or how pleasurable, we make it
ok to feel exactly how we feel through
being vulnerable. Vulnerability births
us into a world of our own authentic self

rather than suffering through denying
self.

What is your greatest fear, shame, sadness? Swimming in the scary waters of
it allows the emotional charge of it to be metabolized and dissipated in its
appropriate time. Denying the scary waters keeps them frozen while were
stuck in the middle with no substitute for the healing radiance of
vulnerability.

Does being vulnerable feel safe? Probably no safer than doing a back flip into
the Grand Canyon! We invite vulnerability not by making it feel safe, but by
making it safe to feel unsafe. It is a practical necessity to be in an
environment where we feel protected so that we can be more willing to swim
into the unsafe waters of vulnerability. My experience is that some people
thrive into vulnerability in the presence of a compassionate coach or friend,

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while others feel well protected in their own solitude. Where and with whom
would you feel safest being the soft turtle who takes off its hard shell?

Strategy 4: Claim Self-Responsibility for Your Wounding and Healing
If we were to do the metaphysical math, wed likely find that 100% of the
volume of pain and suffering weve had and will have has been created
through our perception. The victim mindset, which lives through all people to
some degree, screams out in protest, Its my mother who betrayed me, she
caused my pain. Its my lover who let me down, its not my fault why I hurt.
The victim mindset will scream as it does regardless of what a more
conscious perspective has to say. While we allow our
For Your
inner victim to cry out, other parts of our us can
Contemplation
consider that it is not what happens to us, rather it is
how we experience what happens to us that is the
Rightfully
claiming genesis of our pain.
your
self-
responsibility for how Why is it essential to assume self-responsibility for
you
feel
and our pain? Would you believe that in doing so we
experience
life reclaim our power that we otherwise lose when we
empowers you and blame someone or something else? Accepting that
frees others in your the power of our perception created our pain anoints
life.
us with the inherent power to heal our pain. Denial
of responsibility for our wounding is simultaneous
We drink poison denial of healing our wounding.
hoping to hurt others
when were stuck in
Questions we all know the answer to logically, yet
the mindset of blame.
reactively deny the answer to emotionally, are, Who

can heal you other than you? Who can give you contentment aside from
yourself? Jungian Analyst James Hollis points out the unnerving reality that
if we live long enough, everyone we know will eventually leave us through
choice or death (Why Good People Do Bad Things, by James Hollis, Gotham
Books). If we dont claim our personal authority through self-responsibility,
it may be a very endless, empty wait for someone else to do it for us. Not
surprisingly, you may notice that the strategies in this guide are all acts of
virtue that can only be given to you by
you.

Strategy 5: Accept Conflict
Arguing with other people, withdrawing
from others, and experiencing inner
conflicting thoughts and feelings isnt
pleasant for any of us. Do you notice

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yourself magically fantasizing about a fictional landscape of life free of

internal and external conflict? Our fear of conflict, how we tend to lose self
through it, and how we feel out of control during it, of course compels us to
seek refuge in the conflict-less life of our fantasies.
For Your
While the road to hell is paved with good intentions,
it can be startling to see the pavement under our feet
Contemplation
when we realize that our resistance to conflict
If peace of mind isnt creates more conflict. It produces conflict about our
lost through conflict, conflict.
is it lost through
conflict
about Accepting conflict helps free us from the conflict
conflict?
about our conflict that we get swallowed by in our
efforts to escape conflict. Our inhale will always
Does the accepting conflict with our exhale. The constriction of our
hand of friendship heartbeat will always conflict with the expansion of
extended
toward our heartbeat. We will always see things our way
conflict become the while others see it their way. Part of our ego will feel
source of new found as it does, while another part of our ego feels a
peace of mind?
different way. The past will be what its been, while

the future will be as it will. If we can accept our inner
and outer conflict, are we saying yes to a significant source of life enriching
intimacy?

Strategy 6: Surrender Control
Left to our own unconscious devices, everything about our lives becomes
about acquiring more control. When our ego feels as though its in control it
makes life seem more predictable, which in turn makes us feel safer and more
powerful. Surrendering control is
the last item on the list of
interesting endeavors to the ego.
The egos life preserving strategies
become life ending strategies if the
inkling to transition from self
preservation to self realization isnt
acknowledged. In its unquenchable
thirst for control our egos are never
satisfied. Well notice feeling bitter,

resentful, angry, or very passive
about aspects of our lives in response. This is our cue that the ego is
drowning itself in an effort to quench its impossible thirst.

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You may wish to consider how you operate control dramas in your life. If so,
please think about whether you get your control needs met by controlling
other people or by being controlled by other people. Which parts of your
inner self feel power through controlling other parts of you? Which parts feel
safer by being controlled? You may find yourself acting out via the active or
the passive polarity of control, either way it is still the expression of control
needing to be recognized before it can be
surrendered.
For Your

Contemplation
From an energetic standpoint, could you consider
What else can you that control is life to the ego and death to the spirit
truly control other self? Conversely, while surrendering control feels
than your ability to like death from the egos perspective, does it
surrender the need to exponentially expand life from the spirits
perspective? If we consider the possibilities implied,
control?
~Zen saying we may find that the physical, emotional, mental, and
spiritual rigidity created from a tight grip of control

constricts the possibility of contentment right out of
us. What happens to the flow of contentment when we can surrender, relax,
and expand?

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Section 3: The Journey Onward

As youve just invested in the consideration of meaningful strategies for
removing blocks to allow the flow of contentment to greet you within, what
now? The proverbial what now? may best be answered by inviting you to
gift yourself with consistency at integrating the talked about strategies into
your life. After doing so you may find genuine disagreement with some of the
strategies. If that is the case, please do let go of the ones that dont serve you
after a thorough test drive. And of course, as you
For Your
continue with increased mindfulness about the
Contemplation
strategies that seem to be the richest for you,
youll likely find new rays of contentment coming
Is
happiness
about into your experience. As you do, you may be
seeking comfort, while doing yourself a great favor by not trying to figure
contentment is about out how to stay in a place of contentment once
seeking meaning?
youve experienced it.

Echoing wisdom throughout the ages asks us to seek the journey, not the
destination. For the sake of your contentment, would you be willing to
surrender the idea that contentment is a destination that we can arrive at and
become rooted in? In the spirit of the journey of contentment, we may be
well served with the alert introspective questions, Can I recognize when Ive
fallen out of contentment? And how quickly can I help myself find the balance
again? Peace of mind on our journey is knowing that we will fall out of
balance, the questions ask us to
recognize when it happens and can
we proactively help ourselves back
into the balance of contentment.

Now that youre equipped with a
degree of meaningful inner
resources, you can dare to journey
onward and risk welcoming new
experiences and expressions of

yourself. Pain, sadness, and
suffocating
sensations
will
inevitably arise from your past or meet you in the future. When they do,
contentment knows how to greet them as a friend, for they are a part of you.
You may notice a degree of peace, acceptance, and inner support through the
suffering of it. If you dont notice these virtues, then youve at least noticed
that youre not in a place of contentment, which can be your gentle reminder

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that proactive mindfulness will be helpful to bring you into whatever degree
of balance the moment asks of you.

May your contentment be your inspiration and voluminous support system
propelling you into many fruitful realizations of deeper meaning, healing, and
peace about your life.

Wishing you many meaningful awakenings,

JP Sears

About the Author
JP Sears is an Inner Coach in Carlsbad, CA. His one-on-one client practice
specializes in holistic emotional healing and resolving self-sabotage issues. JP
regularly facilitates classes, workshops, and tele-classes nationally and
internationally on a variety of inner healing topics while being widely
acclaimed for his heartfelt and dynamic style. For more information on
upcoming classes, workshops, tele-classes, or becoming a client, please visit
www.InnerAwakeningsOnline.com.

The purpose of JPs work is to empower people to live more meaningful lives
as whole individuals by guiding them beyond their symptoms of pain,
sabotage, and stuckness so they may discover and reconcile their inner
imbalances.

If you are interested in:
Healing self sabotage
Healing painful wounds
Finding more meaning in your life
Learning how to have thriving intimacy in relationships

Please feel free to visit www.InnerAwakeningsOnline for information
about 1-on-1 coaching, self-growth tele-classes, and in person
workshops! Also find us at:

www.Facebook.com/InnerAwakeningsOnline

www.YouTube.com/AwakenWithJP

www.Twitter.com/AwakenWithJP

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