I'm Happy. Is That Weird?

How I Went To The Worst Place On Earth and Found Joy

Today I’m supposed to be writing manuals for some new attunements I created, or working on finishing my next book, or working on getting some videos started for YouTube or TikTok, but I was procrastinating because I can be lazy about this part of work. I was chatting with a friend on Messenger while mindlessly scrolling on Facebook and saw a post from another occultist. They were talking about emotions and relationships, I think, but the part that got me was them saying how sad they were and how they meditated to numb the pain. I don’t understand that.

I’m happy almost all the time. Sure I get annoyed, frustrated, angry, sad, and everything else from time to time, I’m not a robot. But more often than not, I’m content and happy. It makes me sad that other people who devote their lives to spirituality still aren’t happy. I figured it was part of the process. But apparently not. Am I just weird? I don’t think so. I think my life, and how I chose to react to certain events, thought me important lessons that maybe others didn’t get.

So let me tell you a little about where I was and what I was doing when I found my inner joy. I was arrested in 2001 and sentenced to ten years in prison a year later. I did my time in a brutal south Texas prison. It was formerly known as the Terrell Unit but had recently changed it’s name to the Polunsky Unit as they guy it was named after didn’t want his name on it after they moved Death Row there.

It was considered one of the worst prisons in America. They were trying to make it better, but failing. Just to be clear, the other offenders were not the bad part, it was the guards. They were who was doing all the beating, raping, and extortion. But the worst part was the heat and humidity. The prison is near Houston, aka Bayou City, that means it’s a reclaimed swamp. Temperatures get well over 100°F without dropping below 80°F for weeks if not months. And there is no air conditioning. Then they put in a multimillion dollar camera system but forgot to test it with the lights off, so they had to leave the lights on all the time. We complained about the temperature at the beginning of summer one year and they came up around my bunk with a laser thermometer and I saw that it read 120°F. That was in June. We hadn’t even hit 100°F outside yet. I can only guess how how it got in August. I remember my head would start to hurt sometime in early July and wouldn’t stop until around October. Whenever I meet other people who got out they all say the same thing, that heat will break you.

I can’t tell you how lonely you get in prison. Me especially, as I was there due to betrayal from who I thought at the time was the love of my life. I did something terribly violent to the man who raped my girlfriend at the time. I am not a violent person but she begged me to do it and I saw what he did to her. And once it was done she recorded a conversation where we talked about it and gave it to the cops. So I went in with a broken heart.

At first all your family and friends write you letters regularly, but over time they slow down, and after a few years they stop coming. Same with visits. I was blessed that my mom and grandparents did continue to come each month.

I say all this not so you will feel sorry for me, but so you can understand how easy it would be for me to have sat there and felt sorry for myself. But that isn’t what I ended up doing, and I think this is how I discovered the key to happiness.

Ok, we are going to get religious here, but stick with me because while I learned these lessons through religion, I think I can help you understand what I did so you can do it without having to become Catholic. I was basically agnostic when I went in. I was very scientifically minded, but still believed there was a God of some kind. I found community in the Catholic Church while in prison and they had some amazing volunteers who took the time to explain the theology as well as the history. They didn’t sugar coat anything and were honest when they had no answers. They did tell me that there are a lot of Mysteries in the faith with a capital M. Mysteries were things that not only had no diffinitive answer, but the more you studied them the more questions you would have. Those who devoted themselves to the Mysteries were called Mystics. I was hooked. A church who didn’t claim to have all the answers and was even comfortable saying we can’t know all the answers? That was amazing to me. I started studying the writings of the Catholic Mystics like St. Francis, St. Clair, St. Theresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and St. Ignatius of Loyola. More on him later.

I was eventually Confirmed and was able to take Communion and go to Confession. I loved Confession. Sure it sucks telling someone else everything you did wrong, but it made me start thinking about everything I did wrong and not wanting to tell the priest made me think about it a bit more before doing it. But it wasn’t just confessing. It made me look at what I did and didn’t do each day. At night I would pray and do what is called a daily examine. I would think about what I did wrong and what I did right and think about why I did what I did. I would ask for forgiveness for my sins. And then, more importantly, I would think about and be grateful for all the good things I still had in my life.

Fasting was popular with several of the Catholics so I gave that a try. I once went 14 days without food, but most of the time I wouldn’t go more than 3. Fasting brings a clarity and what I would now call an altered state of consciousness.

At a certain point I decided to start living like a monk. I prayed in the morning and at night. I said the Rosary each day. And I would fast here and there. This is what I was doing when I started learning to meditate.

Unlike the other magician, meditation doesn’t make me numb, it makes everything feel good. I hate to use the term bliss, but by meditating I clear my mind of a lot of the various layers of thought I usually have going on and I can feel my inner joy much stronger. And yes, it often feels good physically. (I want to be clear that I seldom am able to shut off my thinking entirely, but I get short gaps here and there between thoughts. I say this because I think people have unreasonable expections about meditation.) And don’t get me wrong, I don’t meditate like I should. It is still hard, and like I said, I can be lazy. I used to be much more dedicated to the practice.

One of the Catholic volunteer chaplains wanted to start a meditation class and for whatever reason he picked me to lead it and changed my life forever. I don’t know why he picked me. I didn’t know how to meditate. But he gave me all the material I would need to teach the class and six weeks to figure it out.

The instructions were easy: sit with your back straight, breathe from your diaphram, repeat your forma (mantra) over and over, try to only think of the forma, when you realize you are thinking and not saying the forma label your thought and go back to saying the forma, and do this for 20 to 30 minutes twice a day. I sucked at it. I mean I was really bad. But I stuck with it.

For weeks I would meditate and I got nowhere. Which is normal. But it was getting close to Christmas and I think I decided to do a longer fast during Advent to get ready. It was during that fast that it was like a switch got flipped in my mind. I couldn’t meditate any better, but I got something out of it! It suddenly felt good. It was almost sexual. It was still very hard, but it was also rewarding. Was this the ecstasy the mystics had written about?

As I continued to meditate I began to notice that emotions would start to come over me, but as long as I just repeated my forma and didn’t think about them very much they would quickly fade. It was like a cloud floating over the sun. This was an important discovery. This meant that I could choose my emotions rather than be ruled by them!

The final step that I think matters to this topic is I got a copy of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. These are a series of meditations and practices that you do for several weeks. Things like imagining scenes from the Bible and using your imagination to interact with them. (Good practice for pathworking now that I think about it.) Through the process you really do a thorough self examination. You look at your whole life and think about why you have done the things you have done.

I can’t say exactly when it happened. But in the process of doing all of this I began to be happy regardless of my circumstances. I was miserable and lonely. Betrayed and abandoned. Hot and abused by guards. But I realized that even though I was in prison I was more free than the guards were.

So now I will strip away the religion and just state what I think I did to become happy.

First, I stopped feeling sorry for myself. I took responsibility for my life and owned up to my actions. Sure other people may have influenced me but ultimately everything I did, I chose to do. (And this isn’t just my crime, this is everything in my life.) It is impossible to be a victim and be happy. When you think of yourself as a victim you are focusing on all the bad in your life and pointing the finger outward. You see your life not as something you have control over, but as something that happens to you.

Second, I forgave myself. When you realize your life is your own fault the next step is forgiving yourself and letting it go. It can be real easy to beat yourself up at this point and slide into self-loathing. This is when you can acknowledge all the outside influences that have had an impact on you and helped set you up for failure. Not to let yourself off the hook, but to give yourself some grace. To admit that life is hard. It’s also helpful to see how most everyone else messes things up too. That we are all a little broken and traumatized and it’s ok. You don’t abuse your best friend if they mess up, so don’t do it to yourself. Acknowledge what you have done, let it go, and promise to try and do better in the future.

Third, I saw myself as the creation of divinity who is love and goodness. It’s hard to strip this one of all spirituality, but you can apply it to whatever belief system you have. You are created by love for love. You are inherently good and loveable. This comes from conscously spending time with the divine in it’s many forms. This can be in prayer, meditation, and sacred reading, but also in spending time in ritual, in nature, or dancing. This will continue to grow and devolope your whole life.

Fourth, I counted my blessings. I wouldn’t just focus on the bad, but would take the time to think about the good and feel grateful for it.

Fifth, I meditated regularly. This gave the realization that I could choose my emotional state by deciding which emotions to feed into. If you are depressed and then sit around thinking about everything that is wrong you are feeding into the depression. You can do the same thing with happiness. Also, they have shown scientifically that people who meditate regularly are happier.

Sixth, I practiced fasting, went without sex, and without much comfort. So I would recommend some form of self-denial. This can be fasting, exhaustion, abstainence, humilition, pain, or meditation. (In meditation you are denying yourself thought and is a powerful form of self-denial.) It keeps the ego in check and I am pretty sure the ego wants us unhappy because it gets more attention. Unhappy people are often, not always, very caught up in themselves. You can see how these steps often overlap. Now don’t do anything dangerous or extreme here. I was young and healthy when I fasted for two weeks and I wouldn’t do that to myself today. Start slow. A little goes a long way.

Seventh, I become more present. I tried to live more and more in the moment rather than thinking about the past or worrying about the future. Both are imaginary. All that is real is what is happening right now. Are you in actual pain or some kind of emergency right now? If yes, then you should obviously deal with that. But most of the time we aren’t. The pain is in our heads. It’s from something in the past that’s over, or something in the future that hasn’t happened yet. And if it’s in your head you don’t have to feed it. You can chose to feel another way.

I can add another one to the list now that I couldn’t then, but it goes along with mindfulness, and it has absolutely helped keep me happy. Whenever I am having a rough time I stop and remind myself that I am not in prison anymore. And no matter how bad it is, it’s better than that. Now you don’t have to go to prison to do this. Just think of the worst point in your life and as long as it isn’t right now, you are ok.

I think expectations also play a huge part in our happiness. If we expect our lives to be a certain way and we fall short than we feel like failures and victims for not getting what we feel like we are entitled to. So we need to flip that so we compare our lives not to unrealistic highs, but to the very real lows that we have overcome.

So let’s review. Here are the steps I took that I think you can take that might help make yourself more happy:

1. Stop feeling sorry for yourself

2. Forgive yourself

3. Know who you are and that you are good and deserve love and good things

4. Take time to think about the good things in your life and feel grateful for them

5. Meditate

6. Some form of self-denial practice

7. Be here now

8. Drop your expectations and be grateful you aren’t in a worse situation

Before wrapping up I know that some people who read this are probably mad because it sounds like I am victim blaming. I am not. I recognize that there is a lot in our world that causes pain and suffering that is beyond our control. Nothing I have said is about avoiding these things. The key is how you react to them internally. It’s not your fault if you get knocked down. But if you choose to stay down, complain that it isn’t fair, and point the finger at what knocked you down those are all choices. You can also choose to get up, dust yourself off, and keep going.

Also, I want to be clear that I am not talking about people with mental health issues. We are physical beings as well as spiritual and our bodies have a huge impact on our emotional wellbeing. Brain chemicals, hormones, neurological disorders, and any number of other things can make it impossible to feel normal much less happy. I had to be on anti-depressants for years before I could even start this process. So I get it.

Also, I don’t want it to seem like I’m picking on the other magician. This has been on my mind a lot lately. We have a friend who is considerably younger than us. He is in his twenties and just getting started in life and he is in almost complete despair because he just doesn’t have any hope for his future. We also have other friends who recently have all mentioned just how miserable they are. It really makes me feel like a freak for being so happy all the time. I know there are so many reasons for people to feel lost, lonely, disconnected, and without hope. But where there is life there is hope. As long as you are alive things can change and I firmly believe that we can learn to be happy no matter what the circumstances.

Please don’t think I’m some special and unique. I’m far from perfect. I have problems. I have an eating disorder from prison and am overweight. I have PTSD. I can be lazy. I get frustrated from customers questions too easily. I get stressed over money. So I’m no saint. I’m not perfect. My life isn’t perfect. I just did the work.

It is my mission to try amd help people free themselves from what oppresses them and help them gain sovereignty over their lives. But often what oppresses us is us. No ritual is just going to make you happy. No attunement is going to do it. They can help, but you have to do so much more than just the ritual to manifest happiness. The hardest step is probably the first. Taking responsibility for your actions and your life. You will never have sovereignty over your life if you give the responsibility up to fortune and the actions of others.

I hope this helps someone. Despair seems to be an epidemic. I hope someone out there reads this and puts a plan together and starts working it and changes their life.