Six years after the suicide of her father, in one moment her own intense suffering was swapped for mind-blowing joy, altering her life permanently. Happiness and peace became her predominant states. Laughter exploded at the simplicity and power of the shift, and tears of gratitude flowed.
Understandings began to come about how we have been living backwards, how we have mistaken the outside for the inside, and how we have tethered ourselves to the uncontrollable winds of change in the midst of freedom—and how we can return to truth, sanity, and peace.
She dropped everything she was doing to show people how to feel good no matter what because when you shift your state, problems dissolve, villains become victims, and compassion kicks in. So much gratitude came with this revelation, she began helping people awaken love and joy in their lives.
Months after discovering joy, one day in the woods she was knocked to her knees by an explosion of love that ended the imaginary separation of self and other, speech fell away, and all she could do was laugh and cry at the cosmic joke.
Forty years of self baggage suddenly fell away. The thinker and speaker she thought she was, was gone. Yet the Self remained. Cindy is writing about that “direct seeing” of Self in a third book she is working on.
She is the author of Alchemy – How to Feel Good No Matter What, and The Happiness Lie: What Generations Have Been Told That Makes You Unhappy.
There is a terrible trap of an idea that many modern, popular, *leading* spiritual teachers have set for you.
They have elevated suffering to some sort of spiritual heroism.
You must suffer, they say, otherwise you would have no character, compassion, or humility.Worse, they say that you *need* suffering to crack the ego.
I am sorry you’ve heard and possibly accepted this falsehood.
Suffering is a symptom, not a cause—and not a solution!
Suffering is NOT necessary.
Wisdom only strikes where and when suffering stops.
It is the end of suffering that ends suffering, not suffering that needs suffering to stop suffering. This is nonsense.
All of these teachers (if they actually attained peace) FIRST stopped suffering, THEN had access to wisdom—and not before.
Suffering is a stupid, ignorant and limited state.
It’s in the cracks between suffering that wisdom shines.
Suffering is never necessary, and is an action that you don’t have to take.
You are already free.
So free that you can suffer. And so free that you can simply stop doing it.
