"To attain wealth, the lasting kind, the kind that gives your life meaning, value and sustenance, base your daily existence on the generosity of spirit. Everything else you desire will follow of its own accord." —Deepak Chopra, Abundance: The Inner Path to Wealth To experience great joy in our everydays is to experience bliss. If ever you find yourself smiling in the middle of your everydays just because, if you are me anyway, you are experiencing a bliss-filled moment. We may find it surprising or difficult at first to imagine the possibility to experience such a natural state going about a life routine that happens nearly everyday, but that is exactly the point to living consciously. This is exactly why choosing to understand what true contentment is makes all the difference. The culture that surrounds us often extols that everyday living must be grueling, busy, stress-filled, chaotic, loud, full of drama and gamesmanship and constant competition and comparison, and that the only way to escape such a 'real' life is to choose unnatural means or substances outside of our body or go to extremes in our celebrations and 'play-time/free time/weekends' to bring us calm, or 'bliss'. Now don't get me wrong, I enjoy a glass of wine with my meals and I enjoy traveling to see and be immersed in cultures that capture my fascination, but I have never been one to need anything beyond consciously and intentionally living a life of true contentment to feel true bliss in my everydays, because when you experience what true bliss is, when you have created a life you love living every day, and have let go of trying to please the culture, let go of holding on and refraining from controlling things and people and their actions that can never be in our control, that is when you open your life to the potential to feel an abundance of bliss. Deepak Chopra in his new book Abundance: The Inner Path to Wealth speaks to what many other authors that have been discussed here on the blog, the podcast and in TSLL's books have shared about finding peace within ourselves, and thus living a most fulfilling life - dharma. From Jay Shetty to Martha Beck to David Whyte and so many others, Chopra as well speaks to the gift we give our lives when we find the focus/purpose that marries what (1) contributes positively to the world (giving it something it needs, not what we think it needs or forcing our idea upon society) with (2) what we have a deep passion and unique ability to give to the world. "Dharma is constantly showing the way forward." —Deepak Chopra And you see, it takes time to know exactly what this is, and while others who have good intentions may notice and nudge us in a direction that leads us to discovering our dharma, only we can discover it with certainty. And in order to be certain, we must be present, and live, as Chopra describes it, in Simple Awareness. Sharing that simple awareness is the "most powerful engine for change", your simple awareness already exists within you and always has, but often we live the purported life outlined above by a 'bustling and harried culture', errantly seen as the only way to really live and find supposed bliss, in constant pursuit of something more and supposed happiness, that we drown out what our simple awareness is trying to show us, trying to teach us about where to find our dharma. "You can glimpse [simple awareness] after finishing a great dinner or when appreciating a great work of art, while listening to Bach or listening to your child at play." Simple awareness is the space between the thoughts, a gap, and it is through meditation that we strengthen our ability to go deeper. "The mind naturally seeks its source. It will connect to your soul, or true self, if given an opening. Your mind doesn't have to be coaxed to go there, much less forced." Reading Chopra's words was encouraging to me and validated so much of what I have experienced in my own life journey. So often, because we let