Alvaro

It's no simple matter to combine success and happiness, in fact, but the world's wisdom traditions do offer a strategy. The long-term goal of the conscious lifestyle is inner growth, gong beyond the selfishness of the ego-personality to reach higher values like love, compassion, selflessness, and empathy.

Plenty of driven, ambitious, competitive people devote their prime years to getting ahead, letting happiness more or less take care of itself. Such a sharp focus on external achievement contradicts the conscious lifestyle. One is outer-directed, the other inner-directed. To have any hope of being adopted, the conscious lifestyle must bring short-term rewards also. Rarely is this pointed out, still more rarely does anyone carry through.

The common link is consciousness itself. I argue that expanded awareness improves both halves of existence, inner and outer. If you look deeper into the world's wisdom traditions, there isn't a division between the two. The world "out there" reflects the world "in here," and in both domains your level of awareness determines how your life turns out--not just one compartment of life but its entirety. As you move out of constricted awareness, which its built-in insecurity, anxiety, and narrow perspective, it's only natural that success and happiness will be joined. The one won't be achieved at the cost of the other.

We all know people who cannot exist without their work and who devote everything to career and achievement. Society praises and rewards such people, but society doesn't reveal the disorganized, empty lives that high achievers often have or their higher risk for stress and the damage it causes over time. Quite often, even when constricted awareness makes it look as if everything is going your way, your path through life is like a train in the night, seeing the track ahead through a single headlight. What lies to the left or right is unseen, and there's no hope of jumping the rails.

All the best!

Álvaro.