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Happiness tends to anticipate a bright future, while contentment tends to arise after an inner achievement. Contentment arises when you’re living up to your own expectations and your internal moral code, and when you’ve accomplished an important goal or done your work well and properly. Contentment comes forward in response to tangible actions and the mastery of clear-cut challenges. Contentment also arises when you’ve successfully navigated through your difficult emotions—especially your angers, hatreds, and shames. When you’ve restored your boundary, honored the boundaries of others, and corrected your actions or made amends, your contentment will come forward to confirm and validate your excellent behavior. Authentic contentment arises reliably when you respect yourself and others, and when you respect your emotions and allow them to guide your behavior.
Social structures often interfere with your authentic contentment by trying to replace or usurp your natural internal confirmations with prizes and praise that come from outside. While it’s nice to receive gold stars, awards, extra privileges, and special attention, these fabricated confirmations can actually short-circuit your own ability to feel honest pride or self-worth unless someone throws a party every time you accomplish something. External praise also contains a troublesome aspect that is not a part of internal contentment—and that’s competition. All external praise and awards come with built-in comparisons that place you in competition with others. Though the awards and praise may have value, they tend to isolate you from your peers and identify you as a competitor or a pleaser, which will often bring your natural shame forward to question the “fun” of winning. In natural contentment, there is no shame, because your achievements aren’t about doing better than others, but about honoring your own good judgment and your own values.
If you can’t connect with your natural contentment, you may have a short circuit that was created by authoritarian, scholastic, or parental structures. This short circuit may lead you to seek praise and awards instead of your own internal confirmations. This often means you’ll tend toward pleasing and perfectionism instead of wholeness and emotional agility. You’ll tend toward following this rule, chasing that award, and constantly measuring yourself against external expectations, instead of allowing your honest emotional reactions to guide you. Luckily, you know what to do with externally applied expectations and behavioral control: burn your contracts and reanimate your authentic contentment once again! Then, when you’re connected to your own internal wisdom, you can guide, correct, and validate yourself in self-respecting ways rather than relying on external validation.
The practice for all of the happiness-based emotions is extremely simple and infinitely hard (at first): you acknowledge them, thank them, and then let them go completely. If you force your contentment (or any other form of happiness) to be your leading emotional state, you’ll lose your way in a split second. Real, honest contentment arises naturally when you work with all of your emotions in healing and honorable ways. Welcome your contentment with open arms when it arises, thank it, and congratulate yourself (“Thank you for renewing my faith in myself!”), and then let it go and trust it to come back the next time you honor yourself and behave in ways that make you feel proud.
Remember to welcome and honor your contentment: it arises when you’ve done an excellent job. Good on you! Thank your contentment.