The True Art of Hedonism

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I spent much of my life being very proud of the fact that I was a hedonist. I considered the pursuit of fun and happiness the most important aspect of living and I took great delight in pushing my boundaries and seeking out ever more intense and gratifying experiences. And in many ways you could say I had a real talent for it. I could sniff out the wildest parties, and indeed threw many myself. I would initiate the craziest adventures and always bring playfulness and games into everything I did, always attempting to find new ways of having fun and causing mischief.

At the time I saw the hangovers and the pain, embarrassment and desperation that followed those spikes of euphoria and debauchery as being all part of the cycle of a life well lived ‘What goes up, must come down’, ‘No pain, no gain’ and all that. You need the sour to make the sweet feel sweet. All of those ideas were fully ingrained into my life philosophy.

By the age of 25, it was getting harder to ignore the shifting dynamic that the highs were no longer as good and the lows were getting worse. And the time between the highs and lows was characterised by an increasing sense of mediocrity, ennui and occasionally, downright despair.

I would go running in the morning to make myself feel better, but I didn’t always make the time, or more likely was injured or hungover. Then there would be the feeling of failure.

I pretty much fell into meditation because of my long standing insomnia and a chance meeting with a friend of a friend who convinced me to give it a whirl. I of course boozed throughout my first year of meditating enjoying the new least of energy it gave me.

But as time went on I began to realise that the thing I’d been missing was growing larger by the year, and that no amount of legendary mischief would satisfy it in the long term.

I also noticed with increasing clarity that actually, one of the things that had driven me to seek out and embrace ever more craziness was the recognition from others that I was a guy who knew how to party. In short, I was doing it to prove something to myself and to prove something to others. I was taking a performance approach to how I lived and enjoyed my life. I didn’t do this consciously. It was all part of the sub-conscious patterning I’d picked up as a young lad. I was a sheep to my own programming.

And then one day, I discovered that the original meaning of the word hedonism was not ‘be a crazy man, live for the highs and show everyone what a good time you’re having’. It was simply, ‘do the things that make you happy’.

With great clarity it dawned on me that all those attempts to have a good time were proxies for happiness itself. And none of them were sustainable. And then there were all those other things in life which did make me happy and were sustainable, and I realised that I’d been under-nourishing myself with these activities in favour of doing what my peer group approved of and did, only to a more extreme level.

Peer approval is so persuasive, precisely because our sense of self-worth is so often derived in what we think other people think of us, rather than what we openly and honestly think of ourselves.

We spend our lives looking outside for happiness, when really it is something that comes from within. Happiness comes when you’re expressing yourself. When something deep in your core is singing and demanding to be given full breath and life. When you’re sharing something golden, something that touches you and another person deep inside. Happiness springs from feeling fulfilled that you are living your life fully, not just some of the time, but all of the time. That you are realising your potential as a human being and sharing that with others.

Happiness is not something you extract from life. It is something you give to life. It is an offering of the pure joy that you are when all of the layers of stress and crud that have accumulated in your life have been removed, or temporarily forgotten, as you engage in the bliss of a life well lived from the level of the heart and the soul, not from the level of the mind and the ego.

So, not only do I dare you all to be wise, I also dare you to pursue that which makes you sustainably happy, rather than that which makes you superficially happy. Living from a place of inspiration and balance will usually do the trick, and the tools exist to open up a channel to ever more degrees of balance, harmony, life, love and happiness. The ancient knowledge is there, because man has been searching for happiness for as long as man has been walking the earth, and sage individuals were able to develop systems of knowledge to help us tap into this rich inner field, so that we can all live a life of hedonism if we choose too. It’s simply down to whether you, the individual, wishes to live a life of superficial hedonism or something deeper, and truer. The highway of hedonism awaits you if you dare…