Creating a Happy Ending

Creating a Happy Ending
by Jennifer Hoffman
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Every story should have a happy ending and every situation should have a joyful and pleasant result. If that were true we would not experience pain, we would never experience betrayal and disappointment and every relationship would be loving. That sounds good in fairy tales but it is not always true in our reality. In real life, we have painful experiences, relationships often cause our greatest heartbreaks and disappointments and our happy endings do not materialize... But is that really true? Does a happy ending always have to look like the fairy tale or can we re-define happy endings so that we find them in every situation?

INTERPRETATION - Our definition of a happy ending determines how we will interpret the outcome of our lessons. And we will then judge them as good or bad, depending on how we feel about them and the final result. What if we defined a happy ending as something that provided us with such an enriching learning experience that it changed the course of our life? What if a happy ending meant that we gained knowledge that would help us make more powerful, informed and enlightened decisions in the future? What if a happy ending meant that we became so confident in our abilities that we could step forward into our divinity with absolute faith and trust in our Source connection? That would indeed be a happy ending..

IN EVERY SITUATION - There is a happy ending in every situation but it is not always happy, in the sense of how ‘happy’ is generally defined. Sometimes happy endings are sad, involve loss and disappointment, teach us that we can’t control anyone or their behavior or show us that we are limited in our ability to heal or change others. Sometimes happy endings show us that we have powerless results when we make powerless choices. But they are empowering, help us make different choices and can take us out of our personal cycles of karmic lessons and healing. Just as we create our reality, we also create our own definition of happy endings..

CROSSROADS - In taking responsibility for our reality we can look at these situations as setups, where we deliberately created something that was difficult and painful. Then we move into failure mode because the outcome was not as joyful or successful as we expected. And then we are at a crossroads—do we move forward and recover or stay stuck in the pain and berate ourselves for not knowing better, for not applying our spiritual knowledge and avoiding the situation, for not being able to see what was going to happen and create a different outcome. We can move forward when we change our definition of a happy ending..

SUCCESS FROM ADVERSITY - We can create success out of what appears to be adversity when we change our definition of happy endings. And we can do that by examining the process of learning. First, we deliberately create a situation in order to help us gain knowledge, confidence and increase our spiritual understanding. Then we allow it to erode our confidence and trust and become stuck because we have an attachment to the outcome. We judge the outcome as a failure because it did not meet our expectations and he ending was not happy—but we are judging it based on how we feel not on what happened..

SPIRITUAL PERSPECTIVE - And, our definition of a ‘happy ending’ is not the same as that of the Universe. From a spiritual perspective, a happy ending occurs when we have achieved new levels of spiritual growth and understanding, which is not always ‘fairy tale’ happy and sometimes involves painful endings. With a happy ending we are stronger, wiser, more confident and always gain on a spiritual level. But it also means that we may have to release something or someone, let go of an expectation, or change our perspective..

RECOVERY - Recovery is an important part of this process, one that we often forget or cannot move into. It is the most important part of our learning process because it allows us to assess what has happened, see what we created, every aspect of learning and healing that was available to us and how it has moved us forward on our path. Self-forgiveness is an important part of this process. We are often hardest on ourselves when we feel we should have known better, seen a lesson coming or been able to avoid it. We can’t always create happy endings by simply avoiding lessons but we can create them by celebrating what we have learned..

A NEW PHASE - Every step forward we take helps us create a more powerful reality, every painful lesson we learn moves us into completion with that aspect of our healing. And this is a very happy ending because it means that we have completed a karmic cycle, finalized an aspect of our soul growth and moved into a new phase of our spiritual journey. Rather than allowing one difficult experience to stop us in our tracks and permanently damage our confidence, trust and faith in ourselves and in the Universe, we can find the happy ending and use it to help us create a different outcome for the next lesson..

THE HAPPY ENDING - The happy ending may not be what we imagined and the process may take longer than we anticipated... But what have we learned, how much more do we know and what are we now able to create with that knowledge? That is the happy ending, one that we can take with us as a permanent source of knowledge and understanding and use it to create new and different happy endings!