Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling. 
Margaret Lee Runbeck

How does it serve?

This is a question I was taught to ask in place of, “does it make me happy?”  The idea is to learn to make choices outside of the reactive realm of emotions, and to base them on developing one’s personal evolution instead.

Yet I found my answers to the question, “how does it serve?” always trended toward telling a story that it might lead to something that would one day make me happy.  Meaning becoming happy was still the underlying motive for my choices. 

The only trouble with this mindset is it enforces the idea that I am not already happy, and there is something about the present moment that requires improvement.  In order to escape the belief that there was something wrong with my life, I needed to learn to orient toward goals that didn’t enforce that idea.

So I started asking more detailed questions, in alignment with the spirit of “how does it serve?”  I noticed they work best from a space of neutral observation:

Does this activity or thought encourage me to become more conscious or less conscious of my present experience?

What is the action of the energy?  If I follow the energy of where I am putting my attention, where does it take me?

What am I holding onto?  What is it like to let it go?

In my experience, the most useful intention is to achieve neutrality.  Happiness is already here, it is when we make it a goal that we experience separation from it and bind ourselves to an elusive chase.

Neutrality on the other hand is a freeing tool.  It observes experience, and the thoughts about experience, and allows for ever expanding awareness of what else is here, and what else is possible.  It has no charge so cannot be caught in a pattern of the mind, rather it recognizes the patterns and makes a different choice.  Practice being a neutral observer, and you notice there is a sense of expansive joy woven into the very nature of your being.