The Hidden Keys to Happiness
Awakening Your Capacity for Joyfulness
What makes you feel happy? Is it the weather? Do you feel more positive when the sun shines? Or is it your work? Your family? Your friends? Is it good food or perhaps a relaxing movie? What do you usually do in order to raise your spirits and put a smile on your face? Perhaps you’ve got a comprehensive list of all the things that trigger your happiness. It’s good to know what works for you. But there could be far more to your potential for happiness than you might’ve imagined.
Let’s begin by recognising the importance of happiness as a way to improving the quality of our lives. It’s an emotional condition that supports better health and a more positive attitude. It can boost our confidence, stimulate our creativity and enhance our ability to solve problems and resist stress. That’s an impressive list of benefits. We could argue that happiness is too important to be left to the randomness of unpredictable events.
Yet we seem to be strangely conditioned to associate happiness with our external surroundings. And the conditioning begins during our earliest years. We learn to feel happy according to set parameters and conditions, adopting the examples set by our local cultural influences and the examples of our immediate family. Happiness therefore becomes a learned behaviour. Its interpretation can even extend to determining the degree of intensity we can experience during any individual episode of happiness.
Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.
If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.
– Albert Schweitzer
It’s fair to say that happiness is a deeply individual experience that may vary enormously from one person to another. It might be a sad admission to consider but some individuals have never learned how to be deeply moved by the extraordinary power of happiness and they live their entire lives beyond the reach of the realms of bliss. Some people have been taught to believe that they don’t deserve to be happy and they do everything they can to resist any feelings of joy. They may even conspire to create situations that support chaos and unhappiness rather than allowing themselves to feel the sweet balm of contentment.
This insight can help us to understand that we can’t make people happy – without their permission and cooperation. We can create the right circumstances, offer our love and care and support, ty to make them smile – but the way people respond is entirely at their discretion.
However, in contrast to the kind of happiness that we associate with external circumstances, there is a deeper and less volatile kind of happiness that flows from within ourselves. This concept might seem unusual because we’ve learned to accept that happiness can only be triggered by something that takes place outside of ourselves. When you grasp the implications of gaining access to this internal emotional dynamic, it might seem strange to you that our culture does not promote this sense of inner happiness. Strange because it can help us to feel so powerfully centered and complete.
To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one’s family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one’s own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him.
– Buddha
When we cultivate this wonderful sense of happiness, we realise that we are the only ones who are truly in control of this extremely powerful emotion. As we experience this revelation of personal emotional power, we can learn to switch it on at will. We can conjure feelings of happiness simply because we choose to allow them to flow within us. We can learn to detach ourselves from our immediate surroundings and direct our hearts to feel exactly how we want to feel. It might be one of the most liberating experiences we can encounter.
As you learn to direct your emotional energy and determine precisely how you wish to feel, you’ll appreciate that you can also chose the intensity of whatever you want to experience. It’s another of those profound and deeply personal revelations. Your emotions can be adjusted for greater or lesser intensity. Imagine being able to turn up your happiness. Can you imagine being able increase the power of your happiness until it’s simply too much for you to hold within your emotional framework? Can you imagine the power of this extraordinary emotional energy? Can you imagine how it would feel to experience this intense flow of emotional power as it overflows beyond your boundaries and into your environment? It just feels too good to hold onto. You’ll want to share its raw energy wherever you go.
Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.
– Denis Waitley
If you want to experience the real power of making a difference in the world, begin with your own heart and open up your life to this immeasurably powerful and beneficial force. Like all good and worthwhile things in life, it’s certainly worth practising and repeating until the feeling becomes a natural extension of who you are. You might be amazed at the difference this emotional energy can make to the people around you. It’s one of the most extraordinarily effective way of changing your life for the better. Begin today. Try it right now and see how happy you can feel just by choosing to experience a deep sense of joy. For no other reason except that you’ve chosen to feel this way.
The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.
– Epictetus
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Greg Parry created The Wellness Foundation and the Cognitive Empowerment Programs specifically to help people master their stress, overcome their limitations and explore the power of their true potential.
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