Tag: Choose Happiness

Face What Scares You

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Health, Success

There is a Buddhist idea that comes from the Sanscrit word ‘maitri’, which means loving-kindness. Quite often, we are hard on ourselves, and we put ourselves down, or we are judgemental towards others. In each of these cases, we are thinking about ourselves or others based on opinions and beliefs that we have collected over the years. Opinions and beliefs that may not have any truth to them at all.

This is also true of the things that scare us. The reason we are scared of people or situations is because of our opinions and beliefs about them. It is as if we are running away from them without actually looking at them. When we apply loving-kindness to ourselves, we are looking at ourselves openly and with an embracing sensibility that diffuses negative thinking until what remains is only positive.

If we apply loving-kindness to the things that scare us, when we are curious, when we are interested in why these things scare us, then they lose their power. They lose their power simply because you have chosen not to run away, we have chose to face them. I am not saying that this will be easy, but it is worth it.

Choose a Better Response

Happiness, Health, Relationships, Success

I often see people swiping their arms at flies buzzing around them, which is usually accompanied by comments such as “damn fly” or “irritating fly.” I have increasingly been of the opinion that being annoyed by a fly is a choice.

This comes from the perspective that life and the world are not as they are but how we are. We interpret the events that go on around us based on the meaning we put on them. This is not to negate verifiable facts that exist independent of interpretation. What I mean is whether we see something as good or bad, intimidating or joyous.

If it is true that we put such meaning on the events that we experience, then we choose to see a fly as irritating. We can, if we choose to, say hi to the fly and thank them for their visit, for example. They can not harm us and will usually fly away shortly after they fly near to us. If we apply this idea to the rest of our lives, there are many situations where we can choose a better response rather than reacting with negative emotions.

Be A Rebel, Be Content

Happiness, Health, Success

To buy the new fashion item or the new gadget, etc is to be unhappy with what you already have because it is not the new thing being sold to you. That is what it boils down to. This comes from the story told by those selling things to us that what they are offering will make us happy. This cannot be true if the last thing they sold us, which is now out of fashion or less up to date, also was supposed to make us happy.

It is better to try and be content with what we already have. Otherwise we will be leaping from shiny object to shiny object and never really being happy, just momentarily joyful.

The Key To Being Happy

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Health, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

We often get frustrated that things don’t go as we want them to. Sometimes it feels like the world is against us and nothing goes our way. Thinking about life in these terms is destructive towards our happiness.

If the world was always as you want it to be, then it would not be the way someone else wants it to be. There are billions of people in the world and each person has ups and downs in life. I am glad everything not how you want it to be, because your way is different to the way of so many others.

The key to happiness is not to try and control what happens in the world, or even to expect things to be how you want them to be. The key is to control how you respond to the events of life. Your mindset is the thing that impacts your level of happiness the most. How you explain the events in life to yourself matters.

Saying something bad always happens to you takes away any influence you have on the situation and you end up feeling helpless. It is better to say the bad things happened at a specific time, to limit its power and then decide what positive actions you are going to do next.

Building Joyful Energy

Happiness

When we think of people with lots of energy we often think of hyper individuals who can’t sit still or who talk a lot. When we think if the opposite we think of people who are down in the dumps or who are mostly negative.

When I talk about joyful energy I am not talking about being hyper, what I mean is the energy we get when we are joyful; and being joyful is a state of mind. When we think of things that bring us joy our energy level goes up.

With practice we can become joyful more often and be filled with positive energy. Being joyful is a choice, it is a matter of what we focus on and how we choose to see the world. Go be joyful.

Improve Your Life

Happiness, Health, The Pathway To Fulfilment

When a person is depressed we give them antidepressants, which changes their bodies chemistry into a happier state. Our body chemistry is changing all of the time from situation to situation. If we are sleeping it will be one way, if we are exercising it will be another, if we are having an argument it will be another.

What we are physically doing has an impact on our body chemistry, but our thoughts more so. A happy thought and a sad thought create very different states in the body. If we change our thoughts we change our body’s chemistry and we can elevate ourselves to a state of joy or excitement, all with our thinking.

Our thinking patterns have been hard wired into our brains by our beliefs about a variety of things. If we can identify the limiting beliefs and then prove to ourselves that they are untrue, we fundamentally shift ourselves towards a more powerful state of being.

Improve your beliefs, improve your thoughts, improve your life.

Suffering Is A Choice

Happiness, Success, The Fullfilment Framework

As someone who suffers from chronic pain, I can tell you that our mood and the way we see the pain, makes it worse or better. The pain is still the same, but it feels less intense or more intense depending on our level of focus on it.

I have Fibromyalgia and it causes nerve pain in my joints and muscle across my whole body. Some days are better than others. I’m beginning to master the art of pushing the pain into the background and getting on with my day. It is possible, through practice, for you to do the same.

There is another type of suffering, the psychological kind. We often get attached to things, experiences and people and when we lose them we suffer. It is right to become attached to the people in our lives, but being attached to things like our mobile phone, our car, or our designer wardrobe, means that when they get a tiny amount of damage we suffer.

The none attachment that many eastern religions talk about does not mean that we must get rid of everything we own and live in a monastery, it means we have the things we need, but we avoid becoming too attached to them. It means we own these things and they don’t own us.

We can become attached to pain too, both the physical and the mental kinds. We avoid change and cling on to that which is predictable. Often this is the pain of a broken heart or the judgement of others or simply chronic pain. However, if we freed ourselves and stepped into the future without clinging to such things, then life will be brighter and better than ever before.