How HAPPY are you?

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Are you the happiest person you know? If not, why not? Most people will reel off their current worries — the job, the kids, the car, the price of fish. I don’t mean to sweep these aside: problems need to be solved, if you can, or waited out until they disappear . But as far as living happily is concerned you have to face a crucial fact. If you can only live happily after all your problems are solved, you are never going to live happily, because when today’s problems are gone and forgotten, others will take their place. So either living happily is just impossible, or you have to do it in spite of your problems.

Being happy depends not so much on external circumstances as on your inner life. This means all your thoughts, perceptions, beliefs, emotions, desires, dreams — your entire mental and emotional scene. Happiness is about how you react inwardly to events, what you think and believe, how you feel, how problems affect you. It may sound obvious, but like many obvious things it’s something that is often forgotten when it matters most. We focus almost exclusively on our external lives, on getting and spending and having fun, and then wonder why we are not happy. But it’s when our inner lives are tranquil that we are happiest and we call this inner peace.

So how is inner peace to be achieved? Is it a question of religion, perhaps, or yoga? These can certainly help but only if they have a positive effect on your inner life. The difficulty is that inner life is based on patterns and habits — some you were born with, most you have acquired . You don’t choose, occasion by occasion, how you respond inside when something happens....

This process is not something you can do overnight, it’s a whole new way of life, but the reward is what we all want most — happiness. There are five main skills you need to cultivate.

Mindfullness - ability to focus your thoughts in the present. (yeah right!!!)
Compassion - put yourself in their place and ask yourself what they might they be thinking or feeling to behave like that.
Story skills - Start to think of your beliefs as stories, and it is easier to accept that other things might be true as well, or even instead
Letting-go techniques - These are particularly helpful when we are unhappy not getting what we want. Generally, we are encouraged to keep wanting and to think that more will make us happier, whether it’s clothes or cars or even love. But wanting is a treadmill: as long as you have unsatisfied wants and desires you won’t be at peace, so to be happy you either have to satisfy all your desires, or let go of some of them. Letting-go skills also include forgiveness, which helps hugely if one of the things you think you want is revenge.
Enjoyment skills - This last group includes skills such as patience , humour and, especially, gratitude . You don’t have to be grateful to someone, it’s enough to cultivate gratitude for things.

Complete article here.