How to Define Happiness in Your Life?
If you were to ask most people if they were happy, what do you think they would say? Would they say yes, no, sometimes or not sure? How would you answer that question?
From my experience, most people would say that they aren’t happy and that makes me sad because it doesn’t have to be that way. If people understood how this world had warped happiness, they would enjoy life more.
What Does Happiness Mean to Me?
Happiness is when you “glow,” and want for nothing. It is a peacefulness and inner satisfaction. Now that doesn’t mean you deny accomplishment; I never want people to think happiness is a place where you reach, and you don’t do anything. Happiness can be a result of doing things or can be a result of doing nothing. Happiness is something that stirs up within you, it isn’t something you can buy, it isn’t something that you can trade, or it’s not something you can magically get, it comes from you. It can mean something different to each person; I just gave you my description of it. So for me to be happy it’s a glowing inside with a deep contentment of satisfaction knowing that I need to do nothing.
Can Anyone Be Happy?
Absolutely because your natural state is happiness. You learn to be unhappy. If you can learn to come back to your natural state, you will be happy. If you look at a child or a baby, they are just happy, aren’t they? They don’t even understand what they have or don’t have. They are naturally happy, so we learn unhappiness, and that is the difficulty we face. Learned behaviour.
Can You be Happy Even in Difficult Circumstances?
Some of the happiest people have the least number of things. Some of the happiest people are the ones who have the most against them. Happiness is easy to forget. That is why people have such a difficult time finding it. You have difficulty finding food, and you suddenly have a meal; you are happy. At that moment, you are happy because you are going to have a fully belly and you don’t have those hunger pains.
But…
What if you never have hunger pains like so many people?
Then we start seeking out other things, and that relentless perceived things we don’t have is the sludge of unhappiness. It starts when we are very young.
So, How Do You Find Happiness?
You unlearn all those lessons you have been taught in this world. You unlearn the fact that if I have a gold watch, it is worth more than silver watch. Or you start to come back to the roots of the true things that make you happy. You find the richest man in the world who is very ill at the time laying on a bed doesn’t give a damn if he has a gold watch, diamond watch, platinum watch or no watch. It doesn’t matter anymore; he just wants to be healthy.
So, I think you have to start taking inventory of the things that are frivolous in your life. If I am healthy, and if I have some shelter, clothes on my back, and clean water to drink and food to eat, I am happy. I start to look at all the simple things that cause happiness, and I stop taking them for granted.
A friend of mine was doing something interesting a few years ago. Before she had any food, she would say I am practicing thankfulness. She would look at the food in front of her, and she would be grateful for each portion. So, whether it was a portion of vegetables, rice, pasta or bread, whatever it was she was grateful for it. I really thought it was a unique thing because she said, “I have to be grateful for the fact that I don’t have to worry about food because 1.6 billion people are going hungry.”
So, when you look at it that way, and you know that a sixth of the world will not eat today at all; I have to be thankful for the simple fact that I had breakfast, I have clean drinking water. How many people are denied clean drinking water? I read a statistic the other day, a quarter of people in India have a difficulty getting cleaning drinking water. One-quarter. That is the entire population of the U.S. not having clean drinking water. The Components of Happiness There are physical, intellectual, and spiritual components to happiness. You have to be healthy; that’s the first component. By healthy, a friend of mine’s wife contracted breast cancer, and she said one of the things she learned is that so many women call it “the gift” Because they begin to come grateful and happier when they conquer it. I thought “wow” isn’t that something else. That is physical well-being.
Mental well-being again, that ability to put your mind in a positive deepness as oppose to a negative deepness, that is very important. Lastly the spiritual aspect, which holds all the feelings that you feel. Yesterday, I had to drop off a family that had come to visit me from Australia. We checked in and suddenly the young one started crying. I asked, ‘What’s wrong?” She could only get out that I’m going to miss you so much and started crying uncontrollably. So, I picked her up and I tried to comfort her. That’s spiritual; that’s emotional.
Spiritual happiness is also your faith in a higher power. There are those who believe, and they take a great amount of comfort in knowing that there is a force greater than them that will take care of them. Then those that don’t have that. They might have faith in something else that will take care of them. Whatever it is, faith is the idea of when I get on the plane; it’s not going to crash and I will make it safely there.
As you can see, happiness is a choice that you make. Learn to enjoy the simple things, and you will find happiness right at your door, waiting to come in.
Namaste