What makes you Happy?

How would you like to see yourself – happy and bubbling with enthusiasm or dull and difficult to please?

Sometimes you like to be pleased, appeased and cajoled, so you put on a tough, troubled face and act difficult to please. People who keep long faces and expect others to cajole and appease them, drives others away. Lovers often do this. A boyfriend/girlfriend expends lot of energy cajoling counterpart, reducing the joy and celebration of the moment.

It is okay to occasionally show how upset you are, but doing it repeatedly is taxing for you and the people you love. If you feel down, appease and please yourself- do not expect others to do it. Your need to be appeased by someone else is a sign of grossness. If you want attention, all you get is tension!!

It sounds a bit philosophical, but it’s true- the inability to experience joy and sorrow is inertia. Experiencing joy and sorrow is a trait of consciousness. Being happy in one’s own joy and sad in one’s own sorrow is a trait of animals. Being happy at another’s joy and saddened by another’s sorrow is a trait of humans. If you are saddened by another’s sorrow, sorrow will never come to you. If you are happy at another’s joy, then joy will never leave you.

Children are more expert in happiness than adults. The adult who can carry the spirit of a child into middle and old age is a genius. Whenever I meet a child I ask him/her a question- what makes you happy? The simplicity of their answers always amazed me. Their answers were rather touching. Here is a little girl’s list: a flock of sparrows in the evening sky, early morning droplets at the tip of grasses, smoke rising from a chimney, moon in the clouds… beautiful right? To become a happy person have a clean soul, eyes to see romance in the common place, a child’s heart and spiritual simplicity.

Many of us manufacture our own unhappiness. Of course not all unhappiness is self created, for social conditions are responsible for not a few of our woes. Yet, it is a fact that to a large extent by our thoughts and attitude we distil out of the ingredients of our life of either happiness or unhappiness for ourselves. A study reveals that four people out of five are not so happy as they can be. Since a fundamental desire of every human being is for that state of existence called happiness, something should be done about it. Happiness is achievable and the process for obtaining it is not complicated.

A very large proportion of the unhappiness of the average individual is self manufactured. It is further distilled by saturating the mind with feelings of resentment, ill-will, and hate. There is a wise saying, “… he that is of a merry heart hath a continual feast..”. In other words, cultivate a merry heart, that is, develop the happiness habit, and life will become a continual feast, which is to say you can enjoy life every day. Out of the happiness habit comes a happy life.

The happiness habit is developed by simply practicing happy thinking. Make a mental list of happy thoughts and pass them through your mind several times every day. If an unhappiness thought should enter your mind, immediately stop, consciously eject it, and substitute a happiness thought. Every morning before arising, lie relaxed in bed and deliberately drop happy thoughts into your conscious mind. Visualize the day the way you want it to be. While dressing, or getting breakfast, say aloud a few such remarks as following: “I believe this is going to be a wonderful day. I believe I can successfully handle all the problems that will arise today. I feel good physically, mentally and emotionally. I am grateful for all that I have had, for all that I now have, and for all that I shall have…..” This is a very simple technique. Trust this fully and practice it by giving you heart. Believe my words; you will be astounded to see the way your life turning around!!

Become one whose enthusiasm never dies, come what may..!!