Bad stuff happens. If you dwell on how bad it is you only compound the problem: the skill is to look instead for enjoyment in that moment, however, well hidden. Enjoy the sensation of just breathing, of being alive...
Are you the happiest person you know? Not necessarily the luckiest, richest, or most successful, just the happiest? If not, why not?
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.
Happiness is based on skills and therefore can be learned. It can also be taught, or at least coached.
Happiness is based on skills and therefore can be learned. It can also be taught, or at least coached.
The implications for the way we all live are significant. We could learn to be happier and teach our children to live happily.
Being happy depends not so much on external circumstances as on your 'inner life'. This means all your thoughts, perceptions, beliefs, emotions desires and dreams - your entire mental and emotional scene.
Happiness is about how you reach 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's often forgotten when it matters most.
We focus almost exclusively on our external lives, on getting and spending and having fun, and then we wonder why we are not happy? 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? You cannot completely avoid problems but you can change how you react to them by acquiring new habits that provoke peaceful inner responses.
There are four basic reasons why our inner lives can stop us living happily: habits of thought, belief, emotion and desire. Many people are unhappy because of preconceptions (often mistaken) that they hold about themselves or others, such as, 'I could never do that' (even though you might with practice) and, 'Everyone is more confident than me' (or perhaps they're just bluffing at being better than you). If we had the skills to change these assumptions we would be much happier. There are five main skills you need to cultivate.
Mindfulness
Borrowed from Buddhism, this involves developing your ability to focus your thoughts in the present. The problem most of us have is the worrying and nonstop mental chattering that our minds are prone to. Mindfulness is a key inner skill because, as it gets stronger, it lets you focus on your own inner life and catch your habits in the act. Once you can see how you are ruled by them, the change you are seeking often happens of its own accord.
Compassion
Compassion, not just being a virtue in its own right, is also a practical skill that counteracts negative emotions such as anger and hatred. Try it the next time someone annoys you: put yourself in their place and ask yourself what they might be thinking or feeling to behave like that.
Wars are started or minorities persecuted because someone decides it's what God wants, or that the minority is somehow a threat. It doesn't mean such people should get away with their actions, but if you get into the habit of thinking more tolerantly -by understanding that actions are also ruled by inner habits - you would find you can react with less anger. And less anger equals more happiness for you: it's not about them. And as a bonus, you might find you can react to provocation more effectively, maybe persuade the other person to behave differently, because you won't be undermined by negative emotions.
Story Skills
Beliefs have great power over your life because a belief is something you take as a fact. Start to think of your beliefs as stories - it is easier to accept that other things might be true as well, or even instead. True stories only select the little bit of reality we are focusing on at that moment: a story is hardly ever the whole truth about any situation. From a different point of view we would see another story, sometimes a whole different world. This is not about make-believe, it's about 'reframing' situations to look at them from a different perspective. The skill of looking for different perspectives and stories is the basis of some very successful therapies, and it is also powerful in everyday life.
Letting-Go Techniques
These are particularly helpful when we are unhappy not getting what we want. Generally, we 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 desires you won't be at peace, so to be happy you either have to satisfy all your desires (unlikely), or let go of some of them. One of the best ways to practice letting-go is to do without for short periods: if the need for something is making you unhappy, work on letting go of that need. Letting-go skills also include forgiveness, which helps hugely if you think you want revenge.
Enjoyment Skills
This 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. Our minds can sometimes make us unnecessarily pessimistic - focusing on the ten per cent we lack rather than the 90 per cent we have. Cultivating enjoyment skills will help redress the balance. The plain fact is that you will get stuck in queues, you will get aches and pains and you will get older. Bad stuff happens. If you dwell on how bad it is you only compound the problem: the skill is to look instead for enjoyment in that moment, however well hidden.
Acquiring all these skills takes time and effort. The important thing is to practice them until they operate without you thinking about them. Your practice routine will be very individual, because everyone needs to prioritise different skills depending on the specific issues that are holding them back from being happy, but keep the skills in mind and you will constantly find new ways to try them out.
