Your Self Improvement Blog

The purpose of life is to be happy – so says the Dalai Lama. However, most people aren’t really sure what happiness actually means. Does it mean being surrounded by lots of nice things – nice home, holiday home, nice cars, nice clothes, cool holidays? Because, certainly over the last few years, a lot of people fell into the trap of judging their happiness based on what they owned – and comparing their ‘happiness’ to what others had. I actually had a client call me a while back to tell me that his wife was threatening to leave him because and I quote ‘The neighbours have better vacations!’ Let her go, I said!

Happiness isn’t about having lots of nice things – it doesn’t exclude them, but they are not the be all and end all. Happiness is about having happy times or, as I keeping saying to my clients, ‘being gurdy!’ It’s a feeling that you have that all is well with the world and your little piece of it. It is a feeling of wanting for nothing – not not wanting to go further on the wonderful adventure that is life’s rollercoaster – but simply of not wanting for anything in this perfect moment.

Happiness is a now thing. Sadly, the normal mind is not present now, so it simply cannot experience happiness. Research tells us that the normal mind is stuck in the past (in particular on the childhood experiences that have made us who we are) and focused in the future (either looking forward to a bit of excitement yet to come, wanting for something that we don’t have or worrying about something or other that we’d prefer not to happen). Given all the facts no way is it possible for the normal mind to be happy – other than very sporadically.

To be happy, you simply have to become abnormal. Normal people don’t bother to turn up to their own lives – and there’s over seventy years’ research to prove this conclusively. To experience effortless happiness ( including effortless success) you’ve got to turn up to the present moment – the only place and time that life is lived. You’ll need a focused and tuned in mind to be present – there are many different ways that you can develop your focus and talent for paying attention. But your happiness and success depend upon it – you happiness is correlated with your ability to pay attention – again something that the normal mind cannot master. You’ve got to relearn how to pay attention – it came naturally to you when you were child when you experienced everything new with every one of your five senses. To be successful and happy you’ve got to come to your senses all over again. Once you do, you won’t need to go looking for happiness – happiness will simply find you.

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