There is No Nourishment Like Happiness
Who doesn’t want to be happy? Everyone desires happiness in their life. We are constantly searching for happiness in some place or the other. We want to do the “right thing” at the “right time” with the “right person”, that is our simple definition of perfect happiness. But is it? Can we not find happiness in the untimeliest of moments, with the most unexpected people, in the most bizarre situations… and still see that the happiness there is actually perfect!
Personally, I know that my happiness is more expensive than real diamonds, because diamonds you can buy, but true happiness you cannot. And so if my happiness is priceless, then I am not going to just give it away just like that… I will cherish that happiness and take care of it, protect it! I will not want to waste my precious gift of happiness for anything.
Each one of us does what we do in the pursuit of happiness; in the belief that by doing that we will be happier for it. If we look at our life and ask ourselves: why we chose those subjects at school; adopted the dress style we did; took on certain hobbies etc, then it will tell us that somewhere deep inside of us, deep within us we were being guided by our happiness barometer. We believed that in doing so, our life would be more purposeful and thus we would be happier for it. And when someone is happy then truly it is a sign of a successful life. If someone is not happy, if we are not of a generous nature, then we may say that one is a loser… Actually we should be happy in the happiness of others, like our own children, we are happy when they do well at school or some sport or other. We take happiness simply from them being happy. So why are we not like this as adults?
Let’s begin by looking at what robs us of our happiness.
Taking sorrow from situations.
Firstly, it can become an ardent habit to always take hold of the wrong end of the stick. To counter this we need to think positive and not think that there is a conspiracy against us… all the time! We are not a victim of God, the Universe, everything and everyone in it! That would be more like paranoia!
Comparison and competition are futile.
It’s a waste of time. You cannot be like anybody else and no one can be like you. Once you realize that you are a unique piece in God’s showcase, then you will stop comparing yourself with others.
Overthinking about the past and future both rob us of our happiness.
For this we need to stay in the moment. This moment now is an absolutely pure moment, unpolluted and therefore it is a happy moment. It will never come again in exactly the same way.
Expectations are a big source of sorrow.
Yet we forget that it is we who are at fault. We set ourselves up for sorrow when we place false and unfitting expectations upon others. It is not the fault of the other who is unable to fulfil them. There is a formula for expectations, and that is the amount of time and energy we invest in any thought and expectation, that will be equal to our dis-appointment in life!
It is important to note that when something does not go as planned, we first become dis-appointed, we take sorrow which means we lose our happiness. We do not become angry first. Anger, ego attachment comes later. For example, when I enter a room and switch the light on, if it does not come on at first, the feeling is of dis-appointment… that this thing is not in my control. After a few attempts at the switch, then anger enters.
So it is important to try and preserve our happiness at all cost. If we do not lose our happiness, then the vices will not enter and take a foothold in our life. The scientists would just love to find the ‘happiness gene’, they would make a fortune!
When we are happy, we are strong and powerful. When we are sad, we are weak! It is simply a case of leakage! When we are happy, we are masters of our life, we have a good decisions making faculty, because we are not becoming a slave to things out there. The moment our happiness goes, that means we have become a slave to that thing, person or even an idea. Think about it, the one who stays happy has power over the one who gets angry! Or do you think that the one who gets all emotional has power? Think again…
When we do something bad the first thing to go is our happiness. So we need to be careful not to lose our happiness as a result of our own weak, wasteful, and negative actions… in a religious sense we could call this sin. Where we totally miss our aim to be good, where we stop using virtues in our life, and somehow get trapped in those old negative patterns of vice.
God wants us to be happy all the time. But Satan does not. Satan’s business would depreciate if his customers became happy and content, and so his job is to constantly make us feel inadequate, creating more and more desires to relish, and then stimulate desires for more dis-appointments, just so that his kingdom can thrive. This is where we need discrimination power to be able to decipher between that which is real gold or fake. When illusion, sometimes also called Maya, captures our mind and our sense, then we perform actions against our own common sense, logic and love. In this case, sooner or later we all suffer from this action, because we have stepped away from our truth and stop living with a generosity of spirit. This is a very painful place to be. Somehow we become divorced from our own self… Then so begins the eternal quest to find our true self once again, and find our way back to the Divine.
We forget that happiness is at the core of our being. Happiness is not to be searched for from outside of us. Like the madame who lost her needle in the house, but was searching for it outside since there was light coming from the street lamp! So, although it looks easier to look for happiness out there… as there is so much light coming from the glamour and glitter, yet we need to find happiness at the spot we lost it and that is certainly from deep within!
True happiness is when we can stay in our true self-respect. Self-respect… is exactly as it sounds… Can we respect our own self? For that we need to see what is really respect worthy. Therefore, when we take a step inside, in meditation, we can dig deep to find the real self, the authentic self. Then we need to stay seated on our seat of self-respect and stay in our own power. True power comes from within.
It’s Time… to cherish our happiness… and not to give it away at any cost! Happiness is my power.