Happiness – Positive Reflection Of The Week
Happiness… Is A State Of Mind
Do you often think about what is actually preventing you from being happy right now?
If you pay attention to the answer, you will probably attach it to something you DON’T have but want. It could be better health, more money in the bank, or a nicer house, or a zillion other things.
And this is what’s making you unhappy right now. Right?
When you think about what you don’t have or what is missing, rather than what you have and is present in your life at the moment, you end up inviting your own dissatisfaction, which leads me to ask, is your “unhappiness” just another state of mind that you are choosing to focus on?
Every single experience we go through in our life is only just a thought. Of course, we experience reality, which is what is, but then everything else is just a thought ABOUT what we are experiencing, and this becomes your own personal experience.
When we go through life’s experiences, we either consider them to be good or bad. But how we perceive them is what matters. For instance, you are here reading this article, and you and it is an experience, right? But you get to decide if it is a good experience or a bad one. It is all just thoughts in your mind. Always. All the time.
To simplify what I am saying, take a look at your life experiences. They were either good or bad. You either liked them or you didn’t. It is your thoughts about them that gives them their power and inherent value. Whether you like a specific event or circumstance or even a person, or not, will not change the fact that they are what they are. Our preferences don’t really have much to do with it at all. Life is unfolding before us, for us, and everything we see, hear, touch, taste are just the happenings of being alive. It’s our preferences that make us happy or sad.
So the truth is, there is reality, and then there is our thinking. And these are two different things.
This means that you and I can lead happy lives regardless of our circumstances and regardless of what we have or don’t have. Because when we drop our interpretation of events being good or bad, when we stop liking and disliking experiences, we find ourselves living in the present moment. When we drop our stories and beliefs about experiences being good or bad, we realize that in this very moment, everything is OK and that we are actually HAPPY.
The key to your own happiness lies in being in the present moment, and not ruminating about the past or worrying about things yet to come in the future.