Buddhist monk, photographer and author Matthieu Ricard has devoted his life to answering the questions of what is happiness and how can we have some.
“Our happiness depends on the habit of Mind we cultivate. So practice happy thinking every day. Cultivate the merry heart, develop the happiness habit, and life will become a continual feast.” — Norman Vincent Peale
Cultivating Happiness in Our Lives
Happiness is a GIFT we give to ourselves on a daily basis.
Gratitude
Increasing Activities we Love
Focusing on the Present Moment
Turning up the Music
Gratitude
Gratitude increases your over all wellbeing. We can practice gratitude each day by investing in a gratitude journal, daily make a list of the things in your life that you are thankful for. Reviewing these lists when you are down can lift your spirits and revitalize your thinking. This process will also encourage an optimistic outlook at life.
Increasing the Activities We Love in our Life
Engaging in activities we love makes us happy. Cultivating happiness would involve increasing the activities that bring joy into our lives. Set out to do something you love each day. Play more with your kids, bake more, watch the sun rise, watch the waves, do something spontaneous, take a drive into the country, listen to the birds sing, help someone, give, what ever is your joy make sure you intentionally bring happiness into your life daily.
Focusing on the Present Moment
Appreciating each moment you are experiencing enhances your outlook on life, allowing you to truly enjoy and savor more of life and not only certain experiences. Allow yourself to enjoy what you are doing, enjoy a meal or a good conversation without the interruptive thoughts of having to do the dishes or getting somewhere.
Turning up the Music
Music increases your emotional, mental and physical well being. Music connects us to times in our lives when there were happy thoughts and feelings that were memorable. Music helps us to reflect on our positive past experiences and allows us to reciprocate those feelings once more regardless to whether there is adversity present in our lives or not.
Studies show that music activates parts of the brain that produce happiness. Music is also relaxing. It increases our respiration and relaxes our muscles. The more relaxed we are the more we can savor and concentrate on the things that make us happy.
Music has added health benefits such as boosting the immune systems of patients after surgeries, lower stress in pregnant women and decreasing the blood pressure and heart rate in cardiac patients, thus reducing complications from cardiac surgery. Music therapy has also proven to be more effective than other types of therapies in patients suffering from depression, and it’s been shown to lower levels of anxiety and loneliness in the elderly. You don’t have to be sick, though, to benefit from the reduced stress and increased happiness that music can bring. Live music may be the most potent happiness trigger because it provides a way to forge social bonds. When you get in a room with people who like the same thing you do, you might create more friendships, a proven factor in the search for happiness.
“Your mental attitude is something you can control outright and you must use self discipline until you create a positive mental attitude – your mental attitude attracts to you everything that makes you what you are.”–Napoleon Hill 1883-1970, Author of “Think and Grow Rich”
Honesty
Acceptance of our Self
Purpose in Life
Passion
Independence
Noise Mute
Excitement & Exercise
Spiritual Practices
Sleeping More
With Happiness in our lives the easier it becomes to live our best life.
We need to be honest about who we are to our selves. Get intimate with yourself and find out all the things that contributed to your perceptions and physical well being. Ask yourself what is it that makes me happy? What is it I want from my life? Who am I authentically? What are my beliefs? Do my beliefs make me happy? Forgive yourself and whom ever that may have cause hurt or pain, intentionally or unintentionally and channel these emotions as positive learning experiences. Then give yourself the permission to unconditionally accept and love who you are as a person and Spiritual being right now. Accept your past as experiences you needed to get you to where you are at in life and know that you are the only determinant of your future. Believe for yourself that you are worthy and deserve to be loved and appreciated by everyone.
Knowing who you are opens you up to finding your true purpose in life. Finding our purpose allows us to live in sync with our being. Synchronicity cultivates happiness in our lives. Finding our purpose in life is the fuel we need to create passion in our lives. Writing down our purpose in life compounds the reality and our brain finds ways of making these written words actuality.
Independence takes us out of the shadow of someone else dreams, life and views and puts us in the spotlight of our own life. With independent control of our thoughts, actions and life we are free to create for ourselves the life we are meant to live. Independence allows us the freedom to be who we are. This liberated feeling brings more joy into our lives.
Moving away from the things in life that bring a lot of noise into our lives cultivates happiness. We all need periods of solitude where we can reflect on our lives, grow, prepare our path for the future and most importantly appreciate the natural beauty of life. Reflecting on our positive past allows us the opportunity to repeat the actions that brought great joys into our lives and ways we can enhance that experience for a bigger better experience next time. It allows us to identify these things so we can consciously plan to create more opportunities to experience them. Turning off the things in our lives that bring noise to us: like the media bringing negative stories clouding our vision, take a walk instead, meditate and let the silence within us speak.
There is something magnificent about reconnecting with nature and simplicity of the earth, it just makes us feel good and creates happy feelings.
Excitement and exercise increases endorphin levels in our body and decreases stress. Endorphins are (feeling good chemicals) neurotransmitters produced by our brain that reduces pain. They are associated with producing euphoria. The thrill of adventure, sun rays, an intense work out increases the release of endorphins, having an orgasm and thinking positive thoughts generate the release of endorphins that makes us feeling happy.
Taking care of our spiritual wellbeing brings about a feeling of completeness that increases our overall well being. Connecting with our spirit and knowing our source answers a lot of life’s toughest questions and relaxes us so we can focus on important things in life like our purpose.
Sleep restores us and renews us mentally, physically and emotionally for the demands of another day. Sleeping the recommended seven to eight hours minimally at night would improve our moods and outlook on life.
If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under the radiator. He will not be striving for it as a goal in itself. He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living life twenty-four crowded hours of the day. ~W. Beran Wolfe
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