What is happiness?

1. What is happiness? Happiness is a feeling. It is not about having a soul mate, family, children, money, a beautiful house, fame, a job, etc. Happiness is just the feeling of fulfillment.

2. To be happy or “full-filled,” we, as systems, need to be filled up with enough of the energy that we get in the form of air, water, food, money, positive feelings and impressions. If one of those elements is absent or we don’t have enough, for instance, not enough food, money, confidence, inner balance – our feeling of happiness is not complete.

3. What is happiness if there is so much confusion regarding it? People rushing to change current spouses, shoes, cars, furniture believing that new stuff will fill up their inner emptiness, their deep longing for true feelings and true satisfaction with their life. Sure, new stuff provides them with feelings of excitement for a while. Then everything gets old and not as interesting, and they start a new round of another rush for the same things, like a horse with blinders at an old fashioned fair walking in endless circles making the carousel go-round.

4. What is luck and why do people tend to see happiness as a blind luck?
Luck is comfortable. Without seeing the whole picture, we believe that luck is a random chunk of happiness that comes from nowhere. The belief that we can do nothing about it justifies our choice to passively wait for happiness instead of making personal efforts on the way to getting what we want.

5. How to be happy? We start asking this question when life challenges us with depressions, not to say tragedies. Often this question turns into a quest for happiness which translates into how to be wise.

6. How to be happy alone? How to be happy single? How to be happy again? Does it seem that just recently you were so happy sharing time with someone you loved? And that’s not the case anymore; that person is somehow gone from your life. Did that person take away the key to your happiness? No. No one can do that. You simply entered a new stage of inner development, where the art of true happiness starts; and where the first lesson is about learning how to be happy with yourself.

7. How to be happy with yourself if you don’t fit all these “happy looking” standards that show all-teeth smiles from various TV-channels and magazine covers? First of all, in order to be happy you have to accept your own uniqueness. In our society of TV-idols and social patterns of sexual, physical and material successes, it’s more challenging than it seems.

8. When we think about how to be happy, we should understand that happiness is comprised of many parts and many feelings. Joy, mutual love, abundance, and a healthy body are wonderful, though they don’t cause steady fulfillment. Joy melts, mutual love goes through crises, and material abundance is not eternal, and the same can be said about our health and physical bodies. There is only one feeling, that I know of, that stays with us no matter what. This feeling is a deep satisfaction with how we live our life, a satisfaction that we earn, and which is based on integrity and wisdom.

9. Satisfaction is the foundation of true happiness. It is never random or free. We earn it like mountain-climbers: every day making small steps up, overcoming our fears and continuing on, following, not desires, but intention and integrity.

10. Satisfaction couples with true balance, self-respect and inner power. It’s not about self-importance. This is a diametrically opposite concept. Self-importance is based on “good looks,” on the desire to be accepted and loved by your flock. It’s a well-manicured need for attention and approval.
Self-respect, on the other hand, is the knowledge that you go up no matter what: If you are loved or not, if you are appreciated or despised, if you win or lose, if you look cool or stupid, you simply always go up. It gives happiness a different taste, like the way a young wine differs from one that is ripe and matured.

11. The stereotype of human happiness differs from the fulfillment of deep inner satisfaction. The typical happiness with all its attributes of material and emotional abundance is like the bubbling water of a mountain creek, while satisfaction is like an endless ocean, which symbolizes the depth of life we are looking for. Actually, both are beautiful.

12. What is happiness? Happiness is a subjective product of perception. It gives us hope that we can be happy no matter what. So, in order to know how to be happy, first we need to know how our perception works.

13. Forgiveness, acceptance and tolerance are the result of our worldview. When we earn them nothing can destroy our balance and steady happiness.

14. Happiness has different faces, but the heart of happiness is wisdom and love.

15. Ask yourself what would you choose: to feel happy without what you want; or to have what you want and feel unhappy? It’s a paradox that helps to understand a lot of illusions.

16. Learn to be happy where you are in life, otherwise you have nothing to give to others.

17. People love those who look happy, as well as, those who have money. It’s normal. As systems, people intuitively turn in the direction from which they detect energy in emotional or material form.

18. Why do we run away from depressive and melancholic people? Because they suck energy from others giving nothing in exchange. In nature, systems tend to save their energy, intuitively avoiding situations that make them to lose it. It’s the reason why challenges are the best test for any relationship.19. Don’t look at others’ happiness. We all have different ways to be happy. This is normal.

20. Usually happiness is a feeling that appears and eventually fades away like joy or any feeling of excitement. However happiness also can be a state of mind, based on integrity and love, which powerfully neutralizes the negativity of adversities and other challenges.

21. True happiness and inner truthfulness are inseparable.

22. People cannot be happy in the same manner. They are like children who at each age are happy playing with different toys. At six months a rattle is enough to make a baby smile and laugh, again, and again, and again. When a child turns three, this trick doesn’t work anymore. A child needs a toy that makes sense: a car or a doll. When a child is about twelve a good book or computer game is much more in demand than dolls or toy trucks. Human souls have ages, also, so it’s no wonder people enjoy life so differently.

23. If you know a guy who is absolutely happy with his simple food, simple sex and simple TV shows, it doesn’t mean that he is a Buddha. He might be a young soul who, like a baby, enjoys the simplicity of a rattle game.

24. If one of your friends is a dreamer who seeks self-realization through music, poetry, or extreme activities, it’s quite possible that his soul is at the level similar to a teenager, when the quest for self-identity and finding your role in the world is crucial. “Teenage-like” souls need their moods, their doubts, their depressions. They grow through them. All their “negativity” is a necessary part of their game of discovering themselves.

25. We all need time to grow through our games. One game is not more important than another one. One player is not better than others. All our games are not complete until we grow out of them like children do.

26. If your happiness today leaves you with nothing tomorrow, it’s better to think now if your happiness is built on a wrong foundation.

27. How to be always happy? If you want to be always happy, first, live your life in alignment with your conscience, and second, be very sincere sharing your time and energy with others, giving from the heart. That is where inner stability and joy come from.

28. Happiness is an art that we master all through our life.