Everyone wants to be happy. Parents want their children to be happy, students want their teachers to be happy, pet owners want their pets to be happy, friends want their friends to be happy, employees want their bosses to be happy. So why is it, with all of this desire for happiness, we so often aren’t?
People think they love feeling happy, but in actuality, most people just hate feeling anything but good. The search for happiness is often less about actual happiness, and more about being pain free.
Unfortunately, in the constant pursuit of happiness, we actually make ourselves quite miserable. In the chronic search to feel good, we become unable to tolerate discomfort, pain, or any other negative emotion. This only creates more discomfort in our lives. The new increase in discomfort starts the whole cycle over again and we continue to seek happiness above all else. Even above our well-being, and the well-being of others.
What is happiness anyways? Do you know where happiness comes from? Do you know what it feels like? Could you describe it to me if I had never felt it before?
Happiness is a FEELING. An emotion we experience in our body. It is created in your brain by your thoughts. It does not come from the circumstances of your life (the weather, your spouse, the job, etc.). Once again, happiness is created in your own BRAIN.
Most people would say it’s opposite is sadness. But if I had never been sad, could I recognize that I was ever happy? No, I couldn’t. And neither could you.
We need opposite emotions, and we need to experience them regularly. We need some sad to our happy, some low to our high, some sorrow to our joy.
Once we stop being scared of being anything but happy, we allow ourselves to learn what happiness really is. Believe me, you will most likely realize that you have been hanging out in a lot of false pleasure and very little happiness.
For me happiness is a way of life, not a feeling I am hunting down like an addict. Once I let go of the notion that me, and everyone else, should be happy all the time, I found something better than happy just around the corner…peace.
