Happiness Now

Happiness is something we all want. It’s the reason we do what we do. However, less than 30% of people report being deeply happy. Everyone is motivated towards happiness and hardly anyone is happy. How could this be?

A lot of us have the false impression that we need to do something in order to enjoy happiness. Because of this reason, we hold off happiness until we meet the criteria that we have set up for ourselves.

About 5 years ago, I thought that if I could optimize my schedule I would complete my goals faster and as a result experience more happiness. However, the more I put in my day-timer, the more that new tasks seemed to pop up. I was always just a bit away from reaching all my goals. One day I had a realization. I was never going to arrive at the end, because the end kept getting pushed farther into my future. I was denying myself joy by putting it off with ever bigger goals.

There was no way i could continue to delude myself. I needed a new strategy for feeling joy. Soon after my search began I realized the obvious answer. I didn’t need to do something to be happy. I could be happy regardless of where I was in relation to my goals. It was a major breakthrough. In the book Happy for No Reason, Marci Shimoff says of this idea, “When you’re Happy for No Reason, you bring happiness to your outer experiences rather than trying to extract happiness from them. You don’t need to manipulate the world around you to try to make yourself happy. You live happiness, rather than for happiness”.

This is echoed in Eckhart Tolle’s book A New Earth. He says, “Being at peace and being who you are, that is, being yourself, are one. The ego says: Maybe at some point in the future, I can be at peace–if this, that, or the other happens, or I obtain this or become that…The ego doesn’t know that your only opportunity for being at peace is now”.

Where does happiness arise in your awareness? It always comes from within. This means that happiness is not something to get, but something that is a part of your inner landscape. It is a part of you. This can be felt very intensely by closing your eyes and identifying with happiness directly, as if it is your essence. The same way that you feel like your body is you, you can feel like happiness is you.

To experience this, sit in a comfortable position and close your eyes. Remember a time when you last felt really happy. As the feeling of happiness comes back, begin to focus on it. Now, while feeling happiness, imagine becoming happiness. There is a vast difference between experiencing an emotion and being that same emotion. The purpose of this practice is to be happiness. Let the emotion fully suffuse your body. Sit with this awareness for at least five minutes.

By sitting as happiness, soon a sense of relief begins to wash over you. It is the relief that you can be happiness at any time. Even in the most depressed state, when the body is in pain, and the mind is lost, happiness is there. To a mind starved of deep happiness, this experience is truly refreshing.

Happiness is the experience of accepting and embracing what is. By becoming open and accepting of whatever is in your awareness you can begin to feel a profound and natural joy. True happiness is the emotion that naturally arises when we let everything be as it is. True happiness is you.