Sunday, August 26, 2012

How To Achieve True Happiness


                              How To Achieve True Happiness From Within

It is too bad that after you hear, “I now pronounce you husband and wife” it isn’t followed with a handing out of an instruction manual. How much easier would it be if we had one of those manuals to get through life? Everybody would be in a perfect relationship, children would be very well behaved, and there would be no prisons. But, fortunately or unfortunately, however you want to look at it, we all have free will. Let’s not forget, we also have the pursuit of happiness. Thomas Jefferson said so. However, I do believe that we take that part of the Constitution too literal.

Some men and some women will use that line as a way to excuse their infidelities in their marriage. “It’s my right to try and be happy.” It may be your right, but aren’t you possibly going about it the wrong way?

If we believed that other people are responsible for making us happy, then this would be a justifiable excuse for infidelity. Yet, this is not the case; we are only responsible for our own happiness.

No marriage is without its ups and downs. I know this because we’ve had our share of ups and downs in my own marriage. I want my husband to be happy, as he wants the same for me. We do things for each other in the hopes that it will make the other one happy. Yet, if one of us is displeased in our relationship or more importantly with ourselves, nothing we can do for the other will make us happy. In fact, trying to make the other half happy will only result in agitation from him or her and exhaust us from all those attempts to make the other happy.

Happiness comes from within us, not from other people or things. To be exact, it is nobody else’s responsibility to make you happy but yourself. Think for a minute, what makes you happy? Puppy kisses, a call from a loved one, a nice breeze on a summer day, or maybe a warm bath on a chilly night? How long do these things make you happy several seconds, hours, what about a day? These are moments in life that are good to have and leave us feeling happy, but it isn’t true happiness.

To achieve true happiness we must have peace of mind. We must be secure with ourselves and we must realize that what life hands us, whether it is a goal met or a disastrous event, we will come through it just fine with new goals and plans in place. Life is nothing more than a ride. It can be a an amusement park ride with many ups and downs and twists or it can be a smooth slow moving ferry boat ride. It’s your choice. It’s your journey. Have faith in yourself that you will be able to get through anything life throws at you.

When you have peace within yourself those puppy kisses, that long awaited phone call, the cool breeze on a warm summer day, or the warm bath on a chilly night will be all that more appreciated.

The lesson to learn is that we cannot be truly happy with others if we’re not happy with our own self. Why? Because, we can’t recognize that those little moments of happiness are not true happiness. We will want those little moments to last forever, which is impossible. We may even keep trying to find those little moments in other things, such as overspending, gambling, or other self-destructive ways.

If you are unhappy, look inward at yourself, not outward at the other people in your life or the things you do or don’t have, then change what needs to be changed to give you true happiness. Be kind to yourself.

Decide today that from this moment on you will choose to be happy. What happened yesterday let go of, because it happened yesterday. Tomorrow hasn’t happened yet, so don’t worry about tomorrow. Concentrate on the today, the here and now. When we fret over the past and worry about the future, we miss the blessing that is today. We tend to over analyze what worries us and miss all the little moments in our life because we are too focused on what worries us. When in fact, the things that we worry over were nothing to stress about in the first place. Let tomorrow happen. Make like a waterfall and just go with the flow.

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