 How can you find happiness? Stop looking for it. In fact, happiness is the euphoric feeling that occurs when the denial of its natural existence ceases. You have to stop investing in the search and come back to your natural self to experience happiness.
Everyone knows what happiness is. Everyone has experienced it,-- sometimes in short bursts, and sometimes for long durations,-- but no one knows where to find it. Looking for something or someone to make you happy never works. Neither does trying to make yourself happy when you are sure you are not happy. This is why there is a low rate of success for the use affirmations designed to convince you that you are already what you want to be. How can you find happiness, when happiness is literally the end of the pursuit for it? True acceptance lies at the end of the pursuit and search for happiness. You will never be happy if you believe something, now or past, should be different than it was or is. Happiness is revealed as the mental constructs and modifications of beliefs and thoughts are released and no longer reified. This is when Buddhism suggests that you have perceived the true nature of reality. It is not, however, that the true nature of reality is happiness, more that the true nature of reality is without the obscurations of attachments and afflictions. Let’s not confuse happiness with gratification or pleasure. Engaging in sensual pleasure, self-indulgence, and instant gratification of desires, sometimes believed to be the pursuit of happiness, will not contribute to an achievement of happiness. Pleasure, indulgence, and gratification are all changeable and impermanent. Grasping for something, watching it slip away and trying to procure it again can cause you to feel more unhappy than happy. If you spend all your time, energy, and skill trying to protect, safeguard and secure what you believe you have achieved, you have lost happiness, not gained it. Fulfilling an insatiable desire momentarily does not bring happiness, it brings the frustration of limitation and the realization that happiness cannot be dependent upon time and space, but must be even more free of three-dimensional constraints. So, what can you do? Stop Pursuing and Start Expressing Let go of the idea that you have to chase after happiness and learn how to simply express happiness in whatever form it takes in your world. There is no happiness savings account, whatever you have, spend it immediately on everyone around you. Think of Happiness as Your Only Mission The most essential mission of any human being is to be happy—to live in your most natural state. Happiness is not the ultimate outcome of a life “well lived,” it is the most fundamental outcome of a life. Get to happiness by diving deep into everything you are and just being that which you are in total acceptance of all that you are. Remember Happiness Is Your Natural State Whatever you are doing in your life, do it from a place of knowing happiness underwrites it all. Your nature is happy, however you might be feeling in any moment. Feelings move and change all the time, happiness is solid and deep inside you. It is reliable and abundant. It is at the source of your humanity, always ready to be shared. Keep Your View Pure and Expansive The world is wonderful. Stars shine, the sun rises, everything is in order. Stop looking for what is wrong, and see what is wonderful. Appreciate your aliveness. It is your thoughts and feelings that determine your experience, and you are the thinker of your thoughts and the feeler of your feelings, but you are not the totality of All That Is. There is always happiness amidst and underneath and around all of life—all One Life. Allow yourself to keep returning your thoughts and feelings to the most expansive place, the purist view of One Life unfolding and expressing happiness. Smile Something as simple as a smile can change your experience from suffering to happiness. Smile at yourself from the inside out. Smile at everyone you see today, and the next day, and the next. Don’t think you have to feel happiness first, then you will smile. Smile first and then you have a good chance of remembering happiness as your natural state of being. Practice happiness. Be happiness. See the world through rose-colored glasses. Reality is not the fixed place “out there” where suffering occurs. Reality is whatever you are experiencing in the moment. Let this moment be whatever it is, accept it unconditionally, and express your truest nature: Happiness!
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