What is happiness? It is not the giddy fleeting moment you feel when laughing at a joke or enjoying your favorite meal. According to self-help author and Blockchain expert Ernesto Lee, true happiness is a state of mind where you feel in perpetual peace. What are these basic elements that keep us humans, grounded and independent of external events while also open to internal contentment? How do we attain contentment? Most importantly, what are the ways to sustain contentment in a world that is constantly changing?
These questions are frequently asked but often answered differently. According to new studies, happiness is compared with health – a condition which is not seen but felt. For example: if a fever runs, it makes an impact on your body. Likewise, happiness is also a mind body problem. It is a state of mind which fluctuates in accordance to events, accidents, incidents, occasions, etc. Moreover, there are ways through which you can elongate this feeling from temporary fleeting happiness to lasting contentment which should be the goal of all human beings.
Let’s discuss five things which definitely makes you happier, irrespective of what you have and don’t have.
1. Self-awareness stands out as the primary precursor to happiness. Self-awareness always precedes self-acceptance which itself precedes self-love. Why is self-awareness important? Because you must know better to do better. Self-awareness is the first step towards happiness because you must be aware of your present situation before you can take control of it. Being aware of your present situation often leads to the recognition that we are “sick and tired” of being “sick and tired”. There is one rule of thumb to achieve self-awareness: staying brutally honest with yourself.
Awareness is all about being honest with yourself while simultaneously appreciating yourself for who you are. Self-awareness means you maintain the light that burns inside of you by allowing yourself to forgive your own self and viewing prior challenges as obstacles you were able to overcome. Death is not the worst thing in life. The worst thing in life is when your hope dies and you accept that as your reality. You must know yourself to lead yourself. It is self-doubt that is the biggest killer of dreams… not fear – False Expectations Appearing Real. You must be aware to recognize this.
2. Freedom and independence will always make people happy. An extreme form of dependence is slavery which is malignant in building your healthy personality. What we know about freedom is that it is the root cause of happiness. Include it in your life from the smallest acts or activities to the largest ones.
Freedom also means that you are allowed to get attached to people, things, ideas, ideologies, and thinking patterns. This freedom can be squandered if the attachments chosen are unhealthy. It is worthwhile to understand the different types of attachments. Bob Marley once said that “Everyone will hurt you. It is up to you to determine if they are worth the suffering”. Said differently, you are free to choose your attachments but choose incorrectly and you will suffer. The opposite is also true; healthy attachments will allow you to grow in a positive direction.
What you should remember is the fact that happiness is something that is totally and completely fixated to things you are associated and linked and it is only you that has the power to decide.
3. Empowerment comes when you are totally in control of yourself. After the discovery of knowing who you are, what makes you happy, and what you are attached to, you should focus on the implementation. With the knowledge that happiness comes from deciding on healthy attachments, it becomes clear that you are in control of your own fate.
Unhealthy associations with ideas, people, and things has to be removed from life to make yourself content. When your life does not add up… look to add by subtraction. Commit to performing at least a single random and anonymous act of kindness each day AND also remove one unhealthy relationship from your cell phone. It doesn’t mean that the other party is a bad person, it just means that their chapter in your life has ended. The essence of power in one’s life remains constant – to strive for happiness. Once you realize that you become one with what you are attached to, you can not hurt them without hurting yourself like you can not place your hand in fire without burning yourself.
What can you do to make yourself empowered on a daily basis? Here are some ways:
- Commit to interreact with those that provide positive healthy energy to your life
- Eliminate one person from your life who does not provide a healthy connection for you
- Commit to being the example that you wish to see in the world
- Perform or do rituals with the pure intention of finding solace, peace, and happiness
- Last but not the least; do small acts of kindness… often and anonymously
- Consider having balance in these aspects of your life:
- Thoughts
- Speech
- Actions
- Understanding
- Work
- Effort
- Intention
- Concentration
Strive for balance in each of these areas… daily… make it a ritual… and then a habit and eventually it will become a part of you. What got us here in life will not get us there.
4. Be aware that you are the most important being in the world and you yourself more than anyone deserves your own love. Attachments with oneself is the most crucial attachment and that is why we always encourage people to be their own role model. Make peace with your past or bad experiences and ensure that you know “everything happens for a reason” – even if you don’t understand what that reason is. The unhappiness trap that many fall in to is to worry about things from your past. You can not change it so not accepting it means that YOU are doomed to suffer from your past repeatedly. Commit to not being a slave to the past and choose to be the hero of your story instead of the victim of your own past.
5. Love is something which you can’t give others if you don’t have enough for yourself. Love and embrace yourself. In this way, you will never need others to complete you emotionally or psychologically. Know that you can only start loving yourself after knowing about yourself in detail. The best way to see your future is for you to create it.