Happiness Takes Work: 5 Choices to Create Happiness

All of us have met people who just seem to be happy most of the time. Perhaps you have assumed that these people are just naturally happy, or that they are the lucky people who have an easy life, or they had really loving parents. Most of the time, nothing could be farther from the truth.

Happy people are making specific choices regarding their thinking and behavior. Happy people consciously choose to think and behave in ways that result in happiness. Unhappy people are unconsciously thinking and behaving in ways that create unhappiness.

Following are five of the specific choices that happy people make:

OPTIMISM

Happy people see the glass as half full, while unhappy people choose to be pessimistic – to see the glass as half empty. Optimistic thinking does not just happen - it is a choice regarding how you see life. Optimistic people are optimistic because they CHOOSE to be optimistic. Instead of allowing their ego wounded self to be in charge with all its doom and gloom, happy people put their loving adult self in charge and open to the wonderful possibilities that life has to offer. Happy people realize that their thinking is the beginning of a creative process that leads to manifestation. By thinking in positive ways, they move themselves to act in ways that manifest their dreams.

KINDNESS

Happy people choose to be kind and compassionate toward themselves and others. Happy people have learned that how they treat themselves and others determines much of how they feel. Happy people do not wait to be happy before being kind to themselves and others. They realize that their happiness is the RESULT of their caring behavior, not the CAUSE of it. They are kind, caring and compassionate whether or not they feel like it. They have chosen this way of being, and their happiness is the result.

FORGIVENESS

Happy people do not harbor resentment toward others, even others who have been mean and hurtful toward them. They realize that resentment makes them unhappy, so they choose to allow people their humanness and forgive them their hurtful behavior. Because happy people tend not to take personally others' uncaring behavior, they don't get their feelings hurt in the same way that people do who take others' behavior personally. Happy people recognize that another's behavior is really about that other person, so they move into compassion toward themselves and others rather than into judgment.

ACCEPTANCE

Happy people realize what they can control and what they can't. They live by the Serenity Prayer, accepting the things they cannot change and changing the things they can. Unhappy people are constantly trying to change people and circumstances and do not accept their lack of control. As a result, they are constantly frustrated. Happy people realize they cannot control others and outcomes, so they focus on what they can control – their own thinking and behavior. Acceptance of what they can and cannot control leads to happiness and inner peace.

GRATITUDE

Finally, happy people are consistently grateful for what they have, rather than complaining about what they don't have. They notice the many gifts and blessings that come their way and they frequently express gratitude for the everyday things in their lives – the beauty of nature, the food they eat, the smile on a friend's face, their ability to see, hear, walk, talk. Even many disabled people who may not have the blessings of eyesight, hearing, speech or legs are often happy people because they focus on what they do have and what they can do, rather than focusing on what they are missing out on.

If you want to be happy, then you need to recognize that happiness is the result of your thinking and behavior, not the cause of it. If you choose to focus on becoming conscious of what thoughts and behavior make you feel happy, you can become a happy person – regardless of your present circumstances. Happiness does not just happen – it takes work!

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Living with Joy

Living with joy can sometimes be a challenge. When things appear to be going against our will, we tend to experience this as pain, suffering, or that we're having a bad day. Recognizing that we are in control of our feelings, and that we have the choice to live in joy, or in fear is the first step to creating a life full of joy and positivity.

One principle that we all need to acquire is the ability to see all situations, people, and events from a positive perspective. Instead of viewing bad things in life as a prompt to get upset and angry, try to view the "bad things" as lessons that are helping you grow, helping you to become as whole of an individual as possible. Too many times, we think that the outer world, the physical reality is creating our day, causing us to be sad or unhappy; however it is the opposite that is true. We create our day, we create the circumstances for joyous living.

The most important lesson is that "beingness" precedes experience. In order to be happy, we first need to "be happy" inside, and this internal happiness radiates outward through every cell of our bodies and creates the outer experience of a smile, or a laugh, or an intimate connection between two people. It is in this "beingness" that we have the ability to see and to choose our feelings, desires, goals, and dreams, which then enables us to manifest an outer reality based on our true selves.

We create the reality in which we experience joy, anger, love, and fear. Because we have the ability, the free will, to choose our reality, we can make that conscious choice to try to just be happier, more grateful, and more sensitive. This happiness though will never come if you are looking outside of yourself first. Because, what we just learned is that in order to be happy we have to have the internal feeling of happiness to then create that happiness in our daily lives. Remember that your beliefs about reality create your experience of it.

So, start changing your negatives into positives, gain clarity, and open your heart by looking inside yourself. When we start changing ourselves from inside out, the universe will respond to us in ways in which we could never imagine. The ability to start manifesting your goals and dreams is already inside of you. Take the leap to start living in joy today.

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Why Do We Hurt Those We Love Most And How To Stop This

You love each other but can't manage to communicate without arguing, fighting and ending up exhausted, each one in his corner, trying to lick his wounds and thinking of how to protect one self against a new attack. And in spite of that…you love each other? How is this possible? Why do people hurt most those they love?

How come we can't express our love? How come we are full of good intentions but when it comes to reality we find ourselves again shouting and blaming the other one. And then that monster of guilt jumps out of nowhere to our throat to strangle us once again.

How to stop this infernal behavior?

First let me explain why this happens.

We all need energy. We need energy to live and to survive. Energy comes in many forms : love, attention, interest, food, friendship, money, approval, recognition…

We all need this to feel good, to build our personality and to find our place in society.

But here it is : as long as we think this energy has to come from other human beings, we will get caught up in struggle. Because human energy is limited. We have to fight for it. Human energy doesn't last. There isn't enough of it. So we have to be the quickest, the smartest, the most beautiful one, to attract the attention from the other and to pull his energy.

If this doesn't work, we try another strategy. We try to pull attention by negative behavior. Every child learns this very quickly in his early life : when he is playing quietly on the floor with his toys, mum goes on cooking dinner or talking with daddy. But as soon as the kid hurts his little sister or is playing "sick", mums hurries to give attention to him. She shouts maybe, she's angry or worried, but no matter, all this is attention for the child! He learns very quickly which behavior gives him the greatest amount of attention and energy. When his mother or father looks at him, even angry, it still is energy coming his way! When they shout at him, they give him energy. Negative energy, alright, but it is better than no energy at all.

When we grow up, and start to date, we discover a very interesting phenomenon : when we fall in love, we receive a lot of energy (read : attention, interest, time, love etc.) for free. The other person gives us freely and abundantly a whole bunch of energy. We don't even have to ask for it, we don't need to apply any strategy to pick this energy, it's all for free! We let go of our mechanism to pull the energy of others towards us. We loosen up. We "fall" in love. We almost literally fly. We are high! Everything seems to have more colour, is more vivid, we feel lighter, life seems easy, everything goes by itself, we have the feeling we love everybody and everything, even our grunchy boss! Nothing can hurt us, we feel safe and boosted with energy. But this is his or her energy! We are flying on someone else's energy, and human energy is limited!

And that is exactly the problem! This stream of free energy begins to slow down, because the other one goes back to his business and activities he had before. Why? The body is not able to handle this amount of adrenaline for a long period of time, they say… but the real reason is we need to learn to pull our energy from somewhere else, not from a human being but from the source of energy itself.

So our lover gives us less free energy than before. We were used to this energy-flow and now we have to do it again by ourselves! Free energy is so much easier! We don't have to do any effort to get it! And now we are getting less of this free energy, we don't want to let this happen. At this moment our old childhood-system of capturing energy is triggered because of the scarcity of energy (there is an alarm inside us that says : "Danger! Lack of energy!") and the old mechanism to capture energy from others starts running in our head and in our behavior. The mechanism that worked when we were a child to get the energy of our parents, will be triggered by the lack of energy now. We do what we did as a child to get energy flowing our way.

We can do this by playing the victim ("Oh poor me, look at all that I do and nobody is grateful! Look how good I am and still life strikes me with disapproval, disease and misery! Oh oh oh!"). Or we get attention by being aggressive, shouting and trying to dominate the other one. A third mechanism is harassing the other one by asking too many questions and controlling him. A fourth system is playing silence, refusing contact, not to speak and not to react, so the other one will do whatever he can to get in contact with you again and this will give you his energy.

These systems will of course make the energy of the other one flowing your way. But what next? The other one is now low on energy and wants to get his energy back. So now his mechanism is triggered by his lack of energy. He will now use the system that assured him the energy of his parents when he was little, to get his energy back from you. He will either shout at you, either playing the poor one that didn't deserve your treatment, either torture you with a bunch of questions, or refuse contact.

This explains why we hurt the ones we love. First reason is we want their energy, energy they gave once for free. We hurt our loved onces most because they gave us love and energy and attention for free in the beginning and now we have to do it on our own and we are angry and want get back to them. We think we are entitled to have their energy still for free and start our mechanism to get it. Second reason we hurt them most is because of convenience : they are always around, their energy is available so when we are low on energy we try to rip their energy off, and hurt them by doing that.

Stealing energy from another human being is hurting him.

What can we do about this? We should only be in contact with other people when we are sure to be already filled up with energy, so we won't steal theirs. When we are full of energy, and conscious of what happens between people, we can give the other one energy instead of ripping him off. We should not meet each other when we are low on energy. It's the responsibility of each and every person to generate energy by himself and not to depend on other people.

How to do that? By connecting to the energy that is always available. That is the energy of the Universe. The easiest way to connect to this energy is contemplate the beauty of a flower. You also can contemplate the beauty of an object or a person. You can listen to beautiful music, take a walk in nature, meditate, pray, dance, paint, read positive texts, work on your mission on earth, love your cat or dog, anything that gives you energy.

Make a list of every activity and behavior that increases your energy level. As soon as you feel you're in a conflict with your partner, boss, child, parent or whoever, do something to get yourself together and raise your energy. Don't say anything until your energy-level is again high enough to be able to send energy to the other one. By sending energy, you are sure not to steal energy from the other one. This is an act of love. If you are not able to get your energy level any higher, go to another place, do something for you and wait until your vibrations are high enough to meet the other one again.

The important thing in a relationship is not to make the other happy or to expect the other one to make you happy, but to make yourself happy and offer this happiness as a free gift to the other!

Loving another human being is giving him energy!

See the difference? Do you want to love your loved ones or steal their energy?

READ MORE - Why Do We Hurt Those We Love Most And How To Stop This

Life Is Wonderful

It is so simple and so easy to get what we want that we have a hard time to believe it. We are programmed to do things the hard and difficult way, in order to get what we want. We can not believe that we can get anything without hard labour, sweat and tears, obstacles and misery.

This is nothing else but a tough old programmation, a conditioning from our childhood. If you are like me, you were bombarded as a child with expressions from adults about how hard life is and how we have to struggle to get something. We were submitted to a hazardous universe or a God of revenge who could pick us out without any reason to take revenge on us for something we did wrong. We needed to avoid being bad or wrong, but disease could strike us anyway. Sometimes they even said : "It's again a good one who's punished, and the bad one take off easily like usual without paying anything!". We learned that life wasn't fair. We lived in fear and thought life was a valley of tears, fear, struggle, pain, disease and death?

How would it have been if they've told us the truth? The truth, nothing but the truth? That life is easy, wonderful. That miracles happen all the time and that we have the power to make them happen in our own life! That the universe loves us. That there is wealth and health for everyone. That we don't live in a universe of scarcity but of abundance. That we only have to put the right thoughts in our heads to make these dreams real for us.

What would your life have looked like if your parents and teachers would have taught you the truth?

You would have suffered much less! You would not have believed you were less than nothing. You would not have been filled with fear over your ears of getting sick or failing, of being stupid or being not good enough.

If you would have known from the beginning that you were a creation of the Creator, that you will always remain, that you will always be around, that you were created for a reason, and when you find this reason you will be happy, what would your life look like now? If you were told that you had talents, unique qualities, that make you a special person, and that you are on earth with the mission to offer these talents to others, where would you be right now and what would you be doing now?

Isn't it nice? The Genius who created this whole thing did really well : we are sent to earth with a mission and to be able to assume our mission we are already fully equiped from the beginning : we are gifted with natural talents and all we have to do is develop our talents and offer them to the world! Simply said, we have to do what we can do easily already and what we are talented for, and than happiness, satisfaction, love, money and everything we want comes flowing our way!

It is so beautiful, this concept! All we have to do is to do what we love! And of course we need to stop once for all to think we don't deserve happiness or wealth or health. All these thoughts are wrong because they go against the principles of creation of the Universe.

We are already wonderful! We are already loved! We are already rich! We are already free! We are already intelligent! We are already healthy!

Why? Because we were all this before we started our life. It is the way we really are. It is the way we were created, we were born. This is the truth about ourselves. Everything else is "learned" afterwards.

The good news is whatever is learned can be un-learned. Every programmation can be changed and replaced by a new program.

And again, life is wonderful, because a positive thought is 10,000 times more powerful than a negative thought. So you don't have to take another 40 years to undo the negative conditioning in your head. One positive thought can counterbalance 10,000 negative ones.

Can you imagine? Aren't we lucky?

If you choose to do so, you can rapidly turn around your negative program in your head. Go to the bookstore, buy some books with positive thoughts, put them at every toilet in the house, in the bathroom, in your bedroom, in your living room, and read them whenever you think of it or see them. It doesn't matter if you read one page after another or if you just open the book as it falls in your hands. The message you will receive will be the right one for you at that very moment.

Every morning you start your day by saying thank you to the Universe for your bed, your house, the roof over your head, the people living with your, the water coming out of your tap, the light switching on by a simple gesture of your hand, the food available, the choices you can make that day, the love you received in your life and the love you will receive, the miracles which will happen today and the air you can breath.

In your car, listen to CD's or cassettes with positive programmation. Listen to them while you make dinner, clean the house or iron your clothes.

Surround yourself with positive people and stop nourishing negative social talk. Don't watch television unless there is some really positive program.

There is a lot you can do to take a positive turn in your life. Don't think you can do nothing. You are responsible for your life now. Make your choice! Know that every thought you think is either one which will weaken you, or one which will make you feel stronger.

The choice is yours!

READ MORE - Life Is Wonderful