WHY LOOKING FOR HAPPINESS IS TELLING YOURSELF YOU ARE NOT HAPPY SO LET IT BE

Let it be.

Happiness is something I have to let happen.

Working to be happy can fail for I have no guarantee I will be happy or enjoy what I think I want. That causes worry that will prevent happiness being yours.

Seeing happiness as a goal and not as something that you must open yourself up to leads to unhappiness for it is not a goal. It just happens if you know how to let it. It may take time but letting it come is the only way to be happy.

If you keep trying to erase and fight your negative thoughts and feelings, you inflict the pain of a struggle on yourself. You make yourself unhappy. And they can only be erased a little. Eliminating them is not possible - they are inevitable. Instead of fearing and battling them, just be willing to experience them and learn from them. That way you will lose your fear of them. Trying to be happy by eliminating negative feelings and thoughts is refusing to listen to the warnings they give. That alone risks your happiness. It is also fearing the inevitable and that does not stop it happening but makes it worse. A negative emotion is made worse by fearing it. You lose your fear by admitting you have negative thoughts and emotions to yourself. What you do, is prove them wrong to yourself. That is why the power to reason correctly and accurately is so important.

What I do is stop thinking about it and focus on others. I must esteem myself enough to forget myself.

Happiness is one thing: it is being free. In other words, it is the state of not being enslaved. Depression or sadness involves being enslaved to something. It is not success in life that brings happiness but the opportunity to get success and the opportunity to keep it. Without these the success will not be really success. We refuse to be even partly enslaved. That is why we regard ourselves as godlets and bow the knee to no God.

Never say you don’t like something. A person says they hate cheese. They need to widen their focus - the present moment is not just about the cheese. What about the company and the sun outside?

Saying, “Think how things could be worse and be grateful” is actually telling a person they cannot simply be happy. They are told to compare their lives to the horrendous lives of others to feel happy. They are told to have a prop.

Trying to be happy means you find that there is a lack of happiness to a degree in your life. The trying then feeds this sense of lack and so it prolongs the unhappiness at the risk of making it even worse.

The more we want to be happy the more we annoy ourselves. Worrying about how we are going to be happy and how to stay happy isn't going to help. It pushes happiness away from us. But if we just forget about wanting to be happy and get on with life and work to make others happy we will wake up one day and learn that we have become happy.

Happiness cannot be worked for. I will only think then it depends on my efforts. I will fear losing it. Happiness is merely a choice. I do not directly choose it or work for it. I pave the way for it and let it happen. Happiness includes the sense that my life has value and purpose.

Meaning in life is useless unless it is about giving and receiving the feeling that life is valuable. You get it from being good to others and not from mere religious faith.

Pleasure helps you to be happy. But you need enough happiness in order to enjoy pleasure. You only enjoy pleasure if you are happy enough.

If you feel unhappy, you will be advised to think of those who are worse off. That is a very negative way to make yourself feel better. It is also using their plight in a mercenary way. It is a crutch. You must feel simply happy. If you need to use a crutch to feel happy then you are creating a dependency and being a victim.

Be consistent. Align your feelings with your beliefs as much as you can.

Let your belief be shown in your actions. Do what you believe. If you do not, you risk feeling others will be as inconsistent as you and that will harm your relationship with them. Worse, you will end up; being unable to trust yourself. The problem we have with so called evil people is that we fear their inconsistency. That is the only problem.

You will only ever be happy to the degree that there is harmony in yourself. Your thinking, your feelings – your mind and body, these have to be in harmony.

You have a lot of good in your life at this moment.

Recognise it. Accept it. Rejoice. In other words, if you don't want what you have now then what is the point of looking for good things to happen in the future?

If you fail to do these things or any one of them, you are programming yourself as follows: "I command blessings to come to me. But don't take it for granted I will see them, accept them and appreciate them. How can you when I don't recognise and accept and rejoice in what I have now?"

We often only see how much we needed some perhaps challenging or unpleasant experience after it has happened so patience is very important. Impatience will not help us but annoy us.

Don't get annoyed because you don't seem to be as at peace as you want to be. Getting upset only makes it worse. Just be aware of how you feel. Do not judge it good or bad. Belief in God and prayer urges you to be holy, that is judge what is evil and stay away from it. Free yourself from the belief and do not judge your inner state.

Stop the habit of complaining and you can start to want what you have.

When you do good, you get a good feeling and if you don’t at least you are asking for a good feeling.

Eat rubbish and you feel like rubbish and you soon end up treating yourself and others like rubbish. Honour your body by choosing a healthy eating and exercise programme.

One reason why we should not try to be happy but just let it happen is that trying to be happy requires us not to think of sad or upsetting or negative possibilities or happenings. The problem with that is that trying not to think them makes us think them. We might try to ignore them but we still think them.

FINALLY

To be happy is to be in a good position and feel it.   It is not a mere feeling.  Searching for it is a burden and you cannot make it happen so you have to forget about it and it will happen.  Happiness that just happens like that is better than happiness you have to work for.  Paradoxically, forgetting about happiness to be happy is working for it but in the right way.  God is attractive to people who think they need beliefs and ideas to make themselves happy.  They are wrong.