You Have A Good Life If You Equate These 5 Things With Happiness
The secret to taming a troubled mind has little to do with money or fleeting forms of joy.
Fer Almaraz | Unsplash Many things we think will make us happy only do so for a short time. The things we turn to for happiness may be those that provide instant physical gratification, but they don't help you build a good life, unless you take action to grow deeper forms of happiness, too.
Short-lived sensations ultimately do little to boost our overall level of life satisfaction. People, money, material possessions, and status will not create true inner happiness. Taming the mind of its endless needs and sense of lack is the key to happiness. People who have a good life enjoy fun, fleeting things, but they do so in the framework of the deeper quesitons below.
You have a good life if you equate these five things with happiness:
1. Asking yourself life-changing questions
Happiness begins first and foremost by being aware and mindful of our perceptions and thoughts. Our beliefs come from these.
It is vital to ask yourselves questions such as:
- Are my perceptions, thoughts, and beliefs supporting and empowering me, or are they making me unhappy and disenfranchised?
- Are they leading me to experience happiness or discontent?
- Why am I holding onto these thoughts and beliefs if doing so makes me unhappy?
- What new thoughts and beliefs can I choose to create to promote my inner happiness?
The mind creates our reality. What you think about, you bring about. Coming to honest answers to these questions is the first step. No one can change or improve without conscious awareness of how things are currently.
2. Creating a deep sense of connection with others
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To have a sense of connection with people is a healthy and important part of being human and of being happy. You are here to experience, to connect, to create, to serve, and to love.
Counter-intuitive as it may seem, the key to a deep and lasting connection with others is not to let yourself be defined by or overly consumed with those relationships. You must never hold the people in your life responsible for your happiness.
When you define yourself via someone other than yourself, you lose your sense of self in return. This creates heightened neediness and expectations that can only lead to disappointment. Unhealthy attachment creates the fear of loss and abandonment, leading you straight down the road of intense neediness and unhappiness.
3. Practicing acts of acceptance
You may believe happiness comes from standing your ground and convincing others about what is right or wrong, but this way of living backfires by creating resentment, anger, and an unsettling need to enforce your power over others.
These beliefs and behaviors are not the paths to inner happiness. Life is impermanent. Things change! Acceptance is true inner power, a sign of discipline and self-knowing.
Accepting “what is” moves you forward in action. You don't have to like it, but you have the opportunity to work with it. When you resist "what is," you become consumed by your experiences. Acceptance opens the door to new possibilities and helps you flow better with the current.
4. Offering compassion to yourself and others
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I believe it is fair to say that many people can be judgmental or critical rather than accepting and compassionate when they first see or connect with someone. We all have a heart and a spirit.
When you can connect more fully with a person’s heart rather than seeing them as just a personality with its traits, temperament, behaviors, and body, you can be more compassionate and less judgmental toward them. Fear is the absence of love. Judgment is the withholding of love.
Compassion, like understanding and acceptance, is an act of love. Compassion is accepting someone or something as they are — and this includes the self. Compassion for the self is just as important as it is for others. The more compassionate you are to yourself, the greater your willingness will be to offer compassion to others.
5. Keeping your spirit childlike, not childish
To be childlike means to reclaim your innocence and love yourself. It means being honest, open, and willing. When you are childlike, you are confident, unconditional, curious, spontaneous, carefree, inclusive, creative, and free.
To be childish is to be closed-minded, demanding, conditional, selfish, whiny, doubtful, excluding, and restrictive. The more you can hang with your childlike qualities and tame your childish ones, the happier you will be.
Can any of us be happy all the time? Not really, and that’s OK. Life happens. Some life experiences are painful and tragic. This is not to be denied or minimized. Life isn't meant to be easy; it’s meant to be meaningful.
The more you can embrace your life experiences and seek a higher perspective above and beyond what your ego pulls you toward, the more effectively you will move through those experiences, and the sooner you return to the choice and value of happiness.
David Schroeder, LMSW, CPC from Grand Rapids, MI., is a licensed social worker, certified life coach, and author of Just Be Love: Messages on the Spiritual and Human Journey.
