Being happy, staying happy

Image source: Foundation for a Better Life's facebook page

Happiness – the thing that everyone says they want to feel all the time.  But we need to know the opposite of happiness to truly appreciate what it means to be happy.  It is as with all things in life, there is always an opposite to help us truly understand what the positive emotion is.

I am talking about myself, but I feel that a lot of people also do the same thing.  We tend to concentrate on negative emotions more than the positive ones.  What happens when something negative happens? It may be a small thing, someone saying something to you that is unpleasant or rude for example.  When this happens, it will make us feel sad or angry, we start thinking about how the person has hurt us, why did this happen to us, how and what we can do to get back at the person and so on.  What is actually happening all the time that we are focusing on the event that occurred is that we are focusing on the negative emotion that we felt at the instant the event took place.  And by focusing on the negative emotion we are giving it more strength and allowing it to take over.  By not letting it go we are feeding it and giving it more strength; which in turn lowers our energies, makes us feel down, and in really worse cases, if this goes on over a period of time, it can actually start affecting our bodies physically.  And when this happens, we start the process of thinking and feeling even more negative emotions and continually keep feeding the negative emotion energies.

And what do we do when we feel happy, do we do the same thing by constantly thinking of what made us happy, thinking about how we can do more of the same so that we are happy all the time.  A lot of the times we do stay with being happy, but then start taking it for granted and start going about life unconsciously because that is our nature, till something negative happens and we go through a down with negative emotions.

Now wouldn’t it be great if we deal with happiness the same way we deal with unhappiness.  That is to say when something nice happens, we keep on thinking about how nice it was, how the person made me feel so good, how I can continue to be grateful and not forget the good that happened to me so that I can make the happiness last the longest.

A wonderful tool we have in our possession to lasting happiness is that we have a choice about how we feel.  We can choose what we feel.  So while I am sure that all of us would love to be happy all the time and never have any situations that bring us unhappiness, the truth as I mentioned earlier is that we can only truly appreciate happiness by knowing its opposite.  But we can choose not to stay in the unhappiness for any length of time.  We can as soon as we have an unhappy situation, choose to change it to happiness and gratitude.  We will not be able to change the event that brought the negative emotion to us, but we can change how we choose to feel about the event.  We can accept the event as it happened, look at the negative emotion for what it is, acknowledge it and then change our emotion to a happy one.  You never need to stay in the negative emotion; I believe that once we know and feel what it is, we can by choice immediately change how we feel and go with happiness as that is a much better place to be in.

So whatever happens in life, if you choose to be happy then that is what you will experience.

In Love and Light