1. See if your basic needs are met:
You, my friend, were born with a birthright.
You were born with the birthright to be happy every single day.
Everything you need to be happy is given to you from the moment you make your first cry. Be happy, if:
You have your primary needs met — food, shelter, clothing.
You have intelligence that allows you to work, create, observe, feel, and experience.
You have relationships with people who care for you, who engage with you, and who afford human connection.
You live on a beautiful, amazing planet free for you to explore and enjoy.
You, my friend, were born with a birthright.
You were born with the birthright to be happy every single day.
Everything you need to be happy is given to you from the moment you make your first cry. Be happy, if:
You have your primary needs met — food, shelter, clothing.
You have intelligence that allows you to work, create, observe, feel, and experience.
You have relationships with people who care for you, who engage with you, and who afford human connection.
You live on a beautiful, amazing planet free for you to explore and enjoy.
You have easy access to information, ideas, books, entertainment, music, art, and many other things to heighten the senses and stimulate the mind.
In other words, you truly have everything you need right now to be happy.
2. Savor simple joys:
Yes, we all have had difficulties, childhood issues, health problems, relationship upheavals, and unexpected tragedies that undermine our feelings of happiness. Many of these things are simply out of our control. And sometimes they create emotional and psychological problems that separate us from happiness for long periods.
Fortunately, most of us have the ability to heal from these unexpected life problems, to learn from them, and to move forward with happy lives. And yet the feeling of sustained happiness, that mixture of underlying contentment and joy, seems to elude most people.
Do you feel sustained happiness yourself?
Do you see it in the people around you?
When you observe someone who lives from that state of happiness, rather than constantly striving for happiness, you recognize that this person has a gift of some kind, a special knowledge or personality trait that lights them up from the inside out.
There are people born with “happier” personalities. But personality alone does not constitute sustained happiness. Achieving that sense of inner contentment and joy is more a matter of releasing things that have a part of your daily list of habits. These habits separate us from the happiness that is immediately accessible to us every day. And they will continue to do so until we recognize them in ourselves and do the work to let them go.
Author and Credits: Barrie Davenport