Tag: Happiness

Your Happiness IS a Choice

When you realize that happiness is a choice, a lot of things change. They get easier. It's easier to have fun, relax and move forward in your life with the things that matter. Realizing that happiness is a choice didn't come easy though. I believe that having a strong sense of self-awareness really allows you to see how achievable happiness is and what happiness actually means. When I could really understand myself and my goals and really not let other people's perception of me or my goals bother me...being happy got a lot easier. For a while I was too…

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Looking for Happiness? Accept Yourself

I've gleaned some fundamental principles from the wisdom offered by several "metaphysical" guides on how to go about living a life better filled with happiness, health, abundance, and fulfillment. They provide a spiritual code of conduct that, when followed, profoundly affects your perception of reality. These few are the key "natural principles": Accept and Allow. This is the key to living a life full of Love. To accept and allow is to invoke the natural power of Divine Love within you.True acceptance involves eliminating judgment while you allow things to be as they are. Crucially, this begins with yourself. Accepting…

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Don’t Look For Happiness in the Wrong Places

Happiness is not in your bank account. It's not in your closet, your waist line or your garage. Don't go looking to your list of, or lack of, invites, happiness isn't keeping count. Happiness doesn't know the difference between this season's shoes or last season's jacket. It's not sitting in first class on the way to Italy. Happiness didn't arrive on fine china. It's not marinated with filet mignon or dipped in Belgian chocolate. Happiness can't count how many Twitter followers you have or who you're connected to on LinkedIn. It hasn't liked your latest status or analyzed your influence.…

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Today’s Brilliance from Dr. Alex Lickerman

The key to happiness isn't material wealth, health, or even fulfilling relationships. The key to happiness is wisdom. Wisdom is so powerful that it can even put a halt to suffering without changing the circumstances that cause it. Most of us deem a problem solved when it no longer confronts us, but from a Buddhist perspective a problem is solved when it no longer makes us suffer, our escaping or overcoming oppressive circumstances representing only one particular means to that end. Certainly it may be the means we most prefer, and in many cases what we need to do to be…

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The Amazing Power of Gratitude

More and more, gratitude is being acknowledged as an amazing power for good and healing in many different areas of existence –from medicine and positive psychology to gardening and education. It is absolutely impossible, I repeat, impossible, to entertain a deep feeling of gratitude and the least trace of negativity. They totally exclude each other just as light annihilates darkness. Have you ever seen a candle of darkness (??!!) extinguish light? But the smallest candle will bring light to the deepest underground cavern. Such is the power of gratitude to your heart and soul. My daily bedside book – I…

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Find Your Momentum

Momentum. If you're like me, the word itself gives you a feeling of movement, of freedom, of possibility. And if you find momentum to be foundational to your existence, you may also be an Entrepreneurial Personality Type (EPT). EPTs are momentum-based beings, meaning they have a mental, physical and chemical response to momentum, or the sensation of moving forward. Conversely, EPTs also have negative responses to constraint, or anything hindering their ability to move forward. Constraints of any kind adversely affect their emotional states and their understanding of where they fit in the world. When I talk to entrepreneurs about…

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Americans Hate Their Jobs? Shocking!

I recently came across a headline that read “Americans Hate Their Jobs.” And at one time, I was one of them. And because of that, every time I give a talk on the importance of purpose in our life and work, I always talk about engagement, or better yet, the lack of engagement in the workplace today. Did you know that approximately 70% of employees are disengaged in their jobs? Nearly 20% poison the workplace. And this results in $550 billion annually in lost productivity. In other words, employers would be better off paying these people to stay home. The…

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How to Achieve Ultimate Success

The ultimate success has nothing to do with money... Or career. It's not the car you drive. The size of your home. The gold and diamonds you collected. The ultimate success has nothing to do with material accomplishment and gain. It has nothing to do with anything outside of you. The ultimate success is to feel joy exactly where you are right now. No matter what your external life looks like. No matter your situation. The ultimate joy is to be complete and whole in this very moment. No matter who you are or where you are or why you…

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Honoring Your Process and Your “Bothers”

As a perpetual spiritual student and seeker of ultimate joy, I often find myself stuck in a web of conflict. Self-imposed and created, of course. After contemplation and mind games I play with myself to manage my emotions and implement my "schooling," I am left confused, frustrated and no happier than when I began. I persist in hopes of finding a way, "the" way, to relinquish bad feelings and resume feel-good living. There's something about the spiritual path of evolution that can make one feel "bad" for having thoughts and emotions that are anything less than happy or positive or hopeful…

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Milestones… or Memories?

I've observed a theme throughout life, as I reached adolescence and beyond.  This "theme" or pattern probably begins in our 20s, and I've observed it happen time and again to people in their 30s, 40s and 50s.  Though I have yet to personally hear of this experience from someone in their 60s or older, I am most positive it must occur to them, as well.  I am pretty confident it has the potential to make its way into every stage of our life. So what is this pattern, exactly? It is... milestones.  As we approach any new chapter - in particular, birthdays -…

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How You can Find Healing that Lasts

How would your life change if you trusted that your challenges are a part of your journey home – back to yourself and back to Life – instead of feeling that your challenges are here because you have done something wrong or you are being punished or God fell asleep on the job? What would happen if your illness, your difficult relationship, your demanding boss, your compulsions, and maybe even your troublesome dog were showing up in your life to help you heal? The healing you long for comes when you discover how to play the warmer, warmer/colder, colder game. Remember that…

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In This Moment You Are A Perfect You

Where did you learn what a perfect body looks like? Where did you learn what is beautiful? Where did you learn what is ugly? How old were you when you came to these conclusions? We were walking down the street in Paris several years ago to find ourselves taken by a body image considered to be "beautiful." We were looking at the street lamps in front of the Paris Opera House. Built in the mid-1800's, those lamps are supported by statues of naked women. These castings done in the Neo-Baroque style are curvy with rounded bellies and by today's standards…

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How to Enjoy Your Life Rather than Worry About It

Once upon a time, a man was walking through the jungle. Sensing a presence, the man looked over his shoulder and saw a tiger slinking through the foliage, following him. Quickening his pace, the fellow followed the path he was on until he reached a cliff. Looking back once again, he saw the tiger was still there and coming closer. Standing with his toes over the edge, the man noticed that there was a vine running down the cliff face and he swung out onto the vine in order to escape the tiger. Just as he quickly lowered himself down,…

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Solving the Mystery of Letting Go

Sometimes the greatest truths are laid right before our eyes, in the simplest of things, and yet we just can't see them. Take for instance our own hands: what a miracle they are. If we consider for even a moment all they are capable of doing, it's evident that a great wisdom sits hidden behind their incomparable design. But, with this thought in mind, permit me to add one other to help us see another part of their special purpose that lies "hidden" in plain sight. What good would our hands be to us or, for that matter, to the…

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Ask a Luminary

How Can I Control My Emotions?

"I know that I create my own reality with my thoughts, but sometimes when I'm sad I can't seem to change my thoughts - even when I want to. How to I start to take control of my life?" ~ Evelyn, Jacksonville, FL Dear Evelyn, There was a time I felt the same way you did. But a family member I trusted "SNAPPED" me out of it. Soon I realized that the sadness I was feeling was just an emotion I was internalizing. In other words, I was investing too much time into feeling sad until I clearly saw that…

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Ask a Luminary

Can Meditation Make Me Happier?

"I find the world to be filled with sadness, and sometimes, I honestly don't want to be here. I've tried anti-depressants but I don't like the side effects. I'd like to take control of my life and change my attitude, but I don't know where to start. Any suggestions?" ~ John, Boulder, CO Dear John, First, you’re right to have stopped taking the anti-depressants. They do cause unwelcome side effects and they do nothing to get to the root of depression. My answer to this question might surprise you somewhat, but firstly I’d advise looking at ways you can give…

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Sunset over the Ocean

To Have More Happiness, Eat Peas and Grapes! Part 2

Welcome back.  I trust that you have explored holding the energy of Ease and that you’re finding it serves your feelings of happiness to do so. Let’s continue with how being in Ease helps you experience Peace. Ease is the surface layer of this deeper inner state. Peace is your State of Being beyond resistance. A place we all strive to get, and yet, there’s only one place to go to arrive there. Peace is within the Essence of you, the inner state of allowing and trust, the space of unequivocal knowing that everything is exquisitely right, that all is…

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