Category Archives: How Do You Find Happiness

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How To Be Happy All The Time – Part 2

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This is a continuation of the first post in the series about how to be happy. If you haven’t read that post yet, do it before you read this one or it won’t make sense to you.

Here’s the big key that opens the door to how to always be happy …

There’s a part of you that observes everything in Inner Space and Story Space. I call this part of you “The Mind Machine.” It works in a precise way, and for a precise reason.

As I explained, the flow of emotional energy in Inner Space is nonstop. From the time we’re children and growing up, what happens is The Mind Machine observes that flow. It’s always watching, always observing. As it watches, it pulls one specific “movement” in the flow of the flow out of the flow, and says “That’s anger and that’s bad.”

All emotions are just movements of energy. Not good. Not bad. Not painful. Not pleasurable. Not anger or happiness or frustration of serenity.

how to be happy

They’re all just movements of energy, inherently neutral or pleasant if you must describe them.

The Mind Machine focuses on one, yanks it out of the flow, labels it, describes it, judges it, and then stores the label, description and judgment for future use in its “database,” just like a computer does.

Then, as The Mind Machine continues to watch the inner flow of energy, anytime it sees a similar appearance in Inner Space that it’s got in its database, it says, lightning fast, “Oh, I know what that is. That’s anger, and that’s bad. Oh, I know what that is. That’s peace, and that’s good.”

Then it all becomes an autopilot thing. Boom, boom, boom I’m stressed out. Boom, boom, boom, I’m angry. Boom, boom, boom,  I’m depressed. And, yes, sometimes, boom, boom, boom, I’m happy or at peace.

There’s nothing in the emotion itself, the flow of energy itself, that says “this is anger” or “this is happy.” There’s nothing in the movement of energy itself that tells you it’s bad, uncomfortable, or unpleasant, if we’re speaking about the so-called negative emotions.

There’s nothing there, within the pure, raw experience itself, that says anything at all about the experience. It’s all made up, a story that’s bonded to the pure, raw experience.

Now, the flip of that, obviously, is true, too. There’s nothing in the movement of energy itself that says it’s good, it’s comfortable, or it’s pleasant. All of that’s just a big story that’s fused to the energy too — what I’m fond of calling “a big lie, illusion, and story kicked out by The Mind Machine.”

In order for you to experience True Happiness, something has to shift in a big way. Something has to separate the pure movement of energy, the pure emotion, the pure feeling, from the story and the judgment that’s been bonded to it. Something has to then keep it separated, so The Truth can be Seen and Experienced.

This is not some esoteric, spiritual, airy-fairy idea or concept. It’s very practical, very do-able by you and me and everyone else (if it’s part of the story).

I’ll go more deeply into how to be very happy in the next posts in this series.

If you can’t wait, and you want to know how to be happy now, Get The Guide …

Be sure to share this post to help spread the word about how to be happy.

Oh yeah, please leave a comment below so I know you stopped by and to let me know your reaction to this post.

I’d especially like to hear a story about when you experienced an emotion without a name, label or judgment if that’s happened to you.

Cheers … we’ll chat again soon.

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How To Be Happy – Part 1

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That’s the zillion dollar question everyone wants the answer to – how to be happy?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, underneath all our goals and wants is the desire to be happy.

If we do experience what we’d call “happiness,” it doesn’t last.

None of the experts, and I do mean none of the experts, has a sure-fire recipe that works for getting it back when it disappears.

Most experts on happiness – and when I say experts, I mean doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, self-help experts, authors, anyone that claims to have expertise on how to be very happy – say there are positive emotions and negative emotions.

The negative ones are bad and we want to get rid of them. The positive ones are good and we want more of them. That’s the party line.

Here’s the unexamined fantasy about how to be happy …

If there are positive and negative emotions, and happiness is one of the positives, then the only way to always be happy is find a way to make all the negative emotions disappear.

how to be happy

That’s the fantasy, the story, the unexamined belief.

Well, there are two things you need to know about that fantasy:

  1. It’s NEVER going to happen. Negative emotions will never “disappear”
  2. Making negative emotions disappear is not what authentic happiness is all about

What does happen, then?

What is authentic happiness all about?

Lets take a brutally honest look.

Life, or what I call The Human Experience, has two spheres of experience to it. I now call those two spheres “Story Space” and “Inner Space“:

• Story Space is where all the people are, all the places are, all the things and objects. Story space is everyone and everything that appears to be outside of you. It also includes your body.

• Inner Space, as the name would suggest, is the space that appears to exist inside of you. You can’t see it. You can’t touch it. Nobody else can see or touch it. It’s perceived as a vast inner space inside of you.

What are emotions? It’s impossible to describe accurately, but the best I can do is call them “movements of energy in Inner Space.”

There are times when the movement of energy in Inner Space appears to be pretty quiet. There are times when the movement of energy appears to be stronger and more intense. There are times when it’s so intense and strong, it’s almost like a hurricane or tornado inside you. That’s how the big emotional storms always felt to me.

In your daily life, as it relates to emotions, there’s a constant movement of energy in Inner Space. It’s never at rest when you’re conscious, even when it seems to be.

It’s constantly moving, just like the sea, lakes, oceans, and other bodies of water are always moving, even if they appear to be still on the surface.

The inner movement of emotional energy has an infinite variety of expressions.

Music is a really great metaphor for this. Music has an infinite variety of expressions. It’s all just “music,” but we call certain expressions jazz, rock, classical, pop, new age, etc.

We learn to freeze and then break the constant flow of emotional energy into pieces. We label those pieces with words like anger, depression, happiness, and peace.

We judge the pieces and labels by calling them positive, negative, pleasurable, painful, like, don’t like, hate, love.

We accept those labels and judgments as true. And then, the freezing, breaking into pieces, labeling and judging goes on autopilot.

Boom, boom, boom, lightning-fast so we don’t even realize it’s happening in daily life.

Would it surprise you to hear that most of this gets “programmed” and locked into place when we’re kids, and then runs on autopilot for years, decades, lifetimes?

And we forget that we’re the ones who “did it” — that we’re the ones who convinced ourselves we were “unhappy” most of the time!

That ends Part 1 of the How To Be Happy series.

In the next post, I’ll continue the discussion by revealing the big key that opens the door to finally being able to answer the question, “How can I be happy all the time”?

I’m going to be releasing a lot of blog posts in a series like this. To make sure you see all of them right when they come out, be sure to subscribe by email or RSS by looking to the top right of this page.

And, as always, please share, Facebook Like, Tweet, or Google +1 this post to let everyone you care about know about it.

For more on this topic, Get The Guide …