The Way To Happiness

Archive for September, 2009

One of the things that interests me most about conflict is the tendency to resist it and the ways in which this resistance causes me to miss key moments, when I might respond with purpose and intention but do not. Resistance is a reactive habit. When I resist, I’m on automatic, and I fail to spot the opportunity to respond with the conscious engagement of being fully present.

Aikido ? the martial art I practice and teach ? suggests that resistance escalates conflict. When I push, the conflict pushes back. Aikido replaces resistance with alignment and redirection. I change my view from “this person is attacking me” to “this person is offering energy that I can use.”

Aikido (pronounced eye-key-doe) is Japanese for “the way of blending with energy.” Ki means universal energy or life force. Ki Moments are those in which we are fully aware of our life force and our ability to influence our environment.

In aikido, the attack is inevitable, a part of life. We can influence the outcome of the attack by the way in which we engage and direct it. Will I resist and create a contest, ensuring a win-lose outcome? Or will I practice aikido and transform the attack into a gift of energy? How do I make these choices when I am feeling attacked?

To begin:

• Have a positive and useful purpose. Without a purpose to guide us in the conflict, we end up falling back on habitual patterns of reaction. Refocusing on purpose answers the question “What am I really going for here?” and directs the conflict toward a useful outcome.
• Practice skills and techniques that move us toward our purpose. We have reactive habits that ? in the heat of the moment ? take us away from the goal. Changing our conflict “habits” requires skill building, practice and persistent application.

  My work focuses on bringing aikido principles to life in “off the mat” scenarios ? the life “attacks” that we experience in the workplace, in our relationships, and in difficult life events that can occur at any time. How can we turn daily conflicts into life teachers? Just by asking the question, we begin to transform conflict moments into ki moments and attacks into energy we can use to build the kinds of home, work, and community environments we want to live in.

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The following three inspirations were adapted from A Daily Dose of Happiness, and they represent three key ways to increase our happiness.

1. FORGIVING FOR HAPPINESS

We like to think we are better than our friends below us in the food chain, such as the octopus and the snail. After all, we have love. We feel happiness. We have empathy. We have a conscience. We can reason.

We can also hold onto grudges.

Grudges are, in fact, prickly little creatures that worm their way into our hearts. Holding onto them is a self-defeating exercise.

Fortunately, forgiveness is also uniquely human. Forgiveness cleanses the spirit. Forgiveness let’s us get on with enjoying our lives instead of being preoccupied with someone else’s. Forgiveness opens the door to happiness.

2. SUPPORTING FOR HAPPINESS

When things seem to be very bleak, it does not take much to lift someone’s spirits. Sometimes all it takes is to let somebody know they are not alone.

That is why it is so important to smile at people, especially if they look down. And if you know what is weighing the person down, let them know they are not alone. Don’t go burdening them with all your miseries, but let them know you have been there.

Guess what? You will feel happiness for having helped them, too.

3. ACCEPTING FOR HAPPINESS

There is no such thing as happiness if you are not at peace with yourself. Too many people just don’t know how to make peace with themselves.

Peace begins with acceptance. Whether we agree with everything we do (like the environmentalist who sometimes throws out a recyclable container), it is important to accept what we do.

Do we always make the best choices? No. But they are the choices we make.

Do we always treat people with the most respect? No. But it is how we treat people.

Can we improve? Yes, and we should. But that is a project for the future. First we must accept who we are now, rather than condemning ourselves. Then we can move to improve the person we will be tomorrow. Both acceptance today and improvements tomorrow will increase our happiness.
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mind, willpower, yoga, assist, self-development, self-discipline, process, practices, willpower self-discipline, assists, entity, meditation, growth

Article Body:
When we become weak, it propitiates organisms that pander redundant habits that we possess, which reduces the growth and enhancement procedures. In order to reconcile with good habits we must develop willpower and self-discipline, since the two tools work in harmony to assist us with healing the hidden self.

Self-discipline and willpower can assist us with determining the process of development and enrichment of self. Developing self-discipline with willpower endows one’s strength and our willpower to work through difficulties easier. Willpower and self-discipline will bestow one to persevere in an effort to shun direct contentment and happiness. By shunning, we can acquire superior strength of mind and find real happiness and contentment from our efforts.

By inculcating willpower and self-discipline, we can learn to reject the vices that hinder self-development progression. In unison, by inculcating these virtues it will guarantee the development of the self.

Developing enhanced consciousness of mind can help one discover and come to realization of the hidden self. Inculcating willpower and self-discipline, one will find it easier to undergo changes. Once you accept change, it assists you with developing refreshed habits, which oppose lethargic attitudes. These are the attitudes we must sacrifice, abandon to discover the hidden self.

In view of these facts, we must move to meditate daily. Meditation is a process that assists us with reforming and transforming the mind. Yoga practices can prove beneficial and assist you with meditating. Naturopathy therapy and long walks can also benefit you and assist you with self-development. You will also need a balanced diet suitable for your body’s needs.

Meditation is your guide to relaxing the mind and the soul, or body. Meditating often will help you with regaining your serenity and tranquility of the soul and mind. Meditation plays a chief role in developing one’s independence. Independent minds often manage negative or distressing thoughts easier.

Mediation also assists one with restoring peace of mind. Of course, a peaceful mind often finds happiness. Meditation can help one with soothing the mind and the body. In fact, meditative practices have proven to be one of the top therapeutic aids that effectively give you results.

Meditation can assist with restoring the emotional balance and propitiates the body so that it works in harmonization with the mind, to make sure it is properly working in harmony with development and growth of the self.

Yoga as mentioned can assist you with meditation. Yoga can help curb downbeat energies and pessimistic attitudes. Yoga practices have proven to promote growth and self-development by assisting with mental transformation. Yoga can relieve organisms that emerge some disorders, including digestive disorders; insomnia, sleeps difficulties, obesity, and can act as a pain management. Yoga also assists with healing conditions of the heart, as well as other complications one may deal with.

Incorporating practical yoga practices into your self-development scheme can lead you to talk self through vague logics that inhabit your competence by promoting rationale.

Impediments could be effortlessly overcome through self-talk. Self-talk will help one convert his or her thoughts to sensible for self-realization. One can achieve this level of mental strengths through the process of filtration. During this process, negative thoughts are filtered. In the course of personalization, it prevents an entity from pushing culpability on himself for all the cynical deeds.

In order to work through self-development effectively, one must develop an optimistic attitude. The entity must cultivate freewill. Free will is exclusively dependent on the will of an entity. Freewill can treads an entity to an untrue path that may lead him to endure severe consequences. On the other hand, his will can encourage him to accept the confirmatory attitude that may direct on to his growth and intensification in life.

Happiness does not come from without ourselves–other people and other things can never make us happy. This is a very simple fact that will either plague us in our denial of it or it will drive us to exploit it. And never the twain shall meet!

More here:
True and Living Happiness Comes Not From Without But From Within

It is so simple and so easy to get what we want that we have a hard time to believe it. We are programmed to do things the hard and difficult way, in order to get what we want. We can not believe that we can get anything without hard labour, sweat and tears, obstacles
and misery.

This is nothing else but a tough old programmation, a conditioning from our childhood. If you are like me, you were bombarded as a child with expressions from adults about how hard life is and how we have to struggle to get something. We were submitted to a hazardous universe or a God of revenge who could pick us out without any reason to take revenge on us for something we did wrong. We needed to avoid being bad or wrong, but disease could strike us anyway. Sometimes they even said : “It’s again a good one who’s punished, and the bad one take off easily like usual without paying anything!”. We learned that life wasn’t fair. We lived in fear and thought life was a valley of tears, fear, struggle, pain, disease
and death?

How would it have been if they’ve told us the truth? The truth, nothing but the truth? That life is easy, wonderful. That miracles happen all the time and that we have the power to make them happen in our own life! That the universe loves us. That there is wealth and health for everyone. That we don’t live in a universe of scarcity but of abundance. That we only have to put the right thoughts in our heads to make these dreams real for us.

What would your life have looked like if your parents and teachers would have taught you the truth?

You would have suffered much less! You would not have believed you were less than nothing. You would not have been filled with fear over your ears of getting sick or failing, of being stupid or being not good enough.

If you would have known from the beginning that you were a creation of the Creator, that you will always remain, that you will always be around, that you were created for a reason, and when you find this reason you will be happy, what would your life look like now? If you were told that you had talents, unique qualities, that make you a special person, and that you are on earth with the mission to offer these talents to others, where would you be right now and what would you be doing now?

Isn’t it nice? The Genius who created this whole thing did really well : we are sent to earth with a mission and to be able to assume our mission we are already fully equiped from the beginning : we are gifted with natural talents and all we have to do is develop our talents and offer them to the world! Simply said, we have to do what we can do easily already and what we are talented for, and than happiness, satisfaction, love, money and everything we want comes flowing our way!

It is so beautiful, this concept! All we have to do is to do what we love! And of course we need to stop once for all to think we don’t deserve happiness or wealth or health. All these thoughts are wrong because they go against the principles of creation of the Universe.

We are already wonderful! We are already loved! We are already rich! We are already free! We are already intelligent! We are already healthy!
Why? Because we were all this before we started our life. It is the way we really are. It is the way we were created, we were born. This is the truth about ourselves. Everything else is “learned” afterwards.

The good news is whatever is learned can be un-learned. Every programmation can be changed and replaced by a new program.

And again, life is wonderful, because a positive thought is 10,000 times more powerful than a negative thought. So you don’t have to take another 40 years to undo the negative conditioning in your head. One positive thought can counterbalance 10,000 negative ones.

Can you imagine? Aren’t we lucky?

If you choose to do so, you can rapidly turn around your negative program in your head. Go to the bookstore, buy some books with positive thoughts, put them at every toilet in the house, in the bathroom, in your bedroom, in your living room, and read them whenever you think of it or see them. It doesn’t matter if you read one page after another or if you just open the book as it falls in your hands. The message you will receive will be the right one for you at that very moment.

Every morning you start your day by saying thank you to the Universe for your bed, your house, the roof over your head, the people living with your, the water coming out of your tap, the light switching on by a simple gesture of your hand, the food available, the choices you can make that day, the love you received in your life and the love you will receive, the miracles which will happen today and the air you can breath.

In your car, listen to CD’s or cassettes with positive programmation. Listen to them while you make dinner, clean the house or iron your clothes.

Surround yourself with positive people and stop nourishing negative social talk. Don’t watch television unless there is some really positive program.

There is a lot you can do to take a positive turn in your life. Don’t think you can do nothing. You are responsible for your life now. Make your choice! Know that every thought you think is either one which will weaken you, or one which will make you feel stronger.
The choice is yours!