“How can I be happy?”

 

Happy is an emotion.

An emotion is something you feel.

Feelings come from within your heart and soul,

not from something outside.

 

When we are born, we are naturally happy.

We can smile when we feel good.

And when we are uncomfortable, we cry.

As babies, we are too little to change the situation ourselves, so we depend on others to feed us when we are hungry, change our diapers when we are soiled, and care for us when we are unwell.

 

As we grow, we experience life and learn to care for ourselves.

Life gives us contrast and experience.

Some experiences we learn and love.

Some we learn don’t feel so good…

 

But not all experiences that don’t feel so good are bad.

It is up to us to decide and at different times in our life the feeling of an experience can change. It is the contrast that helps us to taste and discover what feels good or feels bad.

Contrast can expand our awareness of how we can feel different emotions through different experiences.

 

When we are grown, we can take care of ourselves and it is our responsibility to stay in situations that feel good or change when we feel bad.

Our experiences shape our beliefs and they are not always the same for every person.

 

Society.

Society is made up of our parents, teachers, friends, and community.

Society tries to teach us what they believe is good and bad.

As a whole, most societies are well-meaning and want everyone to be happy.

They have strong beliefs about what is good or bad, right or wrong, and what should make people happy.

They create rules and punishments in order to control people from doing bad things to others or ourselves.

 

This is where things get complicated, because on a personal level not everything that society believes is bad is bad to you. Your belief about something is then misaligned to what you are taught, and this creates confusion which makes you feel uncomfortable.

 

Being uncomfortable as a baby makes us cry, but society teaches us that crying as we grow up is bad and we must control our emotions and tough it out.

Not everyone learns that they have the option to do something to change a situation so that they are happy, they learn instead to hide their emotions and tolerate being uncomfortable.

They stay uncomfortable for so long sometimes that they forget how to be happy. Misery becomes their comfort zone.

They then depend on others to create their happiness instead of finding ways to create it for themselves.

 

For some, happiness becomes an illusion, a mystery, or an impossibility. They’ve learned a false belief that they are somehow unworthy of being happy as a natural state of being.

If they do find themselves in a state of happiness for an extended period of time, they may begin to expect that misery is just around the corner and they start looking for every reason to validate their anxiety instead of staying grateful for the continued state of their happiness.

 

Anxiety.

Anxiety is fear. Anxiety is worry. Anxiety is expecting the worst to happen. Anxiety is a false belief. Anxiety is negative thought.

Anxiety is the opposite of faith.

Anxiety is a sickness of the uncontrolled mind. It is powerful, just as powerful as faith.

 

Faith.

Faith is love. Faith is hope. Faith is certainty. Faith is pure, positive thought.

 

Thought creates things.

Anxiety creates sickness in the body. Anxiety creates hell.

Faith can heal the body. Faith creates miracles.

 

We can’t control all the experiences we will have in life, but we can control our reaction to them. We can decide what to focus on within an experience.

If what we focus on is something positive, we can feel good and happy.

If we choose something negative, we can feel bad and miserable.

The decision is ours. No one else controls our thoughts.

 

We have the power to choose to be happy or take action on something to change a situation so that we align to the outcome of the happiness that we seek.

 

So, the answer to “How can I be happy?” is “I choose it.”