What is Happiness?
Today, I will talk about Happiness, and more specifically, about your daily happiness. To experience happiness every day more intensely, I offer you 4 Commandments that will help you lead a happy and successful life.
What do I mean when I say “daily” Happiness?
I mean that we – human beings – tend not to be content with our current lives. We crown the past with moments of joy that are not always justified (we forget – because it pleases us – that we went through bad times) and we imagine a future that is “necessarily” happy and even – why not see the big picture? – crowned with success.
But while we lament the past and dream of a hypothetical future, time, our time, passes by and is wasted. When we wake up (because life sees to it that we are awoken, doesn’t it?) we are even more unhappy!
I am not saying you should not honor your past or make future plans, I am saying that Happiness, true and durable Happiness, begins here and now!
It is this kind of Happiness that I am offering you to learn to “cultivate” today.
But, you may say, how to cultivate Happiness? Is it as simple as that? Yes, it is. I can certify it and I will soon prove it to you.
Commandments to cultivate Happiness
These four fundamental elements I would call my “4 Commandments” are the Four Pillars of a successful life to me:
1st Commandment: Cultivate the small pleasures of life
The pleasure derived from eating when you are hungry, from drinking when you are thirsty, from sleeping when you are tired.
The pleasure derived from seeing a friend, embracing a parent, seeing the sun break through the clouds or feeling the rain cool a hot summer day…
2nd Commandment: Learn or learn again how to love yourself
Stop blaming yourself, feeling guilty, depreciating yourself; learn that you are – for yourself – the most wonderful being that exists and that will ever exist.
You also have to understand that you are your own worst enemy when you stand in front of the mirror of Happiness.
3rd Commandment: Experiencing every joyful moment as intensely as possible
Seize the moment when you feel joy. Imagine that it lasts an eternity and let it in because everything has an end. But tell yourself that sorrow, just like joy, will sooner or later come to an end. It will get bored of accompanying you and will leave for another destiny.
4th Commandment: Nothing happens by chance
You have to understand that nothing that comes your way (whether joy or sorrow) does so because you have attracted it to you to gain some experience of life before the eternal. Remember that everything is fleeting, impermanent and temporary only for you to get closer to the eternity of the divine.
Establishing these Four Commandments as principles of life means making them the Four Pillars of a Temple inside which you can now put the following “rituals of life” into practice. They are simple but effective, and they will lead you to “experience Happiness on a daily basis”.
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