One of the major keys to being happy is understanding what makes you happy in the first place. All humans are different and there are different things that make us content and bring us peace. Sometimes we’ve been living in a way that has prevented us from being happy and stepping into our greatest self.
While we might know what we need to do in order to feel good, it’s possible that we have just buckled at the knees at its beckon. Or we’ve gotten caught up living and doing things that we may want—but not what we ultimately need in order to be happy.
If we aren’t happy, it’s completely our fault. We’re choosing to think in a way that isn’t allowing us to be happy. Or we continue to allow ourselves to live in such a way that makes us miserable. Often, this way we’ve been living is something that has been born into us. It’s how we learned to think from a young age and how we associated ourselves with our environment and peer group. For many people, this became a negative association or an association that held us back from things we desired.
This is where self-awareness comes into play, and understanding how you think and how you’re going about your life is holding you back from the joy you desire. We stick to these familiar ways of thinking and living because they’re comfortable and it’s what we’ve come to know. But at any moment, we can make a choice to change our lives in a way that will allow us to be happy and find the things we desire. Change is scary and it forces us to be uncomfortable and question everything that has brought us to the place we are.
I have a friend who has been going through a tough time recently. He’s come to the state of mind where he genuinely believes that he’ll never be happy. So I asked him, “Have you ever been happy before?” Unsurprisingly, he answered with a resounding, “Yes!”.
So I asked him to write in a journal for 5-10 minutes every morning when he first wakes up, about times in life when he was happy. I wanted him to write in detail about the moments, experiences, and time periods in his life where he was truly happy. Then, at the end of every week, I wanted him to go through the pages of his journal and write down key words that summarized those happy times.
These words could be things like “love”, “inspiration”, “energy”, “health”, “creativity”, etc. They’re the common themes and patterns that help lead to his happiness. So I wanted him to write down as many of these words as he could come up with on a separate page and put a bubble around them. I then asked him to compile sub-points below the positive words, which would act as the habits and activities that help manifest more of that positive word into his daily life. Now he had the goals (the words in bubbles) and the building blocks (sub-points) to help him get to more of those positive words that improve his happiness.
After he had written his list, I told him to begin meditating and visualizing on those words every single morning when he wakes up as if they’re already in his life in abundance. I told him to imagine scenarios in his mind that would help conjure up those positive feelings that made him feel really good and purposeful in his life.
While just a small step, the idea was for him to realize that happiness was a possibility for him. He’d gone so dark that he had simply forgotten that he’d ever even been happy before. What can happen is we become our own worst enemy and we build a default, innate negative mind construct that forces us to live in suffering. So, it just requires us reminding ourselves and becoming better aware of what things make us feel good.
Once we know what we need to feel good, and we seed and manifest those patterns into our lives daily, we begin to build better patterns to live the type of life that is going to make us happy and help us live with purpose.
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This post was originally published on jamienrae.com, and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Shutterstock
