Daily Practices for a Happy Life
Sometimes the pursuit of happiness leads us down the wrong path. Happiness is available to everyone with the right Daily Practices.
When I was young, I rarely heard anyone talk about happiness. It seemed we had obligations to fulfill and goals to reach. Once we had reached our goals, we were then entitled to happiness. The Millennials, to their credit decided working 50 years for the gold watch to enjoy their final years basking in retirement was too long a wait.
Kali Kavara in her stimulating Instagram posts has taken her followers on her journey to Ireland where she is visiting sacred sites and diving into the meaning of her own existence. Introspection is a more direct path to happiness than material accumulation.
In my book Markap under going revision, I talk about the 26 practices for happiness. They have to do with our daily thinking, planning, and perspective. How we perceive our purpose and contribution leads to daily thought and practices that stimulate happiness.
Happiness is a state that is the result of Nature’s providing certain hormones and neurotransmitters that reward us for good survival practices. When we learn how Nature’s guidance relates to our daily lives, we learn how to trigger happiness. There is no limit to how happy we can feel.
Where we become misguided is advertising’s manipulative suggestion that buying a product is happiness. Advertiser’s like Pepsi show people having a great time together and tie that happiness in with drinking Pepsi. They are hoping we think drinking Pepsi will make us feel like we have arrived. The same occurs with buying the Ultimate Driving Machine.
What is Nature’s intention for us? In fulfilling her intentions, she provides us with happiness brain chemicals. Improving who we are and learning how to survive at higher levels is her intention. This creates a better environment for our offspring and our self-improvement supports our species. We really not need to look further for the source of creating happiness.
Where we cleverly try to short cut the good work that could be invested in improving who we are and helping mankind is the diversion to shopping, gambling, accumulating, drugs, alcohol, power, and yes anger and violence.
What are a few good habits we could enjoy that deliver happiness? Health, fitness, learning, contributing, protecting, love, caring, empathy, problem solving, and teaching. Each of these practices stimulate happiness brain chemicals.
What is at the core of the most blissful state? Challenge. We have progressed from the cave man days by solving problems. We have taken the challenge of making life better and succeeded. We have developed who we are and made others better in the process. Challenge makes the brain grow and leads to the most blissful states.
Man learned early on that the individual is not as productive or likely to survive as a community banding together to provide services from which everyone benefits. We hunted in groups. We minded children in a community. We protected ourselves as a group. We made life better for the next generation with our progress.
Now, the activities we pursue with the same goals are in alignment with what Nature has intended for us. Those activities in which we try to separate ourselves by being above, more powerful, richer, more special lead to stress. If we isolate, we suffer. Those who do find power and riches are most likely the best contributors. Elon Musk gives us something we want and is good for civilization. Bezos has created something that makes life easier. They are rich and powerful by their contributions.
We can each live in a circle of contribution that begins from the inner, as Stephen Covey says, and manifests outward. Take care of yourself in a loving caring manner and you will want the same for others. See that those in your circles are having their needs fulfilled and you will benefit emotionally with your own satisfaction and from the support of feedback.
Happiness is an inner life more than a pursuit of external accumulations. What we do for the benefit of others is the most rewarding. The process of getting into “flow” in our pursuit of self-improvement and contribution is another topic worth pursuing. The world is our oyster and the oyster is within us.
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