The Secret To Happiness Is Learning To Love Yourself (Here’s How To Start)
Are you truly happy?
unsplash Happiness seems like it should be simple, but learning how to be happy can actually be a really difficult thing. This is because, in the pursuit of happiness, life tends to present both great struggles and great difficulty.
This means that authentic happiness tends to be fleeting because it's hard to love yourself and when troubling times strike to be able to answer the question, "What is happiness?"
Life tends to present you with great love and successes as well as great losses and grief, so figuring out how to be happy in life doesn't always come easily.
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If you're fortunate enough to have good circumstances, you might find happiness in your life for a time, but if your happiness is generated from outer circumstances, that can and will eventually change, it will not last. So, you will struggle to understand how to be happy with yourself in an authentic way.
When your happiness is governed by your mood, it also tends to be fleeting. Everyone has good moods and bad moods. Real happiness is not just a mood, but a deep joy within you.
Real happiness doesn't come from outer circumstance or temporary moods, but from an inner relationship to yourself. It is a deep joy within you, a steadiness, a peace, a love, a connectedness that you have to life where your spirit and your heart are awakened.
When you connect to this joy, you feel as if you are really alive and awake in your life, in this moment.
This deeper happiness is based upon a series of attitudes toward yourself, your relationships to those around you, and toward your experiences in the world.
When you feel loved and lovable and your heart is open, many things open up in life, but when you are feeling alone, isolated, not lovable and disconnected, unhappiness follows.
So like most things in life, a real sense of happiness ultimately has to be based in your relationship to yourself.
You have wonderful potential in your life to find real happiness and real love. You have the potential to find this ocean of happiness, where you are at peace with yourself and with the whole universe.
This ocean of happiness lies within you and in the very substance of all that is. It lies in your own soul, your own self.
Finding your inner connection to your own being, a self-love based in your connection to your inner source, enables you to have a ground, a stable base for your life that is positive and supportive.
When you connect with a sense of unconditional loving consciousness that surrounds you and is within you, you become connected to life. You are no longer "alone" in the world.
This feeling of empowerment, love, and your own being brings the ability to change your attitudes toward yourself, to believe in your own self-worth and to really love and nurture yourself.
When you adopt attitudes of self-love and feel your own worth, it changes your relationships to others and you become able to be more caring, more connected to those around you. Life opens up.
As you continue to affirm positive attitudes toward yourself and others, your experience of the world around you changes. That which you may have found dreary and sad becomes beautiful, because you know you are beautiful, lovable and solid in your own self.
The trick to finding this lasting and deep happiness is to learn to bring your conscious awareness out of its normal conditioned patterns of thinking and to focus it on this inner well of joy, this inner peace, inner love. Meditation is the key to doing this.
When you have a good meditation practice you have the opportunity to work on your inner connection in silence and stillness. As a result of going within in stillness, you have the space to relax into the universal loving consciousness that is in the core of your own being and gain the knowledge that you are never alone or helpless.
You can directly experience the force that guides the stars in the heavens and how it guides you, also. This is the journey home to your true shelter.
Once you have connection to this solid base within you, you can change your attitudes and beliefs and build the life you really want to have. When you're awakened to awareness of this unbound loving nature, then the bindings that caused your suffering and awakened fear in you and bring you into sorrow and joy will fall away.
When you are awakened to your own nature, then there is an immense peace — a love that is unconditional. This peace, this love, this is true happiness.
This real happiness lies in your own essential nature, in the truth of yourself, in the infinite divine essence of being. When you abide in this essence, you abide in truth.
When you abide in this essence you abide in joy. Joy which is not laughter, but joy that is deep in your soul, in your heart, unbound by circumstance and situation, not dependent upon mood, unbound even by the body.
This happiness is the joy of being, the joy of love without end, the joy of deep abiding peace. This is real happiness and a gift awaiting you in your own soul, in your own essence. This is a natural joy that lies within you.
Awakening to this subterranean stream of infinite happiness is the true goal of life. The ability to be your true self, to fulfil your destiny, and to rest in the arms of love divine brings you a happiness which no one and no circumstance, no matter how difficult, can take from you.
Maetreyii Ma Nolan, Ph.D. is a teacher and writer on yogic philosophy, meditation, yoga practices, spiritual awakening and living a balanced, happy and spiritual life. For more information and tips for how to be happy, please visit her website.