Ray from freshblogger has a post about Maile of Breath by Breath and her naikan challenge. Maile asks her readers to take 30 minutes each day for the next 7 days and answer these questions (10 minutes per question):
-What have I done for others? (10 mins)
-What troubles have I caused? (10 mins)
And today when I stumbled upon it again, I see there is quite a healthy exchange of ideas going on between Mark of 45n5 and Maile over at freshblogger.
My personal opinion of this is that we are the happiest when we just let the nature, the universe take its course, when we let the events unfold without expecting ‘something’ – anything – good or bad – from everything that happens.
By changing the way we think, by changing our outlook on life, we can control and even improve our attitudes and our actions and hence the outcome. If the result of our well thought out actions is not the one we were expecting, then we need to work on changing our perceptions.. I believe when we engage ourselves consciously in making a decision to choose, it empowers us with that unseen but definitely felt strength. And when we are empowered, we are automatically happy.
When daily pressures are surmounting, I often find myself a quiet place and try to stop my brain from having those racing thoughts and try to let go of ‘control’ of all outcomes; take a deep breath in and just let go of all feelings and emotions. I think about the statement ‘Everything that has happened had to happen, everything that must happen cannot be stopped’ and it instantly puts me in a state of relaxation. With the relaxed mind, I try to think of how thankful I am for everyone and everything that comes my way and I feel uplifted instantly.
My practice of coming out of one state of mind into another state – of relaxation – leads me into being happy and content. So being happy or content is choice available to all us and we can either choose to be happy or choose to be unhappy. Everyone has to find his or her own way of getting to that state. It is an emotion that we can create with our thoughts. We act upon our thoughts and these thoughts then become our experiences. And, whatever we focus our thoughts on, expands, doesn’t it? Think positive and you will have positive experiences.
Sometime ago, Time magazine had published an entire report on happiness along with scientific evidences, called Mind & Body: Happiness, along with a quiz called, well, The Happiness Quiz with which you could measure your happiness…
Here is that quiz:
Measure your happiness
and the results of a poll that was taken, of course most of the people who responded to the poll are from the US, but this is a fairly large population so this is I guess can be applicable to most of the people..
And “most of the people find happiness in family connections and friendships”..
All research aside, positive thinking and lightening up will definitely make us feel happy.
Maile
Thank you for this beautiful post. I agree with so much of what you said, particularly about relaxing and letting go of expectations.
It’s something I’m working very hard to do in my life (as my old, negative habits of mind are very deeply ingrained), but it definitely works for me.
My favorite sentence was this: “And when we are empowered, we are automatically happy.” I completely agree.