TRUE BLISS IS WITHIN YOU

TRUE BLISS IS WITHIN YOU

Placing your happiness in the hands of others will lead to a lot of pain and disappointment, says Donna Thomson

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet,” said James Oppenheim. True happiness cannot be sought outside of yourself — not in your relationships with others, the groups you belong to, or in the things around you. Unless you can stand alone in your own shadow and feel happiness from within, true happiness may always elude you for external things come and go like the tide. The only constant in your life is you. Love you, admire you, value you and be happy to be you.

Why do we seek happiness from outside of ourselves? From His Holiness The Dalai Lama: “Consider the following. We humans are social beings. We come into the world as the result of others’ actions. We survive here in dependence on others. Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others' activities. For this reason it is hardly surprising that most of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others.”

So we learn from a young age to rely on others rather than on ourselves. If we rely on others for our food, shelter and other needs, why not happiness? Well happiness of course does come from many things and our social relationships and other external factors can bring us much joy, but many of us have not connected with ourselves as we have connected with others. The negative side is that placing all of your happiness in the hands of others will lead to a lot of pain and disappointment throughout your life.

No matter how much you love a partner, a child, or a friend, you cannot make your happiness conditional upon them. Why? Because you will have certain expectations of others and when those expectations aren’t met, you may feel hurt, betrayed, misunderstood, taken for granted, invalidated, confused and so on. Everyone is individual. We have each grown to develop our own sets of values, beliefs, attitudes and ways of looking at the world. Our views may not be exactly the same as our loved ones. However, we often expect those loved ones to know what we want from them.

When someone else’s actions don't live up to your expectations you are let down. Often the other person won’t even realise they’ve done something to cause you pain because they don’t know your expectations unless you have explicitly shared them. Often we don’t even realise our own expectations until we feel someone has hurt or disappointed us.
For example, you may unconsciously expect your partner to show their love in a particular way such as saying “I love you” regularly and when this doesn’t happen you start to wonder if they truly care for you. You may feel unacknowledged and unloved. However your partner may feel that they are showing their love through their actions. You have one belief while your partner has another. Is there a lack of love? No. While you let your feelings build into a stressful negative state within you, your partner would probably be very surprised to know you feel that way.

It’s unrealistic to expect another person to know what's in your head — your values, beliefs and expectations. Thinking “Well they should know!” is not good enough, yet most of us would have thought this of someone else at some stage. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes. They see you become sad, angry, unresponsive to them, or upset and don’t know what they’ve done, or if it’s even them who has made you unhappy. This leads to negative feelings from both sides and possibly arguments that could be avoided through open communication.

Rather than looking to others for your needs, begin by looking within yourself. When you feel a sense of disappointment in someone, use it as an opportunity to analyse your own expectations. The only person who should truly be able to disappoint you is yourself — when you are not being true to yourself in some way. You can take that disappointment and turn it into a positive — a pledge; an action that you can take to better yourself.

Analyse why you are disappointed or hurt. You may find your initial thoughts or statements begin with “Because he did” or “Because she didn’t”. Now look deeper to the true reason for your disappointment. Such statements will start with “Because i expected”, “Because i wanted” or “Because i thought he or she should”.

You truly only ever have control over yourself and realising this can save you a lot of pain. Of course you can be disappointed in others but you have no control over their actions and reactions. You can share the reasons for your disappointment but you cannot expect the other person or situation to change because the other person has free will.

When you realise that you are responsible for your thinking and expectations, you will start to see that you’ve placed much of your happiness in the hands of others. You can now take your power back by recognising that you have the choice to react to something either negatively or positively. By making your happiness conditional upon another person, you hand your power over to them. You feel a ‘victim’ whenever things don’t go as you want or expect. In doing this, you set yourself up for pain, but you can now turn this around and instead set yourself up for happiness.

The key is to not expect a particular outcome. What happens next is up to you. You can choose to wallow in negative feelings which may further damage a relationship, or you can try to place a positive spin on the situation. Perhaps you can find your happiness in the fact that you’ve done your part in dealing with the situation by getting your issue out into the open. Realise that it may not be an issue to the other person, but ideally you will work together to reach a compromise. You can also decide to be happy for the other person and the pain they show you because it helps you to grow. There are always choices and different ways of looking at the same thing.

It puts things into perspective when you resign yourself to the fact that people do make mistakes — they forget things, they don’t think properly, they don’t always consider how others may be affected by their actions, they can act selfishly at times, and so on. We are all humans and we are designed to make mistakes as they are our greatest opportunities to learn. As Horace Friess says, “All seasons are beautiful for the person who carries happiness within.”

Some nice quote from iLand blog

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.
Robert Frost

A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend. A successful woman is one who can find such a man.
Lana Turner

A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life to be thankful for a good one.
Mae West

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his.
Oscar Wilde

Women and Cats will do as they please. Men and dogs had better get used to it. Robert Heinlein , Time Enough for Love, Lazarus Long

By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong.
Charles Wadsworth

Adolescence is a period of rapid changes. Between the ages of 12 and 17, for example, a parent ages as much as 20 years.
Anonymous

Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.
Anonymous

Children seldom misquote you. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn't have said.
Anonymous

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.
Oscar Wilde

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.
Virginia Wolf

I never think of the future - it comes soon enough.
Albert Einstein

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana

We do not remember days; we remember moments.
Anonymous

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
Frank Lloyd Wright

virag sharma

Contentment in Life

from iLand

Benjamin Franklin said, "To the discontented man no chair is easy." What is contentment? Is contentment happiness? Contentment has been defined by words like satisfaction, happiness, pleasure, gratification, ease and peace. So I would express the thought that contentment is basically happiness but maybe not entirely all that happiness may contain.
Happiness is now being defined in two ways. The first way is happiness as it relates to having good humor. The second is happiness as it relates to inner satisfaction. It is here under the second definition that contentment is properly defined. Smiling and a sense of joyfulness are some of the things that happiness contains. You can be content without showing signs of a smile or feeling joyful. These aspects of happiness are not exhibited in contentment, yet contentment still remains a strong aspect of happiness.
Contentment is a strong sense of well being. It could be a state of being satisfied, or a source of satisfaction, such as the contentment of seeing children playing.
Contentment is happiness with one's situation in life. When we talk about satisfaction regarding contentment, we have to make sure we are receiving satisfaction from our own feeling of liking something; as opposed to the satisfaction we would feel from getting approval from someone else. This is an important distinction because in one case you know how you feel about yourself in relation to anything else. Doris Mortman said, "Until you make peace with who you are, you'll never be content with what you have."
Seeking approval from other people in order to feel satisfaction, creates many problems. We have all heard about people who try to become famous so they can be happy. They are trying to feel good about themselves through the approval of others. No matter how much approval or fame you receive, it will never be enough. The more you get, the more you think you need. So satisfaction is never found out there, or by the approval you receive from other people.
Lillian Eichler Watson said, "...true happiness stems from a quality within ourselves, from a way of thinking of life. Of all the millions of words written on happiness, this is the oldest and most enduring truth. If the principles of contentment are not within us, no material success, no pleasures or possessions, can make us happy."
Pleasure is certainly an aspect of both happiness and contentment. But many people think that pleasure is happiness and contentment. Although it is certainly a part of both states of being, it is not all of it. Pleasure can never be all of it because pleasure is a passing thing. Once it is gone the question becomes, how do I get it back or how do I get more of it. So pleasure in this sense very quickly becomes an addition, unlike happiness or contentment. The fact that you need and want more, and you are not content, proves that it is an addition.

Socrates said, "Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty." Contentment means that you feel you now have enough of something and you are enjoying what you have, rather than needing any thing more. Happiness is the very same thing, when you have enough, you have enough. As Benjamin Franklin once said, "Content makes poor men rich; discontentment makes rich men poor." Gratification is another word for contentment. It also means satisfaction, fulfillment, indulgence, enjoyment and delight. These are all words that mean and describe happiness and contentment.

Another word that describes contentment is the word: ease. This is one of the reasons that contentment and happiness is so important to practice. The benefit of being content is to enjoy all the things that you already have when you practice ease or contentment. Ease is a really great word because it means effortlessness, easiness, no difficulty, straightforwardness and simplicity. All these characteristics can be yours with "ease," when you practice contentment. "For I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content." - St. Paul: Philippians 4:11

Finally the word peace has been used to describe contentment. This is one of the most powerful words of all. It is true that peace is also happiness as well as contentment. Look at the opposite of the word contentment: discontentment. The word and the state of discontentment are actually the state of experiencing dissatisfaction, unhappiness, restlessness, displeasure and disgruntlement. Not a very pretty picture of what can happen when we are not using contentment and happiness as strategies for better living. As Doris Mortman said, "Until you make peace with who you are, you'll never be content with what you have."

We have words, like: self-content, self-satisfaction and self-gratification to describe what we can choose to do and to be. Maybe this is a good time to introduce you to self-happiness. Og Mandino has said, "Realize that true happiness lies within you. Waste no time and effort searching for peace and contentment and joy in the world outside. Remember that there is no happiness in having or in getting, but only in giving. Reach out. Share. Smile. Hug. Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself."

Happiness is like a do-it-yourself project. Like self-contentment, you can do it for yourself and help yourself to as much as you'd like. If you get too much, you can always give away a little happiness and share it with others. Greg Anderson said, "...the supply of misery, pain, and suffering is unlimited. But so is the supply of pleasure, contentment, and fulfillment. It is we who do the rationing. Ration no more! Capture wellness this instant! This instant is all there is. Live it!"

I read this article in an online magazine called Happiness, and found it informative.

Positive Thoughts for Self Empowerment

When you say you don't like abc ..... you set filter in mind and try to search same in all the instance.

Following is from iLand post

Positive Thoughts for Self Empowerment

I read the following article online and realized how true it is for most of us:

These days, normally everyone is aware of the power of positive thinking theoretically. However, when it comes to practically being positive in life, one finds it difficult to do so. Most of the times, even though we may be thinking of ourselves as a person of positive attitude, but we end up reinforcing negativity.
Let me give you an example of that. Once, I asked one of my friend, what kind of people she likes. She answered, “I don’t like hypocrites and liars”. I told her that I had asked her what kind of people she liked and not what kind of people she did not like. Obviously she became angry on this and banged the phone. This set me thinking, how often we attract negativity in life and think of it as positive attitude. We try hard to push the negativity away, but still it shows up again and again. But actually we are not being positive. We are just trying to fight negativity, which not only turns out to be futile, but also has difficult consequence. Someone who says that she doesn’t like hypocrites and liars, is bound to end up with the kind of people she doesn’t like and will face difficulties because of that. Why does this happen? Because universe always responds to whatever image is stored in our sub conscious. So when one has a strong image of hypocrites and liars, such people are eventually attracted and she end up being not liking them. Instead of this negative thinking, if she thought like “I like authentic and honest people”, then she is bound to attract such kind of people in her life. I have heard people using negative statements very often. For example “I don’t want to hurt people” But I have experienced that such people often end up hurting others, even if they don’t want to. Instead of that, they should use the affirmative approach like “I care for people” or “I love people” . Let us understand, we can’t fight with the absence. You can’t fight with the darkness, however powerful you may be. Why? Because darkness does not exist, it is simply the absence of light. You can not drive the darkness away, you can only switch on the light and darkness will run away on its own. Same way, one can’t fight with negativity. One can only cultivate positivity. Using affirmative language can turn your life around. From now on, I invite you to watch yourself, when you use negative language and realize that your thoughts are centered to negativity. Be aware of your negative thoughts and discover the positivity you are longing for. The moment, you start to think, feel and speak positive, you would experience ecstatic energy arising from your within, which will attract joy and success. Thinking and speaking the affirmative language can turn out to be miraculous.