Aristotle said that “Happiness depends upon ourselves”.

How accurate is that quote today? Pretty much on the money isn’t it, even all these centuries later?

Accepting that pre-supposes that we can determine our own levels of happiness, no matter what else is going on about us. After all, it’s easy to be happy where things are going well, isn’t it?

Then it stands to reason that we should also be able to learn this technique of “thinking ourselves” happy and there are numerous books on this topic to support this theory, many of them very good.

The The Art of Happiness by the Dali Lama an all-time classic and a tremendous read to help us identify what is truly important from that which is not. Happy for No Reason by Marci Shimoff, another good read on how we are able to control our own levels of happiness from within.

Dr Maxwell Maltz’s classic, Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life teaches that through our “creative mechanism” we can develop the correct responses to situations that result in positive habits.

In other words, without having to “think or decide”, we will respond automatically in a preconditioned way. In his chapter entitled ‘Acquiring The Habit of Happiness’, Dr. Maltz noted that “fully 95% of our behavior, feeling, and response is habitual”.

He goes on to say that we need to understand that these habits can be “modified, changed or reversed simply by taking the trouble to make a conscious decision and then, practicing or ‘acting out’ the new response or behavior.”

Acupuncture4TheMind helps you to realign your reactions to unpleasant events and eases the way to accruing  ‘good habits’ without boring or repetitive hard work.

This has to be good news for us all. Well those of us that actually want to be happy that is!

If you truly desire happiness and are willing to consciously change your automatic responses in order to form a new habit, then you can actually “think yourself happy”!

Did you know that you can take a PhD in the study of Happiness? Dr. Martin Seligman at U Penn has been doing much research into the state and being of happiness for years in Penn’s Positive Psychology Center.

Dennis Prager has some very interesting observations on the subject of happiness in his podcast/radio show. His rather graphic analogy is that we would never consider inflicting our body odors or bad breath on people; so why should we inflict our bad moods?

His belief is that happy people make the world a better place, and do more good for humanity than unhappy people. While this may at first seem a corny or patently obvious statement, it has far deeper implications.

How many of us have experienced the mental drain of having a perfectly healthy good mood dragged down and polluted by somebody else’s negativity? It happens.

Happiness is both a decision and a skill-set. And as such we have the power and ability to affect our happiness. We can engrain automatic responses or habits that maintain a positive mind set when all around us may be not so rosy. We are able to learn to recognize when we are tempted to slip down into negativity and resist.

The choice is ours. To take the glass half-full or half empty analogy further, we can focus on that which we do not have or we can enjoy that which we do have. This counts for material possessions just as it applies to the spiritual.

Often we are initially excited and overwhelmed by new things that we acquire. We feel the uplift they give us and feel good.

“He who has one hundred wants two hundred.”
(Buddha)

But how often does that initial interest dwindle into indifference? Then the desire for some new toy or fad dominates our attention again, until we assuage that desire and acquire yet another item, soon to be doomed to the same fate?

Buddha spent a lot of time talking about the dangers of false happiness when chasing material goods. The Buddhist teachings help us to appreciate the things that we are apt to take for granted.

“Focusing on what you are missing makes you overlook what you have.”
(Buddha)

“Train your brain to become more mindfully aware of all that you can appreciate and enjoy.
Be mindful of your ability to see. Be mindful of your ability to hear.
Be mindful of your ability to talk. Be mindful of your ability to walk.
Be mindful about your ability to move your hands, and to lift, pull, turn, press, and hold things with them. This alone will transform your life.”

“The person who is mindful about these things will have a brain that is so full of appreciation and enjoyment that it will be free from many of the thoughts and pictures that create bad feelings.”

However undeniably wise and true these teachings are it is not easy for us to be so mindful. Our attention is sought by many different distractions every minute of every day and it takes a super-human effort to achieve this level of gratitude for and awareness of the simple things in life.

Acupuncture4TheMind helps you find the way to this level of contentment with the least amount of effort on your part. It is the extra help and assistance that makes this quality of life realistically achievable.