Most people spend their whole lives looking for some measure of happiness. Why is it so elusive? What creates happiness? People will tell you that material things or other people won’t make you happy. Experts will advise you that in order to be happy you first have to make yourself happy. What they usually can’t explain is how to make your self happy. What I try to uncover in my work and in this audio is some of the mystery that surrounds an individual’s happiness.
Happiness is simply an emotional state. It is created by expressing emotions based in love. If you express love, gratitude, and joy, you feel happy. If you create and express the emotions of fear, anger, or sadness, then you will experience fear, anger and sadness. There are no hidden secrets to be revealed in order to live a joyful life. Express love and you are on your way.
You are the creator of your emotions, and then you feel the emotions you create. We aren’t used to looking at our emotions with this sense of responsibility so it might seem a bit foreign. It was a long time before I understood things this simply. What can make it difficult to grasp is that we are used to having an intermediate step to our emotions.
Some of the required criteria the mind sets up might look like: “I will be so happy to lose 10 lbs”, “It will be so nice to get away for the weekend”. Through years of patterning we set ourselves up to express love only when certain criteria are met. When this criteria isn’t met we deny ourselves the joy of expressing love and remain unhappy instead.
We often don’t notice the mental criteria we use to determine the expression of our emotions. Because we overlook these mental factors, it appears that the source of our happiness is external. More about this in my article on the Pursuit of Happiness.
When you gain mastery over your mental criteria you can choose when to express love without needing the world meet your mental construct. Your mind can create some pretty complex criteria before allowing you to express love. And that can be a big roadblock to living in a state of joy.
Why is happiness so elusive? How we feel emotionally is determined by what we express and that can change moment to moment. Our expression can change as fast as our mind changes a thought. We can have a reaction to image in our imagination. That emotional reaction is our expression that we then feel. When our imagination goes uncontrolled our expressions are uncontrolled. Without the ability to direct our mind and imagination, our ability to maintain happiness is elusive.
When you develop mastery over your thoughts, beliefs, and imagination you will have mastery over your expression. In this way, happiness is no longer something you pursue. Happiness is something that you exude and share.