ACHIEVING TRUE HAPPINESS

Happiness doesn’t come from

other people, from places or

things. It comes from within.

I’ve deliberately minimized the use of the word ‘happiness’ throughout the book so that I could leave it right until the end. I hope you can see that by raising your vibration and having feelings of joy, you’re actually experiencing happiness.

We’re led to believe that happiness is based on external influences: people, places or things. We have all these goals and desires in life, believing that once we achieve them, we’ll be happy forever: when we find someone to love, we’ll be happy; when we get our own house, we’ll be happy; when we lose 20 pounds, we’ll be happy. These may give you temporary happiness but this is fleeting – it doesn’t stay with you. So once you acquire these things, you carry on pursuing lasting happiness from other external things.

Money, for example, is frequently linked to happiness and even success. But you’ll learn from the richest people in the world that even with lots of money you can still experience sadness. If money was used to measure happiness and success, at what point would the scale begin and end? After all, numbers never end. You can easily want more and more, even once you identify your target. So you can’t use it as a tool for measurement.

I explained at the beginning of this book that we pursue things because we believe they’ll make us happy when we get them. The same applies to the money we want: we don’t want the money itself, but we do want the security and freedom it will give us, because we believe that this will make us happy.

But if you were the only person on the planet and you had unlimited access to money, how useful would this be? How about being able to afford any holiday or crazy adventure you wanted, but having extremely poor health?

What about being able to buy all that you ever wanted, but being neglected by the entire world? Or even being given an unlimited supply of money while working in the worst job ever, 20 hours a day?

Even your ideal partner has no control over your lasting happiness. They can only affect your relative happiness, which can vanish in seconds if external conditions change – if your partner acts in a way that you perceive as hurtful, for example.

The advertising industry is skilled at toying with your happiness because it preys on the knowledge that all of us want to be happy. ‘Buy this and you’ll be happy,’ it says. You buy it, and then six months down the line they release a new version. You then realize that the previous product failed to give you long-lasting happiness, so you buy the new one in the hope that it will instead. The cycle repeats.

What if you could feel happy all the time? Isn’t this the ultimate goal? It would mean that you’re happy with what you’ve got at any moment – for the rest of your life. We could then say that lasting happiness is what true success looks like.

This is what true happiness is. It’s lasting and it occurs when you remain at the highest frequency, despite everything that’s happening at the surface level of your life. I believe that this is the place we all want to be at; where people and events are unable to change our emotional state from our natural state of love and joy.

To sustain happiness, you must work towards self-mastery. It’s an inward journey that requires substantial spiritual growth. Choosing empowering thoughts over limiting ones should become your natural way of thinking.

You must make it a habit to look on the bright side of things and let go of the past; to stop living in the future and appreciate where you are and what you have right now; to withdraw from comparisons, and love everything in this world without condition.

Embrace what is.

Be happy.