Happiness

Happy to say I have a new mindset and I find myself these days living in a state of an almost permanent beatitude and enjoyment. As if I was permanently high without the next day headaches and lows.

I confess it didn’t happen overnight - it took roughly about a couple of years of intense training of the mind – but I am amazed at how one day it simply just took off and I am now blissfully enjoying the benefits of having a ‘spotless’ mind without having do anything about it but rejoice.

I have been living all my life in a self built cage and raged around about the limits of my humanity, about how much I wanted to achieve in my lifetime and how little I was given to fight with, about how other people have more than me, about how I can’t find love and how I am the ugliest and fattest girl on the face of the Earth etc etc. You name it and I would have complained about it. Loving to hate is an incredibly attractive feeling which I grew terribly accustomed to…Because complaining was easy, it justified my being miserable.

And aren’t we miserable perhaps because that’s what we have been trained to do all our lives? How we’ve been taught to dream about achieving things and suffering when we fail to do it within a certain timeframe, about how we SHOULD look, feel, talk, think, exist, but we always somehow fall short?...

Not sure about you, but I grew up with a sense that tragedy was waiting for me just around the corner and when I least expected it would come and suck me into a deep black hole and if only I kept looking out for it, being constantly alert and aware that it might happen any minute, I could at least congratulate myself that I saw it coming when it did indeed occur (not occurring wasn’t a valid possibility in my mind).

Until one day when you wake up feeling you’ve had too much to eat the same dish and decide to make a change. When that happened to me, I started reading a lot of self-help books and although, at first, they all sounded like unrealistic babble, one day I stopped thinking ‘this is not what real life is about’ and started feeling. I still think a lot of them are written in a metaphoric/childlike way that don’t always resonate with my logic, but having forced myself through various I did find that I could extract the main ideas and apply them to my own life. You’ll never find the exact same situations to exercise your new found inner skills, but extrapolation is a powerful tool. The moment you start feeling the effects of the positive mentality on your own life, you bring it to the next level and good things just start happening.

When I say that I don’t mean I suddenly became filthy rich, found a gorgeous man to whisk me away to a tropical paradise and marry me, of course, wrote a book, won a Booker prize and successfully launched my own styling business. Although now I am convinced all of the above WILL happen one day because I decided they will, I don’t live my life waiting for the day when I will finally start living. I am happy right now because I am living right now and enjoying the ‘right now’. Whether it’s sunny day or a cold and rainy day, I stopped judging, I just acknowledge what is and enjoy what I can from the ‘what is’.  It works miracles…

I learned a very important lesson: happiness, as much as unhappiness, is a matter of habit. And I am grateful I forced myself into the habit of being happy.

But as I was writing this, I received the ‘bad’ news that my Indian visa application was returned and that I had to re-apply within only two weeks to my departure (whoever tried getting an Indian visa, and especially as a non-UK citizen, knows what a pain in the backside this process is!). Naturally I got very annoyed and almost been put off going at all, however I decided that the fact that my application was retuned is still just a fact and that it is up to me if I decide that I ought to get upset and make a big deal out of it or just acknowledge it for what it is and just go down there again and re-apply. I decided for the latter and within minutes my whole body relaxed and I felt incredibly calm. It's common knowledge that there are things in life outside of our control and influence but knowing that indeed I have the power over what I feel about it, does indeed make me carry on this happy feeling day, after day, after day....


And as Abraham Lincoln said: 'Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.'