Happiness
Happiness is a gift, not a commodity. We all have a choice to make every moment, through our senses, our thoughts and our actions. We can choose what we want to see, hear, touch, taste and smell, think, feel and do. Most of the time, we are responsible for our decisions—for our happiness and unhappiness. We can decide how we want to feel even in the worst possible situations. To a jealous mind, an innocent smile is proof of adultery; a prisoner can choose to keep the flame of freedom alive and maintain a cheerful disposition. Events or people around us are not under our control. But our reactions, our responses to them are. Respond with love and peace. The ecology and geography of your inner mind space is in your hands. Study how to deal with each of your five senses to be happy. Focus on happiness, not the lack of it. Focusing on our unhappiness only helps to provide more power and attention to the negative person, event or object that causes it. Focus on cultivating happy people and avoid toxic people. Build protective walls against toxic events that threaten your tranquility. Happiness is everyone’s responsibility.
At each stage of life, it is human nature to feel that the things would be better at the next stage. One would tend to think that he will be happy after getting a good job and a healthy pay packet. At some point the feeling of frustration creeps in and he would feel that he would be happy once he gets married and have children. This search for happiness continues as he passes through each stage. The truth is there is no better time to be happy than right now. Life is full of challenges. It is better to admit as much and decide to be happy in spite of it all. There is no road to happiness. Happiness is the road.
To quote the words of Greek Philosopher, Democritus, “Happiness resides not in possessions and not in gold.” Happiness of life is made of minute fractions like a simple smile, a helping hand, a heartfelt compliment and countless other infinitesimals of pleasurable thought and genial feeling. The sad part is in our pursuit of happiness we fail to recognize this magnificent feeling that is just there right at the end of our nose.
Happiness is, in fact, living with a sense of fulfillment and peace. It is a belief in the fundamental goodness of people, in the value of compassion, a policy of kindness, and a sense of unity among all living beings.
Many of us spend most of our time at work. If we do not enjoy our work, if we feel overwhelmed by it, it will surely damage us. The constant pressure of negative emotions causes inescapable damage to our arteries and other delicate tissues. It also slows down the body’s capacity to repair this damage.
To work at something you love, to be ‘self-actualized’ in Maslow’s terms, is to protect yourself against dying young. As Khalil Gibran wrote, ‘What is it to work with love?... It is to weave the cloth from the strings of your heart, as though your beloved were to wear it.’
Politics can make your blood boil with suppressed rage and unexpressed anxiety. ‘Fast tracking,’ being a corporate star, will extract the inevitable price of damage to arteries if you are not ‘mindful’, if you are not aware of the impact of everything you do on your system.
The latest corporate buzz is to make people happy at workspace - to liberate the butterflies, turn on the fountain of love and to help find joy in the small things in life. "In workspace, people should have two real daily laughs - the first laugh and the last laugh’
"Companies were waking up to the need to make their workers happy. At ICICI Bank, in one of its Mumbai branches, allows its workers to bring their kids to the workplace on Saturdays. The children have fun for a couple of hours while their parents work. And then they take off directly from the office for the weekend," people spend two-thirds of their working hours in office and happy employees can do double the work compared to their unhappy colleagues. Nowadays more and more women were working from home after they have babies.
Preventing stress is a negative way of looking at life; "instead, fill your mind with your garden of poetic emotions like laughter, wonder, love and compassion to counter lust, anger, obsession, greed, jealousy, fear and repulsion.”
The monsters of anger, greed and jealousy, shroud the gardens of the mind, poisoning the blood and turning it into a desolate wasteland of disease. Today, so much of our lives are spent in the office. The corporate jungle takes an unimaginable toll on the heart. Nature’s ultimate survival mechanism of fight or flight becomes a chronic response. This is because of the endless deadlines, the deadly competitiveness and the need for a constant state of high alert. One crisis leads to another. The body is constantly awash with the fight and flight response, resulting from a threat to survival.
Such a response is like using an atom bomb to kill an ant —totally inappropriate. But awareness is absent and the body responds as though to annihilation, moment to moment. Due to the modern urge to change jobs rapidly, many executives find themselves in threatening environments surrounded by potential enemies. They have had no time to develop friends or trusted supports. Every day they walk into the modern equivalent of a jungle infested with wild animals and danger. Family support systems are far away. Nuclear families build up explosive pressure due to a revolution of rising expectations, fuelled by the media.
Happiness is a gift, not a commodity. We all have a choice to make every moment, through our senses, our thoughts and our actions. We can choose what we want to see, hear, touch, taste and smell, think, feel and do. Most of the time, we are responsible for our decisions—for our happiness and unhappiness. We can decide how we want to feel even in the worst possible situations. To a jealous mind, an innocent smile is proof of adultery; a prisoner can choose to keep the flame of freedom alive and maintain a cheerful disposition. Events or people around us are not under our control. But our reactions, our responses to them are. Respond with love and peace. The ecology and geography of your inner mind space is in your hands. Study how to deal with each of your five senses to be happy. Focus on happiness, not the lack of it. Focusing on our unhappiness only helps to provide more power and attention to the negative person, event or object that causes it. Focus on cultivating happy people and avoid toxic people. Build protective walls against toxic events that threaten your tranquility. Happiness is everyone’s responsibility.
At each stage of life, it is human nature to feel that the things would be better at the next stage. One would tend to think that he will be happy after getting a good job and a healthy pay packet. At some point the feeling of frustration creeps in and he would feel that he would be happy once he gets married and have children. This search for happiness continues as he passes through each stage. The truth is there is no better time to be happy than right now. Life is full of challenges. It is better to admit as much and decide to be happy in spite of it all. There is no road to happiness. Happiness is the road.
To quote the words of Greek Philosopher, Democritus, “Happiness resides not in possessions and not in gold.” Happiness of life is made of minute fractions like a simple smile, a helping hand, a heartfelt compliment and countless other infinitesimals of pleasurable thought and genial feeling. The sad part is in our pursuit of happiness we fail to recognize this magnificent feeling that is just there right at the end of our nose.
Happiness is, in fact, living with a sense of fulfillment and peace. It is a belief in the fundamental goodness of people, in the value of compassion, a policy of kindness, and a sense of unity among all living beings.
Many of us spend most of our time at work. If we do not enjoy our work, if we feel overwhelmed by it, it will surely damage us. The constant pressure of negative emotions causes inescapable damage to our arteries and other delicate tissues. It also slows down the body’s capacity to repair this damage.
To work at something you love, to be ‘self-actualized’ in Maslow’s terms, is to protect yourself against dying young. As Khalil Gibran wrote, ‘What is it to work with love?... It is to weave the cloth from the strings of your heart, as though your beloved were to wear it.’
Politics can make your blood boil with suppressed rage and unexpressed anxiety. ‘Fast tracking,’ being a corporate star, will extract the inevitable price of damage to arteries if you are not ‘mindful’, if you are not aware of the impact of everything you do on your system.
The latest corporate buzz is to make people happy at workspace - to liberate the butterflies, turn on the fountain of love and to help find joy in the small things in life. "In workspace, people should have two real daily laughs - the first laugh and the last laugh’
"Companies were waking up to the need to make their workers happy. At ICICI Bank, in one of its Mumbai branches, allows its workers to bring their kids to the workplace on Saturdays. The children have fun for a couple of hours while their parents work. And then they take off directly from the office for the weekend," people spend two-thirds of their working hours in office and happy employees can do double the work compared to their unhappy colleagues. Nowadays more and more women were working from home after they have babies.
Preventing stress is a negative way of looking at life; "instead, fill your mind with your garden of poetic emotions like laughter, wonder, love and compassion to counter lust, anger, obsession, greed, jealousy, fear and repulsion.”
The monsters of anger, greed and jealousy, shroud the gardens of the mind, poisoning the blood and turning it into a desolate wasteland of disease. Today, so much of our lives are spent in the office. The corporate jungle takes an unimaginable toll on the heart. Nature’s ultimate survival mechanism of fight or flight becomes a chronic response. This is because of the endless deadlines, the deadly competitiveness and the need for a constant state of high alert. One crisis leads to another. The body is constantly awash with the fight and flight response, resulting from a threat to survival.
Such a response is like using an atom bomb to kill an ant —totally inappropriate. But awareness is absent and the body responds as though to annihilation, moment to moment. Due to the modern urge to change jobs rapidly, many executives find themselves in threatening environments surrounded by potential enemies. They have had no time to develop friends or trusted supports. Every day they walk into the modern equivalent of a jungle infested with wild animals and danger. Family support systems are far away. Nuclear families build up explosive pressure due to a revolution of rising expectations, fuelled by the media.
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