Friday 10 August 2012

Where do you sit on the scale of happy?


Happiness...the one thing that all of us want, yet many of us believe we will never have. Or we will only have it sometimes if we're lucky. I recently completed my first workshop on choosing your happy! One of the questions I asked the participants was where they would rank themselves on the happy scale 1 being the least happy and 10 being the most. Not one person raised their hands and majority didn't even rank themselves over 5. This did not surprise me but reconfirmed what most of the research says. What the responses did do was make me realize what kind of unhappy epidemic we really do have going on in our world. We are loosing our abilities to smile and feel what that is like inside. I personally believe that we need to teach our children and ourselves about how truly powerful we are. We totally own the ability to choose our own bliss but most of us either don't know how or don't belive that happiness comes from within. Our ability to be happy does come from deep down inside but it needs to placed at the frontal most part of our brains as a priority. As we continue to disconnect, overstimulate ourselves with technology and go on autopilot without understaning how meainngful moments in everyday life really are...we will continue on the path to unhappy. In my own personal life I have experienced some loss, trama and tragedy. However, I was fortunate that amongst it all I was able to connect with my own ability to choose how I experienced my circumstances. This gave me the insight to still find inner joy amongst the chaos and sadness. In the book "Man's search for meaning" by Viktor E. Frankl he speaks to our inner ability for choice on a much more extreme level. Viktor E. Frankl is a psychiatrist as well as, a world war 2 death camp survivor. One of my favorite quotes in his book is "even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstamnces, decide what shall become of him - mentally and spiritually". If someone in a cencentration camp can connect with their ability to choose meaning and therefore happiness in life, than so can we. We need to take the time to actually see the special gifts in our lives and try not to be consumed with what is out of our control. I say let's make a commitment to open our eyes, to genuinely see the beauty in our world and start saying I AM a 10 on my happy scale:).