Pleasure vs. Happiness
Happiness is not pleasure although they can appear similar.
Pleasure is enjoyment of an outside stimuli. You might find pleasure in buying a new car, or in going on vacation, or having friends over for dinner, or having sex, or….the list is long on what you might enjoy experiencing. Pleasure requires an external stimuli for you to experience it.
Happiness does not. Happiness is a belief about yourself and the outside world. You can be doing something you normally experience as pleasurable but not be happy!
Pleasure is born from the external world,
happiness is born from the internal workings of our own minds.
What Is Happiness
Our natural state of being is to be happy. When you remove all the uncomfortable emotions we humans can experience (and they are numerous), you’re left with happiness.
So it’s easiest to define happiness by what it is not.
Happiness is what you feel when you’re NOT feeling….
self doubt
depressed
hateful
fearful
worried
unsatisfied
bored
grief
shame
guilt
discontent
anxious
annoyed
angry
irritated
stressed
frustrated
upset
down
sad
envious
or
jealous.
Stop Comparing Yourself to Others
Being Unique
“Enjoy your own life without comparing it with that of another.” – Marquis de Condorcet
“To love is to stop comparing.” – Bernard Grasset
How to stop comparing yourself with others?
- Awareness. Most often we do these social comparisons without realizing we’re doing it. It’s a natural act, I suppose, and as a result it’s something that is done without consciousness. So the solution is to become conscious — bring these thoughts to the forefront of your consciousness by being on the lookout for them. If you focus on these thoughts for a few days, it gets much easier with practice, and soon it’ll be hard not to notice.
- Stop yourself. Once you realize you’re doing these comparisons, give yourself a pause. Don’t berate yourself or feel bad — just acknowledge the thought, and gently change focus.
- Count your blessings. A better focus is on what you do have, on what you are already blessed with. Count what you have, not what you don’t. Think about how lucky you are to have what you have, to have the people in your life who care about you, to be alive at all.
- Focus on your strengths. Instead of looking at your weaknesses, ask yourself what your strengths are. Celebrate them! Be proud of them. Don’t brag, but feel good about them and work on using them to your best advantage.
- Be OK with imperfection. No one is perfect — intellectually, we all know that, but emotionally we seem to feel bad when we don’t reach perfection. You aren’t perfect and you never will be. I certainly am not, and I’ve learned to be OK with that. Sure, keep trying to improve, but don’t think you’ll ever be the “perfect person”. If you look at it in a different way, that imperfection is what makes you who you are, you already are perfect.
- Don’t knock others down. Sometimes we try to criticize others just to make ourselves look or feel better. Taking someone else down for your benefit is destructive. It forms an enemy when you could be forming a friend. In the end, that hurts you as well. Instead, try to support others in their success — that will lead to more success on your part.
- Focus on the journey. Don’t focus on how you rank in comparison to others — life is not a competition. It’s a journey. We are all on a journey, to find something, to become something, to learn, to create. That journey has nothing to do with how well other people are doing, or what they have. It has everything to do with what we want to do, and where we want to go. That’s all you need to worry about.
- Learn to love enough. If you always want what others have, you will never have enough. You will always want more. That’s an endless cycle, and it will never lead to happiness. No matter how many clothes you buy, no matter how many houses you own (seven, in the case of one famous candidate), no matter how many fancy cars you acquire … you’ll never have enough. Instead, learn to realize that what you have is already enough. If you have shelter over your head, food on the table, clothes on your back, and people who love you, you are blessed. You have enough. Anything you have over and above that — and let’s admit that all of us reading this blog have more than that — is more than enough. Be good with that, and you’ll find contentment.
source:
http://zenhabits.net/lifes-enough-stop-comparing-yourself-to-others/
The Law of Least Effort, Non-Resistance, Forgiveness, Polarity and Relativity
This Universal Law promises that if we harness joy, laughter and love, we will harness success without effort.
Lao Tzu says:
“An integral being knows without going, sees without looking and accomplishes without doing.”
Three practices will enable us to change the energy of our lives and move from the lower vibrations to ever higher ones:
A) Practice Acceptance. Surrender to this moment. Attend to the present.
B) Responsibility. Each person will receive a series of problems or tests for strengthening the light within. We must rise to the challenge before we can progress. Transform the undesirable (“bad luck”) into its opposite (“good luck”)by focusing on the good in it.
C) Defenselessness. When you can relinquish the need to defend your point of view, you will be invincible.
Some AFFIRMATIONS from the book “The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: A Practical Guide to the Fulfillment of Your Dreams” :
* I will practice acceptance.
* Today I will accept people, situations, circumstances, and events as they occur.
* I will know that this moment is as it should be, because the whole universe is as it should be.
* I will not struggle against the whole universe by struggling against this moment.
* My acceptance is total and complete.
* I accept things as they are this moment, not as I wish they were.
Today is an important day in your life
Today is a New Day
Today is an important day in your life.
Because today is your opportunity to create the
circumstances in which you will live tomorrow.
If you could custom design tomorrow, how would it be?
Where would you live, what work would you do,
what people would be around you?
What is the very best tomorrow that you can imagine?
Today is when you can visualize any possibility for tomorrow,
and then set about to actually make it happen.
You make your own tomorrow, by the actions you take today.
Right now, tomorrow is open for you to shape and design.
It is available for you to do with as you please.
Yet you must get started today.
If you let tomorrow come without your active participation in
its design, chances are that it won’t be completely to your liking.
Take action today, and make tomorrow whatever you want it to be.
good thoughts and evil thoughts
A good thought is thrice blessed:
First, it benefits the thinker by improving his mental body.
Secondly, it benefits the person about whom it is entertained.
Lastly, it benefits all mankind by improving the general mental atmosphere.
An evil thought, on the contrary, is thrice cursed.
First, it harms the thinker by doing injury to his mental body.
Secondly, it harms the person who is its object.
Lastly, it harms all mankind by vitiating the whole mental atmosphere.
Every evil thought is as a sword drawn on the person to whom it is directed. If you entertain thoughts of hatred, you are really a murderer of that person against whom you foster thoughts of hatred. You are your own suicide, because these thoughts rebound upon you only.
A mind tenanted by evil thoughts acts as a magnet to attract like thoughts from others and thus intensifies the original evil.
Evil thoughts thrown into the mental atmosphere poison receptive mind. To dwell on an evil thought gradually deprives it of its repulsiveness and impels the thinker to perform an action which emodies it.
the cure for worry is to keep youself busy
“I’m too busy. I have no time for worry.”
why keeping yourself busy drive out anxiety and worry ?
according to one of the most fundamental laws of psychology:
“it is utterly impossible for any human mind, no matter how brilliant, to think of
more than one thing at any given time”
When we are not busy, our minds tend to become a near-vacuum. And Nature rushes in to fill the vacant mind.
with emotions of worry, fear, hate, jealousy, and envy. Such emotions drive out of our minds all peaceful, happy thoughts and emotions.
reference:
dale carnegie,
“how to stop worrying and start living”
no one can escape karma
“Karma” is sometimes considered life’s “hard knocks” – the many unpleasant experiences a soul goes through here on planet earth.
“Karma” simply means the forces of action and reaction – the law of cause and effect.
“Karma” is like one of Newton’s laws of physics – every action has its equal and opposite reaction (“you reap what you sow”).
All things you have ever done in the past, returns to bite or bless you in the future. In other words, “Karma” is a cyclic energy – “what goes around comes around” (harming or praising you).
“Karma” is the universal law of justice that balances the energetic forces of your life – there is no escaping it – everyone is personally responsibility for all that they have ever done.
Karma also has no time limits – if in one moment in one life you set in motion a particular act, you may not reap the fruit of it until many years… or many lives later.
If one plants a seed in the ground, that seed will eventually grown into a tree – this is “Karma”.
Read more at:
just for today affirmation
Just for today I will give thanks for my many blessings.
Just for today I will not worry.
Just for today I will not anger.
Just for today I will do my work honestly.
Just for today I will love and respect every living thing.
THOUGHTS2183 