Dipti Sethi_BLP048_September2012

HAPPINESS

Happiness is an emotion. So is sadness, love, hate, curiosity, revulsion, excitement, jealousy, contentment, depression, anxiety, fear, guilt and anger. All emotions have causes, causes which can be understood and controlled.
    The emotion of happiness is not caused simply by entertaining your whims. (Whims are an obstacle to happiness.) Happiness is not merely a life lived by accumulating moments of pleasure. On the contrary, happiness is a long lasting enduring enjoyment of life, it is being in love with living. It is your reward for achieving a good character and personal rational values in life. Some important values are a productive career, romance, friendship and hobbies.
    Achieving these values requires rationality and takes effort and skill. Two types of skills you can use are thinking skills and valuing skills.
    Once you learn to have confidence in your own mind and once you discover the virtues that make it possible for you to achieve your values and that make your life worth living, then you will experience the result - an earned pride and a genuine self-esteem.

HAPPINESS is:

1.    A state of mind 

2. A life that goes well for the person leading it

The word ‘happiness’ derives from the term for good fortune, or “good hap”. In this sense of the term—call it the “well-being sense”—happiness refers to a life of well-being or flourishing: a life that goes well for you. Importantly, to ascribe happiness in the well-being sense is to make a value judgment: namely, that the person has whatever it is that benefits a person. If you and I have different values, then we may well differ about which lives we consider happy. I might think Mr. ABC had a happy life, because I think what matters for well-being is getting what you want; while you deny this because you think a life of evildoing, however “successful,” is sad and impoverished.

Martin Seligman, one of the leading researchers in positive psychology and author of Authentic Happiness, describes happiness as having three parts: pleasure, engagement, and meaning. Pleasure is the “feel good” part of happiness. Engagement refers to living a “good life” of work, family, friends, and hobbies. Meaning refers to using our strengths to contribute to a larger purpose. Seligman says that all three are important, but that of the three, engagement and meaning make the most difference to living a happy life.

Happiness also signifies a euphoric Peace of Mind example when we find the ability to control our thoughts in our mind a state of complete self sustaining contentment. When we accept who we are and disregard all false fallacies media and society has intended for us to follow. When we say to ourselves “It’s okay I make mistakes and I will make more tomorrow but I accept myself and have a peace of mind of acceptance to who I am.” Happiness is when we can truly accept the fortunes and misfortunes on this world and have a peace of mind. Happiness is accepting the beauty of who and what we will become.

I feel love is the most important ingredient for happiness.
Love in not the way many look at it, where you have someone you can love and spend the rest of your life with love. But i am talking about love the way it was portrayed in the movie “Sweet November” where the actress is in love and is loved back with whomever she is with or meet – simple.
For me happiness is living in a place where people are not competing with each other but rather complimenting each other. Every person i meet or work with is with me because he loves being with me, and not for any personal profit or loss which is ironic in today’s world because loving to be with someone is a profit within itself, you don’t need to take the equation any further.All a person needs to live happily, is to have friends and family where he is appreciated for what he is and his individuality is respected like i always believe “It’s better to live all alone and be happy rather to be with all surrounded by people who disgust you”

A balanced life makes me the happiest. When our needs are all met, we are truly happy for as long as all our needs are met. The difficulty is, we don’t always know what our needs are, so we have to experiment and go in search of the ingredients in our own lives that give us fulfillment. I believe that quite often the thing that we lacked in our childhood and the thing that we loved in our childhood both have the most potential to make us happy. If we were bullied in school, popularity will make us happy in adult life. If we came from a poor family, wealth and money will make us happy in adult life. If we loved to dance as children, then dancing will make us happy in adult life. I think also, we need to have human connection and love and support… without those crucial ingredients, we can never be happy. For the people who are not able to accept love (because their childhood did not teach them that they were worthy of being loved just as they are and for no reason other than just because they do deserve love) happiness will be the hardest to find of all. The ability to forgive is also vital to happiness. If we do not have the skill of forgiveness yet, we will carry all the anger and pain that we have ever been given around with us and even during times of celebration, we will not be happy.

So I think it is this that makes us happy:

Loving respectful healthy relationships.

Having all of our individual specific needs met (physical, mental, emotional, health, moral, cultural, spiritual, freedom, time, self-control) .We must learn about ourselves to know what we need first.  Ability to give and accept love and healthy level of self esteem. Ability to heal past wounds with forgiveness of ourselves and others and also the world and God. Someone special to share our happiness with.