It is ok to be sad in order to be happy !!

 

These days when I am on internet, especially Facebook, I see a lot of articles on how and why you should not be sad. Most of them a cajoled in beautiful memes or written with inspiring stories. They are beautiful to read and also give you momentary high.

What I have observed is that it also puts pressure on you to be not sad. You start feeling like it is some kind of a crime to not feel happy all the time. Over the time the pressure builds up and you become immune to these messages and you start feeling like you are not living your life correctly at all. This ends up making you sadder.

In the beginning, I was addicted to these messages. I would dig them out just to make myself feel better. But the feeling would last for some time and then I would be back to my normal feeling (which wasn’t sad). One day on a walk in the evening it dawn to me that I was putting too much pressure on myself on not have sad thoughts. That pressure just took the fun away from living and in turn added more sad thoughts.

What I have learned from my journey to happiness is that it is ok to feel sad. What is not ok is to be in that state for long time. We are humans and it is normal to experience plethora of feelings and emotions. We are all going to feel sad some time or the other and most probably few times during the day. Feeling sad means that things around you are not going according to your expectations. It is nothing more than that or nothing less. Like any other feeling, it comes and goes. So instead of avoiding it, we need to learn to deal with it.

So what should I do? Tell yourself that it is ok to have sad moments during the day. They are nothing but the difference between your expectation and surrounding at the moment. Like any other moment, it will pass as well. Recognize that it is a momentary thing and not a lifelong sequence. Understanding these things will help you deal with the moment of sadness. Once you start dealing with these moments, they will start fading away and slowly you will start experiencing less moments of sadness. But it all begins with you being ok with feeling sad….counter intuitive, I know.

Time with friends and family is always happy time ....

                               

 

I have been spending last few days with my family and childhood friends. And it has been one of the best times of my trip so far. Re living child hood memories is a part of it. But most importantly, it is more about surrounded by people who unconditionally want you to be happy and do well. In this blog, I am going to talk about effect family and friends have on you and how you can tap into their unconditional vibration to take you to happy place.

So far we have seen as to what we, as individuals, can do to be happy. Now let us look how friends and family can help you at that as well. Firstly, this is not about what friends and family can do to you or how they should behave to make you happy. I have seen and experience many times that the same F&F that I am going to talk about have done things that have made me angry and sad in the past. But that was when I was trying to rest my happiness on their actions rather than their presence. Over time I have understood that they are individuals as well who have their own direction of thoughts and own destinies to be fulfilled.

What changed for me was my time away from them. After moving to US in 2004, I soon started to realize how effective F&F were in relieving daily stress and putting you in different state of mind. I also realized how stupid I was to not look at them that way when I had the chance. Over the years, I have spent focused effort on building closed friendships and repairing and maintaining family bonds that uplift me.

This is what happens; when you are with close family and friends, you are not someone you try to project in everyday life. You become yourself. You are in midst of people who have seen you struggle and who have seen you succeed. That removes the judgement lenses that everyday world looks you at with. The comfort of non judgement removes your internal resistance and takes you to a place where you can enjoy the moment. Enjoying the moment is what happiness is all about.

Also, when you are with your F&F, you go back in time when life was easy (childhood) and live those memories together. This helps you understand that your current reality is not that carved in the stone and can change. And this realization helps reduce stress drastically resulting in happy thoughts.

What should I do? Start looking at your Family as source of non-judgmental vibration. Understand that what they provide you is different than anything anyone will. This will let you look past the outside resistance. Yes, they will do things that will agitate you, but at the end of the day, they want best for you. They provide you with best environment to blossom and forget about stress.

Second, cultivate close group of friends that help you forget about your stress and be yourself. This is important especially when you are living away from home. Remember, they can be sometimes annoying and will do things that may counter your upbringing. But what’s important is how they make you feel. If they make you comfortable enough to be yourself, don’t let them go…

Lastly, when it comes to communicating with F&F, get out of texts and IMs. In person interaction is the best. It gets you to know a person at different level. The body language, their emotions, feelings etc. can be assimilated by doing it. If face to face is not possible, pick up the phone and call them. In short, be personal in communication.

I hope this blog will help you maintain your family ties and develop and nurture your friend circle.

 

What is your IP (Inner Peace) Feeling.....

 

To begin with, sorry for not writing an article last Sunday. Some of my readers actually mentioned it to me, that tells me that you all are reading and looking forward to the articles. That makes me feel good. Thank you for that. It was busy work with customer visits, so had to get all the things in order. Customer liked our facility and gave us Kudos making it all worth it.

Back to the blog, one of my peeps and friend asked me about Inner peace. I thought I would take this opportunity to write about what I think about Inner Peace since it is directly related to happiness (if there is any difference).

Throughout human history, great lives have graced this earth and talked about Inner Peace. From the great Rishi Munis (saints) of subcontinent to Buddha to Tao to Plato, everyone has taken a dig at it and lived their lives exemplifying inner peace. They have gone deep into meditations and found out answers to the worlds sorrows and given us a guide line to attain inner peace. BUT, those guide lines and their thought structure is hard to understand for people like me. As a matter of fact, when I read some of their teachings, they seemed much harder than trigonometry and calculus.

I am not going to write about what they thought inner peace was. The greats have already dissected and given a manual for that. I am not at that level. As a mere mortal, I would like to convey my idea of inner peace and what I do to attain it from time to time.

Inner peace to me is sleeping peacefully at night. It is sleeping like a child without anxiety, fear and regret. It is a feeling that runs through your body at different times during the day. It is a feeling when you finally find a clean restroom when you had to go for 4 hours but couldn’t because you kept on stopping at rest areas in western Nebraska. It is a feeling when you see your loved one home safely when you just saw that accident on the road they travel. It is the feeling you get on the last day at work before going to your dream destination. It is a feeling……….

There are two things about feelings you need to know:

a)      Feeling is a physical sensation.  You feel an emotion in your body or a thought in your body and that is why it is called a feeling. Everyone here has had butterflies in stomach or sinking heart or heart pumping faster during different events in their lives. What is that? It is your body reacting to your thoughts. It is a feeling to your thoughts….

b)      Just like thoughts can change feelings, feelings can change the thoughts as well. Diving into science, just as sound creates vibration, vibration can create sound. You cannot feel happy and think sad at the same time.

Inner peace is a feeling and works the same way. Instead of focusing on mind and thoughts and controlling them, you can actually control your body’s reactions which will lead to correct thoughts to maintain the inner peace. For me, inner peace has always felt like my heart is smiling. It has always been a sensation at center of my heart. Whenever I am feeling inner peace, there is a certain vibration that is being felt in heart area. Over time, I have got aquantied with what inner peace feels like in different parts of my body. So when I get bogged down by the external reality and understand that my mind is going down the sad track, I focus my concentration on my heart area. The more I focus there, the more awareness is created of its existence. The heightened awareness emits the vibration that gives me inner peace. As soon as heart area attains a certain vibration, my thoughts start changing. And more and more peaceful and calming thoughts start emerging in my head. This leads me to momentary inner peace. Then it is up to me to control the timing of it. It’s a continuous improvement on attaining longer periods of inner peace. This all sounds simple, because it is!!

So what should I do? For starters, start observing your feelings. Throughout the day, you are bombarded by a lot of thoughts and feelings. Observe feelings that make you at peace. Observe every aspect of that feeling. How does it feel in your heart area? What thoughts arise when you feel it? May be certain music triggered it, or a memory triggered it……etc. Once you have observed and recorded that feeling, try to recreate it as many times as possible. Whenever your mind is in chaos, try to focus on your heart area. Let the awareness of your heart take over.  Try to trigger the feeling you have recorded. It will be a little difficult at first, but more you try it, you will start getting better at it and soon you will be at a point where you will be able to experience momentary inner peace whenever you want it.

Inner peace is not something to be attained at the end of 20 years meditation or by living a complete astute life for 38 years. Inner peace is something that you can achieve right here right now. As a matter of fact, you already feel it several times a day. You just need to be a little observant and start playing with it.

 

 

Mind your own business !!

 

Last week I discussed one of the subtle traits that keep us from happiness: Justifying yourself. Continuing, let’s get to the second subtle trait that takes us away from Happiness; minding other people’s business.

We have always heard this phrase; mind your own business. Most notable in a negative connotation when asking other people about some parts they don’t want to share. To be honest, no one likes to hear that phrase. The immediate reaction is “I care and hence I ask”. But that's not the whole picture. My continuous introspection led me to believe that Minding my own business is really the secret to my happiness.

Let’s dive in, Minding your own business doesn’t only mean not asking other people about their business, it actually means thinking about your own business. So many times our mind is filled with stuff other people are doing. What is he doing? What is she getting? Is she getting more than me? Why isn’t he answering me? Why wasn’t I invited to his/ her party? Can you relate to these? We think these thoughts and only muddy our own mind. By thinking about others, we put them in the pedestal of our minds. And let me tell you, no matter what, you should be on pedestal of your mind. So stop minding other people’s business and start minding your own. Also, you cannot control others, so get away from trying that by thinking about them J

Another aspect of minding other people’s business is actually a little scary. So many times, I have sat in front of TV and watched horror going around the world. And then I start worrying about the world and then I start feeling bad at all the plight and misery and then one thought leads to other and finally I am going down the sadness spiral. We need to stop it. Reasons being,

a)       We actually cannot solve all the world problems.

b)      Bad thoughts cannot solve bad things. Have you ever heard of using darkness to eliminate darkness?

Have sympathy for people, but don’t change that into worry. You are not going to help people who are in trouble by dropping down to their troubled life. You will only help troubled people by being an example of leading a trouble free life. Remember this!!

So what should I do? To begin with, just like last time, don’t jump into any change. Slowly start monitoring your thoughts. And when you feel that you are thinking about a situation involving others a lot, try to logic as to why you are thinking about it so much? Is your life and present moment worth it? Are you trying to compare yourself or gain acceptance from someone? Most of the times, the answer will be in one of these questions. Using logic will give you extra strengths to quit thinking about that situation and do something else.

Secondly, try to stay away from bad news. Ignorance is bliss and in this case there is nothing bad about this ignorance. Get your house in order first before thinking about world problems. You know why so many protests fail and lead to more disaster? It’s because people protesting don’t have their own shit together. And hence, what protestors are actually doing is to bring their own insecurities up and express them in terms of protests. Remember, you worrying about world issues from comfort of your sofa is not going to help. What going to help is you not being part of those issues. Someone said it right, best way to help poor is not be one!!!

To conclude, keep on minding your own business and stop looking into other people’s business. The more you will focus on your business, the more you will start living in the present and the happier you will be. You will also start focusing on your own desires and wishes. You will have more energy to work towards them and eventually you will start shining and smiling.

Be so good at minding your own business that people should ask you to mind their business……

- Happy Omie

Stop Justifying your existance....

           

If you want to be happy, stop being sad!

The above statement might be very simple and more trivial in tone, but it contains everything you want to know about happiness. It insinuates happiness as a feeling caused by a state of mind rather than an external emotion based on outside objects. It drove me to look for happiness within me rather than in outside world and circumstances around me. I understood that you are a happy being to begin with and you make yourself sad with your thoughts; same as covering the lamp and then crying about darkness.

On my journey inwards, I discovered different scenarios that had the potential to drive me into thought processes that would result in sadness. Some of them were prominent culprits like regrets, fear and anxiety (more on those later), but there were also the subtle ones which had made a way into my normal thought process which looked good from outside but were really causing me to dive into more sad parts.

This article explores one of the most subtle tendencies which might be doing you more harm without you knowing it.

Stop justifying yourself….to yourself: Have you ever taken a step back and noticed how much energy you spend, in action as well as thought, into justifying yourself? That introspection will show you that majority of your days’ work and thoughts revolve around us justifying something. May be we are justifying our point of view at work or maybe we are justifying our stance or existence to our friends and family.

But the most venomous of it all is justifying your existence to yourself. By doing so we inherently accept that where we are in this time and space is wrong and we should be somewhere else. That very thought is a resistance to free flowing energy that is you and that resistance causes sadness. We have a picture of what we should be and then we are in constant struggle with justifying how our actions or thoughts are working towards that ideal picture. Now don’t get me wrong, you need to have your life’s ideal picture in front of you, but that doesn’t mean where you are right now is wrong. While traveling from US to India, I have to stop in Europe. Even though my destination is India, my lay over in Europe is not wrong. It’s just a point towards my Ideal.

Moreover, the ideal picture you portray about your life mostly comes from societal conditioning which is usually counterproductive if you are a free thinker. A lot of people get into roles that have been set for them by society (including parents) and try to live them out; while continuously shunting the inner call to change into directions of happiness. How many of you have been told to “Act your age”, just to find out that you gave away fun and your inner child in an attempt to “Act your age”.  On a side note, is there any chart that shows how to act at what age? I can make Billions selling those….

So what should I do? To begin with, don’t leap into changing yourself from what you are now. Start slowly. At the end of the day, take few minutes to analyze your daily activities and see which ones you did to justify yourself or your behavior. May be you said something nice to someone when you didn’t want to? Or maybe you said something bad to someone and then criticized yourself for that? Or more classical, you had big imaginative argument in a shower with someone and won it by justifying your point of view or your behavior. Once you identify these behaviors, it becomes easy. Just be conscious next time you are in one of these situations and just breathe and relax and walk away. If you cannot physically leave, just walk away from the subject in your mind. Slowly this will become your modus operandi and soon you will block one of the mental paths that was leading to sadness.

Be Happy !!