Looking for happiness in all the wrong places.

Lots of people believe that success, achievement, and material possessions make them happy. While these may improve their quality of living, the pleasure of acquiring them comes with a fear of loss, and with it, pain. If this is so, what we experience when this happens is a form of conditional contentment…fleeting and ephemeris.

The truth is, our definition of happiness is not really ours. We learn other peoples’ idea of happiness and drag it with us all throughout our lives, never putting it under the microscope or challenging it in any way. Our parents and their parents’ parents taught us everything about life BUT how to be ourselves, to know ourselves, to define happiness and be happy with ourselves. We walk around being who others want us to be with little to no regard for what we want; we stay with people we don’t really want or like, and do the opposite of what we want. We live our lives this way because we are afraid to leave the comfort and familiarity of what we know and depend on, afraid to suffer, afraid to be different and alone. Why are we so terrified of ourselves? What makes us so terrible that we would run away every chance we get to be with ourselves? This is the root of our failure to become and stay happy, and with it goes a lack of consciousness, a dormant mind.

In moments of clarity we realize that nothing external and nobody else is able to fulfill us. Is it others’ responsibility to get us there? How do you find contentment and happiness? What are your responsibilities and what’s in your power to do?

When the time is right, take an honest look in the mirror and observe how you live, love, and get happy. If it is too hard to do it by yourself, ask for help to find your strengths and use them to change what no longer works. And remember that the answers you are looking for are inside you not outside of you!