What is happiness?

Happiness is what remains once I remove the clutter from the untidy room of my mind. Thoughts, anxieties, ambitions, desires… oh! so many desires… zoom like crazed electrons around the inner nucleus of my being… Moreover, I have often been sucked in by the whirlpool of other people’s unhappiness – something I’ve learnt to guard myself against. Often people are vocal about their anxieties, disappointments and troubles and when you lend a listening ear these often affect your own inner state, (unless you are considerably advanced!). Even when they are not vocal, they wire into my aura and steal my ‘happy energy’! While compassion to the other is important, it should not be confused with drowning yourself with the drowning.

I don’t really have to do anything special to be happy – only let my energy be freed from the illusion of pain. This is not to say that life is a rosy path, but we need to distinguish between real problems and imaginary problems. The real problem calls for action, the imaginary one doesn’t and is often limited to “what if..” or “I bet my boss will fire me..” “They gossip about me…”. If you can do something about a problem to solve it – good, otherwise what’s the point of worrying? It’s like being in a train and hoping it will go faster, with the acidic anxiety of being late for work churning the stomach. RELAX! No amount of worrying will make the train go faster!! Either make sure you catch the right train at the right time, or accept being late calmly. Otherwise this is useless anxiety and the mind needs to be taught to let it drop. It is essential that we distinguish between real problems and anticipated worries. While we should be prepared for the worst
(life is unpredictable) this shouldn’t be confused with an obsession with possible disasters in the future. After doing what we can… let go…there lies happiness.

In training the mind for this, sometimes some concentration or meditation techniques help, or perhaps being in natural’s glory, or listening to or playing music or simply not being with incorrigible anxiety addicted people. I always find that when I listen to certain kinds of music the outside world falls… it’s almost like a fountain of joy that rises in your spine and flows all over. Happiness is a natural state, it does not require any learning technique, but perhaps we have to unlearn ways to be unhappy! In quelling the mind’s leap to mirages of pain you find the path to happiness.

- Harvinder Kaur