“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony”
Mahatma Gandhi

Last week was such gorgeous weather and, as I said in last week’s newsletter, everyone I spoke to and everyone I saw looked so much happier than the week before, when it rained most of the time.

So, it made me think:

Most of us are waiting, we are waiting for something to change to make us feel happier. 

We are waiting for the weather to improve, we might be waiting to meet that special person, waiting to hear if we’ve got that new job. waiting to hear if we have a wage rise, waiting to hear that our child has been accepted into university, waiting to lose weight, waiting until we find time to exercise, waiting for our next holiday, waiting for retirement, waiting for our health to return – most of us spend our lives waiting for something outside of us, something external to make us feel happy.

Well, what happens if it rains constantly for a month, we don’t get that job, we put on weight, no extra money comes our way?  What happens then?  Do we live our lives feeling unhappy because life hasn’t gone the way we planned?

But, I hear you say, we can’t be happy ALL the time!  No, I don’t believe we can, but, we can be far happier than most of us are.

I love the quote at the top of this newsletter, as it is such a simple truth BUT one that most of us do not live by.

An awful lot of what we think and what we do are completely out of alignment with what we say – this leads to distress, to sadness, to a deep sense of un-fulfilment.

For example, we might say we want to lose weight, but we think to ourselves that we never succeed, we will always be fat and before you know it, the new diet is broken and you are feeling unhappy and miserable – you end up putting your happiness on hold until you lose the weight.  Even worse, this might never happen, so you could go through life feeling dissatisfied and unhappy as you’ve attached feeling happy to an external event – losing weight.

What about if you keep saying how you want to be fit and work on your health, but the thoughts going on in your head are ‘I can’t be bothered to go to class today’; ‘I’m not getting up 20 minutes earlier to do some exercise’; ‘I’d rather stay in and read or watch TV than go out for a walk or run’, so clearly your fitness doesn’t improve and again you feel awful, guilty, unhealthy and unhappy because you are out of alignment and attaching your happiness to something external.

Can you think of some areas in your life where you are not in alignment?

Notice how that makes you feel.

So, one of the easiest ways to find happiness is when what you think, say and do are in harmony, in alignment.

And most importantly, don’t attach your happiness to something outside of YOU.  The external is constantly changing and is something YOU cannot control, so find your happiness inside of you by being true to yourself and therefore being in complete alignment with what you think, say and do.

Happiness 🙂