Happiness

The spiritual thoughts in my diary for April are concerned with happiness.
I am a great believer in being in control of your own happiness and I find these words very motivating and encouraging:

You have the power to hurt yourself or to benefit yourself. If you do not choose to be happy no one can make you happy. Do not blame God for that! And if you choose to be happy, no one else can make you unhappy. It is we who make of life what it is.

I find this really helpful if I am annoyed with someone, say like my bullying next-door neighbour. He behaved very badly and he upset me but I cannot make him be “nice” to me, he is outside of my control. The only thing I can control is how I feel about it. So I try to take control of my thoughts about what happened and send the angry/bitter thoughts packing when I get upset. There is no point in it. His behaviour upset me once; there is no point in allowing myself to be repeatedly upset on account of the same thing. I must choose to laugh about it and put the distress out of my head to save myself any further pain about it.

This might seem like a small example, but I find small examples sometimes pester my head more than big ones, and in any case it is the same method for both large and small upsets in life. What good does it do me to re-live the original pain? I might as well choose to be happy, make of my life what it is.

Another thought on the same theme:

A strong determination to be happy will help you. Do not wait for circumstances to change, thinking falsely that in them lies the trouble. Do not make unhappiness a chronic habit thereby affecting yourself and your associates.

It is a blessedness to yourself and others if you are happy. If you possess happiness you possess everything. To be happy is to be in tune with God. That power to be happy comes through meditation.


Source: Spiritual Diary, Parmahansa Yogananda

Anger

Dalai Lama - thought for the day ...



The first drawback of anger is that it destroys your inner peace; the second is that it distorts your view of reality. If you think about this and come to understand that anger is really unhelpful, that it is only destructive, you can begin to distance yourself from anger.

I have been much less prone to anger in the last few years .. but I am still struggling with other niggling nasty aspects of my personality. 

 I am trying really hard to give up the cynical grumpy voices that bother my calm  ...

God help me .... that's a prayer.