Finding Happiness From Life

by Jared Akers


Finding happiness in life seems to be the goal of most people. However, maybe the better way to look at this is finding happiness in spite of life. Learning to accept life on life's terms and extract happiness from life can sometimes be quite a challenge. Happiness can be elusive but here's an amazing secret, you can't find happiness, happiness finds you! Thinking we can wrestle things out of life if we just manage better, can be an uphill battle, especially when being happy is one of the goals. Many times the key to finding something is to stop looking so hard. The universe often conspires against us if we insist on doing everything ourselves.

Happiness is a by-product of living a life well lived. Most people have an ideal self which they strive for, but many times they fall short, and thus find themselves unhappy. At times, people need to learn to be less harsh on themselves in areas they find themselves falling short. There's nothing wrong with striving for greatness, but just because we fail sometimes, does not mean we deserve to be happy.

Most happy people have something in common; they have found happiness within themselves. As a result of inner peace, they're less dependent on happiness from outside sources. Meaning things that happen around them in life have less effect on their happiness. It's important to think about things in life and what effect we allow them to have on our inner peace; remembering that things in life happen around us, not to us.

Instead of searching for happiness, start with searching within yourself. Learning what our sincere wants and desires are is an important step in designing a future which will lead us to being happy. Being content with our lives begins with being content with ourselves through self-acceptance and love.

Today's expectations are tomorrow's resentments. One way of finding happiness is to minimize our expectations. Think about it, how often do we find ourselves unhappy as the result of something not turning out the way we expected? Thus by lowering our expectations, we're less likely to have something not turn out the way we intended. Some may say this is unrealistic, but it can be done, it just takes practice. Another cute saying along this line is "expectations are resentments in training."

Learning techniques to help us stay in the moment is another powerful tool to reduce unrealistic expectations. By staying in the moment and open to all the possibilities that it possesses, we're less likely to be thinking about the future and what we "hope" it may entail.