Life tends to present us with both great struggles and great joy, difficulty, and happiness. In this mix, happiness is often fleeting. If you are fortunate enough to have good circumstances, you might find happiness in your life for a time, but if your feelings of happiness are generated only from outer circumstances that can and will eventually change. It will not be lasting.
When your happiness is governed by your mood It also tends to be fleeting. Everyone has good moods and bad moods. Real happiness is not just a mood, but a deep joy within you. Real happiness comes, not from outer circumstance, but from an inner relationship to yourself. It is a steadiness, a peace, a love, a connectedness that you have to live where your spirit and your heart are awakened. When you connect to this joy, you feel as if you are really alive and awake in your life, in this moment.
This deeper happiness is based upon a series of attitudes towards yourself, your relationships to those around you and toward your experiences in the world. When you feel loved and lovable and your heart is open, many things open up in life, but when you are feeling alone, isolated, not lovable and disconnected, unhappiness follows. So, like most things in life, a real since of happiness ultimately has to be based in your relationship to yourself.
You have a wonderful potential of your life to find real happiness and real love. You have the potential to find this ocean of happiness, where you are at peace with yourself and with the whole universe. This ocean of happiness lies within you and in the very substance of all that is. It lies in your own soul, your own Self.
Finding your inner connection to your own being, a self-love based in your connection to your inner source, enables you to have a ground, a stable base for your life that is positive and supportive. When you connect with a since of unconditional loving consciousness that surrounds you and is within you, you become connected to life. You are no longer alone in the world.
This feeling of empowerment in love and your own being brings the ability to change your attitudes towards yourself, to believe in your own self-worth and to really love and nurture yourself. When you adopt attitudes of self-love and feel your own worth, it changes your relationships to others and you become able to be more caring, more connected to those around you. Life opens up. As you continue to affirm positive attitudes towards yourself and towards others, your experience of the world around.
you changes. That which you may have found dreary and sad becomes beautiful, because you know you are beautiful, lovable and solid in your own self.
The trick to finding this lasting and deep happiness is to learn to bring your conscious awareness out of its normal conditioned patterns of thinking and to focus it on this inner well of joy, this inner peace, inner love. Meditation is the key to doing this. When you have a good meditation practice you have the opportunity to work on your inner connection in silence and stillness. As a result of going within in stillness, you have the space to relax into the universal loving consciousness that is in the core of your own being and gain the knowledge that you are never alone or helpless. You can directly experience the force that guides the stars in the heavens and how it guides you also. This is the journey home to your true shelter.
Once you have a connection to this solid base within you, you can truly begin to change your attitudes and beliefs and build the life you really want to have. When you are awakened to awareness of this unbound loving nature within you, then the bindings that have caused your suffering and awakened fear in you, that bring you into sorrow and joy that comes and goes - those binding falls away. When you are awakened to your own nature, then there is an immense peace - a love that is unconditional. This peace, this love, this is true happiness.
This real happiness lies in your own essential nature, in the truth of yourself, in the infinite divine essence of being. When you abide in this essence, you abide in truth. When you abide in this essence you abide in joy. Joy which is not laughter, but joy which is deep in your soul, in your heart, unbound by circumstance and situation, not dependent upon mood, unbound even by the body.
This happiness is the joy of being, the joy of love without end, the joy of deep abiding peace. This is real happiness and a gift awaiting you in your own soul, in your own essence. This is a natural joy that lies within you.
Awakening to this subterranean stream of infinite happiness is the true goal of life. The ability to be your true Self, to fulfill your destiny, and to rest in the arms of love divine brings you happiness which no one and no circumstance, no matter how difficult, can take from you.
In addition to being an author of five books, Maetreyii Ma, also known as Dr. Nolan, is a licensed psychologist with a doctorate in Transpersonal Psychology, a teacher of yogic philosophy and ancient wisdom, an ERYT 500 Yoga Teacher, and an ordained yogic minister, or Acharya. Maetreyii Ma is currently the president of Ananda Guru Kula, a non-profit organization dedicated to spreading the wisdom teachings of yoga and a psychologist in private practice. She is also the Spiritual Director of Ananda Kamalalaya Ashram, where she offers ongoing training in meditation, yoga philosophy and regular weekly and monthly events.
She is the founder and past president of Ananda Seva Mission, a nonprofit yogic community. She is a former director of and teacher in the Ananda Seva Yoga Teacher Training certification programs and the ASM Yoga Therapy Certification Trainings. Dr. Nolan is also a former director of the Spiritual Emergence Network and a founding member of the Kundalini Research Network.