Lasting happiness comes from within. The material world can only bring us waves of love, joy, power and peace when we are already feeling it inside. To experience waves of happiness in life we must already be happy and then experience the waves generated by what we receive. If we are already happy, it doesn’t take enormous materal success to generate waves of joy.
When living in the material world we feel unhappy, we sometimes think that by obtaining more, we will find the happiness we seek. But, what good is it to achieve a goal and then feel it is not enough? What good is it to get what you have always wanted and then not want it anymore? What good is it to have a alot of money and then look in the mirror and not like yourself?
To find true happiness, we must make achieving personal success and not material success our number one priority. Personal success is achieved when you feel really good about yourself and your past, present and future. As you achieve more personal success, you discover that wanting more and not getting it does not cause unhappiness. Instead, wanting more creates positive and happy feelings like passion, confidence, determination, courage, excitement, enthusiasm, hope, appreciation, love and gratitude.
Wanting more in life is not the cause of our unhappiness. When you are already happy and confident inside, wanting more and engaging yourself in the process of getting more creates waves of joy, love, confidence and peace. When outer succes leaves us feeling unhappy, we conclude that the cause of our unhappiness is not having the next thing. Most of the time, when we are unhappy, we are wanting something and that we are unhappy because we don’t have what we want. Material success can only make you happy if you are already happy.
For, wanting more is the nature of our soul, mind, heart and senses. It is natural to want more love in our relationships. It is good to want more success in our work. It is normal to enjoy the pleasures of life and want more. Abundance, growth, love, pleasure and the movement toward more is the nature of life.
Unhappiness is simply the lack of inner joy and has nothing to do with our external happiness. It is the absence of joy. Unhappiness is similar to darkness as it is the absense of light. The way to remove darkness is to turn on the lights. Thus, our unhappiness lessens as we learn to turn on the light within us.
When we devote all of our attention to outer success, we may get there faster, but lose ourself in the process. Many people have achieved great wordly success by feeling nothing within. For, it is easier to make decisions and do what achieves outer success when you do not care about anyone else. This is the dark side of material success.
When we connect with our true selves, we are automatically happy, because who we truly are is already happy. Our true nature is already loving, joyful, confident and peaceful. To find that happiness within us we must begin an inner journey to recover and remember who we really are. We find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of our life, but by realizing who we are at our deepest level. We can not find inner peace through others. It comes from us.
When sometimes our comforts of life are temporarily taken away, we experience that we can be happy without them. We find that what we have within us can sustain us and our happiness endures. With that said, material abundance or the desire for it is not the problem. Outer success is only the cause of unhappiness when we make it our primary focus and neglect being true to ourselves. Once we have fulfilled our personal wellness, external factors can definitely compliment what we already have.
Worldly success does not have to take us away from ourselves. You can have outer success and be true to yourself. With an understanding of how to create personal success you can experience both inner and outer success.
Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every moment with love, grace and gratitude. For, if you want to feel rich, you just have to count all the things you already have, that money cannot buy.
