Choosing Happiness Workshop
“The
purpose of our life is Happiness. The turning towards happiness as a valid goal
and the conscious decision to seek happiness in a systematic manner can
profoundly change the rest of our lives.”
His Holiness the Dalai Lama & Howard Cutler.
On this workshop
we will use specific exercises, meditations, stories, laughter and psychological
triggers to discover your issues around happiness and identify and transform
your subconscious blocks to happiness. You will also learn mudras, affirmations
and ongoing exercises & techniques to raise your happiness base rate and to keep
it there, so your one day happiness workshop can turn into a life practice.
This
workshop’s origins lie in a story I heard in class when I was 8 years old. It
was one of the many “3 Wishes” stories, however, it was the first one I had
heard and I sat riveted. I listened in growing frustration as the hero wasted
one wish after another with his folly until he and his family were left with
nothing. The answer was so clear to me from the start, “Why didn’t he just ask
for happiness, he wouldn’t have even needed the other 2 wishes!”
As a species many of us are still chasing happiness through improbable if not
impossible means. We still search for it outside ourselves instead of putting a
fraction of that effort into cultivating the seedbed within.
In
a recent Unicef survey of life satisfaction in children, the UK came bottom of a
list of 21 developed nations. The number of children with emotional and
behavioural problems in the UK has doubled in the last 25 years. In the same
time period, the number of adolescent suicides has quadrupled. We owe it to our
children to make wellbeing a higher priority.
Happiness
is a way of looking at the world. Inner peace and happiness are our birthright,
they need not be dependant on external circumstances. We can choose happiness in
any given moment. We can choose to be grateful for whatever is in our glass, and
be grateful for the glass too. Or we can complain endlessly about the empty
half, each is as true as the other, the only difference is how we see it in the
moment.
Seeing the glass as half full is not the same as looking at the world through
rose tinted spectacles. This suggests a false filter in front of our eyes. The
practice of happiness does not teach that all is perfect in the world. One of
the 4 noble truths in Buddhism is that life is suffering. To be born is to
inevitably experience suffering, loss, pain and death. That too is our
birthright. However, when we reach a stage when we are willing to accept the
suffering, when we no longer fear and run from our pain, we begin to see our
problems and difficulties differently we begin to lay the bedrock for our
foundation of inner peace and happiness. We reach for higher goals, but this
time we begin to look for them in the right place – inside ourselves.
Happiness is not the same as pleasure. Rather, it is more of a spiritual quest.
If we all truly believed in all the spiritual truths we have heard, we would be
living in love, bathed in bliss, emanating ecstasy to all beings, we would be
living Buddha's.
As we all affect the world with a "homeopathic doses" of whatever energy we
carry, learning techniques to lighten our lives and increase our light is an act
of service that benefits anyone who comes in contact with us and ultimately the
whole world, as well as being common sense for ourselves.
Geoff
Mulgan, former head of the govt policy unit, says: “Wellbeing will be the major
focus of government in the 21st century in the way that economic prowess was in
the 20th century and military prowess was in the 19th century.”
When Martin Seligman was elected president of the American Psychological
Association, he turned the focus from mental illness to mental health. He has
made “Positive Psychology” a common term. He and his team discovered that
approximately 50% of our happiness level is genetic, the rest is conditioned by
things under our control – both external factors like job, social life,
relationships, and internal factors i.e. our thoughts and values. They
discovered that some external factors were not as important as people believed,
i.e. changes in income.
Research has shown that people who win large amounts on the lottery return to
their previous happiness level after a period of adjustment, similarly many
people made paraplegic following an accident eventually return to near the same
happiness levels as they had before their accident. It has been shown that our
level of happiness does not rise with income, after basic needs are met.
Research has also shown that laughter increases T cells and NK cells, (Natural
killer cells which fight cancer,) thereby increasing our resistance to
infection, (presumably not to infectious laughter though.) Laughter optimises
the immune system and also reduces stress hormones. When a fertility centre in
Israel hired clowns to make the patients laugh, they found the success rate of
pregnancies increased from 20% to 35%!
Laughter has also been shown to decrease pain, help with depression, sleep and
anxiety disorders.
A group of diabetic heart patients at high risk of a second attach were
prescribed either standard rehab therapy or to watch a funny video for at least
30 minutes 5 times a week. The laughter group were found to have reduced stress
hormones and required less medication. After a year the laughter group had 8%
recurrence of heart attacks while the standard therapy group had 42%.
The government think tank, Foresight, suggests the following 5 points for our
wellbeing:
1. Connect to people. Developing relationships with family, friends, colleagues
and neighbours will enrich your life and bring you support.
2. Be active. Sports, hobbies such as gardening or dancing, or just a daily
stroll will make you feel good and maintain mobility and fitness.
3. Be curious. Value the moment, noting the beauty of everyday moments as well
as the unusual and reflecting on them helps you to appreciate what matters to
you.
4. Learn. Fixing a bike, learning an instrument, dancing, cooking – the
challenge and satisfaction brings fun and confidence.
5. Give. Helping friends and strangers links your happiness to a wider community
and is very rewarding.
Happiness,
like healing, is a journey of self discovery. Our healing path leads us to
greater wholeness, health and happiness. Focusing on happiness leads to greater
healing, wholeness and health. Both teach us to look at the world differently
and to respond to our challenges and difficulties in a more resourceful and
empowered way. We can't progress significantly on our healing path without
finding a greater degree of happiness as a side effect and we can't have long
term happiness without healing our attitudes and beliefs.
Although we all purport to want happiness, in reality it is a significant choice. The fact that you have read this far means you are one of the people who could make that choice. The truth is - if you get as far as coming on a happiness course, you have already taken a huge step. All you need now are the tools and techniques to put it into practice and the determination to stay with it, you are already committed.
The serious pursuit of happiness in everyday life requires courage and willingness to move beyond our mental habits and crutches, to let go of our anger, resentment, judgement and blame against ourselves and others, to let go of any remnants of victim consciousness. We need to leave our "stories" behind, to have the courage to move beyond our cocoon and fly!
In 1996
the BBC produced a QED documentary about a psychologist, Robert Holden, who was
teaching happiness classes - very successfully. The results were beyond doubt,
measurable both personally and scientifically. I watched the people on Robert’s
classes transform in front of my eyes over the 8 week course, their lives had
changed significantly, with some participants even looked very different as they
glowed with happiness and self confidence.
Being happy ourselves is the greatest gift we can give to a world that sorely
needs it! As Robert writes in his book “Happiness Now”:
It is because the world is so full of suffering,
that your happiness is a gift.
It is because the world is so full of poverty,
that your wealth is a gift.
It is because the world is so unfriendly,
that your smile is a gift.
It is because the world is so full of war,
that your peace is a gift.
It is because the world is in such despair,
that your hope and optimism is a gift.
It is because the world is so afraid,
that your love is a gift.