You know what joy is, you know what happiness feels like. Look within yourself, that feeling of happiness is already there. It may be a bit buried under all the thoughts and emotions you've been focusing upon lately, but happiness is there within everyone. Why not focus upon that feeling? You deserve it, everyone does, why not make it that simple?
If you're like most people, you've got a hundred reasons to be anxious, and you think these are all perfectly valid reasons too. If you didn't think they were valid, you wouldn't be anxious about the future, about money, health and relationships. “I don't have time to be happy, I've got bills and work and chores to do!” You bind your happiness to situations, events, things and desires, but the good news is, you don't have to. Happiness doesn't really work that way.
By your own choice, you put happiness into the future, and by your own choice, you can have happiness in the present moment. You don't have to let this all happen unconsciously, you don't have to let happiness depend upon situations that appear to be out of your control. Even if you're struggling to make ends meet, you have the power over how you react to that. Some of the happiest people have next to nothing, while some of the most miserable people have everything they could ever want. It's a choice, and it has very little to do with external situations.
You know what happiness is, you know what it feels like, so focus upon that feeling. If you have trouble finding that feeling, look back to your childhood, or think of how you would feel getting something you truly desire. Think of how good it feels to be loved. When you've got the feeling, let go of the memory or the desire that your happiness is attached to. Those things only put conditions on your happiness, what we're going for here is unconditional happiness.
For most people happiness depends upon the fulfillment of desires, though not so much for children, who have a wisdom adults have mostly forgotten. Often the easiest way to cheer an adult up is to give them money, there's an instant improvement in their mood. Of course, the money and the happiness don't last very long, so it's obviously not a path to real happiness. It's not really money making you happy anyway, it's the perceived lack of money making you miserable. When your reason for making yourself unhappy is taken away, you can't help but be happy! Happiness is your natural state of being, which is why children are quite happy until they're taught to not be.
This is why I encourage acknowledgment of negative thoughts, don't dwell on them, but be intensely aware of what they are doing to you. If you're at work, and you keep thinking about how you don't want to be there, all you are doing is making yourself unhappy. You do it to yourself with your own thoughts, be very aware of this as it's happening. If you can be happy at work, and that's a very real possibility, why not be?
I don't like my boss, I don't like the company I work for, I feel like I have no choice, I feel like a slave. For all those reasons and more, you make yourself unhappy. See what you're really doing there, you're spiting yourself! See what's happening, and then you can break out of that pattern. When you start choosing to be happy, then all sorts of other possibilities start opening up. You can start to transform your work and your relationships, you can recreate them from a new sense of self. Suddenly new opportunities start popping up that you may not have even noticed before.
There's people who actually believe it's selfish to be happy, that by being happy you're being disrespectful to all the miserable people in the world. That's really just unhappiness trying to perpetuate itself, the whole “misery loves company” thing. You're not doing anybody any favors by being unhappy, the world already has more than enough of that. Happiness actually helps lift up everyone around you, it's not like some limited resource that you can use up. The more you feed into it, the more it grows, and the more it can spread to everyone else in your life. Happiness is just like Love, there's really no difference between the two. The more it is shared, the bigger it grows.
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