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.
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