Happiness and Love

My dear friends...

There is a key to happiness and love that very few people have embraced—and that many have never even heard about. Communion with God gives us that key, and here it is: Happiness is a decision, not an experience. You can decide to be happy without having what you thought you needed to have in order to be happy, and you will be.

That is one of the most important things you could ever come to understand. Allow me, therefore, to repeat it. Happiness is a decision. Your experience is the result of your decision, not the cause of it. In other words, if you experience something as producing happiness, it is because you have made that decision about it. It is not the experience that produced the decision, it is the decision that produced the experience.

The same is true, incidentally, of love. Love is not a reaction, love is a decision. When you remember this, you are approaching mastery. When you apply it to your life, you have arrived at the door.

You may think that you need a particular other person to be complete, or a specific job to be successful, or some other emotional or physical gratification to be happy. That is when you may wish to notice that you are here, right now, without it. Why, then, do you think you need it? Close examination will reveal that you do not need it, not even to be happy.

The irony is that when you move into happiness with or without that person or situation that you imagine you needed, you put yourself in a much better position to attract that person or situation. That is because happiness attracts. It is like a magnet. It is the highest energy, next to love. Indeed, happiness is love, felt. The trick, then, is to be happy before you have what you think you need in order to be happy. Do not wait until after you receive it—or you may never receive it.

CwG invites you to come from the place to which you wish to go. In a sense, you arrive there before you get there—and it is this arrival that takes you there. So choose to be happy, no matter what. This will be one of the most life-empowering decisions you will ever make.

How does one choose to be happy before anything happens to make one happy? There are many ways to do that, and we will look at some of them in this space in the weeks ahead. Right now, here is a simple technique suggested by the famed Buddhist monk, Thich Nat Han: smile five times a day for no good reason.

Smiling actually produces a biological effect in your body. It sends chemicals racing around your body and actually lifts your spirits. Try this today. Then, every day this week, smile five times a day for no good reason. Do it sitting in traffic. Do it standing in the shower. Do it walking down the street, or working at your desk. For no good reason, just break into a smile. Watch your mood change, even though nothing in your exterior has shifted.

Sent with Pure Love,

Read this week's Letter to Neale here

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Read a message from one of the prisoners impacted by our Prison Outreach HERE