How To Be Happy

*In this post, I’m connecting you to your higher self. No matter who you are or where you find yourself, the message contained here is for you because the power is yours and it always will be.*

You must accept yourself. Wherever you find yourself right now, accept the present moment in time even if what’s going on makes no sense to you. Everything that happens in your life is a process. Much of what we don’t understand about our life has to do with where we are in the process. When things happen that we don’t understand, what we must not do is hate life. There’s no other way to do it.

Hating life will lead you to hating yourself. I’m not saying you have to absolutely love every single second of life, but what I am saying is that if you make a habit of hating life and dismissing it as less than special, you’ll be lead down a slippery slope of wasteful depression. Wasteful, because what you have is too valuable to be suppressed, so see to it, that you aren’t the one doing the suppressing. That is the essence of today’s message.

You see, you’ve got to be happy with you. I’ll tell you how I did it because at one time, I hated myself enough to think of ways to quietly end my life. Before I accepted myself, I first had to disconnect from this world. One of the worst practices I engaged in was trying to be too many things to too many people. In the end, what you end up doing is diluting yourself to the point where you don’t even recognize who you are and why you are doing the things that you do. It’s hard to love yourself if you don’t even know who you are. And naturally, it’s even harder to be happy.

Until you accept yourself, you can have too much, and it still, won’t be enough.

The moment you accept yourself is the second your life changes forever, because you’ve just given yourself the one thing that everyone desires yet so few attain: Peace. The richness of life springs eternal for those who are at peace with themselves. The feeling that you get when you first accept yourself–if you can get ahold of it and keep it close to your heart, you’ll enjoy a oneness with the Universe that not even all the money in the world can afford. I say it like that because when you accept yourself, you come in touch with a purpose that exceeds your desires. When you come face-to-face with full complete acceptance of yourself, you enjoy a privilege of peace that very few can relate to across the socioeconomic spectrum. Thing is, what is truly awesome about all of this is you can have this feeling right now and enjoy it! The only one stopping that from happening is that person you see every time you look in the mirror.

The power of acceptance isn’t exactly intuitive. As stated previously, I fell into it by disconnecting from the world. For years my self-worth was entirely predicated on the values and opinion’s of other’s. And my success in that pursuit was inextricably tied to my ability to garner as many fancy material things as possible. I was very worldly. When you accept things more than you accept yourself, that’s a conflict that is impossible to overcome unless you turn the tide. When you value the opinions other’s have of you more than your own, you’ll inhabit an island of isolation drifting further and further away from yourself. Any peace you do uncover will be fleeting at best. In a state of constant appeasement, I found myself shifting person-to-person and moment-to-moment, never really planting myself in a deep-seated bank of values underpinned by a healthy dose of self-confidence. When your confidence is as low as mine was, you find yourself in that interminable race to impress other’s, in particular, those who pretend not to notice you.

I spent time looking for my place in the world instead of finding myself.

Until I disconnected, I had no hope of accepting myself because I didn’t have a clue as to who I really was. Perhaps it comes with age. At 36, I’ve really seen that you can’t win over everybody. For a longtime I thought I could get anyone to like me or get along with me. I associated my success at that with being a good person. In the past, I tried to be too many things to too many people (especially women). I put all this undue pressure on myself to perform with the hope of impressing other’s by being things I was not. Contorting myself into the wants, needs, and desires of other’s is not what I was put here for. I thought I could find happiness doing that but all I found was an echo chamber of perpetual confusion. If I’m not happy, why do I continue doing the things that I do?

It wasn’t until relatively recently that it dawned on me that when you spend most of your time being someone you’re not, you’re inherently dismissing yourself. So many of us live this way everyday and don’t even realize it. Then when we wake-up and see where we are in life, we’re confused–we don’t know how we got here. That is what happened to me.

All through my 20’s (maybe being in auto sales had something to do with this) I went around over-extending myself to people who pretended not to notice me. I’d taken everything I learned at work related to sales and allowed it to spill over into my interactions with others. If I could sell myself and prove myself to other’s and get them to like me, that meant I was a good person. Popularity became a virtuous quality worth pursuing. If I could be the kind of person that other people wanted to be around, then I’d be happy with myself. When you condition the mere possibility of your happiness, don’t even worry–it’ll always be temporary. You deserve better than that. When I look at how far I’ve come, I can’t even tell you why I used to do those things.

I can’t even believe I was that concerned with impressing others.

I know who I am but I don’t even recognize who I was.

When you unveil yourself to your own self, and accept that person, you’ll be at your most powerful, and this momentum will only build on itself over time as it permeates every nook and cranny of your existence. Happiness doesn’t just fall in your lap. It has to be built and maintained like any structure. As the one in charge, the responsibility falls on you–this is not something to be passed off on others in your orbit. If you’re looking for other’s to step in and remind you of how important you are, or of how lucky they are to know you and love you, you will be right back in that cage like a hamster running on a wheel chasing after happiness instead of allowing it to come to you like a moth to the flame.

The hardest thing about being happy is you are the only one that can give it to you. The omnipotent aspect about all of this is that even when it’s taken away, you, are the only one that can give it back to yourself.

Before I end this post, here are a few things to live by.

1. Accept yourself right now.
2. Stop rushing through life–accept and embrace the victories that come along the way.
3. Sometimes it’s the path, not the goal.
4. You cry, but then you smile. You lose, but then you win. You’re lost, but now you’re found.
5. Don’t allow for the fingers of your thoughts to hold onto grudges.
6. You’ll never rise to new heights so long as you tether your every choice to the opinions of others.
7. To “let it go” is not to show a lack of perseverance, but it does show the resolve to move on, take what you learned, and use it to your advantage, for next time.
8. No matter what you do, you’ll never have everyone’s approval.
9. They don’t respect you at the bottom. They pretend to ignore you in the middle. Then they hate you when you rise to the top. So… just keep going.
10. There is no life without loss. But when you lose your hate for yourself, a higher you and a higher life will emerge.

–Daniel Cousin

Do you like this post? Do you want more like this? Comment and subscribe to my blog. Feel free to let me know what you think. Also, you can reach out to me on the links below as follows:

E-Mail: daniel@danielcousin.com