Maintaining My Happy

Happiness is your original nature. before you begin to identify with anything--your race, your nationality, your social status, even your body--it is the first thing you experience. Genuine happiness is being committed to your true nature. The more you know yourself---what you love, what you dislike, what inspires you, what makes you who you are--the happier you will be. What I have come to realize and unfortunately have lived is that when you forget who you are and WHOSE you are, something crazy happens, you start to search for happiness everywhere.

Happiness is what you experience when you truly accept yourself, when you relax and when you stop obsessiong about being a size zero, about why he/she hasn't called and about what I should be doing with my life (my personal favorite).  You must accept that the happiness you hope to achieve--after you find your true partner, get the dream job, buy the ideal home and earn the right money---is already in you. Happiness is the natural state of your soul. It is not something you achieve; it is something you accept. 

I have been faking my happiness for awhile now, thinking that at some point my reality would catch up with the fantasy life I created. Slowly but surely I have started walking in my happy. I'm not 100% everyday, all day, but I am happy because I've decided to be. Yup, I have decided that I am tired of being unhappy and living this exhausting double life. So for the last few weeks I have been reflecting on what helps me maintain my happy. Here are the top 3: 

#1  Mi familia! I truly have the best family in the world, their love for me is above and beyond anything I could have dreamed. They have dragged me kicking and screaming sometimes through life and I can't thank each one of them enough.

#2 Sharing my gifts with others: whether it's singing, being a listening ear, helping someone edit a letter or a paper, organizing an event or throwing a meal together that I know others will enjoy.

#3 My True Friends: You know who you are, the family I got to choose. They have saved me from myself countless times. 

Happiness is a journey not a destination and I am embracing every ounce of it starting with today. 

This is one of my favorite quotes:

"True happiness is to enjoy the present without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not." ~Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Let me end with a line from a song I fell back in love with this year: Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say, it is well, it is well, with my soul.