How to be happy

Decide to be happy

The beginning point and the most important factor for happiness is a decision. It’s not about practicing meditation or about which teacher you learn from. Those things are important in learning how to be happy, but the most important factor is a decision itself—the decision to be happy.

For example, sometimes in a relationship there might be friction or our partner might dump us, and so we feel disturbance and anger and these sorts of emotions. Over time it goes away naturally, because something inside us just lets it go and accepts that it’s over. We actually make a decision to not let it disturb us anymore. Although we may not be aware of it, somewhere along the way we made a decision.

My first break-up

When I was in high school, I was dating this girl and after only three weeks we broke up. I was feeling sad and my face was looking sad all day. I remember saying to my step mother, “Have you noticed a change in how I am?” She said, “It’s obvious! Before, you were your normal bubbly self and now suddenly you’re all quiet and sad-looking.”

So you can see, I was experiencing the break up for real but I was also actually aware that I was acting this dramatic role of, “Oh the break up, oh the loss of the romance,” exactly like the Hollywood movies we watch!

So happiness is just a decision to stop acting, stop taking life seriously.

It’s almost like somewhere inside us we are told to be sad when someone breaks up with us, so therefore we have to play that role out. But it’s important to know that we don’t have to do that, we have the power within us to let go of that role-playing and choose a new way of being.

We know how to be happy

Each of us is actually aware and knows when we’re ‘being’ sad. This is important in the search for how to be happy, because it means we can drop being sad if we want to. In the same way, when we are angry, if we really want to, we can just drop it and stop playing that moody person. We are playing it like we are acting.

When I was a spiritual seeker I made a conscious decision: “In my life I will let nothing disturb me.” At the time I would get disturbed by many things, but I made a decision that nothing would disturb me. In other words, “I’m not going to be sad and upset, whatever is happening. I’m not going to get nervous, no matter what’s happening.” It’s a decision you make.

When you decide to be happy, your whole perspective shifts

When you make the decision to be happy, that has massive consequences—massive! Immediately my perspective was shifted and my reactions to challenging situations were different, because of the decision to be happy, to let nothing disturb me.

Meditation techniques helped me to prepare to face life’s challenges, but I didn’t even have to learn too many techniques. In the moment when I was facing a challenge, I just didn’t participate in the drama. So therefore I remained as I was before the event happened, because I had truly made the decision not to let anything affect my normal state of being.

What really is happiness

Believe it or not, when you’re not disturbed, when you’re relaxed and calm, you’re happy—in that moment you are happy. If you are looking for a greater happiness it is not going to come.

We are taught that we have to achieve something to be happy. But if we are not disturbed, we are actually happy.

Practicing how to be happy

When you make a decision to be happy, it’s not a technique. You just have that will to keep your calm and not participate in any disturbance.

It’s not always easy practicing how to be happy, because of the conditioning that pulls you to react with disturbance. Conditioning is all the rules that come when we are facing a challenge in life. We react, thinking, “I should stand up for myself, I shouldn’t let that person scream at me like that, he has no right, I should quit my job!”

These thoughts or conditioning come in, but if you have made a decision to be happy, to not let anything disturb you, then there is something inside you that uses will and strength to be calm, to be relaxed.

At first, you’re not so good at it, but as long as that decision to be happy remains, next time it happens you get better at it. You get better and better, and you get disturbed less easily.

The tools for happiness

Everyone else is facing challenges in life too. But if we have made that decision, it shifts the whole perspective towards happiness, towards life. Now, spiritual practices like meditation, kind deeds and living consciously in the present moment, start to make sense.

They don’t just make sense—you love these tools! It’s like a painter loves their paintbrush. They just love using it to paint because it is their tool of trade.

So these practices become your tools of trade, you love them.

The real decision

Once you make that decision to be happy, you are 90% to mastery. Really! But just because someone is doing actions on the outside, like joining a spiritual group, that doesn’t mean they made the decision to be happy. It could be that they would like to be a part of a group so they feel some sort of connection and love. That is human, it’s beautiful, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but that is not a decision to be happy.

There are people in monasteries who have spent many years with great Masters but they may not have improved very much. How could it be? Because that person made a decision to be a nun or a monk, but did not make a decision to be happy! So that person’s actions do not reflect sincere practice towards happiness. They are not wholeheartedly practicing these tools of trade.

Similarly, someone can make a decision to come to one of my classes, saying, “I’ve had enough of the struggle, I just want peace of mind, I want to learn how to be happy.” But that doesn’t mean they have made the decision to be happy. For their happiness level to progress quickly, they have to make the decision to be happy, not the decision to come to a class.

When life smashes you and you feel heavy pain and suffering, then one day you just make the decision, “I’m not going to let anything disturb me.” You make that decision.

What does it mean to decide?

What does “I want to be happy” mean? It means something really simple. It means happiness is the top priority in our life.

Maybe one of our priorities is that we want to be successful in our job, or that we want to have a partner, or a bit more money in our bank account—there is nothing wrong with that. These things are important, but where is happiness on that priority list? Where on that list is the decision to be undisturbed in any situation in life? Is it first on the list, or third, or not even on the list?

If it’s not even on a person’s list, they won’t look for a teacher, or read books to be inspired to learn how to be happy.

If it’s somewhere on the list, maybe at number seven, then occasionally it is a priority but other things like security, wealth and relationships are more important. So happiness is important, but it’s at number seven. What that means is that when life smashes them, when the relationship breaks up, they start to look for some books that will comfort them, but as soon as they find another partner the books get hidden on the shelf again. So happiness remains at number seven.

Being happy is the number one priority

When we make a decision to be happy, then happiness becomes number one. The other priorities are still important—numbers two, three, four, five, six and seven—but happiness comes to number one on the list. That means you have truly made the decision to be happy.

When that happens, then you’re going to get real good at the spiritual practice techniques you learn. Where someone might take 10 years to practice and be good at something, you will learn it in 10 days and you will be better than people who have been practicing it for 10 years.

The Buddha made a decision to be happy and when he went out to search, he learned techniques from different Masters. He would practice each Master’s technique for a short period of time, and within a week or a month he would reach the highest level of practice for that particular technique. But if he hadn’t made the decision to be happy, and his priority for happiness was at number seven, could he learn the techniques so quickly? Absolutely not!

Teachings for how to be happy

When you have made the decision to be happy, spiritual practices become interesting. You’re fascinated—you can’t wait to practice the techniques you’re learning and to see how good you can be at them.

It’s no different if we put fame as our top priority—we would do anything to become famous and we have a lot of willpower to do whatever leads to fame.

So happiness is really a decision. If you have made that decision, then when you meet a spiritual Master you just absorb the teachings really quickly and you connect beautifully with the teacher.

When you have made the decision to be happy

What happens to a person when they make the decision, “I want to be happy, I will not let anything disturb me”? This decision is their own free choice, so naturally that person loses interest in those things that create disturbance or drama. Suddenly they just have no more interest in watching Rambo movies! Their interests change, naturally.

It’s not just their interests that change, but also the people they spend time with. They don’t connect in the same way with old friends. It doesn’t mean they aren’t friends with them, they just have nothing really to talk about so they don’t spend very much time together any more.

If you made the decision to be happy as your first priority, this doesn’t mean you’re better than other people. It’s just a different choice, that is all. Your friend’s first priority might be security. Another person might have something else as number one on the list.

A life-changing decision

When you make the decision to put happiness as number one, your whole life starts to change.

You start to not worry too much about saving money. Financial security is still important, but it might be number seven, not number one.

A person who has financial security as number one will not share, because if you give money away then you will have less money in your bank account. But the person who decides to be happy, who puts happiness as number one, will love to do whatever it takes to experience happiness.

They may see a Master and think, “Wow, I want to be like that.” So when the Master says, “Be giving,” and the Master demonstrates that in their own life, then they will naturally start to share. Not because someone has told them to share, but because their Master has offered a teaching and they are not worried about losing.

Courage

When you live that way it sounds like you are courageous, but you’re not really. When you are sharing, it looks like you are courageous but really it’s just that your actions are consistent with that decision to put happiness as number one on the list. It’s not really being courageous.

Unfortunately it seems that people only make the decision after immense suffering, and immense suffering generally comes from putting other things higher on the list of priorities.

If happiness is not even on the list, obviously you are going to have suffering because you don’t rate happiness as important. The opposite of happiness is suffering, so you are going to have suffering because you never invested in the tools, you never learned how to master and experience more of that inner peace, that state of joy.

Contemplation

There are two ways to speed up mastering how to be happy.

1. Do a lot of spiritual practice, so you are ‘living it’; and
2. Contemplation—“Do I want this? Do I really want this as number one in my life?” Ask yourself this, and then contemplate, “If not, why not?”

Without contemplation, we wait until life smashes us and all the suffering comes. Then, at that point, we realise that these other priorities such as security, wealth, relationships and such things are actually number one on our list and happiness is lower. In other words, when life smashes you, then you realise that. But why do that? Why not contemplate before life smashes you?

It makes you see, “Oh, that leads to this, and this leads to that, and that leads to misery.” Or, “That leads to this, and this leads to that, and that leads to happiness. I want happiness, I want more of that.”

It makes you see more clearly, so happiness moves on the priority list from seven, to five, to three, to one! Or if you have suffered so much already, after some contemplation you will just put being happy straight up to number one.

My own decision to be happy

I have to admit, it was because life smashed me so hard that I had to ask, “What is really important?”

In my mid twenties, I had a moment when I nearly died in a road collision. I was lucky to be alive and I thought of all those times that I would have liked to have been happy and to have lived with happiness. I just never had the guts to really live like that, and then suddenly when that near death came, I felt, “I have nothing to lose.” It’s like I had been given another chance. It was a really close call.

I made a vow immediately to God, which was very new for me. I just said something like, “God, now this life is not my life any more, this life is your life, please use me. You know what I love—use me that way.”

What I was really saying in the vow was that other things in my life were no longer as important—happiness became number one. I wanted to live a beautiful life.

The decision came to me at that moment. It was just one of those things that happened. It changes you, when you have such a close call like that.

For me, happiness was already on the list at the time, but the issue of survival was more important. And after that close call, happiness went up straight away.

Passion to learn how to be happy

After making that decision, I read books differently, more intensely. Once, I had two or three days to spare when I was on holidays, so I went to a bookshop and spent the whole time reading spiritual books that inspired me. I would just read and cry, read and cry the whole day! My whole perspective was different when happiness became number one.

I realised I had so much more to learn, so when I met a spiritual Master it was very beautiful. I had read about these types of Masters in books but then I’d get to the end of the book and learn they died many years ago. And then I met one! Straight away, I worked to save money quickly so I could go to India to the Master.

My Master always said, “The soap of selflessness will clean all our miseries away.” So every time someone asked me for help, I said yes unless I had another job to do at the time. I was living what the Master taught about selflessness, in every possible moment.

So these actions I took are not courageous, they just reflected that I put happiness as the first priority in my life. You can see that what is amazing is the decision itself, not my actions afterwards.

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