the 'sunshine for a day' method works indescribably. When you can see other people's eyes fully and they are not furrowing they eyebrows in disgrace of eyes glazed met in anguish and despair, they will look at you heavenly and ask you your name. There is only healthy disposition even in the "tramp" sitting in the tardy square outside the shoeshop. I gazed at my Tao book open in front of me as I walked with my hat over my eyes :
"SEVENTY
MY WORDS ARE EASY TO UNDERSTAND AND EASY TO PERFORM,
YET NO MAN UNDER HEAVEN KNOWS THEM OR PERCEIVES THEM.
MY WORDS HAVE ANCIENT BEGINNINGS.
MY ACTIONS ARE DISCIPLINED.
BECAUSE MEN DO NOT UNDERSTAND, THEY HAVE
NO KNOWLEDGE OF ME.
THOSE THAT KNOW ME ARE FEW;
THOSE THAT ABUSE ME ARE HONORED
THEREFORE THE SAGE WEARS ROUGH CLOTHING AND
HOLDS THE JEWEL IN HIS HEART."
No tramp is he, though I. We stopped to look and I touched his forehead with my hand. We spoken for a few minutes when two boys came to stand by "intrudce me to your girlfriend? he smiled to the old man". "this is my fioncee, her name is er..." "Maria" pipes I. The two boys knew the two old men. One of the old men is quiet and holding a knarled stick. I asked him about it veofre, he carves it himself, grown from special yew wood and is very hard. Carved with the face of an eagle on the top. Top notch. One of the boys speaks spanish, was raised in Peru- till he was eight.
When I walked off to the station bus station the tall boy with the blue eyes, who looked like a riminal but nioce in that sorta charming scruff your boots sorta way, said "I fought Argentinians weren't meant to like enligh people, cos of the football"...The peruvian (who looked rather englaish and kept slipping into an essex drawl, said "cos of the falklands" "oh yeah" the otehr lookedpuzzeld and kept his friendly but intense stare."
I walked off after a bit of quitely chatting.
People seem friendlier in summer.
I read this today
Its abut happyness:
The Six Happiness Tools (Adapted from What Happy People Know, by Dan Baker, Ph.D. and Cameron Stauth (Rodale Books, 2003).
We all want to be happy, but most of us are trapped by ways of thinking and behaving that seem to keep us perpetually dissatisfied. But there are six simple tools that will help us to be truly, deeply happy. Find out what they are, right here:
1. Appreciation.
This is the first and most fundamental happiness tool. Appreciation is the purest, strongest form of love. It is the outward-bound kind of love that asks for nothing and gives everything. Research now shows that it is physiologically impossible to be in a state of appreciation and a state of fear at the same time. Thus, appreciation is the antidote to fear.
2. Choice.
Choice is the father of freedom and the voice of the heart. Having no choices, or options, feels like being in jail. It leads to depression, anxiety, and the condition called learned helplessness. Choice can even govern perception. Anyone can choose the course of their lives, but only happy people do it.
3. Personal power.
This is the almost indefinable proactive force, similar to character, that gives you power over your feelings and power over your fate. Personal power has two components: taking responsibility and taking action. It means realizing that your life belongs to you and you alone, and then doing something about it. Personal power keeps you from being a victim.
4. Leading with your strengths.
When you give in to the automatic fear reaction, it makes you focus on your weaknesses, which only reinforces your fear. But when you take the path of the intellect and spirit, you naturally begin to focus on your strengths—and start to solve your situation. People often think that fixing their weaknesses will save them, but it rarely works. It's just too painful. Leading with your strengths feels good, and that's why it works. Simple but true.
5. The power of language and stories.
We don't describe the world we see—we see the world we describe. Language, as the single most fundamental force of the human intellect, has the power to alter perception. We think in words, and these words have the power to limit us or to set us free; they can frighten us or evoke our courage. Similarly, the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives eventually become our lives. We can tell healthy stories or horror stories. The choice is ours.
6. Multidimensional living.
There are three primary components of life: relationships, health, and purpose (which is usually work). Many people, though, put all their energy into just one area. The most common choice is work, because work best assuages our survival fears of not having enough and not being enough. Other people become obsessed with relationships (because relationship is another word for love), and some people limit their lives in the name of longevity. None of this works. Happiness comes from a full life.
The Five Happiness Traps—Part One
The essential trick of happiness traps is that they seem to offer the solution to happiness, even as they destroy any chance of ever achieving it. They seem to fight fear, but they don't: it's an illusion. One of the cruelest paradoxes of life is that the things we so often seek to soothe our souls are the very things that ultimately feed our fears and cause happiness to forever recede ahead of us, just out of our reach!
1. Trying to buy happiness
At Canyon Ranch, the author often heard people talk about hunting—for diamonds, planes, houses, paintings, and boats—but what he really heard, beneath the surface of their conversation, is people talking about hunting down the one big prize that will finally free them from the two basic, survivalist fears that have haunted people since the Stone Age: the fears of not having enough and of not being enough.
Many of the people the author counsels become fixated upon their hunts. In the heat of the hunt, they often feel a keyed-up, hyperalert sense of excitement—which they generally mistake for happiness—but once the hunt is done, they're almost never satisfied.
The most important message that the science of happiness tells us about money is, almost nobody thinks they have enough. In the dark recesses of our brains, free-floating fear tells us that we need more, more, more—or our very survival will be threatened.
Face facts: Scarcity is burned into your brain. You'll probably never feel as if you have enough money. It's time you accept this. And rise above it.
2. Trying to find happiness through pleasure
One of the new theories of the science of happiness. It's called adaptation level theory, and it says that once we became accustomed to any pleasure, it no longer has the power to makes us happy.
The principle is one of the biggest obstacles to happiness that many people now face, because as a prosperous society were awash in a sea of pleasures that were once out of reach.
Happy people, however, know that its wise to regularly back away from lifes banquet, so that pleasure will stay novel and refreshing.
3. Trying to be happy by resolving the past
About 100 years ago, Freud noted that people often stored traumatic memories beneath the surface of their day-to-day consciousness. Lacking the knowledge we now have of brain anatomy, he dubbed this black box of memory the subconscious, and theorized that if the box were to be cathartically emptied by means of psychoanalysis, people would no longer be haunted by traumatic events.
These days, the strongest new trend in medicine is to help patients achieve vigorous health, and the strongest new trend in psychology is to help people feel happy. Similarly, as the same approach has gained steam in psychology, psychologists have discovered that helping people be happy—without fixating on their anguish—usually solves mental problems even better than trying to somehow "purge" or excise the problems.
One of the main reasons that this approach is working so well in psychology is because Freud's basic premise was faulty. The subconscious cannot be emptied of its dark and dreadful contents merely by bringing them to the light of the day. The subconscious, instead, is a living, functioning part of the brain—the amygdala—which cannot be drained.
The Five Happiness Traps—Part Two
Over the last three decades, this author has listened to thousands of people's stories about the central drama of life—the battle between fear and happiness—and he's found that there are five primary traps that ensnare people who are trying with all their hearts to be happy.
Which happiness traps have seduced and captured you?
If you missed the first three, link here: The Five Happiness Traps—Part One
4. Trying to be happy by overcoming weaknesses
Trying to overcome weaknesses may sound heroic, but its really just another way of being reactive to fear, instead of being proactive about making life better.
Focusing on strengths works simply because it feels better than focusing on weakness. It creates energy, which is always necessary for transformation. Also, its self-sustaining and it's full of rewards.
For example, the author never talks about eating with those with eating disorders. Those people aren't good at eating. What he does talk with them about is what they are good at and about what they love.
5. Trying to force happiness
Happiness is hard work—and it's harder for some people than others, because there is a genetic component to it. In an important study of identical twins who were reared in different homes, it was found that happiness may be as much as 40 percent heritable.
Fortunately, most of the 12 major qualities of happiness—such as love, optimism, and freedom—are intrinsically pleasant, and most of the happiness tools that help generate these elements are innately satisfying. Learn the happiness tools. They can change your life. They've worked for others. Now it's your turn.
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