6) The First Steps Towards Happiness

Usually, we only decide that we need to make changes in our life when we have come to some kind of rock bottom. This could be discovering that we are terminally ill, or someone close to us is diagnosed with illness, or we lose someone very dear.

Something that rocks our world in this way, makes us sit up and notice that our life is passing us by, but that we are not really doing anything with it to help other people. We feel in our very core that this is not right. We feel we should do something to help. We feel it is our place to help. That helping is our destiny, that it is the only way to achieve fulfillment. Doing something that will somehow help others will also help us happy and make us fulfilled. We feel this deeply for the first time. And it hits us hard.

We start on the path by deciding that from now on, we will do these three things daily, every day, constantly:

1. From now on, we will actually go out of our way to avoid hurting ourselves or others. 
2. From now on we will meditate daily, to keep our minds balanced and at peace. 
3. From now on we will actively learn about our world, where we come from, where are we going, where we fit in. 

We stop hurting ourselves and others, firstly, by stopping automatically reacting to things and people. The auto-reactions are so much a part of our lives, but when we stop, we also stop misinterpreting the messages our senses send us. We become happier, and we find internal peace, and therefore so do those around us.

As within, so without. As we sow, so shall we reap.

But we have to make a big effort.

We have spent our lives to date, repeating the mistake, of re-acting rather than responding to people and situations. We have extremely hard set habits. It takes a huge amount of determination to change habits.

We need enough determination to bring success. Without a strong resolve, we will give up, because changing habits is difficult.

We will find the strong resolve, if we have total conviction that stopping the auto-pilot is the only way to bring lasting, true peace and happiness into our lives.

To develop the conviction, we need to research it a little. Understand exactly what we need to do and why we need to do it.

We can be under no illusion that to achieve the peace and happiness which is available to everyone, will take constant practice and hard work.