I am back from a week of R&R in Kripalu Yoga Center and feeling very POSITIVE. Seriously positive! It is not only the yoga, meditation, scenery, nature hikes, and being surrounded with nice people, etc. It is also seeing people actively pursuing their goal of living HAPPY lives. As Tal Ben-Shahar, a positive psychology guru, once said “There’s more people wanting to be happy than rich”. Well, we all know “money cannot buy happiness”, so why not go straight to the goal and be happy? Simple eh? Well it is indeed.
Tal happened to be in Kripalu this week teaching the course on Positive Psychology for social workers and therapists. I didn’t attend the course but spoke to some participants and they were totally overwhelmed. Apparently, being happy is SIMPLE! You just have to focus on the right things. Here I’d like to offer this short video by Tal Ben-Shahar talking about the “Incredible Power of Positivity”. Just watch and learn:
So let’s start asking these questions: “what’s going well in your life?”, “what’s going well in your relationships?”, “what are your strengths?”. Let’s talk about our happy moments and happy experience and focus on positives. May be this will shift your balance and attitude?
According to Dalai Lama, “Compassion is a state of mind where you extend how you relate to yourself toward others as well” If you dislike or even hate yourself you’ll create this “hate wave” towards others as well. Dalai Lama teaches us that the key is to start loving ourselves first: “Yourself first, and then in a more advanced way the aspiration will embrace others. In a way, high levels of compassion are nothing but an advanced state of that self-interest. That’s why it is hard for people who have a strong sense of self-hatred to have genuine compassion toward others. There is no anchor, no basis to start from.”