Happiness is Socially Responsible

At this time of my life, I am happier more consistently than I have ever been in my entire life. Sometimes when I talk about this with people, they say, but how can you be happy? Look at the state of the world, so much suffering, and so on. I say my happiness is not dependent on what happens outside of me. Somehow that doesn't seem to satisfy.

Recently in one of my Quantum Goal Setting group coaching sessions, someone mentioned feeling very guilty about how much she had and how happy she was. I paraphrased Wayne Dyer who said "You cannot be unhappy enough to make others happy". In other words, no matter how unhappy you get for those others or because of those others, it will not change their happiness level. What he meant was that you being unhappy, too, is not going to change those other's happiness. All it would mean is now you have two unhappy people instead of one. So what does this mean for us?

Be happy. Live happy. Express happiness. Share happiness. Teach happiness to your children. This is how you make a difference in the world. As the Buddhists would say, you cannot help others while suffering yourself. Being happy is the socially responsible thing to do. Your happiness will set an example, radiate out to others, and change the overall energy level of the entire world. If you are happy and because of that a few others have their mood lifted a little, then their moods being lifted causes an uplift in the moods of the folks around them, there is a positive ripple effect.

In case you doubt that happiness can make changes in and of itself, let me give you a couple of examples. The first is taken again from Wayne Dyer. In an article at www.healthtimesonoma.com/spring04/wayne.html, he says, "An interesting physical phenomenon occurs when you are kind to someone, Dyer says. Both you and the person you are kind to end up with a good feeling, a real increased level of serotonin, the calming, feeling-good hormone. Even better, the witnesses to this act of kindness also feel good, and their serotonin levels increase as well."

"You know how good you feel when you see an act of kindness. You know how bad you feel when you listen to the news. The answer is to really change around your energy," he says.

"The solution to all of that for each and every one of us is to say 'I want to feel good and I want to teach every one around me to feel good', and if enough of us learn to feel good, and that is the same thing as saying I want to feel God" “… Instead you start practicing acts of kindness and acts of love and eventually, inch by inch, the world is a better place," Dyer says.

"A universal source that creates everything in this universe comes from a perspective of kindness," Dyer says.

In another study, meditation was found to significantly drop the crime rates in several major US cities. The meditation was done by an organized group within the city and others in the cities noted more calm even though they were unaware of the meditation going on. This effect lasted for awhile even after the meditation ceased. Additionally, crime rate dropped in the cities by as much as 25%. To see more about one of the studies, see http://www.istpp.org/crime_prevention/

So using only a small leap of imagination, if you compare kindness or the meditative state to happiness, you can see that happiness can make a real difference to those around you and even to those across the world through the ripple effect.

Striving for happiness is not only NOT SELFISH, it is the socially responsible thing to do. So go for it!

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