Want to know the key to happiness? I believe that the key to happiness is deciding to be happy. That’s right, YOU have the ability to choose how you feel and how you respond.

One of my favourite quotes at the moment is by Charles R Swindoll; “We cannot change our past...we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it.”

We’re too easily and too often influenced by the conditions of our environment, that we don’t actually realise we get to decide our perspective.

This is where meditation has taught me a lot about my own ability to choose how I feel and not wait for something to happen in my external environment in order for me to finally feel good.

I can simply close my eyes, return my focus to my breath and bring to mind a visual image or memory where I feel or felt energized, happy, excited, hopeful, loved… you name it!

The body will simply follow the mind, so if you think positive thoughts or re-live positive memories, your body actually begins to respond as if that event was happening in real life!

This is also why gratitude works so well for cultivating more joy, appreciation and happiness in our life. When you CHOOSE to think about all the good things that happened in your day and that you can be thankful for, you take control over how you want to see your life and where to allocate your focus. As you draw on those positive emotions, your body then gets to re-live it once again and you have become your own source for feeling GOOD.

Either, we decide to be calm, confident, composed, grateful and accepting of the things we can’t control, or we don’t.

…and we let the conditions of our environment determine it for us.

In taking the second option and relinquishing our control over our own emotions and perception, we’re basically handing over our responsibility for our own lives.

It’s like saying, ‘If it’s raining, I will be sad, and if it’s sunny, I’ll be happy.

This is also something that Gabby Bernstein talks about and I’d recommend you grab a copy of ‘Super Attractor’ to learn how to climb your emotional ladder from hopeless to hopeful without looking externally.

With love, Jess

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