How To Be Happy – Busting the Happiness Myths

Posted by Christine Hoeflich _Featured_, Happiness Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012

Recently I read an article on, in a nutshell, how to be happy. In the article, the spiritual teacher states that she has found that many people in her circle who have been following the “path” have been in fact experiencing a lot of the opposite recently; for example, serious health problems or incidents of what they’ve determined they do NOT want in their life–even though they’ve been into various types of spiritual practice, intending and positive visualization. So what is going on here?

The teacher claims that this negativity usually means that you’re very close to manifesting what you DO want. It’s just that you need to “claim this change,” to “return what you did not order” and to demand what you “ordered on your plate.” You just need to be certain of what you want and get back to imagining what you desire and “prepare yourself to receive,” she goes on to explain. I left out the name of the teacher in my article because it really doesn’t matter; almost all of them say the same thing.

I am so tired of this regurgitated nonsense. I thought we have learned some things about manifesting since the book, The Secret, came out several years ago. Apparently not a whole lot.

Do you get happy by lying in bed and visualizing your happiness? Do you get what you want by visualizing in your mind what you do want and “returning to the Universe what you do not want?” Haven’t lightworkers been trying these same techniques for years now without a whole lot of success?

I’ll tell you how to get happy. It’s really not that complicated. You will get happy when you connect with your higher self / soul / true self (sometimes referred to as your “heart”) and follow through with your “heart’s” guidance. You will become happy when you align with your higher self. Another way to say this is: you will get happy when you stop betraying yourself.

How can you be happy when you’re constantly going against your heart? Every time you ignore your inner guidance, your subtle inner feelings, you’re betraying yourself. No wonder you’re not getting what you want and you’re not happy about it.

You can try to fill the holes in your “heart” by worldly things such as going shopping or going to fancy lunches with your girlfriends or going drinking with your buddies. But you’ll find the hole only gets bigger the more you try to fill it with those empty distractions.

I remember feeling this hole in my heart about a decade ago. I tried to fill it by going shopping or by going to lunch with fun girlfriends. But my higher self wasn’t easily fooled. I felt the hole in my heart got bigger the more I tried to fill it with those “outer world” things. So I stopped doing them and embarked on a different path. I connected with my higher self and worked on fulfilling my higher purpose. (Well, I got pushed in that direction by other means, too.)

I wrote about this experience in my memoir, What Everyone Believed: A Memoir of Intuition and Awakening. I wrote about how once I got into doing my higher purpose (following my heart, which means following through with the inner guidance I receive), I turned down lunch offers with girlfriends and spent the time alone, writing. (For me to do this was amazing, since what I was writing about at that point was actually quite painful. But I was truly having a blast.)

In fact, a friend of mine got a bit insulted when she read that part of my manuscript. But I explained that it wasn’t that I wasn’t valuing her or her time for I truly love and value her. It’s just that what I needed to do at that time was to write–while the creativity and writing were flowing.

The steps for how to be happy or how to get what you want are really the same: reconnect with your higher self and integrate (align, merge) with your higher self by following through with your inner guidance so that you fulfill what you came here for: your higher purpose. It really is that simple. It’s just not that easy. (But … most everything worth having takes some effort, no?)

To discover the steps (including real life examples) for reconnecting and integrating with your higher self, check out my how-to eBook by clicking on the link below:

Activating 2012:  A Practical Guide for Navigating 2012 with Confidence and Clarity

Featured image source: Doegos’s Flickr Photostream