BE A PIG IN SHIT; FIVE FUNDAMENTAL RULES OF HAPPINESS.

Committed to a Masterpiece Day, every day.

There is so much wisdom available from the great thinkers across thousands of years that has been so helpful to me. In the coming months I will be breaking it all down into bite size chunks like this each day. Free and available to anyone who enjoys it.

Very simply, there is nothing more powerful than a changed mind, so if we can change one mind, we can positively transform one life. One becomes two, two becomes four and exponentially compounded growth becomes a billion lives faster than you may think.

Yesterday evening I was inspired to write this post after watching an enthralling program "The Biggest Little Farm". If you haven't seen it yet I would strongly recommend taking a look. Not only is this project a blueprint for how we save humanity and the planet on which we live, it is a living metaphor for the struggles we all must endure in life on a road to ultimate happiness.

I continually advocate with the backing of many profound thinkers throughout the ages that happiness is not living in comfort having everything you want and gloating on social media, it is in fact all about living in your own genius and creating fulfilment, doing what you love with those you love, going beyond the stated norms of society and accepting the growth in pain and suffering that leads to ultimate fulfilment and true happiness.

No suffering. No happiness. Human beings need trials, we need hardship, progress, challenges and connections to each other to survive. If we want to be happy as a pig in shit, first we need to address our mindset, attitude to suffering and how we use our own brains.

Dan Brown.

Right now in this very moment we can be happy. Before we get into all that let's take a look at our most immediate and effective route to brining happiness and joy into our own lives, keeping FIVE FUNDAMENTAL RULES OF HAPPINESS in mind each day.

There is no magic trick, its all about understanding ourselves, being still and learning to breathe. Sounds simple?

Well Simple and Easy are not the same thing my friends, and if you need proof and understanding of what this all means in real life, I suggest you take a look at the life experiences of John and Molly here on "The Biggest Little Farm".

“When we suffer, we tend to think that suffering is all there is at the moment, and happiness belongs to some other time or place. People often ask, ‘Why do I have to suffer?’

Thinking we should be able to have a life without any suffering is as deluded as thinking we should be able to have a left side without a right side.

If there’s no right, then there’s no left.

Where there is no suffering, there can be no happiness either, and vice versa.”

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

FIVE FUNDAMENTAL RULES OF HAPPINESS - NO MAGIC TRICKS.

1. If you like something, enjoy it. You're human and don't need to be a saint, live like a monk, or live at extremes. Find the middle way and enjoy everything you "choose" to have in life.

2. If you don’t like something, avoid it, in fact REMOVE IT immediately.

Jobs, people, a cheese sandwich, anything not aligned to what you decide MATTERS it your life. Decide today, now, and then just cut off the negative distractions remorselessly like a gangrenous leg, they are poisoning your most powerful resource (the mind). Move on.

3. Don’t like something and can’t avoid it? Change it! Happiness is key, life is short, and so decide what you are prepared to tolerate, what matters, what steps to take, and what to remove. Do it every day relentlessly. You decide.

4. If you can’t or choose not to [very important distinction there] avoid or change something you don’t like, then accept it.

You are making the decision to tolerate things that you don't like, you are making a choice to suffer. Pain and suffering are not the same. Pain is physical, suffering is a choice.

5. You can make something acceptable if it matters to you by changing your perception of it.

I hated running for example, still do! I do however like being efficient and walking long distances. I changed my perception on running to taking a very efficient walk, then trained my mind to accept it.

ICE Baths, trained my perception to look at it in the same way as sitting in a hot tub.

Lovely. It's all in our own perceptions.

I will give the final word on this to our man Thich Nhat Hanh with this.

“If we can learn to see and skilfully engage with both the presence of happiness and the presence of suffering, we will go in the direction of enjoying life more.

Every day we go a little farther in that direction, and eventually we realise that suffering and happiness are not two separate things.”

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Bring it on!