CHECKLIST OF THE ARTS OF HAPPINESS

Many people need to raise their happiness “set-point” because biological factors and/or life experiences have lowered it. Yet we all need practices to maintain, broaden and deepen our happiness. These practices affect –in the direction of greater inner peace and contentment — your actual neural networks as well as their interactions with your endocrine system, organs, etc. Frequent practice is the key to this, and they become good habits too. This list is a reminder, and a jumping point for more learning and exploration during our sessions.

• Setting the intention upon waking, and many times during the day, to be as happy as you can; to make each moment as beautiful and meaningful as you can make it.
• Paying attention and savoring, for a few seconds at least, each beautiful and meaningful creature, person, thing, interaction, feeling, idea. Living your day as a poem (there are all kinds of poems).
• Mindfulness: mindfulness of what’s around us; mindfulness of your inner states: physical and emotional feelings, stress levels, attitudes, intentions, triggers, etc..
• Mini-meditations and relaxation. Pause several times a day for just one or two minutes, breathe deep and gently, scan your body for tension and reax it, and envision your brain as very soft playdough, flopping, resting upon a soft comfortable pillow inside your skull. Smile.
• Transforming your “harsh inner critic” into “your best friend and wise advisor”. Making the choice, moment by moment, to have a gentle and caring attitude towards yourself, so your self-talk comes from your wisdom within, spoken like a best friend would.
• Updating your self-concept. Don’t let the views about you, and what is possible for you – created when you were younger and more vulnerable — continue to limit you, and lower your self-esteem.
• Not allowing useless, repetitive, worries to go on and on in our heads. Instead, interrupting this and implementing a method to (a) get it out (journal?); (b) define the problem and the information to be sought; (c) make a plan of action, and (d) go to do self-care and to something fun or interesting. All guided by the wisdom in the Serenity Prayer (understanding what we can change, what we cannot change, and knowing the difference).
• Re-state problems as creative questions. Find ways to gain big perspectives.
• Choose the best stress management, decision making and problem solving strategies for you. These may change over time.
• Learn about your biology. What hereditary, past experience, age, and environmental factors are affecting your mood/anxiety/stress response levels — your resilience. Take leadership of your wellbeing, together with the best therapists and physicians you can find.
• Sleep, nutrition and exercise: They are absolutely key to good mood. But if they need improvement, find ways that you enjoy, that inspire you, and are as gradual as needed to not arouse resistance that defeats the endeavor. “Working” at these in stressful ways is counter-productive.
• Use natural supplements when you need them and find good professional advice for you (all the items on this list are natural medicine too), but don’t outright refuse other medicines if they are right for you and will give you the support needed to practice the arts of happiness.
• Have fun, pleasure and relaxation every day and as often as you can. Practice breathing relaxation several times a day (a minute each). Learn to do what needs done with creativity, with authentic presence, savoring people and moments.  Find funny people, funny jokes, funny movies – and your own funny bone.
• Make a list of all the things you would enjoy doing, pause when you run out of ideas, and search for more. Sometimes we forget things we would enjoy, we get into ruts.
• Cultivate your relationships with the special people in your life, and if needed, find other real, healthy, wholesome people to befriend. Show them your love frequently. Don’t miss opportunities for having meaningful times with such people.
• Find teachers, mentors, helpers and role models, for different stages of your life.
• Do random and non-random acts of kindness; exercise your compassion – it also needs exercise. Find your ways to make a better world.
• Learn who can be trusted and with what, and who cannot be trusted; and set firm limits with the latter. Understand and eschew co-dependence. Learn how to manage difficult people who don’t respect your boundaries and your rights.
• Practice the assertive attitude: “you deserve to express yourself and ask for what you need and want – with a care to respect others as you wish to be respected.”
• Cultivate integrity. Deceiving yourself or others makes for a shallow “happiness”. Know your values and how to put them in practice in healthy ways. Resolving ethical dilemmas deepens and matures a person.
• Have a gratitude practice: name 3 things you are grateful for – at least when you wake up and before sleep. Gradually become more mindful of gratitude while you savor moments during the whole day.
• We each give meaning to our moments and our days: Consider, daily, the miracle that the universe exists, and the incomprehensibly amazing journey of the universe un until it made you – with all the universe of feelings, thoughts, capabilities and uniqueness that is “within” you. Make each day count; and each day honor this miracle.
• Connect or reconnect, ever more deeply, with nature. Take care of Nature.
• Develop awareness of how emotions feel in your body. Listen to your body’s reactions and intuitions.
• Get to know your own soul. Use whatever practice works for you so you are increasingly living out of the deepest part of you which I will call “soul” — rather than being driven solely by external circumstances.
• Spirituality is something that one develops. Keep developing yourself and you’ll experience meaningfulness.
• Use your creativity, and develop your creativity further. One can be creative in any area of life. It is the opposite of: being in a rut, being inauthentic, fitting a mold, being stuck and uninspired. There are many ways to access and develop creativity – but they all involve the capacity to listen to something voiceless, something that feels like a possibility, until it takes form.
• Learn and do new things: physically, emotionally, relationally, intellectually, artistically, spiritually.