Episode #287 - My Road to Happiness

We are spiritual beings living a mortal life.  It is important to remember that happiness is found in the journey not the destination.

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Welcome to Episode #287 – My Road to Happiness.  What is happiness?  Is it a destination, a location, a person, an experience, a self-help strategy?  The truth is that it is none of those things.  Happiness is not found in the destination but in the journey.  What do I mean by that?  We spend countless days, months and years chasing happiness.  It is in our nature to attempt to be happy and content.  Although those two things don’t always go together.  Only true happiness brings peace and contentment.  False happiness only brings a temporary sensation that must be chased and experienced over and over again.  This chasing of happiness and the never ending quest to find it is the greatest problem of our current society.  They chase happiness everywhere but rarely find it.  And why is that.  Because they seek it in a one time or many time experience where a feeling of excitement is the replacement for true happiness.  The truth is happiness is not an experience or a destination, True happiness is found in the journey and often in a specific journey.  If your journey is running from one exciting experience to another.  Your happiness will be fleeting and will never really feel like true happiness.  If you are waiting for happiness to come to you then you are looking in the wrong direction.  Happiness is simply not a destination we find.  My experiences have taught me a great deal about happiness.  Depression and anxiety and even mania teach you a great deal about how to be happy and content.

One of the blessings of an illness that teaches you about sadness, grief, and discouragement is that it teaches you a great deal about finding true happiness in your life.  So today I am going to outline where true happiness and contentment is found.  You don’t need a self-help book to tell you where to find happiness.  You simply need to listen to your spiritual heart.

1)    Lesson #1, you are a spiritual being having a mortal experience.  Mortality is bewildering to the spiritual being.  Mortality presents all types of feelings, emotions, desires and passions that we didn’t necessarily feel before this life.  Because of the bewildering nature of the feelings we struggle with them.  They very much feel like reality when in actuality they are only partially real.  Our mortal body is meant to survive, reproduce and seek for things that satisfy the mortal body including food, love, respect, admiration, excitement, the rush of adrenaline and a host of other feelings and desires.  However, each of those emotion fulfilling desires comes with a price to be paid and a reward.  Seeking rewards of the brain can be good but only in a balance to the spiritual.  If we allow our hearts and minds to continually obey our base desires, we will find rewards but little to no real happiness.  That is because the reward we are seeking is only temporary and we must go back to the well time and time again to find our chemical happiness.  This is where addiction comes into play.  I would suspect that a great deal of the population of the earth is simply addicted to various sources of chemical happiness.  Now there is nothing wrong with chemical happiness until it takes over your life and you begin seeking for happiness in dopamine and adrenaline rewards.  Addictions vary per person but they always lead to unhappiness.  You can be addicted to almost anything your body rewards including sex, food, adventure, exercise, power, authority, peer pressure, a person or people and a host of other things that bring us rewards to the brain.  The problem here is that you are not seeking happiness but the addiction.  If you want to be happy then moderation is the key.  Do not let something in this life dominate your temporal lobe and your attention. You can certainly have hobbies and passions that drive you but remember that feeding the dopamine in your brain consistently leads to terrible addictions that are robbing you of freedom and happiness.

2)    Lesson #2, spiritual beings need spiritual experiences.  We are spiritual beings that have lived that way long before we came into mortality.  Most of what we have know has been spiritual and that is where we learned happiness.  It is no wonder why we don’t feel happiness from mortal things.  That isn’t where are happiness is centered.  The gospel of Jesus Christ outlines our happiness through teachings that are to be applied to everyday situations.  When we help a neighbor, listen to a friend, get lost in the scriptures, make others our priority we find happiness not in the event but in the journey.  Now there is much more to spiritual experiences and some of those experiences even include mortal ones.  A blending of mortal happiness and spiritual happiness is where true happiness is most likely to be found.  The key to happiness is to remember that we are spiritual beings having a mortal experience.

3)    Happiness does not only come from spiritual experiences but teaching them.  We need to teach others happiness through our own actions and by our thoughts words and deeds.  As we teach others happiness, happiness will come to us.  Happiness comes through the spirit of the Lord.  When we are attentive to the spirit and its teachings and revelations we receive the reward of happiness.

4)    It is going to be very difficult to feel happy during deep episodes of depression, grief and anxiety.  Even mania has its challenges.  That is important to remember.  We can fight so hard for happiness during our episodes that we will make ourselves even more depressed, anxious and unhappy.  Forcing happiness never works.  This doesn’t mean we can’t work to be happy and we should.  Sometimes we just push too hard and get ourselves under stress.  Happiness should not be stressful but come to us naturally.  So what do we do when mental illness strikes.  We pray, and pray some more.  The Lord is generous when we pray even when we have committed sins because of our illness.  The illness allows for mercy and the Lord knows our trials and troubles better than we do.  Strangely all of our depression and anxieties provide for a deeper and greater happiness than we could ever have felt.  In this world and the next, the deeper we feel sadness the deeper we feel happiness.  One of the reasons for our illness is to teach us happiness.  Now I know that it doesn’t feel that way but we will be very grateful for these lessons in the next life and even this one.

5)    So how to be happy now.  Reduce the stress in your life and that includes religious stress.  The Lord never meant for the gospel to be stressful.  If it is then you aren’t doing it right.  Allow the gospel to dispel into your heart rather than trying to force it into a space that really isn’t ready for it.  One of the best ways to become happy is to avoid reliving the past.  It is rare that when we relive the past we relive happy moments.  When we suffer our body tends to bring back memories of suffering and  difficult moments.  We need to learn to occupy our minds with other things and to cast out the past.  Don’t get me wrong.  This is not easy to learn.  I have spent many years trying and still have not mastered this ability but I have found some measure of peace as sI have been successful in my attempts.  A note that is important is that the Lord will help you to avoid reliving your past.

6)    Do you best to live the teachings of the gospel without stressing yourself out.  Stress is a major factor in reduced happiness and this includes worldly endeavors and spiritual ones.  Right now I slept a great deal due to my autoimmune illness and my mental one.  This was and at times continues to be difficult for me because I had been taught that it is wasting your day.  I have had to retrain myself that it is OK.  My body needs it and it isn’t sin.  When I do force myself not to sleep I tend find far more problems.  Sometimes we just need to accept what our body allows and not worry about wasting our day or other traditions taught by men.  Avoid stressing yourself out about everything.  You can’t do it and that is OK by the Lord.  This doesn’t mean that we don’t push ourselves a little but to do so to the point of serious stress never does us any good.  Feeling bad about our limitations will never lead to happiness so accept them and do your best.  Those limitations that we have in mortality are important to our salvation and so we must do our best to accept the limitations that Lord has given us.  If we are to be the widow with two mites then so be it.

7)    Finally, you have been given a gift that very few get to have.  Now you might say I don’t see this as a gift.  But as you lean upon the Lord I promise that you will.  Gifts from the Lord rarely come in easy packages with pretty bows.  They often come in dark nights and deep pain.  The Lord always works in unique ways to teach valuable lessons.  The is why it is called his strange act.  As we see our trials and troubles as gifts we will learn their purposes and designs.

8)    As a final thought, lean upon the Lord.  Let him carry the burden and you learn the lessons.  These lessons of life are individual and not easy.  The harder the lesson the more likely you are to learn valuable lessons and skills needed for exaltation.  The Lord is ever willing to help you.  Don’t think in large ways but small ones.  I have found the Lord willing to help in both ways but most often he wants us to daily lean upon him, not just in moments of deepest troubles.  Talk about your minor problems and your major ones with him and ask for solutions and bring him solutions.  I promise as you do you will find answers to your questions and concerns.  Most of all learn to love the Lord.  You know I had never heard the Lord specifically state that he loved me individually until just the other day.  I know that sound strange but this illness does strange things to the heart and mind.  May the Lord bless you in your struggle and heal you in your pain.  Until next week do your part so that the Lord can do his.