Tao In You

If you want to be happy, chances are you’d be unhappy.

If you’re happy, you don’t have to think about wanting to be happy. Happiness comes naturally from factors like love, contentment and pleasure that make you feel good, not the thought of wanting to be happy.

When you want to be happy, it can be that factors like sour relationship, failure, stress, and what not are making you unhappy. Such factors, unfortunately, will not go away with the thought of wanting to be happy.

If you want to be happy, learn to accept what life is.

Learn to flow with life.

Learn to see happiness as a process, not a destination.

When you can accept what life is, you will be able to accept what come with it, good or bad.  You will see whatever good or bad as a process that you have to live with. The question is how you want to live with it: in happiness or despair.

Being happy, in this case, becomes a way of life, not a desire.  It becomes a choice, not good to have.

This is more likely to make you happy, rather than simply wanting to be happy.

Know the white,
yet keep to the black;
it is the pattern of the world.
Flow with the pattern of the world,
you are constantly in the path of virtue,
and returning to the infinite.

Lao Tze Dao De Jing 28

Staying healthy begins from your mind.

How you see the values in the things that you have can make the quality of your life very different.  When you can be truly at ease with what you own, you are relaxed, and ‘chi’ begins to flow smoothly throughout your body.  This will lead you to a healthier life.

The following verse of Lao Tzu is useful in this aspect.

Which is more important, your renown or your life?
Which is more valuable, your possessions or your being?
Which is more harmful, gain or loss?

So deep love leads to great expense
and heaping wealth leads to greater loss.

Be contented and you will not be disappointed,
He who knows when to stop can stay clear of danger
an thus endure long.

Lao Tzu (44) (Translated by Tekson)