23 June 2008 5 Comments Print This Post  Email This Post

Photo Courtesy of dogwelder

If you want to be happy, be. - Leo Tolstoy

Each person has his/her own unique style of dealing with pain and sadness. And this style is important. It determines whether you are moving towards pain or away from pain; whether your life is going to be painful or painfree. While it is obvious that everyone wants a painfree - happy life; consciously and consistently choosing happiness over sadness requires practice and often is quite difficult.

People who know me, think of me as a very happy and upbeat person who rarely gets sad. And as someone who has an amazing bounce rate anytime she does have a downtime. Following is my method of dealing with pain which has made me a pro-happiness person. I call this technique “Bargain with Pain”:

Pick up a time when you are sad and judge for how long are you going to be sad given what has happened. Ask yourself - Considering what has happened, for how long will I remain sad. 1 year? 2 years? 10 years? And then, start the bargaining process. If my answer is 1 year, then I ask myself - can I not get out of this sadness within 6 months? If getting out of sadness within 6 months is possible, then isn’t the same thing possible in 3 months? The key question is that how much of my sad time is what happened worth.

Everyone goes through heart breaking - heart wrenching moments when we think that this is it … now I will be sad for my entire life. However, no matter what had happened, we get out of this sadness. What is worth paying attention to and thinking about is that what changed between then and now. It’s definitely not what happened or how things were; for these are constant factors. So, what has caused this change?

The only thing that changed is that as time passed by, we told ourself that it is not worth being sad over anymore. We made a decision to accept what happened / is happening and move ahead and choose happiness inspite of it. And if we can make this decision to accept what happened then and make peace with it some time later, why can’t we do that today; fasten the process basically?

Accepting today whatever has happened, however we are, frees us to move on and be happy.

With practice this entire process has now become as simple as -

• Something happens which can give me pain/make me sad
• I ask myself whether I want to be sad over this
• I decide it’s not worth it.
• I choose to be happy anyways.

That’s it. All of this happens in an instant. I don’t need to do anything beyond this.