You will need to practice every day to experience happiness from within you as your truth. Getting motivation for happiness and to continue practicing every day after feeling like a failure is the next step. Sometimes you see a few results as you go along, but the pain of the skinned knees can make you want to give up.
So after you make a decision to seek happiness from within, you will also need to nurture your motivation at the same time to see true and lasting results.
Motivation for happiness is cultivated in two ways: Positive and Negative. Most people are familiar with negative motivation and don’t even realize it. One good example of negative motivation in my life is exercising. When you think about the reason people exercise, how many people do you know that exercise for the sheer enjoyment of it? Not many. One main reason people exercise is to lose weight. While some people try and lose weight for health reasons, it is fair to say that lots of people are motivated to lose weight so they can look more beautiful.
Can you see how it is negatively motivated?
They aren’t exercising out of anything positive. They are exercising because they hate the way they currently look and are making an attempt to change it. It is no wonder that people cannot really stick to an exercise plan for years on end – it is because the motivation is negatively cultivated. Negative motivation is always short lived. None of us like negativity on any physical or spiritual level. Therefore it is only a matter of time before you try something else to find happiness.
On other hand, let’s envision exercise from a positive point of view. If you were motivated to exercise by something positive, like the sheer enjoyment of it for example, how long would you exercise for? If exercising made you happy, I would say that you would never stop right? How long would you chase anything that made you happy? Forever! When I shifted the reason I exercised from negative to positive, I was able to keep exercising for the long term. I still exercise today and I do it for the enjoyment of it. As a reward, I have experienced the benefits of a healthy body image.
That is motivation for happiness is cultivated, that is how to get and stay motivated.
The same is true for happiness. If you seek it from within you and motivate yourself to keep going with a positive form of motivation, then you will experience the benefits of your own individual form of everyday happiness regardless of what is happening in your life.