How to be happy

I sometimes get asked how I manage to be such a happy and positive person. I can tell you I wasn’t always this way. There was a time, when I felt as though I was under a dark storm cloud, as thick and black as my mood. It was a long process to move myself from under this dark storm cloud and back into the light. A process that I feel I repeat, every year, after we come out of the cold, dark, long winters that we have here in England.

I am happier, when it is light outside. I am happier, when I can feel the warm rays of the sun on my cheekbones. I am happier, when I can feel the wind in my hair. My preference is summer. It’s always summer. I like the colours of autumn too but, really, autumn is just a stop-gap; a bridge between all the things, I love, that are decomposing in front of my wide eyes, and the cold, dark, bleak, winter. Autumn is my last sunset. Autumn is, simply, holding on a little too long to something that is soon to dissipate. Soon to be replaced with things I do not like. And like a caterpillar rolling back into its cocoon, I wait patiently each year for March to come – for the nights to get lighter, for the sky to open a little more, to breathe back into myself and open my wings, like a butterfly, as the flowers come back into bloom and the sun peeks out from behind the trees, whose leaves are replenished onto the branches, as the sweet circle of life continues and seasons anew .

I was always that “sensitive”child; the difficult child. The child who felt too many things and wasn’t the master of its emotions. I was always too loud, too quiet, too sullen, sulking, never quite right, imperfect, out of control, wild, raw, unfiltered. And over time, I learned to behave appropriately. I learned grace, compassion and pulling all the pieces of myself together, into coherence. But it did not come naturally. I was born, awkward. A person that didn’t fit into a mould. A person that was difficult, problematic, wild. And as I moved through the years of my life, like a vine, wrapping itself around a tree, I roamed a little far from where I had started. I forgot who I was. I came back to the house, where I had lived as a child, as an adult and I asked myself, “Where am I?” And I didn’t mean in the geographical sense. I meant “Where did I go?” Why did I end up so far from where I intended to go? Why did I get so distracted on a pre-determined path that I concluded that I no longer wanted to go where I was headed? I wanted to abort the journey and be somewhere else. And I sat there in the bedroom, where I grew up, which bared no sign that I had ever been there. All my things were packed into a storage unit, off the A40. And I looked at the barrenness of the life I had made for myself, represented by the small suitcase, I was living out of, which sat, sullenly, in the corner of the room, like a petulant teenager, and I thought: I am on a holiday from my life. I realised I was hiding from the life, I left behind. I think I intended to go back, but it had to be different. I wanted to be different. I stopped what I had been doing, holding onto the things, and people, that didn’t want me. I stopped being the person who made the effort, with people who didn’t reciprocate the same effort. Things, naturally, ebbed away from me. People who were once important, where now just not there. If I didn’t reach out, then they never would. I realised that I had been the person who made all the effort in most of my relationships and I realised how little I had received in return. That was a difficult realisation to come to. And I had to learn to cope with that. And I learned, slowly, to live without them. I was, completely alone, living at my parent’s house, like it was a hotel. And I realised that all my stuff had been holding me back, like a heavy suitcase I had been carrying around me. I had baggage and I needed to learn to put it down. Just as I realised that things that other people had said about me were holding be back from attaining my full potential. I knew that to be happy, I needed to let go of both the idea of who I wanted to be, and the idea of who others thought I was.

But to be able to do that… I first had to learn yoga…

Yoga may look like a bunch of blonde, gym bunnies, twisting their lithe bodies into unmentionable, tantric, positions to impress a nameless male, but if you go to a (good) yoga class, you will realise it is the furthest thing you could possibly find from that. Traditional yoga is practiced by all sorts of people: young, old, virile, not so virile. It is practised by all sorts of bodies: male, female, tall, short, thin, lumpy, able, less able. It is a “church”, a place of worship to do the work of healing.

Yoga teaches us to listen to our bodies and to take time for ourselves. The commitment we make to ourselves is: for the (limited) time we sit on the mat, we respect ourselves, our time, and we give, to ourselves, the gift of listening. We listen to our bodies, we still our thoughts. We quieten our loud brains and we are able to hear something, quieter, subtler, fluttering underneath, and that is the voice of our heart. Yoga teaches us to sit with discomfort, as we contort our bodies into shapes that do not feel natural, and stretch muscles we have never before used. It teaches us to exist in our bodies. It teaches us that our bodies are powerful, strong and capable, and therefore, so are we. Yogis do not care about the size of your ass, the cut of your yoga pants or your number of instagram followers. And if they do, you are in the wrong yoga class! There is no quest for perfection in yoga – only the desire for improvement. Every moment we give to ourselves, on the mat, is an investment in improving ourselves, both how we feel and how we are with ourselves. Yoga has taught me so many lessons about how to sit in my body and feel the things I do, without reacting, that I owe it a deep, long breath of gratitude.

And so we come onto the next tool in our happiness toolkit: gratitude. I learned many years ago, that the act of practicing gratitude is the antidote to unhappiness. You know how sometimes you feel irritable and everyone is getting on your nerves? You know sometimes, the sound of someone whistling on the street, can prick a shiver up your back? You know how sometimes you are in a miserable black cloud and everything just makes you really, really, mad? The answer to these difficult and irritable moods, I always find is focusing your attention on “things” that make you grateful.

Being grateful is a way to dissipate that bad mood and make your brain “hone in” on those small moments that make being human, more beautiful. An example might be: gratitude to the barista who made your coffee, exactly the way you like it, or who put a smiley face on your cup; the station guard who held the tube for you, as you were running up the stairs, out of breath, to get that last tube to get you to work on time; a colleague who holds the lift doors for you; the colleague that goes out of their way to make everyone laugh; your partner who makes you dinner, after a long day; the girlfriend, who runs you a bath, with her favourite bath salts, after a long run, when you are covered in mud because you fell over; the dog, who greets you with a waggling tail every day, when you come through the door; a child who makes you a picture, which holds pride of place on your fridge; the Deliveroo man who brings your hangover breakfast. There are endless moments of kindness that happen to us, each, and every day, that we will notice once we start to pay attention. Once we cultivate this respect, admiration and gratitude to other human beings, we will see there are “helpers” everywhere. There are people who will be kind to you, for no reason other than that they make the world a better place. They are the people who smile at dogs on the train; who wave to children in passing cars; who often work in service and health industries; who are kind to old ladies and help them count out their change; who pick up a wallet that has fallen out of a stranger’s pocket and immediately hand it back to them. You will notice these moments, every day, if you teach your brain to focus on them.

Another lesson in happiness is to surround yourselves with people who encourage you to grow and who accept you exactly as you are. This is a much harder thing to achieve, of course, if you are not being your truest version of yourself. But if you are able to open your heart to who you really are, and allow that person to live out there in the world, unencumbered by others’ expectations, then you will find you have an easier life. You are not fighting a constant battle, against yourself. I’ll give you an example: if you are a highly tolerant, caring, liberal person, then working in an environment filled with narcissistic, greedy, intolerant, self-serving, assholes is probably not going to make you happy. It is less of a struggle to be with “our people”: people who share our values and like us. But I also think it’s important to be around people who challenge us, and push us to be better. How else will we grow? And it’s not good to surround yourself with people who push you in a direction that you don’t want to go in, or push you to do things you don’t want to do… No, I am talking about the kind of people who call you out on your BS and make you better, because they know you and want what’s best for you, even when you can’t see that for yourself.

Another tool in the happiness toolkit, is this very small lesson: we are all growing, learning and improving every day but we will never be perfect. If you see life as a journey, where we are learning, every day, then you will no longer beat yourself up around what you know, or don’t know; you’ll not carry unrealistic standards of knowledge around with you; you’ll be able to hear others, because you’ll realise you can learn from them. And that’s not to say, everyone can teach us something, you have to learn who to tune in/out to. But if we can approach life as a journey, where we will learn and grow, we rid ourselves of the expectation of perfection or “destination”.

I always find that the quest to reach a certain “destination” or to achieve a certain goal has sometimes hindered my enjoyment of the “thing” you have to do get there. If you rent a car just to get from A to B, you’ll only ever get from A to B. You’ll have achieved your goal, but would you have achieved any joy on that journey? Probably not, you’d have achieved a chore. What if you rented a car to get from A to B, but you took a route you knew you’d enjoy or you asked a person you like to come along on the ride with you, what kind of journey would you have then? Is getting to B what would you would remember from that trip or would you remember the the places you saw, the things you did and the conversations you had with the person you went with? When I tell myself that life is an “adventure” or it’s a “journey” that is what I mean: the tiny pockets of time that are filled with joy are the things that make life beautiful. We just have to sit still to appreciate them and see them for the important moments they really are.

Next-up, spend your time doing things that you enjoy. This is a really basic one. The more time you spend doing things you actually enjoy, the better the quality of your life. If you love singing, spend a few minutes a day doing that. If you love dancing, spend some time each day, dancing to your favourite songs. If you love swimming, go swimming. If you love playing an instrument, spend some time each day doing that. If you like reading, cultivate some time in your schedule to spend some time with a good book. The more time you allow yourself to do things that bring you joy, the more joy you will have. I personally love travelling, so I always try to plan a few trips a year, as I’m always feel happy when I am visiting a new city, or am taking a flight to an unknown land. And when I am landlocked for a long period of time, I start to see my mood darken, so I know it’s time to plan another trip.

Another way to be happy is to practice kindness as much as possible. Don’t get me wrong, we should not be doormats to be walked all over; some people are entitled assholes, who should be shown where the door is; but mostly people are imperfect humans, who make mistakes, who are on occasion, annoying. Most people are just trying to live their own lives; and some of the seemingly, most unpleasant or annoying people are (often) the ones who need your kindness the most. So always approach life, if you can, with the intention to be kind. You’ll find you enjoy life more, where there is less day to day conflict. But in giving kindness, I fully expect that should be reciprocated. People are not doormats to be exploited. Effort should be reciprocated. If people are unwilling to show you they care about you (with actions not words), then you have no choice but to distance yourself.

This are my go-to tools to be happy. It’s an imperfect science, but an open mind and an open heart, I find, at least guides us in the right direction.