If you really want to be happy, rearrange your mind, not the furniture.

"Happiness is something you decide on ahead of time. Whether I like my room or not, does not depend on how the furniture is arranged. It is how I arrange my mind.” 92 year old woman.

I came across the above quote while doing some research and got to thinking about ‘happiness’. It is the secular nirvana of our human experience and one desire that we all share. The Buddhists say that our desire to be happy is one of the main things that connects all sentient beings. We all want to be happy and none of us wants to suffer. Happiness in modern media is also a product such as soap, that is fastened to products like big red bows to stimulate us to want them and buy them.

The trouble we humans run into with happiness is that we think it is something that we have to make happen through our work, our money, our religions, our fantasies and our relationships. If we do ‘x‘ then we will be happy. The ‘x‘ depends on who we are asking but the equation is always the same. The truth is that happiness isn’t a state to be attained, nor is it a place in our lives that we arrive at. Money, thinness, celebrity, you name it, all have been touted as the path to happiness. None of them are. They can each make life easier and more fun, but none of them can guarantee happiness. All you have to do is glance through a celebrity magazine to see the sad reality of that.

The truth is that happy is something that you decide to be. It is the product of our perceptions and our perceptions are driven by our beliefs about ourselves and the world. These beliefs are formed early in life and reinforced by the world as we learn and grow because we never challenge them. We merely strain to see out of the same glasses we were given as children and never think to get a new pair. If we are lucky those glasses get dashed along the way by some life shaking experience and we end up seeking a new pair through counseling, spirituality, or other paths of inner exploration. Emerging later with a pair of glasses of our own, we can then make new decisions that lead with the belief that happiness is where we start, not where we are going. As the old saying goes, ‘happy is as happy does.’

Here are 5 Tips for ‘arranging your mind’ towards happiness:

1. Take responsibility for everything in your life right now. This includes body, money, relationships, health, state of mind, work, all of it. This is very important because vicitms refuse to be happy no matter how hard they try or how much they have.

2. Decide that the power to be happy is in you, is something that you own, doesn't lie outside of you and isn’t someone else's to grant you. Very little, if any of how we feel, happy or not, has anything to do with anything outside of ourselves. Yet most of the time we look to someone or something else to fix us, or give us something that we can use to feel better.

3. Stop focusing on what you don't have or what you don't want. Most of the world decides on what they want to have, do and/or feel whether more money, a better job, less weight, healing from an illness, and then they focus on its opposite. Someone who wants more money thinks and complains about being in debt. Someone who wants to lose weight thinks and complains about being fat. And so it goes. Our brains only know what we tell them and they are very compliant. If you want to be a fat person, complain about not being able to stick to a diet and your brain will help you out. Taking what you believe as real, it will produce the depressive neurochemistry to support the feeling of ‘I can’t’ and’ what’s the point’, and you won't be able to make the changes necessary to have the physical body you say you want to have.

4. Happiness is not a goal but a moment to moment experience that comes from a decision to feel good. This creates an intention that will inform your choices and help you always go in the direction of what you want, what feels good to your body, mind and spirit, and what will create that feeling of happiness and joy, in every moment.

5. Understand that we are meant to be happy. Life is supposed to be fun, or, what's the point since no one is getting out alive. Lighten up, laugh at yourself, risk making a bad decision or seeming silly. None of us are really that powerful or important in the grand scheme of things. Isn't that a relief?

A Valentine's Day tip: 5 things to pack for your relationship journey

With Valentine’s Day quickly approaching, I wanted to write something about love. Not the hearts and cupid kind of romantic love that we are all so familiar with thinking about when we talk of love, but, of human love. Love between two human beings in all their wonder and imperfection. Immediately loses its sexiness doesn’t it? That isn’t a surprise given that since humans began to portray love on the stage, love has been associated with the process of bonding for mating purposes, which involves a high level of oxytocin and dopamine, and which by design was meant to be short lived. As dull as it sounds in its biological form, this is being ‘in love’. It is wonderful and worthy of all its praise, but, it isn’t what keeps people together. It isn’t what sustains a relationship. Mature love, not love for old folks but love that lives into the mature phase of a relationship, is something you pack for. It isn’t a weekend trip where you only need your toothbrush and best underwear, it is a journey you are embarking upon that will hopefully last your whole life and take you to amazing places together, most of them without leaving home.

When packing for this trip of life most people unconsciously, or sometimes even consciously, pack their mates suitcase instead of their own. I have known self-help gurus that tell women to carry around lists of characteristics of their ideal mate to help guide them in their choices. That is well and good as far as it goes, but, the first list to make is a list of our ideal characteristics as the mate of such a person. The first question to ask in any such search is 'am I a person today who could attract, could meet and could be a loving partner to the one I say I am looking for?’ A bit of time pondering this question could clear up the confusion around ‘why do I seem to end up picking the same person again and again?’ Simple answer is because you are doing the picking, again consciously and unconsciously, and we are the common denominator in all of our relationships. If we want to be with a different type of partner, we have to become a different kind of person, one capable of making new choices, not just repeating the old ones.

So, say you are here, you have chosen outside of your old patterns, and you are ready to commit to a life together with the person of your dreams. What will you need to pack in your suitcase for this unpredictable, sometimes exciting, most the times not, wonderful, disappointing, fulfilling, frustrating and humbling (if you do it right) life-long adventure? Now this is a list I would encourage you to create and carry around with you.

Here are 5 suggestions for that list from my personal and professional experience:

1. Be sure to pack your sense of humor. Life on its own is a challenge at times and without the resilience that a sense of humor brings, it can be like trying to ski without bending your knees. The bumps (and in relationship there are a LOT of bumps) might be the same size, but, they feel a lot smaller when you have some give. When I talk about having a sense of humor here, I am not just talking about laughing at a joke. I am talking about not taking ourselves and the world so seriously. Being able to see the light side of even the darkest moments but not just using humor to avoid feeling uncomfortable. Being a human is a moment to moment humbling experience. If we are doing it right we are reminded on a daily basis of our 'right-sizedness': not as big as we imagine nor as tiny as we fear. We all fit someplace in the middle of the sea of humanity in all of our measurable qualities, and if we were to be honest we would have to admit to messing up and falling on our behinds constantly. And, the truth is, that is funny. It is funny to observe, just look at the movies, and it is funny to experience IF we let ourselves be a human among humans.

If we still hold out the unfortunate notion, admitted to or not, that we are somehow better than the rest of the species, then it is going to be a much tougher go. This is because we won't be able to admit our imperfection, and will have to disavow our mistakes, and therefore will always end up defending ourselves, our position and our behavior. We end up in a self-made prison of perfection, terrified of making a mistake, falling on our behinds, and seeming the fool in front of others. Absolutely not fun at all. I encourage all of you to practice making mistakes, every day, and to pick something once per week that is guaranteed to make you feel foolish like telling a joke, wearing a silly hat, or going to work with mismatched shoes. It won't take long before you are feeling more relaxed and things, your mate, your life and yourself, are seeming a bit lighter and more humorous.

2. Include the traveler's guide to 'fair fighting' and 'being right vs. being happy'. There are some people who will vote for being 'right' every time, believing that it will make them happy, and it might. What it won't do is make the relationship a happy or peaceful one and that can trump personal satisfaction in being right any day. There are a LOT of books on the subject, or you can just Google it. Many married male comedians like to joke about this one saying that before their wife says anything they blurt out ‘I’m sorry!’ funny, not off the mark, but, not what we want to pack. This is just avoidance of confrontation and is actually very passive aggressive because swallowing an argument to quiet someone is still quieting someone. It looks like you are just rolling over, but, what you are actually doing is displacing your anger onto your mate and making them into the aggressor and then surrendering to them. This ends up with one partner acting like a victim and the other feeling like a bully. You think you are trying to keep the peace, but, this will just lead to resentment and more fights as your mate tries to give back your bully projection through trying to show their 'right-ness' in this or future arguments.

All couples fight, it is a natural, healthy part of every relationship and I would be concerned if you didn't. That said, all couples need to know how to fight and to have some agreements. These can be to stay in the moment and not bring out the list of priors and witnesses to the crime (you know, the 'you do that all the time', 'my therapist says that I am right', 'Dr. Phil had someone on who is just like you', etc.), not to name call, not exit the fight without an agreement as to when to take it up again, and the permission to call a break again with the stipulation of a time to take it up again. These are just some ideas for some 'rules of engagement', but talk to your mate and come up with your own.

3. Do NOT pack the net but don't forget your mittens. The inability, or refusal in some cases, to let things flow under the proverbial bridge with the river of life, can become a real problem for some couples. It can foster resentments, and make it impossible for them to stay in the moment. Either by nature or by training they have become adversarial in their interactions. Collecting evidence, making lists of errors and omissions, basically arming themselves for future battles with their mates. This would be a good time to restate the importance of packing #2. Using the river analogy, they put a net on the down current side of the bridge to capture anything that tries to ‘go by’, and then drag it all back up for reevaluation and rearming. Knowing when to stand your ground, and knowing when to let things go is important, but always better decided while holding hands. The best example of this is to imagine that you and your mate each put on one of those connected mittens that are often seen on children. Two mittens connected with a long piece of yarn. With each of you wearing one of these mittens it is impossible for you to completely disconnect from the other even if you want to. I realize you may do the 1000 things to do with a paper clip here and start thinking of ways you could cut the yarn, but, bear with me a minute. If the yarn stays intact, and the connection remains even during a bad fight over 'right', the worst that can happen is that you go in circles. But, if you drop hands, disconnecting from each other and taking up polarizing positions ready for battle, then the need to be right can take the fight, and the day, and the energy of the connection won't be there to hold the love while you fight. By staying connected, the blame game goes back and forth, defending, proving, etc., but, eventually you will get tired and if you let it, it will just lose steam. One of you will crack a smile, or make a funny comment, and again, if you let change happen, you will remember why you like each other and move on to something more enjoyable, move you back to 'happy'.

4. Pack only your TRUE Self, it is the only one you will need. Accept this remarkable human being that you picked as your partner on this journey, completely, just as they are, right here right now. Better yet, acceptance of the remarkable human being that you are, completely, right here, right now. It all begins there anyway. If you don’t accept yourself then you won’t be able to accept your mate, period. You will love them more on days that you are feeling good about yourself, and less on days you aren’t. You will be doing relationship in projection barely seeing the other person as a separate, autonomous, human being with rights and priveleges thereof. If they become your means of making yourself feel better, then it will become very important to you that you are able to control them in some way. If they get all independent and act on their own, who knows if they will make you feel as loved and special and important and beautiful/handsome, and strong and safe, etc. as you want and need them to make you feel? Think about it. You make another human being the source and solution to your good feeling about yourself and then just let them do what they want? Dicey at best, duct tape at worst. The end to this story lies in the divorce statistics that we all know so well. My advice here is to make sure you pack your true Self for this journey and make sure you take it with you on the first date. Never lie, never try to please and never morph into someone you think they will fall in love with. You might just get what you want and end up not wanting what you have.

5. Put on top the user's manual to your own heart. The kind of love that stays and grows requires that we accept complete for our own feelings, especially the love that is in our own hearts. Over the course of a relationship feelings can wax and wane, but, 99.9% of the time that we are ‘not feeling the love’ anymore, we are discontent with some aspect of our own being, or our own life. The mates we chose are basically the same people for the course of their adult lives. They can grow and change for good or not so good, but, at core they stay the people we picked and were so in love with at the start. The trouble is that our feelings towards them don’t and that can be confusing and troubling when it happens. When this happens I encourage people to pause and take an inward look instead of an outward one. We tend to use our world and the people in it to help us act out feelings and questions that we are having trouble dealing with internally. It is sometimes easier to locate the blame for a lack of joy or satisfaction with our mates, rather than take responsibility for what we aren’t changing in our own lives. It is my experience that relationships end up carrying the burden of the individual’s unprocessed stuff, sometimes to the point of being made the sacrificial lamb. It is very important that each party in a relationship take 100% responsibility for the care and feeding of their own physical and emotional beings and that looks like seeking help for what feels like diminishing feeling, before it is made into a relationship issue. So, refer back to #4, pack your true Self, and your commitment to the care and feeding of that Self, and don’t be afraid of wavering feelings in the course of a relationship, they happen.

There you have it! Now, make your own lists and pack your suitcase wisely and you can look forward to a rewarding, unpredictable, imperfect, love-filled journey together through life.