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?