4 Important Things To Note When Learning To Cultivate Happiness From Within

1. Our past/childhood gets carried over into adulthood.

Many of us had this issue. Where maybe at some point, usually when you’re little, you may have been told you’re not good enough, not smart enough, or not pretty enough. Whether it was intentional or not - by teachers, parents, or friends - the feeling you felt when you were told that you’re not good enough never truly fades away. It’s been embed deep in your subconscious mind for years after. This hurt feeling gets carried over into your adulthood and affects how you live your life. You may find yourself not feeling confident to do certain things and you don’t understand why. You may find yourself working so hard and never feel truly satisfied no matter how much you achieve. 

This can become an exhausting, never-ending cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy. 

If, as a child, you had to work so hard to get love and acceptance from parents, you subconsciously felt that the love was “conditional”. You have to be a high achiever, or else, you’re not worthy of love. This doesn’t only affect your personal life where you find yourself constantly working. But in your romantic relationships, you also find yourself subconsciously drawn to romantic partners who make you feel loved the way your parents made you feel loved. You will be drawn to romantic partners who validate you for “being good enough” the way you had to get love and acceptance from your parents. This is because it feels familiar.

Until you understand this and work on rewiring your beliefs around this, you will continue to be attracted to the same type of people and relationships that may not be healthy for you in the long run. You may find yourself being attracted to people with the same childhood traumas. You may find yourself being attracted to people who treat you as well or as badly as your parents did or as your parents treated one another. 

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2. It is important for one to have the freedom to explore, find, and become their most authentic self in order to find their happiness.

If you grew up with parents who are similar to you and are more relaxed and chilled, you may not have struggled with this. However, if you were, different from your parents and the majority of people in your society, then you may have felt like a “misfit”.

Being a misfit is not easy. As a child, we all want love and acceptance from our parents more than anything else. As a teenager, we all want acceptance from our friends. If you’re a misfit, you may have struggled with feeling like you’re not good enough and that your parents wouldn’t love you unless you become who they want you to be. You couldn’t be your authentic self. The love was “conditional”. You never felt truly accepted. You felt like you’re weird and your parents wanted you to be who they thought you should be. And they probably wanted the best for you. However, their dreams and insecurities are not yours to bear. But since we usually live with our parents for the first 18 years of our lives, we cannot escape the fact that their thoughts, beliefs, values, and patterns affect who we are.

Unfortunately, for most of us, unless we have done a lot of personal development work and become aware of our subconscious thoughts, feelings, and actions, we tend to subconsciously pass on our fears and insecurities to those closest to us. 

This can be exhausting as you may have followed the path you thought was right for you - only to never feel truly fulfilled. You follow other people’s dreams, but not yours. You’re not being completely yourself. 

I truly believe that we can only find our true happiness when we can fully accept ourselves and love ourselves unconditionally. And sometimes, we just have to accept that we can never truly accept ourselves until we accept the fact that our parents are the way they are, and other people are the way they are, and we cannot change them. The only thing we can control is ourselves and what we do, act, and feel. 

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3. We can change our patterns and beliefs. 

When you grow up in a household with negative energy and limiting beliefs where parents have negative ways of thinking and limiting beliefs, such as, believing that money is evil; life is unfair; or having the tendency to focus on the possibility of negative outcomes, you subconsciously adopt those beliefs and ways of thinking from you parents. They become your thought patterns and you live your life through those lens. 

Once you recognize these patterns of yours and the fact that you can never see the world and circumstances in life differently until you change them, then you can begin to work on changing them and find your happiness. After all, happiness is a state of mind. It lies in the way you look at things. 

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4. The end of happiness is the lost of gratitude

Following the previous point, you can focus on what you have and feel happy, or, focus on what you lack and feel unhappy - the choice is yours.

And if, by default, you tend to focus on what you lack because you grow up with someone who kept talking about what they lacked in life, you need to work hard to change these patterns. You can start by starting a gratitude journal. It will feel weird at first to force yourself to think about what you’re grateful for. It will feel repetitive to have to do this every day. However, repetition is the key to making any thought become deeply embed in your subconscious mind and become a belief. Every time you think a new thought or take a new action, your brain fires a new synapse. Each time you think the same sort of thought or take the same action, that same path gets repeated and becomes stronger. You need to practice the new way of thinking over and over until the new way of thinking becomes stronger than the old way of thinking.

Happiness can, after all, be easily ignited through the practices of gratitude. And the more grateful and positive you feel, the more beauty you will see in life and the more positive people you will attract into your life. We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are. There are millions of things happening around us every day. We can only see things which match what lies in our subconscious mind. So nurture your subconscious thoughts and beliefs. They are the control panel of our heart, mind, and soul.