Group gathers to spread
happiness, positivity in university area
Amid all the terrible news of
crime and chaos in the city and the rest of the world recently, Albuquerque
drivers got a dose of happiness from a couple dozen positive picketers who
waved supportive and encouraging signs near the University of New Mexico early
Saturday afternoon.
Heather Hutzell, holder of the
“You Are Enough” sign, is a UNM student who organized the “Happiness Sprinkling
Project” event Saturday near the university. The event drew at least 25 people,
she said. (Jim Thompson/Albuquerque Journal)
University of New Mexico student
Heather Hutzell, a strategic communications major, organized the “Happiness
Sprinkling Project” event as a project for her social marketing class.
She used social media and other
tools to gather people to Central Avenue and handed them signs that said, for
example, “Be You,” “You are Loved” and “It’s going to be okay.”
The signs have been passed along
to organizers for similar events all over the country.
Hutzell said the event was aimed
at counteracting negativity that is broadcast by news media and deeply felt by
people in Albuquerque and elsewhere.
Instead, Hutzell, who is set to
graduate in December, said people need to embrace positivity.
“This is the kind of stuff that
our city needs right now,” Hutzell said.
The turbulent life story of
Bhutan's happiness guru
By Candida BeveridgeBBC World
Service, Bhutan
In the 1970s, the king of Bhutan
announced that the happiness of the population was more important than Gross
Domestic Product. Saamdu Chetri has been charged with overseeing Bhutan's
happiness - but his own life has had its share of suffering.
On the banks of a river in the
remote Bumthang valley in the foothills of the Himalayas, Bhutan's first
happiness centre is under construction. Among the workers breaking stones is
Saamdu Chetri, dressed in monks' robes, wielding a pickaxe.
At first the workers were puzzled
at his hands-on involvement, he says. "Then they realised it's not just
for them, I'm helping myself by being physically fit."
Chetri chose this remote location
because of its spiritual history and its beauty. "It's one of the most
beautiful valleys in the country," he says. "This is a place of
happiness for me where I find so much relation with nature - the place itself
is so serene."
For a man charged with bringing happiness to a nation, Chetri has
suffered much in his life and comes from the most humble beginnings.
"I was born in a
cowshed," he says. "I was so attached to animals, plants - anything
to do with nature.
"My parents never thought
about schooling. We had seven brothers and four sisters, they were all working
and I thought I would also be one of the working persons."
To his surprise, when he was nine
years old his brother took him to school - something that worried his father a
great deal.
"I was the most loved child
and they didn't want me to leave the house," Chetri says.
"My father was very worried
that I would become weak, so he sent a cow with me to school." He laughs
at the memory.
"Of course the cow couldn't
stay long because it had to be fed and looked after, so he took back the cow
and he started visiting me with a lot of butter, cheese and milk."
He left school at the age of 14
because his brothers and sisters had left home and he felt a duty to help his
parents. His day on the farm began at 04:00 when he would walk a kilometre to
fetch water, after which he would feed the ox and begin to plough.
He decided to carry on his education,
but his life changed dramatically when his parents took him on a pilgrimage to
Nepal. There, they befriended another family who had their eyes on Chetri as a
potential son-in-law.
He was only 15 at the time and
knew nothing about it. Their intentions only became clear when one of the men
from the Nepalese family invited them all to a family wedding.
"The man took me to town,
then they started measuring my finger - I said, 'What are you doing with my
finger?'" The man explained that he was only trying the ring on because he
was the same size as a boy who was going to get married the next day - the same
happened with the wedding outfit.
The following day the wedding
ceremony began. Two ceremonial places were built, and Chetri and another boy
were placed next to two empty chairs. "Then suddenly there are two men
carrying two girls on their backs, coming towards us. One girl sat beside that
boy, the other girl sat beside me. I tried getting up and they pushed me down
on the chair," says Chetri.
"Then my mum came and said,
'Sorry son, you have been duped.'
"I felt I was dead - I
wanted to die that moment. I was not only angry, I was so hurt. I couldn't do
anything."
Once the ceremony began, it was
too late to escape. The couple were given a small hut to retire to, but Chetri
was too upset to sleep.
"I wanted to jump into the
well and die, because this was something that I never expected my parents to
do," he says.
Chetri was climbing up to the
well to carry out his plan when his wife's father caught him from behind, and
broke into bitter tears. "Please don't blame your parents, it's me who has
cheated everybody, because I found you would be a great husband for my
daughter," the father said.
Tradition
He begged Chetri to think of his
young bride. "If you die now, the repercussion that will happen on this
little girl is that she will be widowed and nobody will marry her after
that."
Chetri and his wife had children,
and she lived at home with her parents while he continued his education at
college in India. However, traumatised by events in her own life, one day she
disappeared, leaving Chetri with two young children. A female friend from
college offered to help. Over time, their relationship grew, and they married.
After a while his first wife came
home. Chetri was faced with a dilemma. His first wife offered to go and live
with his parents, but soon disappeared again. It was 19 years before Chetri
discovered where she was. Now she is back in her home country, Nepal, and lives
with a mental illness. It's something Chetri struggles with.
"I still think about her, in
fact last night I was praying for her."
Despite his own share of personal grief,
nowadays Chetri always has a smile on his face. He says he's a naturally happy
person, but he never dreamt he would end up as the man responsible for Bhutan's
happiness.
His rise up through the ranks
started when, freshly out of college, he was called on by government to bring
about the the king's wish to develop Bhutan's newly emerging private sector.
Working for the royal family wasn't an easy task.
"For us, a king's wish is a
command," he says. "You have to work very hard to meet their
expectations." He would often work until 03:00, catch a few hours' sleep
at home and be back at work promptly at 08:00.
If he made a mistake, he would be
punished - on one occasion the king's aunt called him and said, "Saamdu,
I'm coming with a stick. Stand on the roadside."
"If I got a scolding I would
cry," says Chetri. "I always tried to be very straightforward,
working as sincerely and loyally as I could, and if some blame came to me I
felt always hurt - so I cried often."
After many years of working in
the capital, he retired to his village in the south of Bhutan - he wanted to go
back to living among nature, which he had loved as a boy. But it was not to be.
When Bhutan elected its first
democratic government, he was summoned back to the capital, Thimphu, and asked
to work for the cabinet office of Bhutan's first, freshly elected democratic
government.
Five years later he was the man
chosen to head up Bhutan's first Gross National Happiness Centre based in
Thimpu.
Despite the focus on national
wellbeing, Bhutan faces huge challenges. It remains one of the poorest nations
on the planet.
A quarter of its 800,000 people
survive on less than $1.25 a day, and 30% live without electricity. It is
struggling with a rise in mental illness and divorce.
Chetri explained how Bhutan's
nationwide happiness surveys are used to improve people's lives.
"The research could come out
and say: women between the ages of 30 and 55 are unhappy. The reasons could be
because they have very little education, because they lose a lot of time
collecting water from distant places, they have to collect firewood, and they
have no education, no time for themselves."
The solutions might be to bring
on formal education, pipe the water closer to their villages, and provide
efficient cooking stoves.
Principles
Five years after it was first
announced, Chetri is about to realise his dream of creating a centre in a
beautiful natural setting where people from Bhutan and the rest of the world
can come to learn how to lead happier lives.
Visitors to the GNH centre,
finished this month but officially opening its doors to the public on 18
October, will learn three basic principles - to be part of nature, to serve
others with kindness and compassion, and to discover their innate value.
Chetri starts every day
meditating and it's compulsory for everyone in his office to start the day this
way too. "I wish I did not need to do anything but just to sit here and
meditate," he says.
"I would love that, but it's
difficult to be looking after a centre where you have to do a lot of planning,
a lot of administrative work. It irritates me a lot."
Saamdu Chetri appeared on Outlook
on the BBC World Service. Listen again to the interview on iPlayer or get the
Outlook podcast.
There’s
a biology to lasting happiness, and there may be way to train yourself for it
Katherine Ellen Foley
July 26, 2
That uplifting feeling you get
when something good happens to you? Researchers now think they know the part of
the brain responsible for it—and they suggest we may be able to train ourselves
to make those positive emotions last longer.
Their conclusions are based on a
study (paywall) conducted by scientists at the University of Wisconsin, where
psychologist Aaron Heller and his team conducted an experiment with more than
100 college students. For a period of 10 days, participants were sent text
messages about 25 times a day asking them to rank their positive and negative
emotions on a scale of 1 to 9, with 1 being a low level of feeling and 9 being
the most intense. Once a day, the subjects were invited to play a game of
chance: They were asked to guess if a computer-generated number would be above
or below 5, and if they were right, they won $15. After the game, participants
checked in with their positive and negative emotions every 10 to 15 minutes for
the next hour and a half, so that their moods could be monitored.
The researchers also analyzed
brain scans, taken by an MRI scanner, of 40 participants in the study. Here
they found that those who were happier for longer periods of time after winning
the game had the longest activation in a part of the brain called the ventral
striatum(pdf), which helps regulate our reward system.
“People who sustain positive
emotion the longest in the course of minutes and hours were those people who
showed the most persistent brain activity in an area that’s thought to be
responsible for reward and reward learning,” says Heller, who is now on the
faculty at the University of Miami. He tells Quartz that there are “dynamics
over the course of seconds in the brain that seem to be related to dynamics of
emotional experience over the course of minutes in the real world.”
Heller thinks that this research
can help scientists understand how we may be able to train ourselves to be
happier. This might involve prolonged activation of the ventral striatum, or we
might just consciously choose to savor moments of happiness—when we take in a
beautiful sunset, for example—in order to make the emotional satisfaction last
2 Guaranteed Ways to Be The
Happiest Version Of You EVER
By Charles J. Orlando, Cara
Cordoni, Leah Benson, John Gray, Atul Kumar Meh
All humans have one common goal
in life: To achieve complete happiness.
Many ancient Greek philosophers
famously contemplated the key to happiness. Socrates, for example, said,
"The secret to happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in
developing the capacity to enjoy less."
This adage has definitely stood
the test of time — even in our modern, capitalist world. Many believe that
happiness comes from rewards earned from our successes. We fill our lives with
an abundance of monetary wealth and expensive objects (cars, houses, jewelry,
etc.).
But honestly, as cliché as it
sounds, money can't buy you happiness. According to a collaborative global
study released in 2011, researchers found that 30 percent of the population in
some of the wealthiest nations — with the U.S. near the top of that list —
suffer from depression.
What's the REAL key to happiness,
you ask? Author and host Charles J. Orlando, author Dr. John Gray, life coach
and speaker Cara Cordoni, licensed psychotherapist and bioenergetic analystLeah
Benson and counselor and therapist Atul Kumar Mehra discuss what the true ways
to gain happiness.
Here are two keys to achieve the
happiness you crave:
1. Find Meaning In Your Life
The first step to happiness is
finding meaning in every aspect of your life. Everything from closerelationships
to your career has meaning. Seek out people worth relating to and loving. Set a
career path that makes a profound impact on your life as well as the lives of
others. Creating and maintaining aspects of substantial value in your life WILL
make you happy in a meaningful life worth living.
2. Be Comfortable In Your Own
Skin
Don't be so judgmental and
nitpicky about your natural emotions and your body. Love who you are, and know
that any struggles you face will end. Know that you have the intelligence and
confidence to overcome those struggles. Know that sadness, frustration and
stress are not permanent.
Leah Benson further explains that
happiness involves "being able to have a range of feelings — happiness,
joy, anger, confusion, sadness, fear, rage. [The foundations to being able to
be happy are] that whatever the feeling is that you're having ... you are OK
with that, and [you] won't judge yourself for it. [All] the passing feelings
sum up to you feeling good in your body, yourself ...."
Want to know the other definite
keys to happiness? Watch the video above to hear what the YourTango Experts
panel says will inevitably end your search for happiness.
Follow
Your Bliss: Happiness and the Art of Doing What You Love
By Michael Wayne
An important ingredient to being
happy is doing work that you find meaningful and is an expression of who you
are.
This is called Doing What You
Love. It is also the ability to, as Joseph Campbell put it,“Follow Your Bliss.”
Campbell was an American
mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative
mythology and comparative religion. His work is vast, covering many aspects of
the human experience. His philosophy is often summarized by his phrase: “Follow
your bliss.”
This is what Joseph Campbell had
to say:
Joseph Campbell
“What is it that makes you happy?
Stay with it, no matter what people tell you.
This is what I call, ‘Following
Your Bliss.’
If you do follow your bliss, you
put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for
you.
And the life that you ought to be living,
is the
one you ARE living.
Wherever you are, if you
are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment,
that
lives within you, all the time.
When you can see that, you begin
to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open doors for you.
I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will
open
where you didn’t know
they were going to be.”
And so the question to you is:
Are you following your bliss? Are you doing what you love?
And if not, what is holding you
back?
The truth be told, it is fear
that holds us back from doing what we love.
But it can be overcome. The first
step is to ask yourself: if I could do anything, what would that be?
You may not have an answer right
away, and that’s alright, because we are not programmed to think that way.
We are programmed to think that
we need to make a living, and that we should make the most pragmatic choice in
that regard.
But instead, what if we follow
our bliss? As Joseph Campbell says, doors will open for you where you didn’t
know they would be.
Which is a tremendous thing,
because when you do what you love and follow your bliss, you will be happier,
healthier, and more fulfilled.
And there is nothing more
important in life than to live in a happier, healthier and more fulfilled way.