Project Happiness Articles

Do you crave more? More money, time, love, happiness? Whether you want to make a huge change in your life, or simply find peace with everything around you, including with your finances, gratitude is the place to begin.

It is important to take the time to rededicate ourselves to becoming a little more aware of the beautiful things we’ve been given. And maybe we can say in discovering the earth, we’ve discovered ourselves.

Research suggests why the experience of gratitude is transformative and offers tremendous health benefits. Thankfulness awakens our brain’s pleasure centers, and our bodies produce bio-chemicals that activate a strong and powerful sense of our potential, well-being and connection.

When we truly realize and trust that we are created from the fabric of Love, and thus this frequency lives in us, activating it feels not only possible, but inevitable. Love is in our DNA. Our Blueprint. Even if we are not feeling it coursing through us at the moment, it is still who we are; waiting to be realized. And the more we put our focus on awakening the Love within us, the more it shows up.

I learned early on to smile in the face of slurs, to bury my emotions, and I convinced myself everything was fine. For most of my adult life, I was able to maintain a sunny disposition on the outside, priding myself on being available to anyone who suffered from lack of joy or who needed help. 

Life presents so many opportunities to ask ourselves, “How willing am I right now?” The question could be prompted by a potential job change, by a request from a loved one about a pattern they hope you’ll change, by a realization that things in our external life won’t change until we do. The question of willingness is primary in how we navigate through so much of our life.

We often believe that if we can change our circumstances, we will be much happier.  We compare our lives to others, or an unattained standard we wish we had reached; this is a simple way to ensure that we will never be as happy as we could be.

The search for true happiness has been an ongoing quest for many and continues to elude most of us. The reason it seems so out of reach is because most people don’t realize that happiness is not dictated by their external circumstances, but their perception of those circumstances.

Over the past few years, the idea of living mindfully and practicing mindfulness has captured the collective imagination of people all around the world. From the streets of Bali to boardrooms in Silicon Valley, there has been widespread adoption, and thousands of mindfulness gurus are teaching a myriad of flavors of it.