From our episode, “The Secret to Being Happy by Staying at Home, your Heart” with Pradeep Kumar Cheruvathoor
A couple years ago, my eight-year-old daughter made a kite at her school. She came home and she was running around the court flying her kite, and her little brother, who’s five years younger than him, wanted to have a kite, too. So all I did was take a piece of computer paper, punch a hole in it, attach a string on one end, and a ribbon on the other, so it looked like her kite. Obviously, it’s not going to fly, but he was just so happy to run after her and his little kite was just dragging on the ground, he was just happy as a clam.
Happiness is beyond all definitions.
When we were children, we enjoyed our lives, whether we were breaking things or playing with other kids. We didn’t need anything to be happy. But as we grew up, we got conditioned to think that we would be happy if we got this job or if we made a billion dollars, and so all those counter-intuitive thought processes creeped into us as part of our cultural conditioning. The more we become aware of it, the better for us.
If we wait for things like, “I’ll be happy when I get this promotion, get this car, buy this house,” that actually hurts our happiness because we have all these expectations about how happy we’ll be and, they may not be met and then it actually drives down our happiness a little bit.
Happiness is never taken away from us. We are in control of our own happiness, and happiness is our own nature. So, the very act of looking for it when you’re already there takes it away from us.
There is no one-to-one correlation between happiness and what we’re desiring to try to achieve, what goes you’re creating in your mind. Our actual happiness is prior to that.
The secret to happiness
The more we understand the structure of happiness, the more it happens when we are in our peaceful state. We are happy, but when a desire comes, our energy jumps to a particular object or a particular state and tries to achieve it. And then, we come back to a natural state, and there is a kink in the graph of when the next desire comes.
So during that time, we are by ourselves. We are happy. But we somehow correlate that happiness to the achievement of that particular object or desire, and then we get caught up in the illusion, whereas really it is sticking to that graph.
All our actions arise out of happiness. Whether it’s a single-celled organism or even highly evolved beings, they’re all searching for their own self, their own happiness, but unfortunately, the search is outside rather than inside. That’s the only challenge.
Leveraging the power of silence
Pradeep coached executives and he does it this way:
He goes into a deeper silence. Whatever problems they had just before they got into the silence, it’s all dissolved. It’s not solid. It’s no longer there because those thoughts have melted away, and then they’re able to see themselves more clearly from a corporate perspective.
They become more cohesive, more empathetic, and more helpful to each other without even saying every single word. Silence is like the mother from which all thoughts come, all languages, cultures, conditioning, every single word. That’s how powerful it is.
Achieving happiness in our personal lives
If you understand how we get conflicted, then that can open the door for happiness in the sense that we make it associated with our bodies. In reality, that’s just a label. We are the energy field in which everything exists.
So, the more and more we become aware of that energy field, the less conflicted we are and the more we start to see it as part of ourselves. So, natural empathy arises. We start feeling that love, and not the love as we define it in so many words, but because of that oneness of experience that we start getting naturally. All the silos that are created by thought melt away and the solution is found.
