365 Ways to Live Happy (36 page)
Consider adding a blog on your website in which you journal every day on the subject of happiness. Blogging is a way of creating a lens for yourself and those who read and respond to your ideas about happiness. A daily focusing on happiness, which ebbs and flows according to your thoughts, moods, actions, health and well-being, will teach you more about happiness than just reading a book or trying on other people's ideas.
You can use happiness as your theme for any special occasion for which a card is appropriate, but the happiness focus works especially well for holiday cards. Create a handmade card for birthdays, anniversaries, engagements, christenings, and other occasions, too. Craft stores carry blank cards and envelopes. You can use calligraphy and water color or tempera paint to create appropriate images, or design your card on your computer and print it on card stock. Implicit in your unique card are messages of caring, thoughtfulness, and, of course, your wishes for abundant happiness.
Iron-on transfers are easy to produce and apply on T-shirts that you can then sell over the Internet. Simply select digital photos or other images and take them to your local copy center to have heat transfers made. If you want to promote your happiness website, blog, charitable cause, or you want to spread a little good cheer with a happiness quote or joke, put it on a T-shirt, get it exposed, and spread the good cheer.
If you like research, go online or to the library and find what some of history's great thinkers had to say about the pursuit of happiness. Keep a list, and when you have a few pages, enter them into a computer file. Or, you could find some pretty paper and write each quote using calligraphy. Turn your collection of sayings into a small booklet that you can bind in various ways. For example, you could use a three-hole punch and weave a brightly colored silk ribbon through the holes and use something inspirational for the cover. Your book of sayings can serve as a source of inspiration for those times when you or someone you love slips into negative thinking and can't find happiness and peace of mind.
Watch Comedy Central or Saturday Night Live and try writing a little monologue about happiness to perform for your children and spouse. If you have a comedic sense and love to laugh, you might enjoy refining your skit and offer to show it to friends, who, of course, would be willing to critique it. When you get really good, consider taking it into your community, performing it at fundraisers, school and church programs, charitable events, and even a local comedy club. Be fully engaged in the process. The French novelist Colette noted that she had enjoyed a wonderful life and only wished that she had realized it sooner. Enjoy and claim your life's happiness now.
Learn about laughter yoga, how to do it, and why it can bring you numerous health benefits such as lowering your blood pressure and decreasing the amounts of cortisol and other stress hormones circulating in your blood. That's good for your heart health. When you laugh, you breathe deeper, increasing oxygenation of your cells. Fake laughter, according to laughter yoga teachers, has the same mental and physical health benefits as real laughter. Some studies show that laughter can bring about the release of endorphins (the body's natural hormones that decrease pain), provides a massage of sorts to the internal organs such as the liver and spleen, and often increases the likelihood of having a good night sleep. The average adult may laugh roughly fifteen times each day, but laughing comes naturally to children who laugh up to three hundred times a day. Check out
www.laughteryoga.org
.
Put your cooking skills to good use preparing food for children at a summer camp. Children need good nutrition to keep them active, healthy, and happy. Unlike a meal thrown together when you are angry or upset, the food you prepare when you feel a sense of well-being, happiness, and love is infused with good vibrations according to yoga practitioners. So cook up something kids will love and serve it to them with a smile. You already know that kids laugh a lot, so a smile or a snicker could be enough to spread the cheer all the way down the serving line.
If you feel passionate about human rights and would welcome the opportunity to serve in that field in some way, organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International may have a position for you. Amnesty International works to raise global awareness of human rights violations, such as in Mexico where one in four women are subjugated to abuse from her partner. The organization is also concerned that rich nations are breaking international aid promises. In addition, Amnesty International seeks a moratorium on the death penalty because people in many countries have not received fair trials, may be innocent, and are facing certain death. If the work of that organization appeals to you, check out
www.amnesty.org
. Bring light back into the life of someone who may be facing darkness alone. Restore his or her joy through your work.
When you find a happiness quote that you love, put it at the bottom of your e-mail so it will be read by everyone you correspond with throughout your day. Also, when you happen upon funny pictures, hilarious stories, jokes, quips, and quotes that brighten your day, spread the good feelings to everyone in your e-mail address book. If your e-mail recipients are having a bad day, your dose of optimism, humor, and happiness may be just what they need to start giggling and get back into their joyful groove.