The Art of Happiness
Why did I decide to talk about happiness today? Well, one of the things is that I’ve been seeing a lot in the newspapers and in television reports that they’re expecting a decline in mental health. People have been locked in, people have been isolated not able to connect with their loved ones. There’s a lot of concern about mental health in general following COVID or as COVID winds it’s weary way on. I thought I’d talk about some of the things that I learnt about happiness, about how to achieve some level of happiness from when I was clinically depressed.
I think this is so important because when we are in a miserable state we often we don’t, we lose those tools and techniques. Actually, the more that you can hold onto them the more that you can do to maintain a happy state the more it stops you sinking down into those depths that I once experienced and quite frankly, I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. So back in when I was around 39, 40, so back in 1995, 1996, I really wasn’t in a good place. I knew I wasn’t in a good place and I hadn’t been in a great place for a couple of years.
I’d tried to do various things about it. I had joined an outfit called Insight. If you ever heard of the landmark forum, it was one of those kinds of organisations, personal development, personal growth and I’d done a lot of work with them. But ultimately it hadn’t really made a difference. I had started to go and see a psychotherapist and that wasn’t making a lot of difference either but at least seeing a psychotherapist, I knew that somebody was kind of holding my, holding the container for me, so that if I felt really fell through the cracks or if I looked like I was becoming a danger to myself, then she’d be there to step in and step up any help, lend any level of help that I needed, but I was really, really unhappy, and I have no energy.
I didn’t know what was going on. I thought maybe, at first I thought it was like a prolonged flu because I couldn’t get out of bed and I had headaches, and then it got to a point where I just wept and I wept and I wept. Then I moved beyond that weeping where I was numb and I just couldn’t feel anything. I didn’t want to take the pills and I didn’t at that point have a clinical depression diagnosis anyway. But I really didn’t want to go down the pills route I’d been put on Valium when I was 13, and that hadn’t gone very well for me.
What I decided to do, was to look around for other alternatives and I heard about NLP. NLP was, I didn’t know much about it, but I thought, well, I’ll give it a try. I interviewed a load of companies. I checked them all out and eventually realised that NLP might just possibly have something to offer me. So I started on this path with NLP. Now it didn’t solve the whole problem. It didn’t get me completely out of depression, but it started me on my way.
There are a couple of things from NLP that I think really really started to help me with the difference.
The first one was, that I realised that I was very much focusing all the time, focusing on the negative, you name it, I’d focus on the negative. I was known at work for being cynical. I specialised in being cynical and always finding the downside. Always find it, in a funny way, but always finding the downside. So the first thing that was useful for me, was to start to focus on those things that were good. It didn’t matter how small. The first thing was even in the very small moments, finding something good to think about. Finding something positive to think about rather than, because once you start thinking about the negative you spiral down, you go down, down, down, down. When you start thinking, even this teeny weeny weeny, something that’s good, it changes neurology, it changes your behaviour.
The next thing that really, really helped me was the realisation that there’s a huge huge connection between our state of mind and our body. If you’re really feeling internally in a miserable state, and you can’t change it from within your brain, then change it from within your body. A lot of us, we certainly people certainly me, I was very disconnected from body. I was very much living up in my head, but the thing is that because of the way that we are wired, you can change what’s going on in your brain, you can change what’s going on in literally in your posture. You can change what’s going on in the way that you react to things.
So just try it out. So what I want to invite you to do, is have a mildly depressing thought something not something, something that you’re mildly peeved about and just focus on that mildly peeved thing. Then what I want you to do is just do it standing up. It’s great to do it standing up. So stand up, think about getting to that state, thinking about that thing that you’re not particularly happy about, and now what I want you to do is throw your head up, look at the ceiling, put the biggest grin you possibly can on your face and go. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Really really loudly. Keep grinning keep grinning. Keep thinking about I’m. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And now how you feel, notice how it’s different. Notice how you feel. You’ve got a bit of energy. You might be smiling or laughing. It’s such a simple trick.
Change what you’re doing with your body. Dance it out, screaming into it into a towel, move, go for a walk but do something change, literally change your physiology change what’s happening in your body. Get into your body, and it can make such a profound difference. Even a silly little exercise, like the one that I just invited you to do. It can make such a profound difference. So changing our posture changing our, what we’re doing, can really significantly make us feel more cheerful.
Another thing that you can do is, and it wasn’t around when I was doing my the depression thing. Is look at something like Action for Happiness. It’s a website and it’s got some really great resources. The action for happiness website’s got some great resources, because it really is all about promoting happiness. So that’s a place that you can, that’s a resource that you can go and look at. Another thing that you can do, is listen to your own language, listen to how you talk to others, and what to you say to yourself in your head.
When we’re depressed we have a tendency to make everything mean something miserable. We will have one experience and we make these generalisations. I had a bad experience. Somebody scowled at me in the street, and that means that people don’t like me. So we’d take a tiny, tiny experience, and we generalise out and suddenly everything is awful. Everything is a disaster. So notice when you do that, when do you have experience of something really quite small happening, and you take it to mean that the whole world is against you, that everything’s awful, that nobody likes you. You take small events and you let them trigger your biggest fears, your biggest beliefs about yourself. Something small happen then you let your inner critic run riot.
Inner critics can really, really make you feel depressed. I know when I was depressed my inner critic actually, until I numbed out and I was so numb that my inner critic couldn’t really do much. But your inner critic can really really make you feel very depressed. Listen to when your inner critic, that little voice in your head, the little pesky it’s going you’re no good, you shouldn’t be doing this, you’re stupid All that stuff, and I will do a live on the inner critic at some point.
Listen to when that starts to happen. If that does start to happen, just turn around and ask it nicely. So what’s your purpose? What’s your point? How are you helping me today? ‘Cause if you’re not helping me, frankly piss off now, leave me alone, and let me do my body exercise. Let me focus on somebody scowled, oh, maybe they are not feeling great today. Because very often what we do is we interpret the reactions of the other person in terms of ourselves. When actually it’s not about you, it’s about them.
I hope these couple of tips have been helpful. If you are interested in doing more with Huna and exploring more with Huna, one of the things I’m doing at the moment and certainly happiness is an element of this because we’re doing a lot of meditation and we’re doing a lot of release work. I think release work is probably the most powerful thing that I know in terms of finding happiness. I can give you hints and tips, but actually it’s the release work that for me coming out of depression really, really made the difference. So if you want to join us, we’re doing the Kukui Collective. It’s a coaching group. We meet together twice a month. It’s group coaching. As I said, I’m doing some group coaching, meditation, release work. And the idea that harnessing the power of Huna and Huna can offer and harnessing the power of the group, then we can really start to make a change.
The Kukui Collective as I said it’s for women only, women who are in this group and women who are not in this group. So if you know a woman, who would benefit from this, who’s got an interest in things spiritual, but would really benefit from getting more exposure to release work, group support and some meditation and energy work. ‘Cause we’re gonna be doing a lot of energy work. We’ve just started, we had our first meeting last week and it was just so it’s so excited.
If you would like to join, if you’re interested, because it’s invitation only, go along to secretartofhuna.com/saoh-kukui-collective-info, have a look. From there you can get a link to my diary, and we can have a chat. Because I really, this works saved my, it literally saved my life. NLP helped me along the path. Huna saved my life and you look people meet me now and they go, you were depressed? That’s what Huna did for me. That’s what I want to share with the world because I believe it really can make a difference.
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