“Look around you. Take it in . . . this is it! The time of your life! Don’t think, ‘I’d be happier if things were better’. That’s the trap. The time of your life is not dictated by circumstances, but by your chosen frame of mind.”

So says Mike Dooley when he realized that he has spent most of his life getting ready for his life, not realizing that those years were his life. “How funny, if not a little sad, to perpetually think one day I will make it, achieve it, and live it, as the days . . . just . . .  tick . . . on . . . by . . .”

That brings us to the million dollar question – how to be happy now. Matt Kahn talks about ten golden rules to unlocking emotional freedom and the first one is, “You’ve done nothing wrong”.

He says you simplify life when learning to let go of regret and releasing yourself from self-blame, -judgement and -criticism. Everything you think you did wrong was actually exactly the right gift for your highest growth and learning.

No matter what happens or which mistakes you think you’ve made, you are experiencing life unfolding in a precise way to help you grow and remember who you came here to be. So, please see the value in what you presume to be failure. Everything you’ve gone through has been preparing you to be the perfect instrument to make your one-of-a-kind impact in the world.

Seeing life from this perspective has been a giant step in the direction of happiness for me. But happy-all-out-no-holds-bar? In our household the dogs are the only ones to experience that kind of happy. That’s why I shrieked with delight when I came across the book, ‘Are you as happy as your dog?’ by award-winning author, Alan Cohen.

He writes that his dog, Munchie, lives in a state of continuous delight and discovery and is the most joyful creature he has ever seen. It became clear to Alan that Munchie knew something he didn’t know or at least didn’t remember. He decided to study Munchie’s attitude to see what the dog knew that the human was missing.

Professor Munchie’s lessons include: Give your heart to someone; love to be a lover; ask for what you want; keep your eye on the ball; get off the leash sometimes; dig where the real bones are; don’t settle for mush; and dream with your feet moving.

Alan says that Munchie’s basic secret is living from a place of love. “You can choose to react from a place of fear or from a place of love. That’s it. That’s what determines how you experience life.”
Most of us are so riddled with fear that we automatically react from an unconscious basis of dread.

Psychologist Gay Hendricks explains that under the stress of coping with the circumstances of our early lives, we develop two sets of intentions: conscious and unconscious.

The conscious intentions are bent on creating positive results through actions that attract positive recognition. The unconscious intentions are focused on the short-term solution of warding off pain at the sacrifice of long-term solutions that prevent the pain from occurring in the first place.

Gay says that when we are not aware of our unconscious intentions, they run our lives. The process of personal growth involves a slow awakening to how and why we create painful results when our conscious intentions were so lofty.

The trick would be to find out what our unconscious intentions are. Gay says that it was a life-changing moment for him when he heard the 80-year-old Indian philosopher, J Krishnamurti, say that people don’t need to go to therapy or record their dreams to see their unconscious. All you have to do is look around you: Your life is your unconscious in 3-D – the good, the bad and the ugly.

Okay, I’m looking around me. Let me open my desk drawer . . . Maybe not such a good idea. Then, looking at my dog in the basket under the desk, I think I get it – the whole how-to-be-happy-now thing.

It goes like this: When reacting to anything in any moment whatsoever, just ask yourself – what would love do? Trust the answer you get, girlfriend. That’s who you came here to be.