happiness | Ascension Lifestyle

25 Jan 2022
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6 ideas from around the world to help boost happiness

Saudade, from Brazil

In [Brazilian] Portuguese, there’s something called saudade, which is a feeling of longing, melancholy, and nostalgia for a happiness that once was—or even a happiness you merely hoped for. The concept is so entrenched in Brazilian ideology that it’s celebrated every year on Saudade Day (January 30^th).

Most of us will have experienced a bittersweet pleasure in moments of melancholy—flipping through old photos or caring about anyone enough to miss them when they’re gone. These sentimental moments can make us appreciate these memories even more and encourage us to pay attention to the details of the here and now. The concept of saudade reminds us to spend time remembering those we’ve loved and lost, then practice being a little more grateful for the ones still around.

Meraki, from Greece

Meraki refers to “an introspective, precise expression of care, usually applied to a cherished pastime.” The idea behind meraki is to challenge yourself to break up the monotony of your regular routine (say, your nine-to-five job) by intentionally carving out time to invest in activities that inspire and relax you.

Having a passion that you can take pride in can be of extra benefit to those who can’t say the same for their primary occupation,” says Russel. It can also give you something to look forward to throughout the day, which will surely boost your happiness.

Dolce far niente, from Italy

This Italian phrase translates to “the sweetness of doing nothing,” a concept that is all about savoring the moment and really enjoying the present.

While many western cultures tend to save up their ‘fun quota’ for an annual escape or a boozy weekend, Italians spread it over the minutes, hours, and days throughout the year. Adopting this attitude can remind you that you deserve to enjoy life all year round, not just while on vacation.

Friluftsliv, from Norway

The Norwegians have a concept of friluftsliv, or “free air life,” which is about enjoying outdoor socials, even in cold winter conditions. In Norway, time spent outdoors is central to their way of life—but the concept of friluftsliv isn’t just about being outside, it’s about engaging with nature in an intentional way.

Most Norwegians believe you have to work for things—to earn them with physical endeavors, or by battling the elements. Only once you’ve [literally] climbed a mountain in the rain and cold can you truly enjoy your dinner.

Now, not all of us will be climbing mountains regularly, or even live in a landscape where that’s an option but embrace the spirit of friluftsliv by going for a walk or sitting in your garden, watching the birds visit your birdfeeder.

Smultronstӓlle, from Sweden

The essence behind smultronstӓlle, which literally translated means “field of wild strawberries” or “wild strawberry patch,” is to establish a place to go when you’re feeling stressed or overwhelmed where you know you won’t be disturbed.

Even though the phrase is linked to the outdoors, you can also practice this indoors, as long as it’s your happy place that just makes you feel better. Having a smultronstӓllecan be a great way to stay calm, restore balance, and feel rejuvenated.

Wabi sabi and kintsugi, from Japan

Our society often values perfection, which may lead us to put a lot of pressure on ourselves and our performance in life and work, however, the Japanese philosophy of wabi sabi, which translates to “the beauty of imperfection,” can help relieve us of this weight. Accepting the beauty in imperfection can make us feel better when things don’t turn out exactly as planned.

Kintsugi is a physical manifestation of wabi sabi—it refers to the ancient Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with gold or metallic lacquer. While many of us may discard a broken teacup, believing it has been rendered useless, kintsugi celebrates this imperfection by piecing the shattered pieces together extravagantly, highlighting the scar in a manner that makes it even more beautiful than when it was whole or “perfect.”

About the Author:

Helen Russell is a journalist and global happiness expert who wrote The Year of Living Danishly and The Atlas of Happiness.

Original article here

25 Oct 2021
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What We Want Doesn’t Always Make Us Happy

Much of modern economic theory is based around a simple idea: Human beings maximize utility. But what is utility? Many people think of it as happiness or pleasure; British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the inventor of utilitarianism, conceived of it this way. But this isn’t how modern economists think of the concept. To an economist, utility simply means how much people want something. If an economist observes people working hard and making sacrifices to buy houses, then the conclusion is that houses must have lots of utility to those people.

Modern economists tend to assume that utility is good — that people should get what they want. When economists talk about the notion of consumer surplus, they just mean the utility that consumers derive from getting a good deal on consumer goods. Welfare economics, which deals with the question of how much the economy benefits humanity, often conceives of social welfare as a function of the extent to which people satisfy their wants. More egalitarian economists will tend to value the utility of the poor and disadvantaged more than the utility of the wealthy, but fundamentally it’s still about giving people what they desire.

There are certainly reasons to criticize this philosophical approach. First of all, people sometimes make choices they come to regret. Smokers know they should quit now, but they put it off and years later end up wishing they had shown a little more fortitude. So should society care about people’s present selves, or their future selves? This question is very important when discussing whether to ban electronic cigarettes. If Juul Labs and other vape makers get young people hooked on nicotine in ways that they’ll later wish they hadn’t, it might make sense for government to bar those people from satisfying their wants.

But there are deeper reasons to question whether society should just feed human desires all the time. Bentham’s utilitarianism conceived of a good society as one that makes its people happy. But what if the things people desire don’t bring them happiness?

There’s no clear consensus on how to measure happiness. Some neuroscientists have tried to link it to various measures of brain activity. But economists tend to use a method that’s a lot cheaper and quicker — they send out surveys and questionnaires asking people how happy they are.

Happiness research has led to some surprising and troubling discoveries. People seem to reliably seek out a few things that make them unhappy.

One of these things is Facebook, by far the world’s largest social-networking site. In a 2019 paper, economists Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer and Matthew Gentzkow investigated how much money they had to pay Facebook users in order to get them to deactivate the Facebook app for one or two months. They found that the median amount was $100, and the average was $180 (the latter being larger because a few users really loved Facebook).

This suggests that Facebook, which is free to use, generates a huge amount of utility — more than $370 billion a year in consumer surplus in the U.S. alone. This bolsters the argument of those who believe that free digital services have added a lot of unmeasured output to the global economy.

But Allcott et al. also found that the people who deactivated Facebook as part of the experiment were happier afterward, reporting higher levels of life satisfaction and lower levels of depression and anxiety. The change was modest but significant — equal to about 25 to 40 percent of the beneficial effect typically reported for psychotherapy.

Why are people willing to pay so much money for something that reduces their happiness? One possibility is that social media acts like an addictive drug — in fact, the people Allcott et al. paid to deactivate Facebook ended up using it less after the experiment was over. But another possibility is that people use services like Facebook because they’re compelled by motivations other than the pursuit of happiness.

Another example of the disconnect between happiness and utility might be commuting time. Economists and other happiness researchers consistently find that longer commutes are associated with unhappiness. Yet people still pay quite a lot to live in far-flung exurbs. Economist Robert H. Frank has found that the larger houses that come with exurban life don’t compensate for the longer commute times in terms of happiness. House size and commute time aren’t the only factor in the choice of what neighborhood to live in, but this might be another case like Facebook where things that bring utility don’t bring happiness.

There may be a number of such cases. A paper by economists Daniel J. Benjamin, Ori Heffetz, Miles S. Kimball, and Alex Rees-Jones found that on surveys, people usually predict that the things they say they’d pay money for would also boost their happiness — but not always.

So what should society do about the disconnect between utility and happiness? The question raises the thorny issue of paternalism and whether it’s government’s role to push people to do things they don’t want to do, simply because they might be happier as a result. Basing policy on happiness surveys might also be a mistake if these surveys aren’t good measures of true happiness. Such surveys might reflect cultural expectations of what people think they ought to say, or people could gradually lose their ability to gauge how much happier or sadder they are now than they were in the past.

But it also unwise to simply dismiss the disconnect between happiness and utility simply because happiness is hard to measure. If people are consistently making mistakes that lead to a less happy society, it’s a problem that should be addressed. Bentham and the original utilitarians would demand no less.

Noah Smith is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.

Original article here

20 Apr 2020
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The Great Unmasking

“Searchin’ the horizon

For what we can’t quite see

When all we’ve ever needed

Has been there all along

Inside of you and me…“

~ lyrics from A Little Soon to Say, by Jackson Browne

Here we sit, on the cusp of the Age of Aquarius: a true renaissance in spirit/mind/body for everyone on Earth.

Or is it the Age of the Virus, a plague that promises to be the end of the world as we know it? Theories abound:

Is the virus our body’s response to 5G technology?
Is it a bio-engineered plot to control the planet?
Has the magnitude of this event been “trumped up” for political gain?

Over the last few months, these and other questions about the origins of COVID-19 have been batted about ad nauseam. And while questioning authority is always a good idea, in this extraordinary time we need to question reality. So consider this:

Is the virus an out-picturing of endogenous fear — which is, itself, a virus?

Changing the World from Within

In the Gene Keys teachings, a powerful awakening tool that describes the shadow, gift and siddhi (enlightened mind) of 64 human consciousness codes, Richard Rudd writes, of Siddhi 49, Rebirth: “The first insight is that the world in its current form cannot be fixed, no matter how profound or far-reaching the revolution may be. The very bedrock of our modern society is founded upon a species that has always made decisions rooted in fear. The only way for a new future to be created is to begin from scratch — a rebirth.

“The rebirth is the organic flowering of the revolution. Just because we cannot fix the world as it is, does not mean we cannot make the world a better place. Our vision of the perfect future is precisely what creates the necessary frequency shift that will trigger the genetic forking of our species. It will happen because it must happen, but we must still create that happening. This is the paradox.”

If this coronavirus is the embodiment of our collective fear, is it causing the most severe symptoms in those whose DNA holds the greatest degree of ancestral terror? And if so, is this helping us accelerate towards what Rudd refers to as our “genetic escape velocity”?

Yet the genesis of the virus is still not our most powerful inquiry. The deeper conversation calling us is: what can we learn from what is transpiring?

This evolutionary moment heralds manifold gifts for humanity:

We’re healing ancient trauma. Mayan elder and cosmological historian Barbara Hand Clow has discussed paleoscientific research, which indicates “early humans showed no signs of being aware of the existence of the four seasons until 10,000 years ago.” The cataclysm that created Earth’s variable rotation, which gives rise to climatic changes, plunged us from unity consciousness into duality and survival mode, which is still encoded in our limbic brains. Our planet underwent a trauma and ever since, she “trembles,” bringing us the phenomenon of seasonal shifts. So our fear of the “end times” is actually a multi-traumatic memory, not a premonition. The virus is a memory trigger.
We’re giving the Earth a breather. In just 30 days, Himalayan peaks emerged from 30 years of pollution. In Venice, minus tourism, the canals run clear, prompting dolphins to frolic in the crystal waters. Perhaps most astonishing of all, the infamous Los Angeles smog is gone — a potent glimpse of what’s possible.
By staying home, we’re allowing wildlife to re-emerge in droves. Chimpanzee champion Jane Goodall says, “The world is only going to come right when every day is an Earth Day, because we’re part of the natural world; we depend on it.”
We’re connecting with “strangers”, having heartfelt conversations six feet apart, without artifice or agenda. While wearing facemasks, we’re becoming much more vulnerable, melting the masks of separation as never before.
We’re discovering what kindness means at a primal level. The ultimate key to coming home to ourselves as one people and one destiny may lie in what peaceable cultures have always known: from the pain that cracks our hearts wide open, compassion and kindness flower. Naomi Shihab-Nye’s poem, Kindness, eloquently expresses this “proper dose of poignancy”.

Clearly, this global time-out is a directive to be introspective. We’re being asked not just to isolate, but to innovate and co-create. As one ally put it, “It’s go time, Starseeds.” And we are.

Searching the Horizon

Viewing what’s taking place as a gift opens the quantum door to 5D, not 5G. It depends on how far we can allow our minds to s-t-r-e-t-c-h beyond the known. Everything is experimental, now. A Native American elder urges, “Let go of the known unreal, and throw yourself into the real unknown.”

As Thea Alexander writes in her wildly prescient 1976 novel, 2150 A.D.: “The measure of a mind’s evolution is its acceptance of the unacceptable.” Her Macro Society future is richly imagined, and I encourage you to read and share the book if you can get your hands on a copy.

A high frequency comedic French film, The Green Beautiful (La Belle Verte), explores similar themes: loving and respecting Nature, and loving ourselves as connected, whole beings at one with the natural world. The full movie is routinely removed from YouTube (hmmm…).

Love, not fear, is what needs to spread. Love is the key to our evolution. During my pneumonia gateway 27 years ago, I asked myself, if I died, what would I regret? The answer came quietly: “You haven’t loved.” This surprised me. Then I heard, “You haven’t served.” And I began to understand that loving, and serving, are one.

Now, we are all being asked to open our hearts to a greater degree than ever before. At the start of April, Venus, planet of Love, transited Alcyone, the central sun of the Pleiades, “activating a stream of powerful Divine Feminine energy that will be received on Earth to assist humanity to rise above the darkness and fear that is currently engulfing the planet.”

Growing to 20/20 and Beyond

We’re on a global vision quest in this year of perfect (in)sight.

Barbara Hand Clow writes, “Cosmic light reaches Earth in 2020. Miraculously, at the exact moment of the Winter Solstice, December 21, 2020, Jupiter conjoins Saturn in zero degrees Aquarius trine the Pleiades, the dawning of the Aquarian Age.”

Viewed from this Macro perspective, it is a true privilege to be alive at this nexus, ushering in the Shift of the Ages. We’re the sunrise of the kind of society 2150 A.D. and The Green Beautiful envision: peaceable, loving, healthy, and joyously co-existing with All That Is.

It’ll be a long road; we didn’t arrive where we are in an instant, and the changes won’t occur overnight. We can begin by adopting an eidetic suggestion from Kirstin Miller, executive director of Ecocity Builders: “Start thinking like a flower, not like a tailpipe.”

We are all cells in Mama Gaia, called to become perfusionists for the lifeblood of our planetary body. Out of the chrysalis, unmasking fear and denial to invite Love, respect and co-creation into our lives in a wholly new way.

All we’ve ever needed has been here all along, inside of you and me. Thank you for choosing to be embodied at this auspicious liminal threshold. Welcome Home.

About the Author:

Ascension Lifestyle Managing Editor Amara Rose is a “midwife” for our global rebirth. She offers life crafting, e-courses, business alchemy and content creation to accelerate your evolutionary journey. Learn more at LiveYourLight.com, where you can subscribe to her resource-rich enewsletter, What Shines.

28 Feb 2018
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Life In the Middle Ages: Facing the Feisty Fifties

I see my folks are gettin’ on

And I watch their bodies change

I know they see the same in me

And it makes us both feel strange

No matter how you tell yourself

It’s what we all go through

Those lines are pretty hard to take

When they’re staring back at you.

~ Nick of Time by Bonnie Raitt

I got my period on Valentine’s Day. Talk about a literal red-letter day! Never have I been so unabashedly joy-filled at the sight of blood. For the first time, I truly appreciate a euphemism both girls and women have used for generations to refer to their Moontime: “my friend.”

Perhaps I should explain that I am not thirteen. I’m not 37. I’m 50, and this is my first cycle in five months. Menopause swooped in without warning last fall and I dried up like the Sahara. To suddenly bleed after a week in which I did, in fact, feel premenstrual is confirmation that my body’s still experimenting with this shift. It’s not a done deal. There’s yet time to adjust to the idea of being a Crone — and being eligible for membership in AARP (you’ve got to be kidding!)

Embracing the “F” Word

Now that the largest cohort in history is graying en masse, someone turns 50 approximately every eight seconds. Even this formidable fleet can’t stem the tide of aging jokes, however. At 50, the good-natured ribbing begins in earnest. My friend Faith, who celebrated her 50^th just weeks before me, recalled a card she received when she turned 40: “I’m going to have to say the ‘F’ word: forty! Forty! Forty!”

We lamented that the greeting card industry doesn’t seem to think we have a sense of humor a decade later. Why isn’t there a card for 50-year-olds that reads, “I’m at the age where I can freely use the ‘F’ word: fifty, fifty, fifty!!”

My parents, who do not perceive themselves as “old” in their eighties, sent me a hilarious Dr. Seuss parody of “Thing One” and “Thing Two” called, “It’s a Fifty Thing!” The birthday card included lines such as, “Thing Fifty can groove to the latest CD. (And with bifocal lenses, Thing Fifty can see!)”

Hm. It’s one “thing” to major in gerontology and enjoy working with elders in your twenties; quite a different matter when you’re on the cusp of joining a collective that’s marginalized in Western society and rendered virtually invisible.

I remember my mom telling me with pride about a man at the Department of Motor Vehicles flirting with her when she retook her driver’s test at age 65. I was 35 at the time, and even then, wondered aloud in my public speaking class “how much longer” men would continue to flirt with me.

From the vantage point of an additional fifteen years, I find my 30-something fear rather quaint.

Redefining Wrinkles and “Cool”

The fifties promise to be an intriguing balance of living in an aging body while possessing a certain ineffable wisdom and spirit we hadn’t accessed in our younger years. Although the twenty-somethings and teens I meet today often seem wise far beyond where my generation was at their age, due no doubt to the rapid evolution of humanity as a whole, there is much to be said for the joie de vivre that accrues with vintage.

Wrinkles signify ripeness. There’s a reason the honorific, “sage” is usually conferred on an elder.

I met an 83-year-old woman with close-cropped silver hair streaked fuchsia, wearing peace sign earrings. I commented that it was so cool to see “a woman of her maturity” thus attired, to which she replied, “Oh, I wasn’t cool when I was young!”

Reconciling body image with spiritual awareness is, paradoxically, only an issue if one chooses to focus on the physical. When the body becomes background — as it often is de facto in youth, with parts that are well oiled, shapely, firm, and thus, easier to “ignore” — our essence shines forth, and that’s what people see when they read the story in our eyes.

A Bountiful Harvest

Fifty is a time to harvest our joy — and acknowledge evidence of our mortality. While several of my contemporaries have already matched wits with serious illness, and a few have transitioned to the other side of life, I’ve also watched three dear friends meet and marry their life partners in their fifties. As I’ve been casting my soul mate net for a while now, this is heartening news.

Life in the Middle Ages can be bountiful, as Oprah Winfrey, our ultimate generational role model for accomplished aging, said of her 50^th birthday: “All these years I’ve been taking lessons from life experiences and feeling like I was growing into myself. Finally, I feel grown. More like myself than I’ve ever been. If it’s true what Maya Angelou says, that the fifties represent everything you were meant to be, all I can say is, watch out.”

Riley Mackenzie* embodies Angelou’s decree. In her fifties, she studied the subtleties of Argentine Tango, became a serious ceramics artist, and swung from a high trapeze. Now 68, she’s just back from a leisurely road trip around the periphery of the U.S. with her husband of almost, yes, 50 years. She’s also reinventing her marketing business with a partner, another vital woman in her late fifties. Mackenzie says emphatically, “It’s the most fun I could ever imagine having!”

Hot Flashes…of Inspiration

Age, like everything else in life, is a matter of perspective. Six months before my milestone birthday, I fell into conversation with a lively older gentleman as we waited to cross the street. He was searching his pockets for his eyeglasses, and, after I helped him find them, we walked together for a few minutes. He told me he was 100 years old, and regaled me with tales of his life. As we reached a parting of the ways, he turned to me and asked, quite seriously, “So tell me, young lady, have you graduated from college yet?”

Now, that’s the ultimate tonic for the “chronologically gifted”!

As I sit in a local teahouse, sipping rooibos and savoring my feminine cycle along with some exquisite chocolate mousse, I’m tickled by these words from The Reconnections website, on meeting the beloved: “I saw a license plate the other day, on a car belonging to a woman aged 50 plus: ‘Give me chocolate, and no one gets hurt.’ I thought that one was pretty neat until I saw a better one: ‘I’m over 50 and I’m still hot — except now, it comes in flashes.'”

How true. Flashes of insight. Flashes of inspiration. Flashes of unmitigated delight at just how extraordinary life on this beautiful blue-green planet can be. One author refers to the second half-century as “Jubilee Time.”

I’m ready to party. Considering how many playmates I’ll have in the galactic sandbox, it’s destined to be an unsurpassed blast. Bring it on: fifty! Fifty! Fifty!

* name changed to honor her privacy

About the Author:

Amara Rose can pluck a graying hair from her scalp at 25 mph; driving any faster, she waits for a red light. To see what she’s done with her first half-century, visit LiveYourLight.com. Offer her dark chocolate and you open the doorway to friendship.

07 Dec 2016
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Ways to Make You Love Every Bit of You

One of the first mistakes people make is searching for the happiness in the outside world instead of finding it within. Our dependency on other people’s opinion and the society’s pressure to fit into certain molds – can make us feel inadequate, lonely, and unlovable. What is worse, most people experiencing this stay quiet: they tumble through their everyday, never getting the love they truly deserve. No, this is not about romantic love: we’re talking about self-love. Feelings of unworthiness transfer to everything you do and their true danger lies in the fact they trigger a delusion they are a part of your identity.

Identity isn’t something that’s fixed and unchangeable. Our souls are fluid and fragile, constantly processing everything that’s put upon them and nobody is immune to that. Depending on the way a person has been raised and how the world shaped their identity, it can experience more or fewer difficulties to learn the essence of self-love. Sometimes, it is harder than one may think and while it’s easy to blame the world for it – you should take your share of responsibility. It’s easier not to do anything and indulge in self-pity instead of stop making excuses. Postponing this does you no good: start with three small steps.

The first step towards loving yourself is realizing you do have the right to be loved. Frequent disappointments in dating world can leave you thinking there’s something wrong with you. This attitude comes from not being at peace with yourself: you have to stop assessing your personal value through relationships with others. Instead of asking yourself – does he love me for who I am, try making it the other way around: do I love him for who he is? We often accept others’ love out of fear of loneliness. If it falls apart, stop blaming him or yourself. Some things aren’t meant to work out: what’s for you won’t pass you by. There is a higher force taking care of you.

The second step would be mapping out the reasons you feel bad about yourself. Too often we forget that the only thing standing in the way of achieving our dreams – are we alone. You have the power to change and you are in charge of your life. Life’s too short not the get the most of it. If you feel bad about traveling so little, figure out a way to save up some money and let the world lavish you with its beauties. If you have a weight problem that’s bothering you, take baby steps with workout regimes and healthy dieting. Try meditation: it is proven to rewire your brain and more importantly – it helps you connect with yourself and with higher forces. Align yourself with the universe. Only by being in harmony with yourself can you become one with the world. This feeling of peace and serenity will definitely shift your perspective about how you feel about yourself.

The third step is putting yourself out there. Expose your heart to new experiences. Do something you’ve never tried before, even if you think you are not going to like it. These adventures can reveal new sides of you that you didn’t even know they existed. They are the fuel for your transformation process as they push you outside of your comfort zone: it can be small things like signing up for a yoga class or doing something you’re scared of – skydiving perhaps? You are a unique living being that’s not taking the advantage of what the world has prepared for you. By daring to be brave and opening your heart to all kinds of love, you will learn to love yourself and accept the love you truly deserve.

Embrace the paradox that emerges from the following fact: you need to accept yourself, but you also need to be aware that only change is constant. Self-love is the cornerstone that makes you unapologetic about how you want other people to treat you.