Stop Striving For Happiness!

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness. — Chuang Tzu

After I cleared my incoming email recently of non-essential messages, five remained. “How curious,” I thought as two of the five messages pertained to happiness. One was from the Daily Good, which opened with the above quote from Chuang Tzu. Simple, refreshing and clean. The other was from publishing coach, Robin Hoffman, with details about another happiness book.

Next I typed “happiness” into the Yahoo search engine and noted 227,000,000 results! A Google search on the same term yielded 54,300,000 results. Far fewer, yet overwhelming.

What is it about happiness, I thought? The more we seem to pursue it, the further from our grasp it seems to be. Then I returned to the Chuang Tzu quote. It’s all right there. Stop doing and start being. Experiment with withdrawing your attention from the pursuit of happiness and decide to BE happy. Experience happiness in the moment, in every moment. Try it and share your experiences with us via comments to this blog or on our Living Energy Facebook page.

Related articles

• Livia Kohn, Ph.D.: Chuang-tzu: The Tao of Perfect Happiness (huffingtonpost.com)