The Secret to Happiness

The secret is to be yourself.

There, I said it right up front. If you love to skim when you read, you can probably just stop right here and get on with the rest of your day.

But, if you want to dig a little deeper, to understand the juicy underpinnings that are the backbone of yoga and mindfulness philosophy, read on, because this is going to get interesting.

You. Know. You.

Only you know yourself: how you feel, what matters to you, what you’d fight to defend, what makes you laugh and what makes you cry. You are unique. Only you have been through what you’ve been through. There is no one else like you. And the life you’ve created is a reflection of that uniqueness.

In the yoga cosmology, we teach that there is one source for all of us. It is a pure light, like a steady white beam, that lives in everything and everyone. Each of us is like a prism or a crystal, and as the white light shines through us, it’s refracted and transformed into every color of the rainbow.

Some use the word diversity to describe this. There are no two colors that are exactly alike, but the point is we all come from the same source, and it’s alive in everything. The key to happiness is knowing this inner light while simultaneously celebrating how it shines as our own uniqueness.

Every action, activity, expression, word or work of art —every single thing we create, do and say, emerges from our core, from this meeting point of sameness and diversity. If everything we create, do and say emerges from our inwardness, then everything is an opportunity to know both our source and our own vibrant color of the rainbow just a little bit better.

Yoga teaches us that life is a mirror and that every experience, every person and how we interact with them are ways to know ourselves better. Through life experiences, we keep glimpsing both the light within and our special reflection of that light. When we forget this, yoga and mindfulness practices give us a chance to remember.

Who we are at our core — this nexus of white light & rainbow — is always evolving in response to life experiences, new understanding, circumstances and personal revelations. While the inner light of our core may always shine, how it shines is always in flux. This is where we often get lost, perhaps because we attach to the changing light, frustrated that it’s changing and making us uncomfortable while we forget there is an unchanging light within that never dims.

Our goal as yoga practitioners, and one of the keys to being ourselves and being happy, is to be open to the experiences and the conversations of life. To say yes to our own evolution. Mindfulness practices give us the chance to be present with it all and who we are in the process.

We emerge from these experiences, “with a larger sense of self than one brought into it, in which we learn that the self is not a scrap of turf to be defended but a capacity to be enlarged.” (Parker Palmer)

As we become more familiar with our ever changing inner landscape, we feel more confident and secure in who we are. We feel happier when we remember that we can’t be hurt or lose ourselves when we truly know who we are. And if we’re devoted to regularly reconnecting with our inner light and letting its rainbow flow through us in our work and in our choices then we’ll never risk feeling empty, unhappy or unfulfilled.