World Happiness Day: Taking Happiness Seriously!

“Happiness is in the heart, not in the circumstances.” 

~ Anonymous

How seriously are you taking happiness?

As recently as 2012, the United Nations elevated happiness to holiday status, recognizing March 20 for the pursuit of happiness as a human right and a fundamental human goal. I was glad to hear of the news.

But while the greater world was catching up, I’d been pursuing happiness for a full half century. For several years, I’ve been promoting it daily through blogs, videos, podcasts, ebooks, public speaking and media interviews in the U.S. and abroad – all under my “Living Happy – Inside Out” mantra.

So in support of the official U.N. resolution encouraging everyone to engage in the day through “education and public awareness-raising activities,” I’m formally releasing my latest contribution to the cause. Aimed at emotional intelligence, my new Foundations of Happiness is the culmination of a fifty year pursuit that’s now available for public gleaning.

With modules inquiring into our origins and identity, the course explores mental backdrops, gifting forgiveness, practicing gratitude and walking into one’s personal destiny. Designed in a reflective, multi-media format, it brings inquirers through their own experiences and helps them emerge with brighter and sounder perspectives.

Details of our lives can differ, but the often futile attempts to find peace and happiness do not. In Foundations of Happiness, I open up certain disconnects between our outer professions and inner thought life that have perplexed me since youth. While pursuing these personal questions, I learned to deconstruct the human experience in deep, and sometimes life-altering, ways.

I carefully weave intimate stories from my own life and those of a few others, too, through videos, audios and written narratives. Explored collectively or separately, they create ribbons that connect us all to an inner core through which happiness, peace and well-being can flow.

Happiness is an inside – rather than an outside – job, one that requires a certain level of emotional intelligence.

In keeping with the theme of happiness, a visit to The Hague a few years ago inspired me to reflect in front of another international institution also established for public good. Standing in front of the Peace Palace, I underscored a long-held belief from which I have rarely, if ever, wavered:

To create a better world, we must first find peace and happiness in our heart.

 No institution or formal proclamation – including the latest created by the 2012 United Nations resolution – will ever succeed in changing our world for good. Thankfully, however, each one of us has the capacity to change the world by making a personal decision.

We can choose to change ourselves first.

Peace, happiness and good will toward men must begin from within. And as long as a better world starts within each one of us, I’ll continue doing my part to ensure that a truly happier one eventually emerges.

Wishing you a happy life and a happy world, starting from the inside of you, too!

Maura Sweeney - Ambassador of Happiness 

Author of the Foundations of Happiness eCourse