Happiness

Some say there are two types of happiness: pleasure from having our needs met, and purpose from living our values and working towards our goals. Hypnotherapy is not something that helps much for pleasure. If one could hypnotize oneself to be rich, I would have done it a long time ago... in fact, I think I did, but it did not have the effect I wanted. When we go into our past, we can discover ways that we fulfilled our needs in the past, become aware of it, and change how we fulfill that need to better meet our values. For the latter, hypnotherapy can be useful as well. When I was little, I remember one Easter when I was ten years old. My siblings and I ran out to gather eggs. I have ten brothers and sisters, and I am the youngest of the herd. When everyone began rushing out of the door with excitement, I became overwhelmed, seeing all the eggs being gathered up and none in sight for me to run after. I gave up. I sat down and cried. In that moment, my older sister saw what was happening, and she came to me and placed an egg in my basket. It was a nice gesture, but the feeling of incompetence had sunk in. "I'm not fast enough." "I'm too little." "I'm never going to win." These and other beliefs surrounded me and crippled me from moving forward.

Needless to say, this is not a good mindset to have in our dog-eat-dog world. One cannot just give up, give in, and expect others to be there to give us what we need... or can we? I was looking toward myself, seeing my inadequacy, my inability to do like my siblings could do. I was comparing, competing, complaining, and criticizing myself. Where does true happiness come from? One answer I have come across is found in the Bible. When Christ went into the wilderness to be with God, he was met with temptations. The first temptation was that of turning a rock into bread. Lucifer was tempting Christ to fall into the belief that happiness comes from bread, and it didn't matter how you got that bread. "Use your own power to satisfy your own hunger." Christ would not yield to this temptation, nor would he yield to the other two. And when Satan departed, angels came down from heaven and gave him bread to eat. Relying on God for our bread brings us true happiness.

Receiving things the way that God wants you to receive them, and giving things in the way that God wants you to give, will bring about true, lasting happiness. Once more, hypnotherapy is a tool for you to better understand how you have been going about fulfilling your needs. It is a time to reflect and change the way you do things so you can do them God's way, therefore finding more happiness in your life.