This Spiritual Renewal Week talk explores how to cultivate true and lasting happiness through spiritual principles. The main points are: letting go of the ego and sense of separation, choosing to embrace positivity while releasing negativity, and staying close to God's ever-present love and joy within. It emphasizes that real happiness comes from our divine nature rather than external circumstances.

Specific suggestions include unmasking the "I" thought, making lists of what you appreciate about others, seeing everything with a sense of "wow", and remembering that God loves us unconditionally like an only child. The overall message is that by attuning ourselves to the bliss within, we can live in abiding joy.
Transcript
Nayaswami Anandi:

Well, when we come to Spiritual Renewal Week and we think about making spiritual progress, we often think, “Okay that means more meditation, more devotion”, and so on.
Choosing Happiness
But as you could tell from Gyandev's talk on energy, and it's certainly true for happiness, it's certainly true for success, that it isn't just that if we meditate right we can have energy, if we meditate right we can have happiness or success, but as we apply our thinking to developing more energy, to developing more happiness, to cultivating happiness, to cultivating success, it very much is an essential ingredient to finding God, to meditating more deeply, to having more bliss in our lives.

The other night, Swami shared a joke that Yogananda, he said, used to love to tell, with so much laughter you could probably, could hardly understand what he was saying.

He said, “There were three men: an Irishman, an Englishman, and a Scotch, a Scotsman. And they all went to a bar to have a drink. They all had a glass of whiskey and a fly landed in each drink. And so the Irishman saw the fly and he just went [spills drink] and you know a third of his drink flushed out along with the fly. The Englishman reached for a spoon and delicately, you know, picked out the fly and put it on the table. And the Scotsman grabbed the fly and squeezed it.” He said Master would say, “Squeezed it”. [laughter] 

So the people who have Bliss, they live in happiness, it overflows, but they also use happiness. Swami said, “Use laughter and happiness as a sword of battle to maintain your even-mindedness and cheerfulness.” We are Bliss. As Swami talked about on

Monday, God is ever-conscious, ever-existing, ever-new Bliss. And God became us. He didn't create us, like the Sistine Chapel, He became us. So there's no part of our being that doesn't have Bliss.

But the thing is, Bliss…it's conscious, it's alive, it's trying to get through to us. But our eyes are not on the Bliss, our eyes are looking outside to find happiness, “I need happiness. How can I find it?” Meantime, the Bliss is bubbling up inside of us all the time.

There's a classic story that's told of the musk deer. You know the beautiful perfume called musk? It has a heavenly scent to it. You may not know it comes from a pouch inside the chest of a deer that lives in the Himalayan Mountains. And this deer is enchanted by that scent, it smells it all the time and it wants to find it. And it wanders through the Himalayas, looking for that beautiful scent and it even throws itself off a cliff if it thinks that the smell is down below. It dies, the hunter comes along and takes the pouch right out of its chest. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

The happiness is here all the time and we need to look for it. So meditation is a way of looking for it, but, and with meditation, we, we find it, but also we have to know that it's our choice. We have to choose it. We have to choose to be happy. And as we choose to be happy, it changes our consciousness.

We know that from meditation, the structure of our brain changes. Our energy comes more to the prefrontal lobes, which happens to be the seat of happiness in the body, the seat of a feeling of joy and well-being. But also as we choose to be happy, the same thing happens. That same structural change happens.

So that as the more we choose to be happy, the easier it is to be happy. And the more we choose to be moody, the easier it is to be moody. It's just structure, it's just energy movement. So we want to look in that direction and say, “How can I choose to be happy?”

Master said about our Path, he said, “A spiritual path should be definite.” So when we meditate, we don't just sit in the silence, which is something that many people on many paths do, but we have very directed techniques: Energization, Hong-Sau, Kriya… they're all showing us the pathway of how to bring energy into the spine and up to the brain and deeper and deeper into the spiritual eye, and it's very specific.

And in the same way as our inner life, we want to go through our outer life, and have it be directed. We don't want to just wait and say, “Well, maybe I'll be happy if I get the right partner, if I get the right house…maybe happiness will flow my way” but to say, “I can be happy right now.” Just as Gyandev was talking about Haridas: it's my choice, I'd certainly rather be happy than not. So we choose it.

I wanted to talk about three, another list of things that can help us, luckily I didn't overlap Gyandev’s list, three ways that we can help ourselves tune into happiness.
The Illusion of the Separate "I"
And the first of these is to get rid of the “I”. Not this eye, this “I”. Get rid of the “I”. And it's not of course easy to do. But even if we can unmask the “I”, it can help us. Have you ever felt moody and just thought to yourself, “What am I thinking right now?”

And you dive deep, and you'll find there'll be an “I” there. ”I deserve more than I'm getting right now. I should be different than I am. What do people think about me?” Just “I, I, I”. And if you can unmask it and say, “I don't care, I don't have to worry about that.” Let it go. You'll find you can choose happiness much more easily.

There is a disciple of Yogananda that shared a story about her early life in the ashram, living with Yogananda. She came as a young woman. And in the early days of the ashram, Yogananda would often take sightseeing drives in the car and he would invite several of the renunciates to go with him, just to get away from the phones and just to be out in nature and so forth. And so she was invited on a number of those drives and was of course very joyful to be with Yogananda.

And then some time passed, and she realized she hadn't been invited on those drives for a long time. And she saw other people going on those drives with him. And suddenly she began to think, “What have I done? I must have displeased him in some way. What have I done, what have I done? What can I do differently?”

And she found herself plunging into a terrible mood which lasted for weeks, in this kind of, “Where am I going wrong? What have I done wrong? Why isn't this happening?”, and so on.

And one day, she had the thought, “Look at you! When you came to this ashram, you didn't even know Yogananda went for drives with people. You were happy all the time! Why? Because you were thinking of God all the time!” And she just woke up, and she threw out that thought which was paralyzing her, and she just felt her happiness return. And just then, one of the nuns came running up and said, “Master is here! Come down to the gate.”

And she went up to greet his car as it drove in, and he looked at her very deeply. And she could feel him saying in her head, “You finally got my message.” There's nothing out there that can make us happy. We have to let go of that which confines us.

So you have heard us introduced as Nayaswamis and you've seen there's a lot of blue happening at Ananda right now and you may be wondering, “Is this a fashion statement?” or something like that. But last year, Swami Kriyananda created a new renunciate order; he mentioned this on Monday.

And a number of people here have taken vows of various sorts and it was really wonderful. They were all vows of letting go of the ego. And it was really wonderful to feel the joy level go up as the ego, sort of, each person sort of, left a little ego behind and the overall joy level of the community went up.

But one of the most wonderful parts of one of the vows, the Nayaswami Vow, the Vow of New Swamis, is a line that I think is breathtaking to many of us. For some of you here, you won't find it at all appealing but for many, it will resonate. And that is the line, “I know I no longer exist as a separate entity, but offer my life unreservedly into the great ocean of Awareness.”

And it's such a marvelous thing, whether you feel that you're ready to take a vow like that, to have in the back of your mind. And when things don't… seem to be going south, and your mood seems to be going south…just say to yourself, “You know, it's not my worry. I don't exist.” There's God happening here.

Lately, I've been thinking about the community, the world as just little waves of Consciousness. We're all not separate, we're all part of the ocean, just little separate waves of Joy coming up and we don't need to worry about this particular one.
Embracing Positivity and Letting Go of the Negative
A second, a second point to help us with our happiness, is to release the negative and embrace the positive. This past year, we had a wonderful class called Happiness and Success through Yoga Principles. And we met with a group of Ananda people who were very enthusiastic to change. And so one of the classes was on “Harmony in the Workplace”. And I gave an assignment, something I tried in my life and found effective, but I wasn't sure what would happen, and I was really surprised at the results which were very positive.

I suggested that each person take someone in their life that was not a perfect relationship, could be at work, it could be in your family, whatever, and do two things: First, make a list of every single thing you dislike about that person. Not things like,