Friends,

People say…. Happiness is a combination of how satisfied you are with your life, and how good you feel on a day-to-day basis.

Actually, feeling good all the time is not happiness at all. Because drug addict feels good all the time after intake of drugs, that is not true happiness.

Even, though people affording everything in life, what they want also does not come under happiness. Yes,  money does not appear to buy happiness.

Imagine you unexpectedly get a lottery of Rs. One lac, While it would certainly excite you and feel happy but for a short time. This holds true for new houses, new cars, new gadgets, and all the other material goods that people spend so much time pining for.

A satisfying and fulfilling life

Happiness is a state, not a trait; in other words, it isn’t a long-lasting, permanent feature, but a more fleeting, changeable state. But,  you have the ability to control how you feel — and with consistent practice, you can form life-long habits for a more satisfying and fulfilling life.

There is a beautiful story defining the true meaning of happiness.

Once upon a time, there were three old monks in north China. The monks never revealed their names to anybody and remained anonymous. They always laugh and laugh without saying any words. Because of that, they were simply known as the three laughing monks.

They always lived together and used to travel from one village to another. 

Their main objective was not to preach but laugh and laugh.

Wherever they went, they would stand in the middle of the market and start laughing loudly.

The Story of the three Monks

One day they entered a village and stood in the center of its main area and started laughing. Slowly the people who lived and worked nearby gathered there but couldn’t resist them, instead, they all started laughing. Hence a small laughing crowd had formed. Slowly the laughing spread to the entire village. The entire village was drowned in the ocean of laughter.

One day, the three old monks moved on to the next village. They neither spoke any word nor preached anything to anyone. Their laughter was their only prayer. They would create such an atmosphere with their laughter that people from all over China loved and respected them.

People would forget all their sorrow and just would start laughing. Whenever someone asked their name, they would just laugh away.

The people were not seen such spiritual teachers before that. The monk believed in the philosophy that life should be taken only as an opportunity to laugh as if they had discovered some kind of cosmic joke as if they have understood the secret of the universe. They were roaming all over china and making people laugh.

Many years passed,  The monk traveled all over china and laughed and spread joy and happiness throughout China.

With time, all three of them get old. One day, while they were in a village in the northern province, one of them died. The entire village was saddened to hear this news. The villager felt that maybe on this day the remaining two monks would definitely cry. Everyone was curious to see their reaction.

Learn to let go

In the morning, people from the village came,  only to witness the other two monks’ reaction to this dramatic event. They were expecting them to show sorrow.

But it amazed them to see that both of the monks were laughing loudly while sitting near the dead body of the third monk.

They were laughing and laughing and could not seem to stop. No one had ever seen them laugh like this before. Some people tried to convince them that, he was your companion and you should not laugh at his death.

Finally, on that day for the first time the monks spoke to the people and said — we are laughing ‘because yesterday on our way to your village, he proposed a bet on who would beat the others two and die first. Today he won,. We are laughing at our defeat and his victory. There cannot be any better way to say farewell than this.

He even had a testament prepared. A tradition in China required washing the dead and changing his clothes before performing the funeral rites, but the old monk had refused to leave the old clothes on him because before dying, the third monk told us not to change his clothes after his death.

He had told them not to bathe his body because he had never been impure.  There was so much laughter in his life that no impurity could ever accumulate on him.

So the old monk’s body was placed on the pyre with the garments he was already wearing when he had arrived. As soon as the fire was lit and the clothes caught fire, to everyone’s astonishment, suddenly colorful fireworks went exploding in different directions.

That monk had hidden firecrackers inside his clothes.

Seeing such a sight of firecrackers the people who gathered there also joined the laughter of the two monks. All they forgot about, was the grief of the third monk’s death.

Yes, even after death the third monk brought smiles to the faces of the people, he preached to us the best lesson of life.

If we see in our lives, we find that our life is also just a joke and nothing else.

One who understands this does not fall into the mess of the world which unnecessarily causes us sorrow.

• There is a way to keep yourself always happy, to share the happiness that comes in your life with others.

• Happiness is something that increases by sharing, and sorrow is something that decreases by sharing.

•  Always learn to find happiness in small things because this moment of small happiness will one day turn into a big moment of happiness.

Friends, next time you face a problem, look in the mirror and just laugh and laugh. You will see the problem is going away because your joy makes you alive.

Please click the link below for previous blog…

BE HAPPY….BE ACTIVE….BE FOCUSED….BE ALIVE…

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Categories: motivational