"I have decided to be happy because it's good for my health." ~ Voltaire
Sounds so easy, doesn't it? Is happiness hard? Our culture of consumption makes happiness difficult because we assume that happiness is something we must acquire, something we must accumulate like a bank account. But perhaps the art of happiness is subtraction, not addition. Perhaps it is a single decisive act of dropping what we are not, so that we can breathe the light and lightness of what we are.
One time my teacher, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, told a group of us to stop treating him like someone special, because he was no different than the rest of us. So I opened my big mouth and said, "Yea, Guruji, but you've got something we haven't got and we want it!"
Amidst the laughter, he looked at me with great compassion and said, "No. You have something I haven't got. I've dropped it: you're still carrying it."
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