Today is a short post. It is just a simple exercise created by the Dalai Lama that can be done in less than five minutes, but the results are big. The beauty is in the simplicity of this exercise. Try it out for yourself 🙂 :

Dalai Lama’s simple exercise for happiness:

Answer for yourself these three questions:

• Are you having a good day?
•  Why?
• Tomorrow, would you rather have a good day or a bad day?

That’s all!

The simplicity of this exercise is deceiving. It is so simple that most people will not even try it, and they will miss the benefits of the results. The most powerful part of this exercise is asking the question, ‘why?’. By asking yourself why you are having a good or bad day, you can objectively look at what you are doing to bring yourself happiness and peace, or unhappiness and stress. This exercise can be used as a guide to help you determine what you need for a happy, healthy, and wealthy life. It will help you understand what you need in your life, and also show you where your life is out of balance.

Living your dreams really can be as simple as asking the right questions, and then following through with your answers through your actions. If you would like to stop living a mediocre life, then this is another step toward a better tomorrow, or even a better rest of the day.

Imagine if you did this exercise once per week and wrote down your answers each time. You would learn so much about yourself and what happiness is to you. After a year, you would have 52 answers about why you were happy or unhappy on one particular day each week for the entire year! That’s some good data on yourself that could be used to find patterns and bad habits causing unhappiness. At the same time, you will be able to see patterns and habits that bring more personal happiness into your life.

So what about the answers you came up with today? What are they telling you about your current lifestyle? Habits? Yourself? Based on your answers from the exercise, what can you change, add, or subtract to bring more happiness into your life?

To living your best life and being your best self,

-Alex 🙂