Author: Ion

Whether you’re someone who sings in the shower or someone with a more reserved disposition, contentment isn’t something that just happens to us.

However, we all have the ability to adjust our habits to deliberately create the conditions and to invite more of it into our lives.

Here are few tips for a happier 2025.

Do the Tibetan rites

The Tibetan rites are an ancient yoga practice that consists of a sequence of five exercises. These are simple exercises that, combined with breathing, increase the energy in your body, greatly improves your strength and coordination.

Make a habit and do every morning the 5 Tibetan rites.

Look forward to the day

Okinawa, an island in Japan, boasts the highest concentration of centenarians in the world. According to the locals, having a clear and distinct “ikigai“—a concept that translates to ‘the reason we get up in the morning’—is one of the key factors contributing to their happiness, contentment, and sense of purpose in life.

Make a daily plan based on your “ikigai”. Having a day plan when you wake up provides clarity and direction, helping you stay focused on what matters most. It reduces stress by giving you a sense of control over your time and responsibilities.

Make new friends

People often narrow their social networks, focusing on spending time with those who they know well. However, staying open to new friendships can be valuable, as they give us slightly different benefits to our relationships with family, which can be based on obligation.

If you are the sort of person who finds making friends or socialising difficult, consider joining a club that aligns with your hobbies, such as a photography or yoga club. Sports clubs can also be an option, but keep in mind that sport people often seem isolated in sport schools. Have you noticed how many people there wear headphones and focus on their phones instead of being conscious of the exercises or interacting with others? This environment may encourage isolation rather than fostering new friendships and socialisation.

Do volunteering

Giving something to others makes you feel better than rewarding yourself, as it creates a strong sense of connection and purpose.

Maintain a humble attitude and refrain from openly discussing your charity activity. Showing off your charities typically attracts bad energy from others (e.g. envy), reducing the personal rewards of volunteering.

Practice compassion

Compassion is derived from the Latin for “shared pain”. This empathy helps us to build strong bonds when our friends are in need of support.

Relatively unknown, the opposite state of “shared happiness” is equally important. Actively celebrating a friend’s good news and showing genuine interest is the basis of a strong friendship. A cold or passive reaction to a friend’s accomplishment, on the other hand, may harm the friendship.

Harmonise with Nature

Take regular walks in nature and immerse yourself in the surroundings. Pay close attention to the seasonal changes in the environment, noting how the landscape transforms throughout the year. This observation can deepen your connection with nature and help you harmonise your internal rhythm with the natural world. By attuning yourself to the environment, you not only enhance your awareness but also cultivate a greater appreciation for the subtle shifts and cycles of nature. This practice can be a grounding and rejuvenating experience, offering moments of peace and insight.

Do introspection

Daily introspection is one of the best methods for becoming conscious of our harboured elementals.

Every day, perhaps before going to sleep, mentally replay your day from morning to evening as if watching a film. Ask yourself with sincerity what thoughts, emotions and actions (e.g. words) you had and you should not have had. What thoughts, emotions and actions you did not have and you should have had.

Make a habit and write a list of good things that have happened to you. Whether that is a life-changing event like passing an important exam, or something seemingly inconsequential, like bumping into an old friend, or enjoying some beautiful evening light while out for a walk. These help to boost your mood.

Do nothing

Looking too much for being happy can actually limit your from experience it. You might have experienced this yourself during a much anticipated event or party you have been looking forward to that doesn’t quite live up to your expectations.

The desire and pursuit of happiness can also increase feelings of loneliness and disconnection. Better to adopt a more relaxed attitude and being more accepting of life’s ups and downs.

In our contemporary world, the environment becomes ever more intricate, inundated with distractions and alluring temptations that pose a risk to our ability to stay focused and connected with nature and universe.

Although the external environment of our lives has profoundly changed across the centuries, the human condition, experience and purpose remain unaltered. Therefore, for a thorough change, we should work towards progress from within ourselves, not from the external environment. Explore and experience your inner reaches, that’s where the key is.

You must explore yourself, sincerely and fearlessly. Evolution and grow are not a passive engagement, but an active and sincere determination to clean the heart and clear the mind. It is not enough that we read, sit and talk, we must not accept anything unless we ourselves have validated and experienced it. Truths unexperienced quickly degenerate into dogmatism.

“If you cast yourself into a sea, without any guidance, this is full of danger, because man mistakes things which arise within himself for things arising elsewhere. If, on the other hand, you travel on a sea in a ship, this is perilous, because there is danger of attachment to the vehicle. In the one case, the end is not known, and there is no guidance. In the other case, the means becomes an end, and there is no arriving” – Al-Niffari, Sufi mystic.

To be able to evolve ourselves, it is required that we develop the following abilities.

Observation

Observation is attention without judgement and tension. The ability to witness and recall in detail what you have observed is the basic ability for exploring yourself, your thoughts, emotions and behaviour.

A great way to practice observation is by taking regular walks in your neighbourhood and focusing on a particular object, for example a tree. After each walk, recall the tree’s details. During subsequent walks, check the accuracy of your observations and notice even more details. Notice any changes or evolution in the tree’s appearance.

Concentration

Concentration is attention with the ability to completely focus on the subject of contemplation, emotion, thought or idea, while ignoring distractions. Our concentration should focus and become absorbed and unmoved by the forces of the external environment, with the result of suspending our present-day self.

To exercise concentration, select an item like a small ornament, candle flame, or spot on the wall. Focus solely on this object for approximately 10 minutes. Observe its shape, color, texture, and details. When distractions arise, calmly return your attention to the object without judgment.

Visualization

Exercises and mediations require the ability to visualise, to consciously form and create objects and situations. Visualisation is one of the key abilities.

There is nothing more powerful than thought. Visualisation is the process of harnessing thought in a constructive manner for the cleaning of our heart and mind, and for the expansion of consciousness.

Be aware, visualisation is not imagination. Visualisation is the construction of images through conscious steps towards a defined goal. Imagination is a spontaneous process, not guided by a conscious thought, we imagine what we already have in our subconscious. By visualisation we actively rewrite our subconscious.

To exercise your visualisation abilities, envision a serene landscape and observe the gradual growth of a seed into a fully formed tree. Visualise the intricate process of transformation, from the initial sprout to the majestic canopy stretching towards the sky. Through this exercise, you also cultivate your observation and concentration skills.

Introspection

Introspection is the inner exploration of ourselves, to trace the sources of our emotional and rational behaviour. With the goal of understanding why we do the things we do, why we react the way we react. We study the thoughts and emotion forms we harbour in our subconscious and we express daily.

With introspection we determine which subject we should work on during meditation. Introspection is usually done daily, at the end of the day.

Meditation

Meditation consists of mainly two parts. First part consists of calming the thoughts and emotions as a preparation phase. The second part involves a series of successive reflections towards developing the conditions for an intimate exposure to the sacred energies. 

With the subject determined by the observation during introspection, and using both concentration and visualisation, we move beyond the subjective experience of our daily misguided thoughts and actions. We align ourselves with the universal and eternal in this transformation.

Will-power

In the practice of meditation, progress occurs gradually and at different levels. Whether it is grand or small, every step you take holds significance. Rushing ahead is not feasible. Rather, you must proceed steadily, mastering each step of the journey before advancing further. It is the unwavering faith and will-power that fuels the courage to persevere despite difficulty or delay.

We all must begin somewhere. There is work for those just beginning, there is work for those on the way. Patience and moderation are the rule. Excessive exercise can lead to over-meditation, which has no positive outcome. Practice for about fifteen minutes at least once or twice daily. 

Many of us are deeply influenced by all sorts of beliefs, like culture, traditions, communities, profession, family, and friends. These beliefs influence our thoughts and behaviour in subtle ways, often without our awareness. They become an invisible core part of who we are.

Blindly believing other people’s opinions is risky. You must discover truth and knowledge for yourself or it will not be your truth or your knowledge. Your own truths and knowledge lives profoundly within your being, while someone else’s truth and knowledge can penetrate no deeper than your intellect.

Keep an open mind and a healthy dose of skepticism at all times so that you avoid go down on blind alleys. It is those who abandon the open minded skepticism and curiosity, in pursuit of easy and quick answers, who end up stepping into belief traps.

This doesn’t mean you must navigate everything alone. It is a good idea to include wisely selected people in your journey. Engaging with others can help you develop a broader perspective and provide much needed encouragement as well as guidance and direction. But others cannot learn and grow for you — you must do that for yourself. Wisdom, intuition, and the capacity to love are all inherent qualities that you possess within the core of your being.

Some people associate belief primarily with religion and are unaware of the pervasive and significant role that belief plays outside the typical religious context. Culture, traditions, communities, profession, family, and friends can be as powerful as religion belief. Somebody told Voltaire (the famous French writer and philosopher) “Monsieur, je suis athée (Sir, I am an atheist)” at which Voltaire replied “Alors l’athéisme ç’est votre religion (So atheism is your religion)”.

Everyone understands the term religious belief, but few realise that scientific belief is as powerful as religious belief. Scientific belief is the belief that the larger reality and all truth must be solely defined by, and limited to, objective, repeatable, consistent, hard-science measurements.

This scientific viewpoint severely constrains our evolution. Consider the advancements in physics over the past three centuries. Initially, we believed the world to be flat, only to later realise it is round. We once thought Earth was at the center of the universe, then we thought that the sun is the center of universe. Eventually, we acknowledged that we still don’t know where the center of the universe is or if there is a center after all.

According to Isaac Newton’s proof published in 1687, our world is part of a block universe with absolute and uniform time. This view was so fundamental that many scientists believed this was the last discovery to be made in physics. Albert Michelson, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, made a significant announcement in 1894: “The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote . . . Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.”

This turned out to be not only an overconfident assertion, but a prediction that couldn’t have been more wrong. Within twenty years, Albert Einstein again fundamentally altered our worldview by demonstrating that our world is part of a space-time continuum universe with relative time. As if that weren’t transformative enough, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger developed quantum physics, revealing a probabilistic digital universe where each matter and particles, literally everything, exists as both mass (what we see) and field (unquantifiable form in a separate dimension).

So fundamentally different was the quantum science view of reality, that Niels Bohr summed it up in the following words: “Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.” 

Clearly, scientific belief and scientific progress is undoubtedly very useful in making our lives more comfortable. However, it does not bring us closer to the truth, and can keep us ingrained in a closed circle.

Do not get stuck in patterns, habits, or rituals. Do not rely on organisations or groups to tell you what to do. Do not fall into belief traps. Have confidence in yourself. You not only can do it yourself, but you must do it yourself eventually, quickly or slowly, easily or with great struggle. We are all constantly evolving our consciousness. Evolution forces choice and change. Remaining the same by choosing the no action option is not possible. Change cannot be avoided. Change can take place as either positive growth or negative deterioration; the individual choices you make ultimately determine the direction (positive or negative) of your growth.