Your positive thoughts can make you feel good and together make you happy.

Think positively and feel good. This is a formula for happiness. Happiness is the ultimate desire and yearning of the human spirit. People engage in many kinds of endeavors to be happy and often they are futile, producing not happiness, but disappointment, despair and anguish. They pursue and chase after rainbows, accumulate money and acquire power only to discover that happiness has alluded them.

Yet, the path of happiness is not tedious, difficult or mysterious. The way to happiness is not a secret. Simply by embracing or, better still, embodying, positive thoughts and good feelings you can be happy. Furthermore, you will know that you are happy and will not have to ask someone else if you are happy. Equally as important, you will not need someone else to prescribe for you a remedy for your unhappiness.

Because thoughts and feelings, both negative and positive, are interwined, and because thoughts produce feelings, not the other way around, at least not fundamentally or rootedly, thoughts are the key to happiness. It is as if when you think right you will act right and feel good. To feel good is no small matter. Feeling good has to be one of the top ten, if not top three, of all personal achievements. How we feel determines our behavior. The fruits of a joyous person are many and not least of them are health, kindness, love and peace. This resonated with John the Apostle when he wrote in his Epistle to the family of God: "Beloved, I wish above all things that you may...be in health." (3 Jn. 1.2)

Thoughts may be negative or positive. Admittedly, to a certain degree, we cannot prevent negative thoughts from entering our minds. What we can do is apply control to our thoughts. Thought control is a matter of thought replacement, i.e., replacing a negative thought with a positive thought. Sometimes this requires bombarding a negative thought with positive thoughts. This depends on a person having a positive attitude. Having a positive attitude is a choice that nobody or no something can deny a person. This accounts for a person behind bars in prison being free while a person not behind physical bars being imprisoned in his body, mind and soul. Having a positive attitude is not a situational thing. It is a way of being or lifestyle that enables a person to discern between negative and positive thoughts, very often instantaneously, while the thoughts are still in the thinking stage. After all, thought is the past of think. Replacing a negative thought with a positive thought can be a mind game that is intriguing. Sometimes, this means that in order to replace the negative thought with a positive thought a person will have to change the context to a construct and look at the concept or idea in a different way and give it a different meaning than the context suggests or prescribes. Remember, context need not have the last word unless the person with the thought makes it so. Context is not immutable. In today's vernacular this
is like unto the expression "think globally, not locally." Do not allow limited thinking or negative thinking to deprive you of joy.

Learn to accept and trust your feelings and that means your bad and good feelings. Equally, as important, is to be in touch with your feelings. Do not suppress or deny your feelings. Maybe you will say as I do when I am tempted to suppress or deny my feelings, "Damnit I feel!" Your feelings can be the best thing that ever happen to you. Own them and let go of your bad feelings by replacing your negative thoughts with positive thoughts.You have a right to feel good. It is conceivable that the reason you were created an autonomous person is so that you can be happy, even if other persons around you choose to be unhappy. To reiterate, your thoughts are the antecedents of your good feelings that are the underpinnings of your happiness. Your happiness is your responsibility. It all boils down to "happiness through consciousness."

Copyright 2007 by Uriah J. Fields