Things To Be Happy About

Do a meditation to discover your 'soft spot'. Close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and relax your body more with each exhalation. Imagine someone you loved very much as a child and a particular instance in which you felt loved and nurtured by that person. Notice the tender loving feelings of this memory; this is your `soft spot'. Note any other feelings involved. Focus on and explore your soft spot's feelings without judgment. Gently extend these feelings to this loved one. Stay here for a while and allow the loving feelings to overflow your whole being.
Use every means during the day to guard your meditation experience as you would protect a child.
Parents should invite their children to share their meditative experiences if the child wants to.
Koan: The fearless hero is a loving child.
Meditate to make your life richer right now. Meditate when you sit and walk, when you embrace your parent or care for your child. Meditate to bring joy to your existence.
A three-part contemplation: Imagine what it may be like to have no worries, no fear, no confusion, no stress, nothing that you are wishing for or waiting for, nobody to be angry at, and no pressing matters at hand. In your mind's eye, invoke an image of yourself as a young child - remembering that a child would have just such a life. Take all of that carefree feeling and bring it into the circumstances of your life as it is now. You are looking at your life with the people and things that exist in it now - but with absolutely nothing to worry about. This is what it feels to integrate spirituality into your life.
Find a photo of yourself as a child and focus on it, recreating in your mind the physical characteristics, feelings, perceptions, mind functions, and consciousness that you were at that age. With a half smile, focus on this for 15 minutes.
Imagine yourself as a child lying on your back, gazing into a cloudless sky and blowing soap bubbles through a plastic ring. As a bubble drifts up into the sky, you watch it rise and this brings your attention into the sky. While you are looking at the bubble, it pops, and you keep your attention right where the bubble had been. Your awareness now lies in empty space. - B. Alan Wallace
When you feel emotional pain, the most common response is to push it away. Visualize your emotional pain like an upset child and imagine holding this child lovingly, soothing the child with gentle words until the pain subsides.
Touch! Close your eyes and touch anything - your beloved, your child, your friend, your pet, a tree or flower, the earth. Close your eyes and feel a communication from your heart to that entity.
You are your child's compass and teacher. As you decide a middle path for yourself, you must decide it for the child.
Do sky-gazing meditation. Relax into your posture. Be natural as a child dropping its body to the grass. Drop your mind. Let it rest in simplicity and awareness. Chant AH. Raise your gaze. Elevate the scope of your awareness until it is 360 degrees. Be mindful, present. Rest in the natural state. Like a child lying in the grass watching the clouds roll by, allow everything to simply pass through the sky. Rest in that skylike nature of mind. Enjoy the spectacle.
Ask: What is my situation? What am I supposed to be doing, right here, right now? When you are in the car, your task is to drive. When your child comes to you with a problem, your task is to listen. Each moment has its own intelligence. Just as you follow your breathing, you direct yourself to that task.
See your parent as a small child, fragile and vulnerable, and breathe in. See the parent's suffering. Smile with love to the small child within your parent and breathe out.
Take time to do something for a child.
Try taking impeccable care of something for a week: a child, a pet, a plant, or even an object like a car. At the end of the week, notice if you feel closer to what you took care of. Making the connection that "taking care of" leads to caring can be an important insight on the spiritual path.
Know you are breathing in. Know you are breathing out. Be aware of a pleasant feeling arising. Hold this feeling as though it was your most precious child. Smile with joy at your happiness. Then be aware of an unpleasant feeling arising. Be aware that you dislike this feeling. Hold this feeling as though it was your most precious child. Smile with compassion at your suffering. Be aware of the feeling arising and passing away. Dwell in the present moment.
Bring your attention to a pain as if comforting a child - and hold it with soothing, loving attention.
Try a born-again meditation. For an hour behave like a child. Nothing is prohibited except touching other people. Be your childhood. Then for another period of 20-60 minutes, just sit silently. Just be.
See yourself as a small child, fragile and vulnerable, and breathe in. See the parent's suffering. Smile with love to the small child in yourself and breathe out.
Invite the child you once were to sit on your lap, to sit with you. Place your hands palms up. Invite this child to place its hands on your hands. Feel this, the fingers warm and trusting, nestled in your hands. You are a child of the universe, but inside you the Universal Mother resides. You are sitting in a sacred lap just like the child self sits in yours. Be your breath and be filled with the knowing, the light.
Gatha for washing dishes: Each dish I wash is my most cherished child. Each movement contains boundless love.
Pay attention to the way a child moves at play.
Just as with the child who is continually told what to do and constantly encouraged to distrust his most natural direction, there's a deep sense of loss somewhere within and it creates deep anger.
An unrestrained mind is like an unrestrained child: temper tantrums, fits of wanting, aversion.
There is no greater happiness than when your heart becomes pure and simple like that of a child
Shed the skin of habitual behavior and see the world through the eyes of a child.
Have the fearless attitude of a hero and the loving heart of a child.
Experience all things with the enthusiasm of a child, as if you were seeing it for the first time.
With a compassionate state of mind, your actions will always carry a tone of kindness and softness, which is very useful in overcoming difficulty with anyone, child or adult.
Bring your attention to a pain as if comforting a child - and hold it with soothing, loving attention.
When we see someone, especially a child, say or do something that is not to our liking, we easily become irritated. If our understanding and compassion are not strong enough to protect us, we will allow that person's behavior to provoke the seed of irritation within us. What we say or do may be violent.
Work like a grownup and play like a child. Be a man and enjoy the joke.
Returning our mind to the breath is how we learn to be mindful and aware. Like giving a child a pet - caring for a living creature teaches us responsibility and lovingkindness.
The wise man is a happy child - full of grace, freshness, innocence, joy, awake.
Do not try to speak for someone else, even if it is your spouse, child, or parent.
Those who seek happiness in pleasure, wealth, glory, power, and heroics are as na?ve as the child who tries to catch a rainbow and wear it as a coat.
Think of the impact -- of a happy, loving parent on a child, a happy loving teacher on a student.
Know you are breathing in. Know you are breathing out. Be aware of a pleasant feeling arising. Hold this feeling as though it was your most precious child. Smile with joy at your happiness. Then be aware of an unpleasant feeling arising. Be aware that you dislike this feeling. Hold this feeling as though it was your most precious child. Smile with compassion at your suffering. Be aware of the feeling arising and passing away. Dwell in the present moment.
In any situation, it can be tricky to find quite the right words to express yourself. Free yourself from this feeling of restriction by taking a few minutes on your own to speak in gibberish. Yes, gibberish! Let go of expectations about what should, or shouldn't, come out of your mouth and just allow yourself to make random sounds, like a child learning to speak. Setting aside logic and meaning can feel challenging at first, but keep going—the end-result will often be a feeling of real lightness and liberation.
If you doubt that you can ever change your thinking, remember some of the beliefs you had as a child—about your family and the world in general. As an adult you may have to work harder at change, but at least you have maturity as a starting-point.
Newborn babies love to look at faces, so be sure to give your child plenty of eye contact—feeding time gives you an ideal opportunity. Newborns can't focus beyond about 12 inches (30 cm), so hold them close as often as you can.
Kids benefit from responsibilities, which help their self-esteem. Charge a child with the task of remembering something, or bringing something along, or such like—if they do well, stretch them a little further next time.
If you speak a second language or play a musical instrument, teach it to a child or a group of young people. Sharing your skills is one of life's great pleasures.
Be on the lookout for ways to help others enjoy life—carry a stranger's shopping bags, buy several pairs of winter gloves and donate them to needy people, give a disposable camera to a child who's setting off on vacation. Invest generously in others' happiness—you'll discover benefits for your own.
Mothers have a special wisdom: a closeness to what really matters in life. When you speak to a mother, you know she's capable of boundless love. When you're a mother yourself, you know life has given you its most precious gift: a child. Spend time with a new mother and feel her uncompromising love for her baby. She may be stressed at times, but her selflessness reminds us that emotions can be positive as well as negative—and that the transcendence of ego is something that many millions achieve daily.
New mothers and fathers feel the wonder of birth more intensely than anyone, but even a non-parent can appreciate the perfection of a baby: focus on the tiny hands, with their tiny fingernails, putting your adult hand alongside for comparison. As Henry David Thoreau said, "Every child begins the world again.

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