Wellbeing & Me - Maria Dooney-Jones

A few weeks ago I asked for the book ‘The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama’ from my brother. I’m not sure what made me give it a go, but one thing I do know is that I’m glad I did! At the time I had been going through what felt like a lot; really it was just a mixture of stress, exhaustion and hormones. However, this book helped me in more ways than I knew it could. 

At first I was apprehensive and didn’t put much faith into the book, yet, over time, I noticed how much sense it all made! The Dalai Lama talked about so many things, but these few snippets from the book are the ones that helped me the most:

“Happiness is determined more by one’s state of mind than by external events”

“Our happiness has little to do with our absolute conditions, but of how we perceive our situation and how satisfied we are with what we have”

“Our feelings of contentment are strongly influenced by our tendency to compare”. 

Throughout the rest of the week, not much changed.  I knew and understood what he had said but couldn’t bring myself to do something about it. Moreover, my wellbeing seemed to be crumbling around me, until I did it: I slowly started to look at things differently. When I felt envious of a classmate, instead of brooding about it for the rest of the day, I simply thought about it differently, putting me in a happy mood again.

I am now so much happier; I feel like myself again and it’s got a lot to do with this book. Although I must admit that I find it hard to get off the laptop and read it, when I do, I feel it’s been so worth it. My wellbeing was completely in my hands and it still is. As soon as I changed the way I looked at things my situation seemed to change completely too.