How to increase your happiness

What would make you happy? Can you imagine a milestone, a win, or even a material possession that would unlock this feeling? In this animated version of David Steindl-Rast’s popular TED Talk, Brother David explains how a simple adjustment in how you move through the world might just change what you see, how you feel, and how you act.

Now my topic is gratefulness. What is the connection between happiness and gratefulness? Many people would say, well, that’s very easy. When you are happy, you’re grateful. But think again. Is it really the happy people that are grateful? We all know quite a number of people who have everything that it would take to be happy, and they are not happy because they want something else, or they want more of the same. And we all know people who have lots of misfortune, misfortune that we ourselves would not want to have, and they are deeply happy. They radiate happiness. You are surprised. Why? Because they are grateful.

Now, we can ask, what really do we mean by gratefulness? And how does it work? Something’s given to us that’s valuable to us. And it’s really given. These two things have to come together. It has to be something valuable, and it's a real gift. And when these two things come together, then gratefulness spontaneously rises in my heart, happiness spontaneously rises in my heart. That’s how gratefulness happens.

Now, the key to all this is that we cannot only experience this once in a while. We can be people who live gratefully. And how can we live gratefully? By experiencing, by becoming aware that every moment is a given moment, as we say. It’s a gift. You have no way of assuring that there will be another moment given to you, and yet, that’s the most valuable thing that can ever be given to us, this moment, with all the opportunity that it contains.

Does that mean that we can be grateful for everything? Certainly not. We cannot be grateful for violence, for war, for oppression, for exploitation. On the personal level, we cannot be grateful for the loss of a friend, for unfaithfulness, for bereavement. But I didn’t say we can be grateful for everything. I said we can be grateful in every given moment for the opportunity, and even when we are confronted with something that is terribly difficult, we can rise to this occasion and respond to the opportunity that is given to us.

So how can each one of us find a method for living gratefully, not just once in a while being grateful, but moment by moment to be grateful? How can we do it? It’s a very simple method: Stop. Look. Go. That’s all. But how often do we stop? We rush through life; we don’t stop. We miss the opportunity because we don’t stop. We have to stop. We have to get quiet. And we have to build stop signs into our lives.

And when you stop, then the next thing is to look. You look. You open your eyes. You open your ears. You open your nose. You open all your senses for this wonderful richness that is given to us. There is no end to it, and that is what life is all about, to enjoy, to enjoy what is given to us. And then we can also open our hearts, our hearts for the opportunities, for the opportunities also to help others, to make others happy, because nothing makes us more happy than when all of us are happy.

And when we open our hearts to the opportunities, the opportunities invite us to do something, and that is the third. Stop, look, and then go, and really do something. And what we can do is whatever life offers to you in that present moment. There is a wave of gratefulness because people are becoming aware how important this is and how this can change our world, because if you’re grateful, you’re not fearful. If you're not fearful, you're not violent. If you’re grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not of a sense of scarcity, and you’re willing to share.

If you're grateful, you are enjoying the differences between people and you are respectful to everybody. And that changes this power pyramid under which we live. What we need is a networking of smaller groups, smaller and smaller groups who know one another, who interact with one another, and that is a grateful world.