Notes on happiness - joy.

Happiness originates from joy

1. Mindfulness throughout various moments of your day can train your mind to be at ease. Easing into joy is step one. This permits you to discover the joy that is always there for you to recognize and accept when you’re not bogged down in anxiety and disappointment. Although joy is a fleeting emotion, it is possible to access it in almost any situation. The more often you access joy, the more generally happy you feel. When your mind is comfortable, joy becomes easier to attain. You have to be joyful at rest, with no ego stroking or sensual pleasure required. Cultivating this form of inner joy begins to release you from over-dependency on intellect and self-image stimulation to derive pleasure. This means joy becomes more and more accessible wherever, whenever.

2. If the mind is inclined in a certain way, then positive emotions flow effortlessly. This principle summarizes step two: inclining the mind toward joy. The sharper the slope of a mountain, the more trouble-free the water gushes down it. You need to teach your mind to be unaffectedly predisposed toward joy. Learn where to look for it, and most likely, it is already available to you — in moments that you, perhaps, have ignored in the past. As Chade-Meng observes, “You make a fresh routine of becoming aware of the joy that’s already at hand in simple moments of daily life, by paying close attention to the qualities of joy.”

There is joy to be found in a calming breath and in the pleasures of ordinary activities. Inviting and noticing joy should become part of your meditation practice as well as your habits to make your daily existence more relevant.  The more the mind becomes familiar with joy, the more it perceives joy and effortlessly creates the conditions conducive to joy. It takes six seconds to complete one full breath, and within that limited time, you can begin to access joy. Try it right now. Perform one in-breath and one out-breath, and you will notice that you were just a bit more relaxed during that conscious breath. “This happens because when you’re conscious of the breath, it naturally becomes a little slower and deeper, which triggers the relaxation response in the body,” Chade-Meng explains. And if your attention is grounded in the present moment, you can’t be worrying about the future or regretting the past. You are free from those causes of unhappiness. These physical and psychological comforts allow you to realize a subtle yet profound sense of joy.

3. A big secret of happiness is to be on the giving end of a kind thought. This is a big aspect in step three: uplifting the mind. Practice kindness and compassion and you create joyful mind states. Whenever you are able to generate benevolence or empathy, you are also able to build joy. The wholesomeness of such joy creates a positive impact on your mental health, very much like wholesome food provides benefits to your physical health. Such joy also leads the mind into a more stable, collected state because it doesn’t have to fight with anything like regret or envy. In turn, the stable, collected mind is more conducive to wholesome joy, thus establishing a virtuous cycle.

You can work on this step right now. For one full breath, think of three people and wish each one of them sincere happiness, one at a time. If you take a few seconds to do this exercise each day, you might notice that you become a bit more of a “jolly good fellow.” And with a little bit of training, Chade-Meng proposes that you gradually extend your realization of joy from one breath to many moments of the day, including demanding situations. Undoubtedly, that joy can become deeper over time.

All in all, Joy on Demand should be seen as a challenge, accepting that happiness can seem fleeting at times. It is also a science, believing that the key to lasting joy is to find it beyond pleasure of the senses or the ego. For tips on how to gain a right of entry to  “joy’s kingdom,” take a clear lesson from this inspiring tome: “There was a man who had a skin condition that made his skin itch all the time. Every time he scratched his itch, he felt good. Then one day, a skillful doctor cured him of his skin condition, and he didn’t have to scratch anymore. He realized that scratching his itch had felt good, but not having to scratch an itch at all feels even better.”

Your mind is conditioned to have a mind that itches for two types of pleasure: pleasure of the senses and pleasure of the ego. When your senses are pleasantly stimulated, as when you eat something tasty, or your ego is pleasantly stimulated, as when you are praised for something you did, you feel joy, which is good. What is even better is if you can feel joy independent of sense or ego pleasure. For example, when you are eating chocolate, you experience joy, and when you are just sitting there not eating chocolate, you still experience joy. In order to do this, you train the mind to access joy even when it is free from stimulation. This is also the secret to raising your happiness set point.

If you want joy badly in your life, work for it or, better yet, demand it. Theodore Roosevelt exclaimed, “The joy in life is his who has the heart to demand it.”

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Joy is a maintainable condition that energizes your imagination and motivation to do innovative work. Learning to develop and nurture joy is the basic secret to success. It fortifies your facility to draw friends and to get along with people of varying types and orientations.

Happiness is an emotion in which one experiences feelings ranging from contentment and satisfaction to bliss and intense pleasure. Joy is a stronger, less common feeling than happiness.

Comparison chart

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Happiness is a synonym for joy

Consult English dictionaries and you’ll see how contrived this supposed contrast between joy and happiness is. The first definition of joy in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary is “a feeling of great happiness.” The American Heritage Dictionary defines joy as “intense and especially ecstatic or exultant happiness.”

What about Christian dictionaries? The Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology defines joy as “happiness over an unanticipated or present good.” The Dictionary of Bible Themes defines happiness as “a state of pleasure or joy experienced both by people and by God.” Happiness is joy. Joy is happiness. Virtually all dictionaries, whether secular or Christian, recognize this.

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Many of you have probably already noticed this. It can be the feeling of pure satisfaction after a completed workout or the joyful anticipation of the next one – or just the growing confidence in your own capabilities. Responsible for this are biochemical processes and the release of so-called happiness hormones. The most popular ones are endorphins, dopamine and serotonin.

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Happiness is a mental or emotional state of well-being defined by positive or pleasant emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy.^[1]Happy mental states may also reflect judgements by a person about their overall well-being

Psychologist Martin Seligman asserts that happiness is not solely derived from external, momentary pleasures,^[14] and provides the acronym PERMA to summarize Positive Psychology's correlational findings: humans seem happiest when they have

1. Pleasure (tasty food, warm baths, etc.),
2. Engagement (or flow, the absorption of an enjoyed yet challenging activity),
3. Relationships (social ties have turned out to be extremely reliable indicator of happiness),
4. Meaning (a perceived quest or belonging to something bigger), and
5. Accomplishments (having realized tangible goals).

There have also been some studies of how religion relates to happiness. Causal relationships remain unclear, but more religion is seen in happier people. This correlation may be the result of community membership and not necessarily belief in religion itself. Another component may have to do with ritual.^{[15][full citation needed]}

Abraham Harold Maslow, an American professor of psychology, founded humanistic psychology in the 1930s. A visual aid he created to explain his theory, which he called the hierarchy of needs, is a pyramid depicting the levels of human needs, psychological, and physical. When a human being ascends the steps of the pyramid, he reaches self-actualization. Beyond the routine of needs fulfillment, Maslow envisioned moments of extraordinary experience, known as peak experiences, profound moments of love, understanding, happiness, or rapture, during which a person feels more whole, alive, self-sufficient, and yet a part of the world. This is similar to the flow concept of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.

The main difference between them lies in the fact that being happy is for special occasions and instant events as well as for long term state of mind. You can be happy because something nice happened and you can be a happy person in general as previously mentioned. Being glad is more connected with an incident or a reason for having such a feeling. 
Usually you don't say he is a glad person or he is leading a glad life, it is more of an instant feeling linked with a certain trigger for being pleased or content.

Al-Ghazali (1058–1111) the Muslim Sufi thinker wrote the Alchemy of Happiness, a manual of spiritual instruction throughout the Muslim world and widely practiced today.