To assist with your joyous ascendancy I’m pleased to present my top ten tips for a happy life.

1. Be aware that happiness is a choice. Most things contain both light and shadow. You get to decide what’s worth focusing upon.

2. Appreciate what you have. When you're pleased and thankful with your present lot in life things have a way of sliding easily forward. It’s as though the sunshine in your heart and mind attracts more sunshine to you.

3. Make a conscious endeavour to treat yourself well. You’re in a position to influence, advise and mentor a person of great worth and potential: yourself. Think hard about doing a good job.

4.  Consider and confirm your inner values and purpose then reconcile your conclusions with your actions. Action that coincides with conscious meaning will make you happier.

5. Let love lead you to your passion in action. Giving energy to the things that excite you will energise you for all other stuff you need to get done.

6. Find your personal balance. All work and no play is not ok. All play without work means you cant pay your way. So slow down to find your best balance of rest, work, and play.

7. Pay generous attention to the people around you. Contrary to popular belief, familiarity breeds affection. You get what you give, so treat your loved ones well and reap the benefit of greater happiness.

8. Have a go at new and interesting things. Don’t be put off by being inexpert. If you do something new you’ll get better at it and regardless it will contribute to keeping your thinking fresh.

9. Try not to take yourself too seriously. Seeing the silly side of yourself perfectly balances the fact that you are simultaneously the most important and valuable person of all.

10. Finally take time out at least daily. 30 minutes of quiet reflection can keep your mind tuned to the correct station.

Application of any or all of these ten tips will assist in uncovering the happiness that lives constantly within you.

This one comes from the heart. In a way each of these blogs I write are acts of intuition, but generally I decide what seems topical or interesting, then write with a plan towards that. Tonight I have no idea what will happen since I’m determined to abandon my intellect.

Having set my stance I’ve waited a long few minutes, during which nothing of enormity has pierced my deliberate mindlessness. Fortunately this echoing silent din within is broken by the stormy entry of the compelling feminine flurry I know as my daughter who spoke to the effect as follows.

 “Sometimes when you have a plan and an intended destination, things don’t work out the way you wanted. Sometimes people who have aimed accurately whilst adding effort still miss their target, repeatedly hitting their head against a unseen ceiling”.

“It seems unfair when it happens to you. You can feel like giving up and taking it as a defeat. Yet”,

my inspirational daughter continues,

“You can’t give up on life. You have to treat every bad situation as an opportunity to learn. Adapt your plan, but don’t give up on it, or yourself.”

I’m feeling a little relieved right now. I made a commitment in the first paragraph that has been vindicated. I had no way of knowing that my heartfelt faith would be rewarded with this gift of angelic wisdom from my teenage daughter whom, by the way, has had a bad week.

Heres what I’m going to take from this experience.

Trust that living leads you as much as you lead it. Let go of the heavy detailed plans you carry at least sometimes. Allow your heart the higher ascendency and let the lovely logic of intellect follow the lead.

Sometimes you may not know what to do next as the plans you had made fall asunder. Slow down and still yourself, breath out, don’t panic, just listen with your heart for the simple smiling miracles that will very likely arise. Oh and listen to teenage daughters carefully. They know some very good things, and can get a little snappy if ignored.

Many of us wonder what the future has in store. Though we’ve allegedly evolved to the point that most of us have laid our faith at the feet of empirical science, there still remains a common yearning to discover the direction of our lives through magic.

One symptom of this desire for knowledge that exists beyond reason and the boundaries of time and space is the widespread use of a variety of methods of psychic divination. Tarot cards, channellinng, palm readings, runes, astrology and other forms of psychic readings remain, as they have for millennia’s, a thriving trade that answers a perceived need that many people value.

Many sectors in our community are against these forms of information development. The sceptical scientists insist psychic readings are in the realm of delusion or dishonesty. Some religions say that psychic divination delves into devilish darkness.

My sense is that there is an infinity beyond reason and that this intuitive art is a presence worth considering. Anxiety diminishes individuals functioning. It’s positive when psychic readings can diminish anxiety by providing a hindsight in advance of the fact.

However it is worth being careful when using these services. The information psychic readings offers are typically imprecise visions rather than solid facts. They are like an impressionist painting where the form is vaguely outlined and it’s the mind of the audience that fills in the gaps

Also, whilst some psychic readers are extraordinarily wise and intuitive there are others who are charlatans or fools to be avoided. Regardless of which category they fall into, it is crucially important to always think for yourself.

Be aware that the future is made and remade according to your choices. At best psychic readings are like a counselling session that can help you develop your options. If you don’t like the direction described, remember you are perpetually in charge of adjusting the trajectory of your life.

I’m not discounting the opportunity psychic readings offer, but ultimately the future is like a Christmas present. If you’ve been good all year you can trust that Santa will give you what you asked for.

Do you want to have a really good time of things? If so I suggest your best success will be had when you finally stop trying.

Everything that goes up must come down. Every flow ebbs. Every wave’s peak is defined by the fact of the trough.

As King Canute found to his chagrin, we’re likely to have a miserable time until we give up trying to stop the rise and fall of the tide. It’s as though in doing so we deny the fact of nature, then end up all distressed like three year olds whose Mum’s won’t buy them lollies.

In a sense the issue seems to be we judge the high times as good and seek to hold them still and stuck in time unchanging. Then as they inevitably slip from our tense grip we suffer fearfully.

The bit that’s missing in our mind is the awareness of the opportunity the troughs offer. Indeed without the fall no new high rise beckons. In letting go we learn to fly from feeling fear to feeling excitement instead.

Stop trying to stop pain, instead falling with its ebb and floating with its flow. Rather than pushing what you don’t want away, let the pain be present fully. You’ll find your pain’s urgency increases like a complainant finally getting their shrill day in court. Then your pain will naturally diminish since what needed to be spoken was finally said.

Rather than struggling against the inevitable I suggest you allow the following compelling sentence to sink into your psyche.

“It‘s possible things might just fall into place with an effortless grace and elegance”.

This contention contains a magic that offers the supplicant relief from tension and in turn a more practical and functional foundation for clear thinking.

Embedded in the notion of trying is an honouring of the potential for failure and fear. Be aware that hope rhymes with nope! Instead remember roller coasters rides are fun because they’re exciting. So loosen up and listen to, then dance in tune with the rhythms that wash through your life.

Martin Hunter Jones

I know of a bloke who remained soundly asleep for ages, only mindful of his dreams when he finally awoke.

He remembered dreaming of many nightmares, lurid horrid violent colours bleeding anger and vengeance, cruelty and fear. Thought forms that seemed endless, growing, as would an unchecked infection in the steamy hothouse of his unawakened mind.

Yet still there was another more miraculous dream of a softer, sweeter, stronger thing. A dream that happened merely moments prior to his awakening to the life he truly led.

In this dream he'd felt a gentle florid blossoming at a place roughly centred near his heart. Exquisitely patterned and coloured wings had unfurled upon his back, diaphanous and beautiful as though they were made of light.

These marvellous appendages were magically muscled. Like the wings of a wanderer butterfly they were able to move him effortlessly for myriad miles across a cloudless clear blue sky. Across any land or sea could he travel. As high as he wished above the struggle and conflict that continued to unfold beneath him.

So profoundly real was this final dream that upon his awakening he remained unsure as to whether he was man who had dreamed himself blessed with angelic butterfly wings, or was in truth the one with the wings now dreaming he was a more ordinary man.

Throughout the days that followed this image continued floating through him. Moreover he imagined those souls surrounding him as being similarly adorned with wings spun of light and gold.

As he smiled this glowing awareness towards all who caught his eye there were many that returned his smile, reflecting together a sparkling joy. It seemed that many others lived a dream of strength and loving lightness as butterfly angels one and all.

If you're looking to ascend above the torn riven strife that has perhaps hither too been the bane of your life don't search for wisdom, let it find you. Ask that your dreams to reveal the diamond within. When you do awake to such a grand awareness I urge you do one thing. Don't go back to sleep!

Bob Marley, the dearly departed king of reggae, was one of the coolest people to have trodden upon the planet. His body of work is legendary. His rhythms and rhymes still sound sublime as they continue dancing forth from sound systems, east and west, all around the first and third worlds.

Mr Marley sang his songs well but it was what he communicated that cemented his mythical status worldwide. This mystic poet speaks intelligently to the heart of people everywhere about many important ideas in a way that allows much to be said and read between his short sweet and lyrical lines.

“If you get up and quarrel, every day you’re saying, prayers to the devil, I say.”

If something is getting under your skin have the courage to face it and deal with it. Being cranky and angry simply serves to empower your personal negativity and in turn your mood may infect those around you.

“Overcome the devils with a thing named Love.”

Underpinning anger is unexpressed sadness and anxiety. The fundamental source of these experiences coincides with and is exacerbated by a sense of being alone. It may feel difficult, and as such is an act of courage, but reaching for love in your time of pain will allow support to hold you.

“One love, one heart, lets get together and feel all right”

Reaching for love and closeness will always redeem your inner world. Loving company can help you simmer down and think things through more clearly. Then soon you may more readily notice,

“The sun is shining, weather is sweet. Makes you want to move your dancing feet.”

All conflict both within a person and also out side them can be resolved by love says Mr Marley and, just like his music,

“When it hits you feel no pain”.

You could do very much worse than to channel a little bit of your own inner Bob Marley.

“All you’ve got to do, is give a little, take a little”, and “ Let Jah love, coming shining in, into our lives again”, then, “every little thing, going to be alright. “

It’s an ancient military tradition that asserts the messenger should be treated well. If you shoot the messenger, information will be lost that might otherwise have averted the costly horror of war.

It’s the same in our battle for physical, mental, and spiritual health. Without diseases generous pain it seems that there can be no gain. You mightn’t want to hear what the message says, but it’s best to listen anyway.

 Disease is a messenger that calls for learning. Every disease is an important invitation to growth that’s well worth attending too. Murdering the messenger will only put change off until it finds another way through.

Medicating the symptoms of your physical disease away will not achieve good health! Tranquillizing emotional distress will have it rise more strongly as it struggles to escape. Turning away from your divine foundation will have your worldly constructions fall like a house of cards that’s built on shifting sandy ground.

Further to this, your mind, body and spirit are inextricably linked. Being ill at ease in any of these points of your existence will be reflected respectively in each of these other aspects of self.

As an example, an all too real physical backache may have an emotional connection to a fear around feeling supported. This in turn may have a connection to a despondency associated with your relationship with your version of spiritual identity.

Fortunately disease is a generous messenger that only wants to be heard and will speak through each of these three aspects simultaneously. Honestly and respectfully answering the call to change at any level will bring about change on all three levels!

I am far from being alone in empirically observing healing of even the most truculent physical disease through mind work and or the intelligent and committed application of one of the many forms of prayer. Equally, I have seen that resolving physical disease has brought about substantial shifts in these other two more subtle identities.

Disease is a valuable harbinger of evolution. Our diseases are symbolic riddles and rhymes, the meaning of which we are tasked to divine.

There are many ways to save energy in a house, some involving little investment, such as turning off the power strip that the TV is plugged into.  Others involve more of an investment, such as buying a more efficient refrigerator.

Emotionally, we have similar energy-wasters that we’re often unaware of.  They exist in our internal thoughts that can go on all day without our notice: like the TV draining energy while on standby.  We may be thinking negative thoughts all day and not notice how much they’re impacting on us.  We end the day drained and unhappy, but might have no idea why.  

If you tune into your thoughts, you can notice how your body naturally tenses up when you think certain things.  Tuning in to your body you might for example notice your neck muscles are tight, or maybe it’s your stomach that’s taking the brunt. The awareness and release of these thought patterns and corresponding body reactions can be a low-investment way to save our emotional energy.

There are also high-investment ways for us to recover our emotional energy, which might involve some planning and time. High investment emotional energy recovery requires some changes in life.

For instance, if your work paid well but made you unhappy or tense you could choose re-employment or retraining. Making significant changes takes an investment in time, money and ultimately an informed committed decision. This is like buying a new energy efficient refrigerator. It costs up front but you reap energy saving efficiencies over time.

I suggest you do an emotional energy audit. Take account of the thought patterns that you have through your day. Notice the negative thoughts about yourself or the people and activities you engage with.  Observe how much tension these thoughts and interactions create in your body.  

Once you do your emotional energy audit, you can action plans to increase your efficiency and reduce the drainage. Small changes and large can have a cumulatively good effect. Developing emotional energy efficiency means you can regain that which belongs to you being the energy to do almost anything at all.

A wonderful woman told me an ancient Taoist story that has profoundly influenced my thinking. As such I’m delighted to share it now in faith that it uplifts you too.

Once upon a time there was a farmer who patiently tended his crops for many years. He was without a formal education and so unassailed by other people’s wisdom, he was free to discover his own.

One day he woke to find that his horse had run away. His neighbour lamented on his behalf that this event was a disaster. To this the wise farmer replied, “Maybe it is, but then maybe it isn’t”.

The next day that horse returned with three wild horses in tow. The neighbour, seeing that the one horse had become four, was delighted on the wise farmer’s behalf saying “How wonderful that your fortunes have been raised by chance”. To this the wise farmer replied, “Maybe it is, but then maybe it isn’t”.

On the third day the farmer’s son took one of the wild horses for a ride and broke his leg. The neighbour again visited to express his condolences. To his assertion that misfortune was afoot the wise farmer replied, “Maybe it is, but then maybe it isn’t”.

On the fourth day the soldiers arrived to conscript the young men from that region. When they saw the state of the farmer’s son’s leg they left him behind and moved on. The neighbour asserted this event as good fortune. I’m sure you can guess what the wise farmer said.

For me the moral of this story is that my attachment to events as being good or bad finds me struggling at the surface of a very stormy sea. Calmly sinking beneath the surface reveals that “good” and “bad” as two essential ends of the same wave.

Clinging to that you perceive as being good will only extend the depth of your inevitable fall. Avoiding that which you perceive as being bad occludes the opportunity for learning that every challenge contains. A bushfire may be horribly hot, but out of the ashes the forest is renewed.

You are more than a body. You are more than your logical mind. You are an exquisite and essential piece of the jigsaw that is, dare I say, both singular and divine. Could I convince you this is so? Or is that you already know?

Perhaps the most obvious identification is with our body. It’s born, changes, growing then degrading until it dies. Bodies invite the perception that it is who you are since bodies seem so solid, but consider this.

High school science suggests our body is made up of cells and that these cells are made up of atoms, and that these atoms are made up of electrically charged particles that orbit a nucleus with the opposite electric charge.

Is it not then the case that this “solid reality” of our body is constituted vastly more by the space between the something than the something itself? Rather than having solid bodies, physical bodies are in fact a collection of tiny points of energy occurring within a vastly larger volume of “nothing”. Your allegedly solid physicality is mostly made up of space.

As for your logical mind it was shown long before, and then again by the philosophers in ancient Greece that logic fails to succeed in describing truth, that logic can at best merely approximately predict reality. Essentially we believe things to be true because it seems useful to do so. Then we construct a detailed story called logic in order to confirm that our belief is valid.

A clever cliché asserts that the wiser you become the less you know. I suggest you let these ideas sink in slowly and allow the urgent search for a secure identity to wane. Stop defending who you are. Stop trying to discover what you could become. Instead simply enjoy what is present and unfolding in the now.

I didn’t really expect to convince you that you’re at one with the divine singularity as I suggested in the opening paragraph. I do however hope I’ve helped you wonder a bit more as you wander more wisely upon your magical mystery tour.

There are only two fundamental and polarised emotions that humans experience. One is love and the other is fear. Perhaps as such the most important movement a mind can make is to learn how to move from feeling fearful towards experiencing a larger sense of love.

The difference between love and fear is a stark dichotomy. In love there is expansion; in fear things shrink. In fear we become closed; in love we open up. In fear we experience doubt and unassailable confusion; in love we enjoy a peaceful trust.

Moving towards love doesn’t mean you can ignore fear. Turning away from fear in the pretence that it doesn’t exist will have it growing larger in the shadows of your mind. Like cockroaches under the cupboard, left alone fear breeds until it’s a plague that overflows through the rest of the house in your head.

The true antidote to fear is courage. Courage means going into the unknown in spite of all the fear. Courage doesn’t mean fearlessness. Fearlessness happens if you go on being courageous and more courageous again and again without end.

The word courage comes from the Latin root cor, which means “heart.” So to live courageously means to live from the heart rather than the head, with which one constructs an illusion of logic as security. To live with courage is to live with the unknown; to live upon the sharp knifes edge of insecurity, and so to move forward towards trust.

 When you feel the threat of fear assail you, when the challenge seems as large as to be overwhelming, focus your attention on the supra-physical space inside your chest. This meditation upon your heart doesn’t force fear away; rather it gently and naturally transforms it. Uncertainty will become “wonder” and insecurity will reveal itself as “freedom”.

As you listen to your heart you create your true and more functional reality. Be courageous and keep moving forward on your path regardless of the fears. Your courage will gradually transmute fear into love. In love you will experience the life and challenges you have chosen as a gift.