Let me share my very best understanding of happiness with you.

We're all familiar with the natural high of buying a new cellphone or winning the lottery. Other forms of happiness include dating someone you really like or planning something for the future such as a holiday.

These forms of happiness excite the mind and makes us feel really alive.

Excitement

What we normally consider happiness is really a state of excitement. The mind gets excited about something but after some time the excitement subsides. There is nothing wrong with excitement-based happiness, not at all. It makes me feel really alive.

Still Is Happy

If someone had told me that stillness is happiness, even just a few years ago, my spontaneous reaction would have been that it sounds boring and I doubt I would have been able to connect stillness with happiness.

When the mind is excited we feel really alive but when we got nothing to do our neurotic tendencies take over and make us restless. We try to escape the unease by keeping the mind busy.

If you lead a busy lifestyle, your initial reaction to stillness is likely to be restlessness and the more stress you're under the stronger the reaction. So, one could say that stillness involves a certain element of fear.

But what happens if we go deeper into stillness? Once you get past the initial reactions, stillness is a vibrant source of happiness. Feeling really still is a beautiful and soothing state of mind. But how do you cultivate stillness? One age-old approach is meditation.

Guided meditation effectively dissolves physical and mental stress and is very soothing. By practicing meditation you learn to cultivate stillness which is a beautiful alternative to excitement-based happiness. Guided meditation is really easy to learn. All you have to do is lie down and listen to the simple instructions. No previous experience needed, practice makes perfect...

Best of luck!