how to live a happy life

In the last six years, I've made significant changes in my life. I left a corporate career after 12 years in advertising and marketing. I changed cities once and homes no fewer than four times. I remarried and was blessed with another healthy baby. I lost my mom to ALS, which launched me on a voracious path of spirituality.

I've become brave enough to share my writing with the world, which is a cathartic and healing process for me. I've devoted my life to yoga, which brings me great joy, health and happiness. I'm about to open my own yoga studio. I have a rewarding travel schedule that allows me to connect with souls near and far.

None of this has been handed to me. I've endured rejection, judgment, doubt, fear, and a serious lack of resources. Through it all, passion has burned within me and driven me for the sake of a few simple objectives: manifesting the divine, connecting with others, creating mass healing and leaving a trail of infinite and certain joy.

One of the greatest take-aways from this specific path to date, one that has come up recently in talks with loved ones repeatedly, which is how I know it's time to share it broadly goes like this:

No one else but you can make you happy.

When it comes to your happiness, your joy, your inherent bliss, no one else is going to understand what lights you up but you. This is part of the great human experience. When you consider that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, this takes on another level of resonance.

Put another way, you and I might be sitting at the same dinner table, in the same restaurant with the same tablemates eating the exact same meal. And yet, we would have a different experience of that meal. We might enjoy entirely separate flavors, colors, sounds, sights.

Why? Because that's our purpose, to learn and enjoy our own preferences, to honor those preferences by speaking them clearly and living them boldly with clarity and without apology, with grace. There's so much wisdom in understanding that you have the freedom to enjoy whatever it is that pleases you, and that you don't have to explain it to anyone else.

If you can accept that others simply may not understand your choices, your preferences, your desires, you are free to enjoy whatever is to your liking. Then you can stop trying to justify it and start living a life you love.

Reclaim your self worth. Stop placing your self worth in the hands of another.