Part I

If you want to be happy, you must not only be good to yourself, but you must treat others well too. How often do we blindly plunge forward in our lives without thinking about the consequences that our actions may have on other beings? Most of the work we need to do to be happy pertains to our spiritual and psychological conditions. Here’s the catch…we do not live in a vacuum so we must practice the spiritual principles that we learn in our lives. In case you haven’t noticed, our lives include other beings

Let’s think about how often our actions inadvertently impact others. So many of our decisions, choices and actions impact other beings. Imagine if with every choice we made and every action we took, we tried not to harm another living being. Now imagine that the entire population did the same. I believe that the world we live in would be a very different place. The change must start somewhere, let it start with you.

Now, for the not so inadvertent ways in which we treat others. I’m sure that there are many times throughout your day or your week where you do not treat other people in the same manner in which you would like to be treated. If you’re one of those people that prefer to be treated poorly, then this doesn’t apply to you and some psychotherapy may be in order When we’re happy, we’re not the only ones that benefit. When we’re happy, we tend to treat others better. We’re nicer, more considerate and more generous, we have a better sense of humor, we smile more and so on. All of this makes us more pleasurable to be around. When we’re not happy is when we usually take it out on others, whether they are the cashier at the supermarket, your coworkers or family members. You may not always be aware of just how poorly you speak to and treat others, but I’m guessing that there are times that you do realize it yet continue to behave in the same unkind manner.

How we treat other beings is directly related to our happiness and our spiritual and psychological conditions. So you see, being happy and at peace isn’t only for us. However, if you treat others well, I am sure that you will feel better about yourself and thereby increase your own self-worth and happiness. Treating others poorly has a direct affect on our self-esteem which has a direct affect on our happiness and peace. It is difficult to feel good about treating others bad.

So, if you have a hard time being nice to people, it would seem that you need to practice the principles set forth on this site. We cannot simply flip an internal switch that magically makes us happy. Happiness develops naturally as a result of right living and spiritual and psychological practice. And, as I explained earlier, how we treat others is directly related to our happiness. You may not be happy and getting happy may take some time, but that is not an excuse to continue to treat others poorly.

This concludes Part I.
Part II is titled Ignorance Is Not Bliss

Tags: Behavior, Compassion, Kindness