Happiness is not a universal feeling, it’s a personal feeling and sometimes your own personal happiness may feel like a fish constantly slipping right out of your hands, but you’ll be glad to know there are very simple methods to finding happiness and filling your life up with it. 

Put as simply as possible, it is your job to notice what makes you feel good and move towards more of those experiences, follow that path. It's also your job to move away from what makes you feel bad and to not follow that path.

However, observing what makes you feel happy and moving towards it is a tricky challenge when everybody around you is telling you what they think you should do with your life, or when you have bills to pay and it feels like the only way to do that is by working a job that makes you unhappy. All of this outside noise can cloud your inner instincts.

So, moving towards your happiness is more of a daily practice than a simple linear path you follow. 

It requires an alchemical recipe of living in the moment, mindfulness, gratitude, and faith. When you work with these factors you will get in touch with your inner truth and have the courage to let it guide you towards happiness.

However as you embark on this journey, collecting and cultivating each ingredient, you can get caught up in some age-old lies about happiness and become lead astray. To help you stay on course to finding what makes YOU feel truly happy, here are two common misconceptions about happiness that need to be unravelled here and now:

1. You Know Exactly What Will Make You Happy
   You don’t! You may think you know what will make you happy, but do you really?
   
   Take Kasey, for example. Growing up in rural Vermont, she dreamed of leaving her small town to become a star on broadway. She got through the misery of high school by telling herself that when she graduated, she’d move to New York, work her way up to theatrical success, and then, finally, she’d be happy. Well, unlike most people who aim for stardom, Kasey did succeed. She now stars in critically acclaimed musicals and is pretty much as famous as you can get in the theatre world! But is she happy? No, and she can’t figure it out: she has everything she thought she wanted, so what’s the problem?
   
   The problem: quite often when we want something, we want it for reasons that don’t actually manifest happiness. For example, yes, Kasey loved to act, but she has to ask herself, why did she want so badly to be a star? If she’s like most people who want to be famous, this desire came from a deeper sense of wanting to feel loved and appreciated by her peers. That’s what she really wanted. As she became successful,she saw that while she was living her dream of getting paid to act on stage, it wasn’t translating into the love and appreciation she was craving. 
   
   The point of the story is this: you can give yourself permission to detach from all the outer achievements you think will make you happy. By detaching, you immediately liberate yourself from the dreadful fear that you won’t get it and therefore will never be happy. Pursue your passions because they make you happy, not because you think success in the category of your passion will bring you the accolades that will make you happy. The material success isn’t ever what will make you happy, the love of what you do will. 
   
   Let go of what you think will make you happy, and you’ll get to the real thing much sooner. 
    
2. Outer circumstances are connected to inner feelings
   They’re not! Well, maybe to some degree, but truth is there is no amount of external beauty that can make you feel happy, and no amount of external gloominess that can make you feel sad. They might if you let them, but they can’t make you. Meaning, you have the ability to choose how you will let the outer circumstances affect you.
   
   It is VERY possible (and common), to have everything you’ve ever wanted and still feel dismal. Why? Because you’ve let your mind see it that way. When the mind sets itself up to be a negative place it only sees the problem.
   
   Meanwhile, you could be living in poverty but still experience bliss from your head to your toes. Why? Because perception is a choice.
   
   It doesn’t require riches--or even pennies--to practice mindfulness, gratitude, and faith in a higher power. It may look like you have nothing, it may look like you have too much, if you’re grateful for the ground you walk on and the water you drink and the miracle that you’re getting a chance at life on earth, you could live your days feeling as if your chest is filled up with light sent straight from heaven. Now that’s happiness

Latching onto a material goal and putting all your happiness eggs in that basket is certain to backfire: either you won’t ‘succeed’, and blame your misery on an imagined failure, or you will ‘succeed’ and you’ll see that no thing or material achievement can ultimately make you happy. ANYBODY is capable of being happy, however that feels to them, by detaching from specific goals and refocusing on these four principles: 

1. Daily mindfulness
2. Living in the moment
3. Gratitude
4. Faith in a power greater than yourself

Oh, and one more thing: you yourself a favor and keep an open mind, you never know what unexpected bliss will sneak its way into your life when make room for endless possibilities.