You can’t try to be happy. You can’t chase or pursue happiness, because it’s not something you can catch. You – or anyone or anything else – can’t make you happy. You can only be happy. And being only exists right now. True happiness is a state of being…actually our natural state of being – possibly better known (and less mis-understood) as joy. Joy is non-resistance; surrender to the perfection of the moment – whatever that moment is and however it feels.Joy requires nothing - no thing to be other than what it is – in order to exist. All joy needs is love, which is who we really are anyway. Joy is not a lack of “negative” emotion, it is a lack of resistance, as joy is embracing the fullness of life – the laughter AND the tears. Do we really want to live a sanatised, mono-chromatic life, bereft of its full spectrum of colours? I personally have created much unhappiness in my life “trying to be happy” and denying the “negative” emotions – attempting to push them away and make them wrong. When I remember that what I feel is not who I am – when I let my emotions just be without judgement and listen to the messages they hold for me – I miraculously find happiness even in the midst of what I’ve often labelled as negative. It’s in loving life - ALL of life…the light and the dark; the up and the down; the happy and the sad – that we actually find true happiness – the joy of life that actually is life. As someone once said, “The stars shine brightest when the night is darkest.” And all of it is life…just as you are. Don’t deny yourself and the world any of the life that you are. Just allow yourself to be that life, be that joy, whole and complete and perfect, just as you are.