What is happiness?

I found myself at numerous blogs yesterday that attempted to answer this question.  After visiting Stacy's blog, I realized it is not a question that any one person can answer for another person because it is subjective.

On further reflection, I realized that happiness, understanding what the "feeling" of happiness is, is useful to me.  I use it as a sign post or pointer to align myself with the frequency that promotes and unfolds a higher degree of harmony in my own life.

The way that I practice this is, I will for example sit out on my back porch before the children are awake and look out at the natural world around me.  Generally, it is rather quiet but the birds are singing and there is a natural movement of life all around me.  I feel the early morning sunlight and look at what the sky is like.

Then, I go into a memory of a time when I felt happy.  I believe this is a good use of memory.  So, it is not that I relive the event that I am remembering but I bring up out of that memory into my mind and body the "feeling" of being that so very happy.

I find that when I take time to do this (and I can't manage to make the time every morning but I like doing so), my day unfolds in a much nicer way.  Now, happy and nice does not necessarily promote evolution and growth - actually being challenged, bothered, prodded and poked does a much better job of spurring on growth and development but I am very lazy about it.  I would choose the easy path always but my higher self doesn't allow it.

So, happiness to me is a natural harmony in my life that is totally authentic to my personal BEING.