By Tony Wilkinson

Are you the happiest person you know? Not necessarily the luckiest, richest, or most successful, just the happiest?

If not, why not?

Most people will reel off their current worries ??? the job, the kids, the car, the price of fish. I don???t mean to sweep these aside: problems need to be solved, if you can, or waited out until they disappear. But as far as living happily is concerned you have to face a crucial fact. If you can only live happily after all your problems are solved, you are never going to live happily, because when today???s problems are gone and forgotten, others will take their place. So either living happily is just impossible, or you have to do it in spite of your problems.

I worked for twenty years as an investment manager among some very rich and powerful people. They had all the playthings they could wish for but, frankly, not many of them seemed any happier than less fortunate folk. Why?

When I left the world of investment this was my starting point for what proved to be a long enquiry. The result is a book, The Lost Art of Being Happy: Spirituality for Sceptics (Findhorn Press). The book picks up the idea that living happily depends on cultivating inner peace and that this process of cultivation is in fact spirituality, but not a spirituality which depends on whether you believe in a religion or which religion you believe.

Six years of studying philosophy years ago at college, plus a lifelong interest in comparative religion shaped my approach. The explanation I found runs like a thread through centuries of thinking about happiness, though often obscured by other concerns. Now that more psychological research is being done into happiness, these old insights are being confirmed. Happiness is based on skills and can therefore be learned. It can also be taught, or at least coached. The implications for the way we live our lives are significant. We could learn to be happier and teach our children to live happily.

Being happy depends not so much on external circumstances as on your ???inner life???. This means all your thoughts, perceptions, beliefs, emotions, desires, dreams - your entire mental and emotional scene. Happiness is about how you react inwardly to events, what you think and believe, how you feel, how problems affect you. It may sound obvious, but like many obvious things it???s something that???s often forgotten when it matters most. We focus almost exclusively on our external lives, on getting and spending and having fun, and then wonder why we are not happy. But it???s when our inner lives are tranquil that we are happiest ??? and we call this inner peace.

So how is inner peace to be achieved? Is it a question of religion, perhaps, or yoga? These can certainly help but only if they have a positive effect on your inner life. The difficulty is that inner life is based on patterns and habits - some you were born with, most you have acquired. You don???t choose, occasion by occasion, how you respond inside when something happens. This happens and you feel angry; that happens you feel sad; you pass the patisserie and you feel hungry (or maybe that???s just me); you hear a tune or smell a certain scent and it reminds you of a particular time or person?? Things produce a response without you thinking about it or choosing how you feel, and they don???t necessarily leave you with inner peace. So the trick is to break the pattern. You can???t completely avoid problems, but you can change how you react to them by acquiring new habits that provoke peaceful inner responses.

There are four basic reasons why our inner lives can stop us living happily: habits of thought, belief, emotion and desire. Take for example an emotion like anger. It???s hard to be angry and happy at the same time, so whenever you are angry you are not happy. Thus training yourself to get angry less often would really help. It???s not a matter of biting back anger, but of gradually training yourself not to get angry so easily. Or take belief: many people are unhappy because of beliefs and preconceptions (often mistaken) that they hold about themselves or others, such as ???I could never do that??? (although you might with practice) and ???Everyone???s more confident than me??? (or perhaps they???re just bluffing better than you). If we had the skill to change these assumptions we would be much happier.

Training your inner life into different habits requires learning skills of thinking, feeling, and managing your beliefs and desires. These are very like the virtues many religions and philosophies advocate, but if you think of them as skills rather than virtues, you benefit from an important and liberating shift. Instead of ???I must become a better person??? you can think ???I would live more happily if I worked on my skills???, so the change in attitude becomes a choice, not a duty. And to these remedial skills I???ve added an extra set of ???enjoyment skills???, otherwise getting happier could turn out a very depressing affair??

This process is not something you can do overnight, it???s a whole new way of life, but the reward is what we all want most ??? happiness.

There are five main skills you need to cultivate.

1 Mindfulness: Borrowed from Buddhism, this involves developing your ability to focus your thoughts in the present. The problem most of us have with thought is having too much of it - the worrying and nonstop mental ???chattering??? our minds are prone to. Concentrating on your breathing is one way to practise ??? observing it closely is enough, although surprisingly hard. But many people achieve the same focus through activities such as sport, dance or martial arts. I have a friend who does it by racing bikes down mountains: slightly mad, perhaps, but the mind certainly doesn???t get a chance to wander. Mindfulness is a key inner skill because, as it gets stronger, it lets you focus on your own inner life and catch your habits in the act. Once you can see how you are ruled by them, the change you are seeking often happens of its own accord.

2 Compassion: Most religions rightly stress compassion, but ???goodness??? isn???t the point here. As well as being a virtue in its own right it is a practical skill that counteracts negative emotions like anger and hatred, which are terrible wreckers of happiness. Try it the next time someone annoys you: put yourself in their place and ask yourself what they might they be thinking or feeling to behave like that. Even ???bad??? people, let alone people who just mildly annoy you, often have a warped or mistaken view of the world which makes them do what they do. Wars are started and atrocities committed, for example, because someone decides that this is what their God wants. It doesn???t mean they should get away with their actions, in fact it may be necessary to take strong action to defend yourself. But if you get into the habit of thinking more tolerantly ??? by understanding that their actions are also ruled by inner habits ??? you???ll find you can react with less anger. And less anger equals more happiness for you: it???s not about them. And as a bonus, you might even find you can react to provocation more effectively, because you won???t be undermined by negative emotions.

3 Story skills: These are very useful for problems with your inner belief system, as they let you stand back and explore alternative versions of reality. Beliefs have great power over your life because a belief is something you take as fact. Start to think of your beliefs as stories, and it is easier to accept that other things might be true as well, or even instead. Even true stories only select the little bit of reality we are focusing on at the moment: no one story is the whole truth about any situation. From a different point of view we would see a different story, sometimes a whole different world. This is not about make???believe, it???s about ???reframing??? situations to look at them from a different perspective. If I break my leg it???s no use pretending I haven???t - but what else is true? What opportunities does it bring? Maybe I need to learn to accept help, or catch up on whatever usually gets crowded out of my life, whether it???s family time or the reading I meant to do. The skill of looking for different perspectives and stories is the basis of some very successful therapies, and it is also powerful in everyday life.

4 Letting-go techniques: These are particularly helpful when we are unhappy not getting what we want. Generally, we are encouraged ??? by advertising and example - to keep wanting and to think that more will make us happier, whether it???s clothes or cars or even love. But wanting is a treadmill: as long as you have unsatisfied wants and desires you won???t be at peace, so to be happy you either have to satisfy all your desires (unlikely), or let go of some of them. One of the best ways to practise letting go is to do without for short periods: many religions have times of fasting partly for this reason. If your need for something is making you unhappy, work on letting go of the need rather than obsessing about satisfying it. Letting-go skills also include forgiveness, which helps hugely if one of the things you think you want is revenge.

Enjoyment skills: This last group includes skills such as patience, humour and, especially, gratitude. You don???t have to be grateful to someone, it???s enough to cultivate gratitude for things. Our minds naturally scan the environment for dangers and resources, a useful mechanism when we were hunter-gatherers. But it can make us unnecessarily pessimistic - focusing on the 10% we lack rather than the 90% we have. Cultivating enjoyment skills will help redress the balance. The plain fact is that you will get stuck in queues, you will get aches and pains and you will get older. Bad stuff happens. If you dwell on how bad it is you only compound the problem: the skill is to look instead for enjoyment in that moment, however well hidden. For example, when you are stuck in traffic breathe deeply and slowly and enjoy the sensation of just breathing. Look around or search your memory and find one thing that???s funny, one that touches you, one that???s beautiful. It puts your impatience in perspective.

Acquiring all these skills takes time and effort. If I listed all the strokes in tennis, you would not expect to win Wimbledon by learning that list. The important thing is to practise them until they operate without you thinking about them. Your practice routine will be very individual, because everyone needs to prioritise different skills depending on the specific issues that are holding them back from being happy, but keep the skills in mind and you will constantly find new ways to try them out. This way of living is a path between religion and materialism. You don???t have to give up your existing faith to tread the path, but you don???t have to adopt a new faith either. It???s an exciting road and a wonderful discovery you, and only you, can make for yourself.