How To Turn Heartache Into Happiness

The thing about heartache is that there’s always learning to be taken from it and you can either choose to look for the learning – so you can move forward in an empowered, joyful way – or you can choose (because it is your choice) to stay stuck in sadness, bitterness, frustration or, indeed, beating yourself or someone else with a big, metaphorical stick.

Some people choose to do the latter for the whole of their lives – isn’t that such a waste of precious life and of magnificent potential for true, unfettered happiness?

Here are some of the main things you need to know about turning heartache into happiness:

Firstly, happiness is our default position, the purpose of life and our birthright. If anything affects our happiness, it’s our responsibility to re-create our happy state again (or create it in the first place). Happiness doesn’t just happen – we make it happen. And, ultimately, our happpiness is nothing to do with anyone else: our happiness is purely down to us.

Whether you’re in a place of sadness now, because the heartache is recent, or you have residual feelings about something that’s happened in the past, it’s really important to allow yourself to feel whatever feelings you’re having . It’s equally important to then identify what those specific feelings are and to explore what it is they want to communicate to you, so that you can learn and grow. Negative feelings only hang around if they’re related to unresolved issues. You can decide, today, to deal with those issues and move forward. All it takes is one new and different thought to get you started….

People are human and we ALL make mistakes – you, me and everyone we know! The wonderful thing about mistakes is that we can learn from them and make sure we never repeat them. The ‘big stick’ approach, towards yourself or someone else, is a waste of your energy: mistakes, however big or small, are simply another way for us to learn about ourselves and others.

Ask yourself, ‘What’s the learning in this?’ and look for the positive outcomes and learnings:

What have I learned about myself via this challenging situation that I wouldn’t otherwise have known?

What have I learned about other people?

What do I now choose to let go of, so that I can move forward in an empowered, joyful way?

What specific learnings do I choose to take forward with me?

And finally, give yourself credit for the heartaches you’ve learned from. I find that the learning from every single challenging event in my life is helpful to me at some later date – but the ‘later date’ only happens when the challenge has been used as an opportunity for learning and growth.

You can’t always choose what happens in your life, but you can choose how you respond to heartache. It’s been said that the seeds of our greatness lie in our toughest life challenges, so look for the learning in everything and use it to create your own personal, deep-down happiness.