How to Increase Your Happiness

This video explores the connection between happiness and gratefulness, challenging the common belief that happiness leads to gratitude. Through an animated version of David Steindl-Rast's TED talk, it emphasizes the importance of recognizing each moment as a gift and living with gratitude, even in difficult times.

What would make you happy? Can you imagine a milestone, a win, or even a material possession that would unlock this feeling? In this animated version of David Steindl-Rast's popular TED talk, Brother David explains how a simple adjustment in how you move through the world might just change what you see, how you feel, and how you act. Now, my topic is gratefulness. What is the connection between happiness and gratefulness? Many people would say, "Well, that's very easy. When you are happy, you are grateful." But think again. Is it really the happy people that are grateful? We all know quite a number of people who have everything that it would take to be happy, and they are not happy because they want something else, or they want more of the same. And we all know people who have lots of misfortune, misfortune that we ourselves would not want to have, and they are deeply happy. They radiate happiness. They are surprised. Why? Because they are grateful. Now we can ask, what really do we mean by gratefulness, and how does it work? Something's given to us that's valuable to us, and it's really given. These two things have to come together. It has to be something valuable, and it's a real gift. And when these two things come together, then gratefulness spontaneously rises in my heart, happiness spontaneously rises in my heart. That's how gratefulness happens. Now the key to all this is that we cannot only experience this once in a while. We can be people who live gratefully. And how can we live gratefully? By experiencing, by becoming aware that every moment is a given moment, as we say. It's a gift. You have no way of assuring that there will be another moment given to you. And yet, that's the most valuable thing that can ever be given to us. This moment, with all the opportunity that it contains. Does that mean that we can be grateful for everything? Certainly not. We cannot be grateful for violence, for war, for oppression, for exploitation. On the personal level, we cannot be grateful for the loss of a friend, for unfaithfulness, for bereavement. But I didn't say we can be grateful for everything. I said we can be grateful in every given moment for the opportunity. And even when we are confronted with something that is terribly difficult, we can rise to this occasion and respond to the opportunity that is given to us.