Eight easy steps to happiness. Yet another viral Facebook update to mock me. As I sit here, feeling relatively unhappy myself, I wonder “what is wrong with me that I cannot find happiness in this Huffington Post article?!?!?!”  Oh right.  Because that would be ridiculous.

That is not to say the suggestions in these practically-monthly articles are ridiculous! Being kind, not putting yourself down – these are certainly all part of the recipe to living a peaceful life! But if your brain has worked a certain way for your entire life, it’s unlikely that a sentence in the HuffPo is going to suddenly reprogram it for the rest of your life. We’ve all made commitments to changing our thoughts, our behaviours (“I’m not going to call myself fat any more!”) that get tossed out the window hours, minutes, seconds later.

The sometimes frustrating, but obvious truth is “change takes practice.”  Perhaps that can be the one “easy step” to happiness: practice it. Practice can come in many form; one form being mindfulness meditation.  We may sometimes shelf our practice, but the more we do it, every moment of our day, hopefully without obsessing or forcing it, the more we realize that it is lifelong, lasting much longer than even the most sticky of viral articles.

Having said that, I still have high hopes that reading this article on fitness (while sitting on my couch watching Hulu) will get me in shape!