The Five Paths to Happiness: The Keys to Living a Happy Life According to Your Personality

By Javier Ramon Brito

You can live a happier life. Discover your type and live a happy life according to your personality. This book shows five different paths to happiness based on psychology and ancient philosophy. An inspirational book to escape the rat race and find authentic happiness, financial freedom and success in your life.

How can you find happiness in your life? How to be happy? We all want to live a happy life. But most of the time we look for happiness in the wrong place or take the wrong approach to it. There is really not a "one-size-fits-all" happiness recipe that works for everybody. We are all different. What makes someone live happy may not be the ideal for another person. This is why this book offers you five different paths to happiness.

Why five paths? Because according to modern psychology, most people can be fitted into five categories. Because, according to ancient Eastern wisdom, there are five elements that govern the universe. Because the holistic systems that are used for healing, like Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda, are based on the interaction of five elements in the human body, mind and emotions.

The five alternative paths presented to you as happiness hacks in this book come from a methodical observation of how the five elements that rule the universe can be translated into practical knowledge and choices to become happy in our daily lives. Interestingly, these five elements also correspond to the five main characters or personality types of people. They all have different traits and different potentials that rightly understood give you the key to living your life according to your own constitutional emotional structure.

Do you want the five elements of effective thinking and feeling, the five personality types and the five paths to happiness explained in easy terms? This book does that for you, combining psychology and counseling with ancient wisdom in a practical way. It is an easy reading self-help book that fosters your personal development, your happiness habits and your happy living.

The final chapter on how to increase your happiness dispels the myths that surround the achievement of happiness in our modern society and analyzes the true essence of an authentic happiness. It offers a sound alternative to the "rat race" in which many people are trapped and a happiness mindset for financial freedom and for living happiness everyday.

Happiness is a choice. By knowing the five paths and understanding the true essence of happiness, people have a choice. You can be happier and live a happier life. This book shows you how.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483578316

Book preview

1

Why Five Paths?

The idea of choosing to work with five distinctive paths to happiness may sound capricious at first sight. After all, if people are so different among them one could naturally think that there could exist as many different approaches and paths to happiness as the number of people on this planet. However, philosophical and psychological reasons support the view that there are five great categories or patterns that can be clearly identified regarding human behavior.

Human Behavior Analysis

The analysis and explanation of human behavior has occupied the minds of great sages, philosophers, physicians, psychologists and scientists from time immemorial. More than five thousand years ago, ancient cultures had a clear cosmology that understood the basic principles that govern the universe and everything in it, including human behavior. One basic tenant of this cosmology was a system based on the interaction of five elements: Ether, Air, Fire, Water and Earth.

By the time of Hippocrates, the father or Western medicine, human behavior was explained in terms of the influence of four body fluids called humors which were blood, bile, phlegm and black bile. This approach gave rise to the classification of human temperament in four types that were known and explained by Galen as sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholic. These types were, in their substance, still related to the elements of air, fire, water and earth, respectively. But the Ether element had disappeared from the picture.

Although Plato spoke about Ether in his dialogue Timaeus, he referred to it as a most translucent kind of air. Aristotle did refer to a fifth element in his treatise On the Heavens, assigning it to the celestial bodies, as the matter of which the heavens are made, but not to terrestrial affairs or human behavior.

The four temperament concept as an explanation of human behavior remained valid in the Western civilization for centuries. The great physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who discovered the conditional reflex, still studied and further detailed the characteristics of the four temperament types, for which he even used different names but without altering the substance.

Interestingly, the Ether element, the most intangible element which was missing in the four temperament concept, started somehow to appear again in the analysis of human behavior, although not properly as an element or temperament or even being mentioned by its name. It started to come back through the door of psychoanalysis as one of the components of the human psyche.

Character Structure in Psychology

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, explained his view that the human personality consists of three systems, which he named the id, the ego and the superego. While the id corresponds to what we could call the animal side of human personality (as it relates to instinctive sexual urges) and the ego corresponds to the rational side of it (reason), the superego relates more to conscience or the higher aspect of humanity and is composed by ethical principles and values.

This concept of superego is the door through which, in my opinion, the Ether element started to show up again in the analysis of human behavior, although neither Freud nor other psychologists or psychoanalysts considered it as such nor ever correlated their analysis of human behavior to the elements that exist in the universe.

The concept of character structure that is used in psychology to describe people with common traits of personality started precisely with Freud, who spoke about character in the framework of his theory of the psyche and identified three distinctive human characters, connected respectively to the id, the ego and the superego.

These Freudian human characters were known in psychotherapy terminology as the Erotic type, the Narcissistic type and the Obsessive type. Other psychoanalysts like Eric Fromm built upon these Freudian ideas and used other names for these character types (i.e. the Receptive, the Exploitative and the Hoarding), adding a fourth type called the Marketing type that described people focused on succeeding in the tertiary sector of the economy.

But it was Wilhelm Reich, the father of Mind-Body Psychology, who extensively studied character structures and documented the fact that people with similar experiences during their childhood had similar types of bodies, while people with similar bodies had similar psychological profiles. [1] Reich had also studied medicine and was interested in showing the connection that exists between the mind and the body of people.

With this in mind, Reich spoke of several different character types in his master opus Character Analysis, where he went deep into the analysis of how certain experiences during the early stages of the lives of people lead to either one or the other kind of character structure and how patterns and what he called defense mechanisms end up being energetically embodied into the physical bodies of people to form what he called a character armor. [2]

Alexander Lowen, who was a disciple of Reich, did a very fine job systematizing Reich’s findings and by 1974 he spoke about five different, distinctive major character structures which he called the Schizoid, the Oral, the Psychopath, the Masochist and the Rigid. [3] These names reflect a heavy focus on the psychotherapy aspects on which both Reich and Lowen worked, but for a lay person these names sound quite strange and somehow derogatory, as if they were related to people with weird disorders and not to normal people that commonly exhibit one or more of those structures.

As Anodea Judith has pointed out, those names make them seem quite pathological, when in truth these character structures are actually very common since most people exhibit one of these five, with shades and overtones of the other structures. [4] Judith has given these character structures much better names, which are the Creative, the Lover, the Challenger-Defender, the Endurer and the Achiever, [5] which I find more objective and even self-explanatory. Other people have also given slightly different alternative names to these five characters, like the Creator, the Communicator, the Inspirer, the Consolidator and the Achiever. [6]

For the purpose of this book, the important point is that Reich’s findings, as systematized by Lowen, lead to the conclusion that most people can be fitted into five different character structures. They gifted us with a very useful protocol to understand the connection between mind and body from five different perspectives. And this understanding of the five characters has been recently extended to the realm of spiritual healing by Barbara Brennan [7] and to the realm of holistic healing by Anodea Judith. [8]

It is most interesting that the analysis of human behavior, which started in ancient cultures with the cosmology of the five elements, after centuries of human history, ended up again identifying five different distinctive patterns of human behavior, just through another door, the door of psychology.

Having studied these five characters as described by Reich and Lowen from the perspective of psychology, what I see is that they can be easily understood also from the philosophical angle of the Five Element theory used by ancient cultures. In fact, the five psychological characters have features that in my view correspond and match