A Place Called Happiness

By Dori Seider

Who among us has not experienced times of vague uneasiness, prolonged stress, depression, or even despair? What if you have just suffered a severe loss or many losses? Where do you turn when everything you've worked so hard to build up suddenly and completely falls apart?

A Place Called Happiness, while understanding that circumstances and events of our lives can be anywhere from mildly difficult to brutalizing, nevertheless affirms a permanent pathway to a state of overriding contentment.

In this concise, readable book, Dr. Dori Seider allows us to encounter, gently yet powerfully, the internal barriers that keep us from our own happiness. She helps us to define a new approach that will invite our contentment in, ask it to stay longer, and make it feel so at home that it will return to us more often.

The book is divided into four parts: Losing Your Happiness, Changing Your Mind, Finding Your Truth, and Loving Your Life. Dr. Seider insists that even in a very troubled world it is possible for each of us to create an enduring sense of well-being, and she shows us how.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 23, 2001
• ISBN: 9781462842759

Dori Seider

Dori Seider has been an author, teacher, music composer and jewelry design artist. She and her husband Mac enjoy cooking and baking and their two beloved cats. This book is part of a series including Jazzy and Rhumbi In Paris and Jazzy and Rhumbi Become Chefs.

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Copyright © 2000, 2009 by Dori Seider. Author Photograph by Elliot Madriss © 2008.

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Contents

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

AFTERWORD

The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, line 247.

TO LILLIAN SEIDER,

MY MOM, WHOSE TRIUMPHS OVER ALL ODDS

GAVE ME THE COURAGE TO LIVE EVERY DAY

WITH LOVE AND INSPIRATION.

TO HENRY R. SEIDER,

MY DAD,

WHOSE OPTIMISM AND WONDERFUL LAUGHTER

INFUSE EVERYTHING I DO.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

SINCE A PLACE Called Happiness originally appeared, readers have been kind enough to send me hundreds of positive reactions. Your responses have encouraged me to come out with a second edition. Some of the many comments I have received were from those of you who had recently lost a special loved one and this book helped you through a very difficult time. Others of you revealed that this book had changed your lives on an everyday basis, because you had suffered through a depression and had been looking for some quick, practical information about how to live differently. Still others of you who were already basically content found the book to be a source of inspiration and support. I was deeply moved that my words could touch so many lives.

A Place Called Happiness is actually about how to be happy when you’re absolutely miserable! It speaks to the sharp contrast between an inner, perhaps quiet, but nevertheless exhilarated

state of being, and an outer world filled to the brim with stress, tragedy, loss and disaster. When I first wrote this book, some of the situations I spoke of were just theoretical—for example, I said things like: What if your country goes to war? What if you are victims of a hurricane? and What if you are in the middle of an economic crisis?

Now, in 2009, these kinds of hardships have all become real. We are in a global economic downturn of huge proportions and so many of us have felt the pain of natural disasters and terrible uncertainty. Add to this the personal pain and loss we face even in a normal life and what we have is compounded difficulty. This book is more relevant now than when it first came out! I even thought about changing the subtitle to: Finding Peace of Mind in Hard Times, alluding to Studs Terkel’s book Hard Times—an oral history of the Depression of the 1930s.

I decided to be true to the first subtitle, Creating the Foundations of Personal Well-Being, because the word Creating invites the reader’s participation and interaction, which had evoked all of your reactions and responses to the book in the first place. Also, once you have established the foundations of happiness, you can continue to create a stronger construction.

So, once again, please feel free to interact with the ideas in this book as others have, by writing in the My Thoughts sections at the end of each chapter. If you are reading A Place Called Happiness as part of a book club or a course, the extra pages can serve as a journal for your own insights, feelings and questions, or your own personal reactions to share with others.

Speaking of sharing reactions, on a lighter note, a discussion of this book seems to be taking place right now at a library in the imaginary town of Pickax City, 400 miles north of everywhere. If you love mysteries, as I do, you will find mention of this discussion on page 171 of Lilian Jackson Braun’s The Cat Who Went Bananas. A Place Called Happiness seems to have captured the imagination of this wonderful mystery writer. Lilian

Jackson Braun’s creative work is also discussed in my book Teach Me Something Real, in Chapter 8, Imagine.

Wherever you may be reading this book, may it spur your imagination as well—you are the skillful artist of your own life’s goals and dreams, and I have written this book to cheer you on and to applaud your efforts. A Place Called Happiness is meant not only to give comfort and solace during difficult times in your life, but also to define the kind of contentment that cannot leave or be taken away. It is often in the worst of times that the best within us presents itself and then takes up permanent residence.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ANYONE WHO HAS helped with this manuscript and has been inadvertently left out of these acknowledgements will be treated to dinner and offered nourishment as well as gratitude.

I would like to thank the following people who supported this writing: Cheryl Adler, Zaven Arzoumanian, Bob Berkowitz, Elaine Billy, Rusty Bourgault, Julie A. Chiorello, Cindi Seider Collins, Branson Collins, Michael Collins, Kathy Conaway, Marilyn Dietrich, Sharon Digennaro, Carrie Everett, Andrée Falco, Mickey Falconio, Joe Falzone, Larry Goldstein, Susan Hecht, Carol Helton, Helene and Adolf Hemmans, Joanna Hitchcock, Jamie Ice, Joy Irven, Framarz Khoushab, Basha Krasnoff, Judy Lass Tobie, Kyounghee Lee, Eileen Levin, Diane Loving, Cara MacAdam, Sian MacAdam, Elliot Madriss, Marga Matheny, Joe Minotti, Kay Mograbi, Rosemary Morton, Maria Otter, Dot Phillips, Daniel Phillips, Douglas Phillips, Kaetra Pletenyik, Rachel

Potasznik, Rae Reynolds, Lynn Robbins, Judith Sachs, Marie Sayler, Pat Schiller, Bruce Scofield, Michael Scofield, John Secor, Kathleen Collins Seibert, Roy B. Seider, Helen Seitz, Carol Selick, the late Wally Selick, Ceil Szeg, Sandy Thatcher, and Joe Wetterling.

At Xlibris, the following people gave generously of their time and expertise: Japheth Brubaker, Sherry Elliot, Brian Jang, Laura Murphy and John Sign.

Special thanks to Michelle Budenz and Jane Sabuga, the best Author Representatives anyone could have.

Special thanks to Kori Klyman for his beautiful and sensitive cover design.

Special thanks to Aleks Gralinska, for her conscientious