How to Properly Pursue Well-Being

Day to day, everyone seems to be striving for well-being. Its pursuit can take many forms: financial gain, social interaction, or material possession or usage. But these things will not lead to well-being; at the end of the day, they will leave you feeling empty. So what is well-being? Psych Central quotes clinical psychologist Ryan Howes in saying that, “well-being is associated with balance, understanding, acceptance and constant growth.”

A recent publication from the Mental Health Foundation (UK) underscores the importance of well-being and its positive effects on people. According to the organization, well-being is comprised of two key elements: functioning well and feeling good. They add that a high level of well-being is associated with better physical health, fewer mental health issues, improved attendance at work, enhanced learning, reduced risk-taking behaviors (such as smoking) and increased social involvement.

There are ways for you to properly pursue well-being and bring quality into your life. Below, Sadhguru offers an insightful look at well-being and how you can achieve it:

“Using science and technology, much has been done on this planet in pursuit of human well-being, especially in the last 100 years. With this, definitely much comfort and convenience has come our way; never before could any other generations even dreamt of these kinds of conveniences and comforts. but has humanity really become well? If you look at the world, especially at Western societies like the United States, over 40 percent of the people are on some kind of psychological medication to keep themselves balanced. This is not well-being. Human beings are not well because thought we have taken care of the outside, we never bothered to take care of the inside.

Real human well-being will happen only when a man is peaceful and joyful within himself. The home that we live in, the car that we drive, the clothes that we wear, the people we have around us and all that we worked for is just waste if we do not know how to be peaceful and joyful within ourself. Only when we are peaceful and joyful by our own nature, we will pursue life without any fear or anxiety. As long as there is a fear, “What will happen to me?” within us, we will only take half strides in life; we will never take full strides. So if a human being wants to find his full potential, the first thing is, there should be an inner stability of peace and joy so that one can explore the possibilities of life.

No matter who we are or how powerful we are, outside situations are not always going to be 100 percent in our control. This is because the outside situation involves a million different ingredients. We do not even know what most of these ingredients are actually. We try to control those few that we know, but we do not even understand the rest. We just hope that it will all fall in place. But when it comes to the inner situation, there is only ‘we.’ This inner situation, at least, must happen our way. If this one doesn’t happen our way, we are a lost case.

This is the reason why people are getting stressed and burnt out. Stress is not because of the nature of our work; stress is our inability to manage our own system. If we really want to bring quality into our life and to perpetuate that quality into people around us, the first and foremost thing that we need to do is to establish our inner realities in a certain way, with a certain stability that what is within us – our mind, emotion, and our system do not go through upheavals to face the challenges of life. Only when there are no inner upheavals and inner issues, we can handle the outside issues well.

So is there a way to create an inner situation? Yes. As there is a science and technology to create external situations the way we want it, we have a whole science and technology to create inner situations the way we want it. As we have engineered the world the way we want it, we can also engineer our inner-self the way we want it. So if we truly want to enhance the quality of our life, we have to take this step and be willing to invest a little bit of time for our inner well-being. If this is done, we will see a remarkable change in the way we function. The necessary technology is there – I call it Inner Engineering, the peak of well-being.”

To learn more about our Inner Engineering course, click here.