Happiness is one of those traits which is described as both a mental and emotional state. For example, you can mentally be happy at an event or for someone else while your overarching mood is sad. However, being happy is also an emotional state where we feel genuine joy coursing through us. It is often hard to capture happiness and to bottle it. However, the state can lead to higher levels of contentment, which is something that is more sustainable in the longer term. Of course, it is an entirely subjective matter, and what makes one person happy may be very different from how someone else might think about it.
Generally regarded as a favourable outcome that has been worked towards, success is a state of accomplishment. Successful endeavours come in many walks of life. For example, success to a sports team might mean winning a match against an opponent. There again, it might be something that is sought in a commercial sense, by succeeding against specific sales targets, for example. Some people regard success as a much more personal matter that revolves around their cultural development or spiritual learning. As such, success means different things in different contexts. Even in the same context, success can be looked at in different ways. For example, a successful person might feel they have failed unless they top a leaderboard, whereas someone who is up and coming might view success as having been achieved with much more modest goals being achieved. As such, it is a relative concept that can never be exactly defined.
Meditation refers to a variety of mental exercises which have their origin in ancient times and became increasingly popular in the western world over the last decades. While meditating, we practice different kinds of focus to achieve a more mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state.
Meditative practices were developed as part of the path towards enlightenment, self-realisation and the end of suffering. There are various types of meditation, such as focused attention, or mindfulness meditation, which is the most widely studied form of meditation in modern science. Metta or loving-kindness meditation is another example of focused attention. Other forms of meditation are the chanting of mantras or transcendental meditation.
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