This self improvement article is written by Stephanie Bennett Vogt, MA

--------

“A happy friend who lives within a mile…boosts your odds of being happy by 25 percent, researchers found. A happy sibling within the same distance increases your probability of happiness by 14 percent.”
––Carolyn Y. Johnson, The Boston Globe

It’s official: Happiness is contagious.

It’s been scientifically proven and is the basis of a big medical study published in the prominent British Medical Journal.

So for all of us who’ve suffered a lifetime of teasing by cynics and curmugeons for being “too happy,” guess what? We get the last laugh.

In her article entitled “New Reason to Be Happy: It May Go a Long Way––Friends of Friends of Friends Cheered, Social Study Finds,” Boston Globe staff reporter Carolyn Y. Johnson writes:

“Using comprehensive data collected on 4,739 people over two decades, the researchers studied individuals' levels of happiness and their social relationships.

A happy friend who lives within a mile, for example, boosts your odds of being happy by 25 percent, researchers found. A happy sibling within the same distance increases your probability of happiness by 14 percent…

“It seems obvious that your closest friends might influence your mood, but the study found that even the happiness of a friend's friend boosts your chance of being happy by 9.8 percent. Even more surprising, the happiness of a friend of a friend of a friend boosts your chance of being happy by 5.6 percent.”
[The Boston Globe, December 5, 2008]

Guess that means the happiness level of the friend-of-the-friend-of-my friend Lisa is affecting me right now. Whoever they are, this particular line-up of friends must be reasonably happy today because I’m feeling pretty good at the moment.

Truth is, the ripple effect of happiness is not new to me. It’s a dynamic I’m very familiar with in my line of work. You see I clear spaces for a living. Using a technique called Dowsing I can actually tune into, and feel, the emotions that people generate in their lives (and unwittingly leave behind in their houses).

Known primarily as an old-world method of locating underground water with a Y-shape branch or stick, dowsing is an ancient art and practice of sensing the invisible world of energy. In Space Clearing dowsing is like shining a special lamp on invisible ink, making it possible to read a variety of energetic signatures that are being transmitted and received by humans and the environment all the time. The dowsing rod acts much like an antenna as it scans the airwaves, follows wave patterns, and reads information.

With dowsing, for example, I can locate, identify, and experience the stressful memories, or charge, left behind by previous occupants. I can tune into and feel the "dips and valleys'" of fault line pressure ridges, feel the "heat" from naturally occurring gamma radiation, sense the "prickly static" of cell tower emissions,
cell phones, microwaves, and so on. This is all possible because each of these patterns has a distinct energetic signature: a wave frequency, a smell, a color, a taste, and a sound.

A good dowser can interpret and clear the charge of this information provided he/she has a clear intent and no attachment to a particular outcome.

When I’m clearing a home that has experienced a stressful event such as a sudden or violent death, a bad divorce, a long illness, severe depression, bankruptcy, or is influenced by stresses originating in neighboring homes or buildings, for example, I can read (by feeling, smelling, tasting…) the energetic “stickiness” or “guckiness” of what went on there. Even if the events took place centuries before! Similarly, if there’s been a lot of love and the home is a happy one, I can feel the distinct yumminess of those patterns too. There’s a clean-burning coherence to energies that feel good.

The thing is, no matter if they feel good or bad to us, these energies affect us all (and our nervous system) all the time, even if we don’t live anywhere near them. They affect us to the degree that we react to, and personalize the information that arises.

So next time you’re in a big warehouse store, or a bank, or an airport, and you suddenly feel a wave of emotion or a pang of something you weren’t feeling before, or you just start yawning for no reason and your hands feel clammy, you might consider the possibility that the sensations you’re experiencing aren’t even yours! Unpleasant maybe, but never “bad” unless you’ve identified with them, made them yours, and taken them home with you (and/or left them behind for somebody else to bump into and “enjoy”).

What’s really cool is that you can clear stressful patterns swirling in the ethers and in the spaces you occupy, by allowing them to arise for starters, feeling the charge they hold without personalizing it, and choosing for happiness (or joy, or ease, or peace…) every time you remember you have the choice. Over time your happiness expands out to affect your neighbors and their friends, and yes, maybe even my friend Lisa’s friend’s, friend’s, friend! There may still be plenty of gucky residue along the way but you’re not buying into it because in the end it’s not yours, remember?

The scientific study may only prove that a ripple effect of happiness exists up to three degrees of separation, but my personal experience indicates that it goes way beyond that–– beyond time and space even. As crazy as it sounds, your joy goes back into the past and way into the future. There’s no separation: your joy is everybody’s joy.

As investigative journalist Lynne McTaggart in her very readable book The Field puts it:

“There is no ‘me’ and ‘not-me’ duality to our bodies in relation
to the universe, but one underlying energy field…We are attached
and engaged, indivisible from our world, and our only fundamental
truth is our relationship with it. ‘The field’ as Einstein once succinctly
put it, ‘is the only reality.’” [The Field, pp.xiii-xiv]

(Originally published at GoArticles and reprinted with permission from the author, Stephanie Bennett Vogt).