Are we looking for happiness at right place?

There is a story of a Sufi saint Rabiya, she used to live in a rural village. She was quite old and was respected by villagers. Once she was searching something in front of her house. It was evening time, and soon was going to be dark. Villagers were coming back from day long work. When they saw her searching, they asked what happened? She told that she lost her sewing needle. So, they also started searching.
After some time, one person asked — “Madam, it is going to be dark very soon, if you can tell us exact place where you lost the needle then it will be easier to search”.
Rabiya replied — “Oh, I lost that inside the house.”
Villagers were surprised — “Then, why are you searching outside the house?”
Rabiya replied innocently— “Because its dark inside and there is light outside, so it is easier to search here.”
Villagers used to think that Rabiya is little unusual, but this was completely ridiculous. They started going away by telling — “you are wasting our time.. how will you find the needle outside if you have lost it inside?”. However Rabiya was trying to teach a deep lesson to villagers.
If we look at our lives, are we not doing the same thing? Searching for ultimate joy & happiness in outside world. Its not that outside world doesn’t trigger joy in us, it does but its limited though our aspiration is unlimited joy. Even when outside world triggers it, source of joy is still inside. Simple example can be 2nd and 3rd scoop of same ice-cream don’t give us same happiness as the first one, which means happiness is not inside the ice-cream but it is inside ourselves which gets triggered by ice-cream in a limited way :).
Then why we keep searching for it outside. Its simple — because we know how to operate in outside world. Right from the childhood we have learnt the skills to deal with people, objects and situations. So its easy to act in outside world.
Inside world has been largely unknown to us, no one has taught us skills to operate in inside world. It seems dark there. Is there a way to learn these skills? If we search, then we can easily find one.
One of the ways is to understand Prana (life force or energy). It is said that inside is play of energy. Different ways of moving energy at different centres create different emotions. We should strive to understand how it behaves, what are the energy centres (Chakras), how they work, how to clean up/develop these energy centres? Various masters has contributed in developing many techniques & practices to achieve these. I have found Art of silence program (called Advanced meditation program in India) offered by Art of living as one of the most effective medium to understand Prana, Chakras and clean/develop them. This is normally 4 days residential program. Participants go through series of guided ‘Hollow & Empty meditations’ while observing complete silence. They also learn various Mudra pranayamas. Eligibility to attend this program is Happiness program, which is introductory program of Art of living in which you learn a powerful breathing technique — Sudarshan Kriya . I have been attending silence programs for around 12 years now, at least once every year. Each time it took me deeper & taught/sharpened skills to operate in inside world. I will highly recommend this.
Whether we do the above described program or try something else, the most important thing is to regularly invest time & effort to learn/sharpen skills to operate in inside world. The steps in this direction will be difficult to take because our habits has been to invest time & resources in outside world so far. So we may need to give a strong push to ourselves, a really strong push. It may seem dark & unknown to start with but that is the right place to search for ultimate joy. All the very best!
