What is happiness, and more importantly, how can we find it and hold onto it? According to D.V. Pasupuleti’s Change Your Mind, happiness is indeed something we can feel at all times, no matter what our outside circumstances. His book offers building blocks for creating a mindset that welcomes, and embraces, our natural ability to be happy.

Using inspirational and educational approaches, Change Your Mind focuses on Five Golden Rules for Happiness but first delves into what happiness means to most people and how many times our view of happiness as something that comes from outside sources is what keeps us from ever achieving inner peace and joy in the first place. This book has a very “soft religious” feel that will be welcome by those seeking connection with a Higher Power, whatever that may be, and yet many of the concepts work well even for those who do not consider themselves religious at all.

Because Pasupuleti is a neurologist and has studied the brain and its functions, he utilizes much of his research, and that of others, in explaining how we can use our mind to help us acquire the one most critical element of happiness: self-knowledge. The book can read a little like a metaphysical text at one time, then a motivational book, and sometimes the repetition gets a little dry. But this is a book that indeed contains many important concepts about learning who we are and how we truly can be happy. Those concepts come down to five basic rules, which you will have to read the book to find out. Suffice it to say, anyone can achieve happiness despite outer challenges, and that makes me feel pretty happy.