Meet the Londoners helping you get happy

According to her website, De Haan is committed to ‘creating experiences designed to connect us to our creativity, to each other, to ourselves and to the possibility of wonder’. In pursuit of this, she will take clients around London, ‘looking for examples of other people committing acts of beauty or kindness’, like giving someone a flower or buying a pack of chalk and writing messages such as ‘dance here’ on the pavement. She describes this alchemy as ‘shifting your perspective at will, which makes anywhere a possible canvas for happiness. An old wall is suddenly somewhere for a potted plant, a bus stop looks so nice with a candle. And when you see with eyes actively attuned to what is already there, you start to find details you’ve never noticed before. It transforms the street.’

De Haan has been a keynote speaker at Google Campus and the UN International Day of Happiness, and her TEDx talk, ‘Why we still need ritual’, has had more than 12,000 views.

A short skip away from that pink balloon-adorned bike, the world’s first Museum of Happiness has opened inside the homeless shelter, Arlington House, on Arlington Road. The museum is a community space featuring mindful dancing, ukulele playing, laughter workshops and, in the words of its 40-year-old co-founder, Shamash Alidina, ‘other secular activities shown scientifically to have a positive effect on wellbeing’. He, too, is part of a movement of dedicated happiness makers, or ‘high vibers’ if you will, that is aiming to redefine what it means to be happy. ‘Life is about connection,’ says Alidina, who got the idea for the museum after a happiness pop-up he and his co-founders ran last year attracted 10,000 visitors over three days. ‘The brain is built to be social and people want to be together.’

Evidence of further activity of this kind is everywhere when you look for it. It’s getting some beans on toast at lunchtime at The Canvas, London’s first happiness café, off Brick Lane. It’s doing an online course with Sam Moyo, 31, the founder of the original early-morning rave, Morning Gloryville, about how to launch your passion or start a soulful community. It’s going to a ‘Right of the Womb’ workshop hosted by Chloe Isidora, 30, who has recently started posting videos to Instagram showing different practices she does regularly to raise her own happiness levels.

Isidora, Moyo and others can often be found at other high-vibrational hubs like The Hive in Dalston, and 42 Acres, a retreat and co-working space in Shoreditch that opened earlier this year, and intended — in the words of its founder Seth Tabatznik — ‘to be somewhere to help people cut through the London noise and align with their higher purpose’. This autumn, 42 Acres has hosted a digital detox workshop, sessions with Ben Medder, who teaches how humans can move like animals, and a class about using the voice to unblock the real self.

Ask the happiness-makers individually about their own daily happiness practice (a radical idea for many of us) and their responses are strikingly ordinary. Anna Murray, who is the co-founder of pattern design consultancy Patternity, recently hosted a sold-out Day of Gratitude at the Ace Hotel in Shoreditch, featuring sound baths and breathing workshops to celebrate the launch of Patternity’s new book, Be Great Be Grateful. She describes ‘microdoses of happiness. Not being euphoric but appreciating the tiny things’. ‘Meditation, meditation, meditation,’ says Shauna O’Briain, aka MC Angel, who MCs at Morning Gloryville and founded Lyrically Challenged, the massively popular female hip-hop night at Passing Clouds in Dalston.

‘One day a weekend crying, watching cheesy films and rolling around being confused about life,’ offers Moyo. ‘Singing different mantras sets me up for the day ahead,’ says Isidora, adding, ‘I’m quite a calm person, so I like calm things — like going for a walk in nature or having a cup of tea.’ ‘A bunch of roses and some Greek yoghurt with raspberries,’ says De Haan.

The simplicity of these practices is actually deceptive, though, because when you take a closer look, they are all effective for jogging them out of the slightly zombified, ‘Tube to work and Pret for lunch’ routine that we all sometimes find ourselves in, and into a realm where far more is possible. ‘It’s easy to live on autopilot, isn’t it?’ says Murray. ‘And there are a thousand special moments we can celebrate if we’re more awake in our lives.’

The special moments Murray is talking about often have other humans in them, and it’s hard not to see a connection between a movement that brings people physically together and the collective, social media age longing some of us feel to be more authentically connected to each other. ‘We live in a step and repeat world, so the idea is to create events that encourage people to look at their internal patterns of behaviour together, and break them,’ says Murray.

This might explain why the high vibe life is spreading so quickly. ‘The more people who back it up with you, the better it works. You co-create a new reality together,’ explains O’Briain. ‘Co-creating a new reality’ is a different motivation for starting something than, say, making lots of cash. Many of the projects, for all of their ever-growing popularity, run on a currency of kindness and collaboration, ‘just hoping that someone will donate some money now and again’, says Alidina, who supports himself with a mindfulness business side hustle. He adds that ‘kindness is a key element for a happier world’, and that he is developing a scheme where visitors to the museum put together care packages to give out to homeless people.

At the Museum of Happiness, visitors are encouraged to fall asleep if they want to, a riposte to the way Londoners often feel the need to be constantly ‘on’ (they are thinking of calling their meditation room the ‘beditation room’). Alidina has a story about a woman who went along to an event and admitted that everybody being so happy made her mostly grumpy. The teacher responded by making her a ‘grumpy licence’ — permission to be irritable for as long as she wanted, which immediately cheered her up.

‘There’s no one happiness formula that works for everyone,’ says Isidora. ‘Each one of us is unique, so instead of wondering why what works for other

people doesn’t work for us, we should focus on noticing more when we’re somewhere or doing something that makes us feel totally alive, energised and activated. After that, we just have to remember it, so we can come back to it later.’

Moyo describes the drive to accept who we are, rather than who we’re supposed to be, as ‘living with a combination of light and dark, and the ability to hold both with grace’. ‘There’s a lot to be said for self-love but if you want to be selfish about it, doing things for other people is a more effective hit,’ agrees De Haan.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that when we put aside our collective inclination towards cynicism, Londoners are more open to playful acts of bonhomie and imagination than you might expect. ‘And if you can’t or don’t want to connect with others for whatever reason, then you can develop a more positive connection with yourself,’ Alidina says. ‘There’s a monk I know called Abanjan and every morning he gets up and says, “Good morning Abanjan! How are you today?”’

De Haan has another story that encapsulates how this way of being in the world can open up, well, a whole new city. ‘In Liverpool Street station the other day, I decided to stop for 10 minutes to see what I could spot,’ she says. ‘There was this couple standing in front of me. The woman had a small backpack on, and inside there was a potted African violet which she took out and placed on a bollard. Then she walked away.

‘I don’t know if that’s happening every 10 minutes,’ she says. ‘But it happened in that 10 minutes, so who knows?’