Enjoy the Ride!!

Today's post is a hodge podge of ideas.  Forgive me for being scattered, but I leave for vacation in 2 days--2 days, I am so freakin' excited I couldn't sleep last night!!  Going to be a LONG 2 days.  But I am really trying to embrace my joy around this trip.  In keeping with that theme, check out this wonderful post on Cold Antler Farm about living your dreams and happiness.  I am consistently inspired and awed by Jenna's passion and eloquence!

Yesterday in thinking about my post on celebrating joy, I was reminded of  one of my favorite movie clips, from the movie Parenthood (I know I am dating myself with that movie reference).   I thought I would share it today, as a wonderful reminder that life is a roller coaster filled with joys and pain and the challenge is to embrace them all.

I am off to Costa Rica so I won't be writing next week--I hope you have a wonderful week and I will see you in March :)

What Keeps You from Celebrating Your Joy?

This week has been a really good week.  In all honesty, it has been one of the best weeks I have had in a while.   For a variety of reasons, I have just had a lot of positive things happen, some of it is the fruit of a lot of work and some of it is luck or the universe or something like that.  Plus in 3 days I leave with my nearest and dearest to sunny Costa Rica for 7 days!  Considering we have 2 feet of snow on the ground and are now in our 3rd week of temps under 32 this is a blessed event!  So in summary:  a really good week.

You would think I have been leaping from the ceiling, dancing a jig, smiling from ear to ear all week.  But no, I have been spending much of the week vacillating between holding myself back from celebrating and reminding myself how important it is to celebrate.  I realized that I am struggling to celebrate the joy of the week. As much as  I hate to admit it I also realized in some ways I am almost more comfortable when things aren't going so well.  When I have something to strive for or work towards, when I am in struggle.  How crazy is that?!!?

So I started throwing the question out to friends/acquaintances this week how do you celebrate your joy? What do you do when things are going well?  This question has led to some interesting discussions and exposed some fascinating beliefs about celebrating happiness.  I realized, I am not alone in my struggle to celebrate my joy.  If my life mission is to help people live happier, then we need to have the ability to recognize and celebrate when we are in fact happy!!!!

Below are the major beliefs people have around celebrating when things go well.

Our Happiness Days are Limited Belief:  If we celebrate that things are going well they will immediately stop going well.  It is as if the universe is watching us and if he/she knows that we are happy he/she will immediately take it away.  Or another popular theory, we only have a finite number of days we can truly be happy so you don't want to waste those days on minor celebrations.

Our Happiness Might Make Others Feel Bad Belief:  The second most popular belief revolves around humility.  If we celebrate our happiness and joy we basically make other feel like crap and that just isn't nice.  So if our life is going particularly well we need to not celebrate it for fear that we will make other people feel less good about their own lives.

You'll Eventually Get Smacked Down Again Belief:   And finally: you shouldn't celebrate happiness because life always brings you back to reality. Eventually something bad will happen (e.g. I will return to the cold and snow after my vacation) so you might as well just keep yourself on the flat even road of life rather than ride the roller coasters of ups and downs

As I talked with people about these beliefs and even as I write them now I am amazed at the craziness of them--seriously, a limited number of days?  But I admit, crazy or not  I have internalized these beliefs too. So I am going to debunk them as best I can.

Our Happiness Days are Limited Belief:  The universe is not out to get us.  This belief's foundation comes from the idea that we are alloted a certain number of days to be happy--that true growth comes from suffering.  While I believe we learn from suffering we also learn from joy.  We learn from happiness and celebration!  The universe has better things to do then keep us in check on our joy levels, in fact I believe the universe would be better off if there were more joyful celebrations out there.

Our Happiness Might Make Others Feel Bad Belief: This belief is a solid one for me, I struggle with celebrating too much because it might make others feel bad.  But in reality my happiness and their happiness are not linked at all.  When someone close to me is having a really good day or gets to do something really fun, I don't feel bad, in fact I feel happier because they are happier.  If I do get jealous or envious, that is about me and my need to take a trip of live a dream not because THEY are too happy.  I am not responsible for someone else's happiness.

You'll Eventually Get Smacked Down Again Belief: As I always say living happier is about experience a wide range of emotions, it is about feeling the joy and the celebration and about experiencing the grief and sadness.  Life is a roller coaster and which means it is an exhilarating, exhausting, scary, fun, thrilling, nauseating ride.  It is a ride.  So yes, I might be experiencing pain in the upcoming months so why does it follow that I shouldn't experience joy.  In reality, preventing myself from feeling joy doesn't make the pain any less painful--it just means I didn't get the thrill of experiencing my joy.

So there you have it--my 'what keeps you from celebrating your joy' social experiment.  Now I am going to throw the question out to you--do you struggle to celebrate your joy?  What are your beliefs around this concept?

What are your barriers?

The Persian Mystic, Rumi has many many wonderful quotes--one of my favorites is:


"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it"--Rumi

Rumi is talking about love but in reality, you can replace the word love with anything you are seeking: success, peace, money, joy, freedom, commitment, etc.  Every now and then I come across a quote that just allows me to take a deep breath and say, "yes".  This is one of those quotes.

I tend to be a doer a goal setter, list keeper type-A personality type of girl.  This quote reminds me that frequently we are getting in our own way.  Sometimes the reason we aren't achieving or getting something we desire isn't because we aren't working hard enough, it is because we aren't open to it.  It is the difference between doing vs. being.  I admit it sounds a little 'woo-woo' and I am a practical gal.  But here's the thing, I am not necessarily talking about energy blocks, I am talking about limiting beliefs, unresolved hurts and issues.  We all have blocks and barriers to stuff.  Even the things we want most in life we have protections built up around them.

Take love for example:  many of my clients are looking for love an intimate partner to share their life.   Frequently, I have found with some of my clients because they want love so much they are on a high mission to find it, 'seeking it ' like crazy.  Often times because of this seeking they enter into unhealthy relationships that end poorly. However, when the look deep enough they see they are picking less then compatible partners so they don't have to be truly vulnerable or really commit.  If someone isn't compatible then they don't have to deal with their lack of self esteem.    To Rumi's point, if they stopped seeking outside themselves and worked on the barriers they have put forth to finding love e.g. commitment issues, vulnerability issues, self esteem issues they might have a better success finding true love.

Another example I find frequently in my clients is career fulfillment/success.  Many of my clients want to find a career they love. They might be working hard to find that, taking many assessments, seeing a career counselor, and applying for jobs they like.  They are doing a lot of foot work.  In reality there are a lot of barriers within them around the career eg. self esteem issues, lack of support of family/friends, negative self talk, etc.  These barriers keep them from truly getting in touch with their success and their passion. They are spending a lot of time doing the work of looking for a job but not paying attention to the limiting belief barriers that are getting in their way.

This week I have had a lot of small victories in my business:  new clients, new opportunities, accolades and positive feedback.  Yesterday, as I was writing my goals for the coming weeks,  I glanced down at my desk and saw the quote.  I had written it down a few weeks ago to use in a blog post and I thought, 'ah, relax girl'.  I have worked hard to get the victories of this week but rather than enjoy them I just felt more pressure to add to my to-do list.  I know for me, when I tend to feel the need to run harder and faster, there is a barrier there that I need to work on.  

 One of the reasons the Rumi quote speaks to me is that I tend to just keep adding things to my list, setting new goals, trying new things.   So this quote is a wonderful reminder to me to relax, take a deep breath and realize that sometimes you are getting in your own way. My job isn't to get stuck in the doing it is to take care of myself and make sure I am as open and barrier-free as possible.

What are you seeking for and what are the barriers you have around it?  Where do you see barriers getting in your way?

Self Help: There is No Such Thing as Get Fixed Quick.

Lately many of my clients have been coming in to my office after having read a self-help book of some kind.  Sometimes these books have inspired my clients to change and seek help, sometimes they have left them beaten down and disheartened because they can't seem to implement the steps that the book spells out.

In my opinion, one of the problems with self-help books is they tend to break it down into 10 steps to change your life--when in reality implementing one of those 10 steps could take years.  The problem with many pop psychology books and principles is that they make us believe in the get fixed quick principles. In reality, this stuff is hard. (I wrote this post last year and it is one of my favorite posts)

This is something I struggle with as I write a daily blog post on living happier--how to break something extremely challenging down to 5 paragraphs. True change takes awareness, persistence, desire, and time.  It isn't something that happens overnight when you can just 'bam' start being more loving or caring or open.

The first goal of living happier is to embrace yourself who you are to remember that you are valuable, lovable, worthy period.  You don't need to change to become a better person.  The second goal is once you have fully embraced that you are lovable, to then look at your life and see what is getting in your way of living happier.

Then pick one thing that you want to change.  Maybe it is your desire to be less self critical.  So first you have to start catching yourself when you are self critical.  Because being self critical has become something you do without thinking, you might just do an inventory at the end of the day so you can start bring your self-critical tendencies into the light.  Then gradually you start noting them down right after they happen, then  you start noticing what triggers your self criticalness--maybe it is your job or your lack of close relationships or maybe you are tired all the time or maybe it is just habit.  So once you have built an awareness around your self-critical tendencies you can figure out  how often they occur, when they occur and perhaps why they occur then you can start changing them.  You can start catching yourself in the moment and replacing self criticism with a loving thought about yourself or the situation.  During this time you may have days where you fall back into the pattern and beat yourself up all day and you might have days where you are super loving to yourself.  All part of the process.  That is how change starts to happen. That process is then repeated daily over and over until eventually your self critical tendencies become less.

It isn't an easy get fixed quick concept--it isn't just like we can change our thoughts and feel better.  We are human beings who are complex and messy.  So give yourself a break.  The goal of living happier is to just slowly, gradually implement principles that allow us to live a little happier then we were a month ago or a year ago.  It is about paying attention to our lives and noticing how we are feeling, what we love about ourselves, what we might want to change and giving ourselves the space to do that.

Who is in Your Tribe?

As a response to yesterday's post on Loneliness.  I thought it might be helpful to think about who makes up our tribe.  Who are the people that we lean on? That we can go to when time's get tough or when we have something to celebrate?

This weekend we are celebrating Valentine's Day. For some people believe this holiday is merely a torture mechanism to realize they are not in a relationship or their partner isn't as romantic as the people on the Kay Jewelers commercial.  But I think this holiday give us a chance to celebrate our tribe.

What is a tribe?  A tribe is the group of people we have in our small part of the universe that helps us get through life.  Our tribe consists of our life partners, friends, children, parents, aunts and uncles, cousins, co-workers, ministers, grocery clerks, mechanics, and teachers.  All those people who help support us and make our lives easier.  We might interact with them daily or weekly or yearly.  Regardless they are the people that help us Live Happier. They are the people who impact our lives in big and little ways. They are the people we should be honoring on Valentine's Day.

We can't do it alone--without our tribe we would be sunk.  So this Valentine's Day--make a list of all the people who impact you and send them a little love.

Facing our Loneliness

In my opinion, one of the toughest emotions to deal with is loneliness.  Loneliness can creep in during the middle of the night as we lie in bed, it can show up in the middle of party when we realize we don't really want to be there, or on the couch with a partner who really doesn't get us. Loneliness can show up when we are truly alone or when we are surrounded by other people.   The truth is loneliness is real.  It is a part of the human condition-it is something we all have to face and deal with whether we are in a healthy partnership of 25+ years or have been single for 5+ years.  Loneliness is different then being alone.  You can be surrounded by people and feel lonely and you can be alone and feel joyous and happy.

For many of us we run from this loneliness, we shove it down, we ignore it, we jump from relationship to relationship trying to not experience it.  But loneliness is always there.  It is a painful reminder that we aren't getting a need met, that we are sad or scared or vulnerable.  Many of us make bad decisions all in the name of trying to avoid loneliness. We stay in unhealthy relationships, we hang out with people who don't support us, we fill our lives with noise and distractions so we don't have to face ourselves.

For most of my adult life I have lived alone.  I use to book myself sold with parties, dinners, movies, just to be out of the house.  I convinced myself that I had a full exciting life because I was never home.  One night as I was sitting across the table from a friend eating dinner out for the 20th straight night I realized, I felt lonely.  Even though my schedule appeared busy and I was alway surrounded by people, I wasn't really connecting with anyone.  I was trying to avoid the loneliness that I felt in my soul by booking myself solid with dinners and people.  I booked myself solid with people who didn't really know me or care about me.  I realized I had to face the loneliness.  Today I still have moments and periods of loneliness, and honestly, my first instinct is always to run from them.  But I have learned that loneliness is part of the human condition, it is there to teach me something.  I built relationships with people who love me and support me who I know I can call when the loneliness overwhelms me.

Facing our loneliness allows us to Live Happier.  It allows us to look at our lives, our relationships and make sure we are hanging with quality people who love and support us.  Loneliness might be there to tell you it is time to face a loss, move on from an unhealthy relationship, or gather new friends.  It is counter-intuitive because we all want to run from it.  The next time that dreaded loneliness creeps just TRY to welcome it.  Ask it what it has to teach you, write in your journal, or call a friend whom you trust. Most importantly, start building some awareness around your loneliness and how you deal with it.

When does loneliness creep in for you? How do you handle your loneliness?  What are your favorite ways to distract yourself when you feel lonely?  Who do you trust to talk to when you feel lonely?

Life is Just a Mix of Sand and Rocks

Recently I was reminded of this story--you have probably heard it before as I had--but it was a good reminder to me about life and priorities.  

A philosophy professor stood before his class and had some items in front of him. When class began, wordlessly he picked up a large empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with rocks right to the top, rocks about 2" in diameter. He then asked the students if the jar was full?

They agreed it was. So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them in to the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles, of course, rolled into the open areas between the rocks. The students laughed. He asked his students again if the jar was full? They agreed yes, it was.

The professor then picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. “Now,” said the professor, “I want you to recognize that this is your life.

The rocks are the important things – your family, your partner, your health, your children — anything that is so important to you that if it were lost, you would be nearly destroyed.

The pebbles are the other things in life that matter, but on a smaller scale. The pebbles represent things like your job, your house, your car.

The sand is everything else. The small stuff. If you put the sand or the pebbles into the jar first, there is no room for the rocks. The same goes for your life.

If you spend all your energy and time on the small stuff, material things, you will never have room for the things that are truly most important. Pay attention to the things that are critical in your life. Play with your children. Take your partner out dancing. There will always be time to go to work, clean the house, give a dinner party and fix the disposal. Take care of the rocks first - the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just pebbles and sand."

I talk a lot in my practice about what is it you value? What is it you need?  This story illustrates the power behind that process.  When we don't take the time to figure out what we value, love, need we fill our lives with empty space and useless dirt rather then filling it with love, joy, and value.

What are your rocks?  What do you value above all else?

Unconditional Love vs Loving Without Boundaries

Last week, I gave a talk to a local group on communication and conflict.  If you are a regular reader, you know one of my biggest beliefs is that what we all crave is a little validation and unconditional love.  Especially when we are dealing with conflict, we need to have the ability to hear people's stories and understand their perspective.

One of the women at the presentation came up to me afterwards.  She had the belief that if you unconditionally love someone they will take advantage of you or not perform their best.  She told me the story of her adult son who was struggling to get his life going and had made some bad decisions.  She felt one of the reasons he was struggling was because she had loved him too much. As we talked more, I began to realize there is a difference between unconditional love and love with no personal boundaries.  Unconditional love is the concept of I know you are doing the best you can with what you have, it is being present to someone in need and holding the space.  Love with no boundaries means I allow you to take advantage of me, to hurt me, to belittle me in the name of love.  In the brief conversation with this woman, it became clear that her son was taking advantage of her generosity and her kindness.  It also became clear that what she thought was unconditional love (financial support and helpful guidance) was laced with criticism and judgment.

It is my belief when we unconditionally love someone when we allow them to be all that they are failures and strengths, personality glitches and generosities, people soar to meet our expectations.  Unconditional love is such a rare and wonderful gift.  We all want to be loved just for being who we are.  When someone gives us that gift we want to strive to be the best person possible.  However, to unconditionally love someone doesn't mean I need to accept someone's rude behavior, or put up with someone's disrespect and lying.  I can unconditionally love someone and have strong boundaries that don't allow that behavior in my presence.

Unconditional love means I see in you all your wonderful gifts and strengths and I am going to continually point those out to you AND when you are struggling and making bad decisions I am still going to see all the wonderfulness that is you.  I am not going to judge you or criticize you AND I am going to have strong boundaries so you don't take advantage of me or hurt me because you are struggling.

As the woman walked away, she said she had never thought of love that way.  She said she realized that she was more angry at herself then her son because she didn't have good boundaries so she allowed him to take advantage.  Don't get me wrong, the son was clearly in the wrong for hurting his mother, however she also had some responsibility in allowing to happen repeatedly.

Unconditional love is not for the weak of heart. Unconditional love requires the strength to love them anyway.  It requires the strength to set personal boundaries so you can love from a distance if need be. It is not critical, belittling or manipulative it is open, full and accepting. Unconditional love allows us to see the best in other people and allows them to become their best.  Bottom line, unconditional love is a wonderful, challenging, difficult gift we can give to ourselves and those close to us.

What are your thoughts on unconditional love?  What do you struggle with around this concept?

Birthdays, Rituals and Cake

Today is my birthday.  I am a big fan of celebrating my birthday!!!   In fact, I usually throw myself a birthday party but this year I am opting for a more quiet celebration and taking a vacation with one of my nearest and dearest!

Honestly, I don't understand those people who don't want to announce or celebrate their birthdays!  I love my birthday, not just because I get to be the center of my own universe for  a day--ha!  I love my birthday because it is a day I can celebrate me!  It is a day I can look back on and celebrate the fact that I am still here, still growing, still learning, still loving life.  I am another year older and hopefully another year wiser.  Now don't misunderstand me--some birthdays can be a struggle.  I usually have a pause at the idea of growing older.  Every now and then I realize I am not 21 anymore even though most days I still feel like it.

One of the keys I think to Living Happier is having rituals or traditions.  Markers at which you celebrate or honor something.  Birthdays are one of these markers.  To me birthdays aren't necessarily about presents or fancy dinners (although those can be nice).  Birthdays are a chance to enjoy the love of family and friends, to reflect on the past and dream about the future.  Birthdays give us a chance to celebrate our lives.

I believe we should celebrate our birthdays with fun rituals/traditions whether that be a card from your mother, your favorite breakfast in bed, a bouquet of your favorite flowers or a birthday cake.   For me, it is the cake.  Hands down my favorite, have to birthday tradition is to have a cake. The picture above is a birthday cake from a few years ago. Those that know me, know I have to have a cake, preferably one that is yummy.  

Overall, my birthday traditions are pretty simple:

• Have time to reflect on the past year and the dreams of the year to come.
• Take time to soak up the joy and love from my family and friends.
• Eat lots of yummy food especially cake.
• And most importantly, all day long as I go through the day I have my own private celebrate me party.  

How do you feel about your birthday? What are your birthday traditions/rituals?  I would love to hear how you celebrate the uniqueness that is you!!

Passion and Cooking

I have become obsessed with the movie Julie and Julia--it actually was in theaters last year and was released on DVD a few months ago. The movie follows the lives of two women.   Julia Child and her struggle to get her cook book Mastering the Art of French Cooking to be published and Julie who decides to take a year to cook every recipe in Julia's book and then write a blog about it.  The movie flips back and forth between these two stories, in the 1940s-1950s and in the year 2001-2001.  I admit I enjoy the Julia Child (played by Meryl Streep) parts better.  But overall, I love the movie because it talks about passion.

The movie shows how these two women discovered their passion for both cooking and life.  I love watching them go through the joy, self doubt, passion, love, fear, self-judgement that all goes along with living passionately.  Somewhere we were taught that once we find what we are passionate about everything will just fall into place.  Finding what you are passionate about simply helps you engage in an activity you love.  Finding what your passionate about helps you live happier because you are feeding your soul with an activity that makes it soar.  Anyone who saw Julia Child cook (and I know I am dating myself here) saw her passion for cooking, her absolute joy in it.  That passion wasn't discovered until she was in her 40s, before that she was a secretary for the US Government.  Once she discovered cooking she just couldn't get enough.  She took classes, she became a teacher, she wrote a book, she appeared on TV.  All those things took years, years of self doubt, of risk of fear.  However, what she kept coming back to, was her passion for cooking.  She moved through her fear, self doubt and continually went back to what she loved.  And with the support of her husband and friends she did finally reach her goal of having a book published that made French cooking accessible to Americans.

I think passion has gotten a bad rap.  Passion has become something that we search after, something we think we need to find. Passion is thought to be this ONE thing and once we find it all will be good with our lives.  I believe, passion is not something we find, it is how we live our lives.  When we live passionately, we participate in activities that we enjoy and spend time with people who engage us.  Passion can infiltrate everything we do from playing with our kids, having coffee with a friend, to working on the computer.  Passion is a state of mind.  However, having passion doesn't prevent us from having self doubt or wondering if we are doing the right thing.  Passion allows us to live with zest and zeal and embrace all of life:  the joy, the fear, the thrill, the doubts.  Julia Child lived her life with passion, from how she engaged with her husband, to how she ate her food she was a passionate person. And she also experienced self doubt and frustration.

So today think about your day as a chance to live with passion.  How can you add more passion to your life?   Where do you get your passion?

Feeling Both: Cranky and Blessed

Back from vacation and I admit I am struggling a bit this morning.  In fact, in the interest of full disclosure it took all I had to pull myself up out of bed this morning.  Partially because I am still experiencing jet lag and partially because in all honestly I am just not looking forward to my day.  As I made my way from my nice warm bed to the bathroom my head was spinning with negativity.  I was feeling down right cranky.  Cranky at having to get up out of bed, cranky at being done with vacation and back into the routine, cranky with having a to-do list a mile long and specifically cranky about the things on my to do list today.  Not feeling down or depressed just not wanting to do anything.  Honestly, just wanting a few more days of vacation.

By the time I had come downstairs and was greeted by my dog (even that didn't pull me out of my mood) I was beating myself up for feeling cranky and for not enjoying my blessings, for not recognizing that really I have it pretty good.  I have a lot to look forward to in the coming weeks and days.  But this "you SHOULD be grateful" mini-lecture didn't really help.  Instead I was now in a bad mood and feeling selfish.  As I poured my cereal and made my coffee and started my morning ritual, I thought to myself, "what if you just went with it".  Just feel what you are feeling.  Don't talk yourself out of it, don't beat yourself up just be.  So I am. And you know what I feel better.  I am not looking forward to my day, I still want to crawl back into bed but I am not swimming in a pool of self hatred and guilt. I know when I give myself space to feel my feelings I usually feel better.  When I allow myself to just feel cranky, tired, in vacation hang over mode, I feel better faster.  The problem comes in when I try to convince myself my mood is inappropriate or not valid.

The truth is we ALL have bad days.  We all have days we don't feel well, aren't looking forward to, or just wake up on the wrong side of the bed.  During these days our first reaction is to try to talk ourselves out of it, to talk ourselves into a good mood.  One of the ways we do this is by using gratitude.  We try to convince ourselves to be grateful.  Gratitude is awesome and I am a HUGE fan of being grateful.  But somehow/somewhere our moods and gratitude got connected.  I can be grateful AND tried and cranky.  Gratitude is meant to help us gain perspective, to help us relish the little things and see the beauty in the every day.  Gratitude can help us feel better and see our lives differently.  But when gratitude or lack of gratitude is used as a way to beat ourselves up it is painful and unhelpful.

Today I am having a bad day.  Today I am grateful for all my blessings for my dog, my house, my career, my family and friends.  I am grateful I am celebrating my birthday this week (more on that later) and in less than a month I get to take another vacation.   I am grateful I get to write this blog and talk about living happier.  Today I am both:  Not looking forward to my day, feeling pretty cranky and grateful that I was able to get up out of bed and feel healthy.  So I am going to hold both, I am going to allow myself to feel both blessed and cranky.  

What are your thoughts on bad days?  How do you help yourself feel better?