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Posts tagged with “happy”

6 Ways Meditation Improves Your Life

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“Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If, in our hearts, we still cling to anything—anger, anxiety, or possessions—we cannot be free.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

Back in 2001, I was a freshman in college, and my saving grace from anxiety was a yoga class. More specifically, it was the most glorious of poses we call savasana that kept me sane.

For those unfamiliar, savasana—or corpse pose—is a pose of surrender and noticing thoughts and sensations without judgment, much like meditation. (It’s the pose that looks like everyone is just lying around napping.)

Back then, …

Why I’m Grateful for Accidents, Pain, and Loss

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“If you have nothing to be grateful for, check your pulse.” ~Unknown

I couldn’t feel my legs.

There wasn’t any pain, just this odd “sameness” of non-sensation.

My body was frozen as I turned my eyes downward to scan down my nineteen-year-old body. Below my knees, my legs were splayed out in a very peculiar way. I was halfway underneath my car, pinned down to the dirt and gravel of the road by the back right tire.

The tire had caught my long, curly hair and the puffy left sleeve of my new white peasant blouse, miraculously missing my face.…

Why Positive Thinking Drained Me (and How I’ve Found Peace)

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“Glimpses of love and joy or brief moments of deep peace are possible whenever a gap occurs in the stream of thought.” ~Eckhart Tolle

Eleven years ago I read a book that was life changing for me. It taught me something I never considered during the previous twenty-nine years—that I could change my thoughts.

The book was Loving What Is, by Byron Katie. It set me forth on a journey that included dozens of books that communicated the same thing: We think the same thoughts all day long, over and over, and many of them are negative, filled with …

That Big Life Change Won’t Be Satisfying If…

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“Nothing changes unless you do.” ~Unknown

In the fall of September 2017, after one of the longest summers of event planning I could have imagined, I quit my job.

As I proudly exited the workforce to pursue my creative talents as a writer, I looked confident and excited on the outside. Yet, in that moment and for the years to follow, I was terrified on the inside.

Even though I’d exited my cubicle walls, head held high, the boundaries, fear, and rules of the office environment followed me around daily for over two and a half years.

I was now …

Even in the Hospital, He Found Joy in the Now

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“Don’t let the sadness of your past and the fear of your future ruin the happiness of your present.” ~Unknown

Back in the day when I was a stay-at-home mom, “mindfulness” wasn’t even a word in my vocabulary. The only mindfulness I was aware of was my own mind-fullness just trying to navigate a busy, full schedule with three children. It wasn’t until later in life that mindfulness was brought to my attention through the examples my oldest son Sean exhibited.

Sean was my mindfulness teacher. He showed me how to be in the sweet spot of the now. He …

How to Live a Life You Love (Even If Others Doubt You)

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“Not all those who wander are lost.” ~J.R.R. Tolkien

I will always remember those words.

I had just decided to ditch my old life. Instead of pursuing a cushy career as a lawyer, I wanted to create a business as a freelance writer because it felt like a fulfilling thing to do.

“You’ll never make it work. You’ll regret your decision,” a loved one told me.

Those words pushed my buttons. I felt scared.

What if I would regret it?

Was I stupid, even delusional, for thinking there was an alternative to living a pre-planned life with a secure nine-to-five …

It’s Not Selfish to Want to Thrive, and I Now Know I Deserve It

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“To create more positive results in your life, replace ‘if only’ with ‘next time.” ~Celestine Chua

I’m twenty-nine-and-a-half and I’ve finally committed to pursuing my dreams of becoming a singer/musician/songwriter, actress, and screenwriter.

But most importantly, I finally feel allowed to live the life I want to live.

I’ve struggled with anxiety and depression on and off since I was fifteen. My coping mechanism always looked the same: isolating myself in my room, listening to music, and making up stories or music videos to go along with songs. I loved to refine these little scenes, repeating the songs over and …

How to Practice Joy and Bravery

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“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorns have roses.” ~Alphonse Karr

“You should have told them. You should have told them you like it. They need to know people are happy there.”

“I know I should have. But I didn’t want to seem insensitive or make anyone feel bad.”

We sat at the dinner table, my boyfriend looking at me, me staring at my cleaned plate. We’d had variations of this conversation before. I tell him my coworkers aren’t happy at work, but I am happy at work, and he is forever confused as to …

It’s More Important to Be Authentic Than Impressive

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“The most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves is to remain ignorant by not having the courage to look at ourselves honestly and gently.” ~Pema Chödrön

All my life I’ve chased after success, as I was encouraged to do from a very young age.

When I was six, my father got me my first proper study desk as a gift for getting into a ‘good’ school. The type of desk that towered over a little six-year-old—complete with bookshelves and an in-built fluorescent light. In the middle of the shelf frame stuck a white sticky label inscribed with my …

Never Forget That You Have the Power to Choose

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“If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can smile, and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

Dedicate today to the power of choice. Your choice. You can’t choose everything that you experience in life, but what you can choose is mightier than any circumstance, outcome, or other person’s opinion.

Where you focus your mind, how you use your words, and how you treat yourself and others are all up to you. One chapter at a time, you write your own story.

We all have the power to choose what …

The Power of Saying No (Even to People You Love)

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“When you say yes to others, make sure you are not saying no to yourself.” ~Paulo Coelho

“Yes, of course.”

“Yes, that’s no trouble at all.”

“Yes, I can do that.”

“Yes, I’d love to help.”

Yes, yes, yes. “Yes” seemed to be the key word in my relationships with partners, family, friends, and colleagues.

I wanted to be helpful, kind, and thoughtful; I wanted to be there when people needed me. I didn’t want to let them down or disappoint or displease them. I spent a lot of my time devoted to my self-image as a capable, nice …

The Number on the Scale Does Not Dictate Your Value

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“To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

We try to give our bodies value with numbers. We’re obsessed with the number on the scale and the circumference of our waist.

We also think our value lies in labels. Words like “obese,” “fat,” and “overweight” are triggers for many, and we abhor them like coffee breath, because we’ve been immersed in pocrescophobia (the fear of getting fat) from before we can remember.

But we are more than a category on a pie chart. We are …

How to Free Yourself from the Burden of Your Potential

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“Changing directions in life is not tragic. Losing passion in life is.”

We all have natural talents, and in some cases, we may have devoted years to honing our skills and turning them into a career. As we’re on the road to achieving our goal or fulfilling our potential, there may be this invisible weight that starts to bear down on us.

That’s because there is a burden of potential. The burden is that fear that we’ll never reach our full potential, and the obligation and pressure we feel when we don’t want to continue on the path we’re on.…

Why I Now Complain Less and Appreciate More

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 “It is not happy people who are thankful. It is thankful people who are happy.” ~Unknown

I used to be a complainer, a fault-finder, a grumbler. I would grumble a hundred times a day about mundane issues, be it the weather, the traffic, or my husband.

I complained when my husband didn’t help me around the house, and grumbled when he helped. It took me some time to realize that it was not him or his lack of housekeeping skills that made me unhappy. I was unhappy because I was turning into an ungrateful person.

I have some fond and …

My Life Will Be My Message

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“Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” ~Gautama Buddha

I have meditated for over half my life. It didn’t always look like meditation, and I didn’t always refer to it as such, but the driving need to introspectively understand my universe has been an ever-present presence,.

For a long time, there was a certain guarded nature to my practice. It was intimate for me. I didn’t have words to explain what I was doing in a way that didn’t seem crazy. …

How to Fight Well in Your Relationship

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“Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.” ~Rumi

I had one of those really intense arguments with my partner recently, and it made me realize the importance of knowing how to fight well in a relationship.

That might sound like an oxymoron, but there isn’t a relationship I know of where the couple doesn’t fall out at one point or another. Fights can make or break a relationship. That’s why it’s important you know how to fight well—because the success of any relationship isn’t based on how well you manage the good times …

Why Some Things Trigger You Emotionally and Others Don’t

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“If you’re hysterical, it’s historical.” ~Anonymous

I had been having problems with my email. I dreaded calling technical support, since my experience in the past involved sitting for a long time on hold and listening to someone reading from a script instead of thinking creatively about my problem. However, since I could not fix the problem myself and I felt I had no other options, I called my Internet service provider’s technical support line.

True to form, after thirty minutes on the phone we had barely moved past the point where I had repeated my name and account number to …

Why I’m at Peace with My Weight Gain

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“Resistance keeps you stuck. Surrender immediately opens you to the greater intelligence that is vaster than the human mind, and it can then express itself through you. So through surrender often you find circumstances changing.” ~Eckhart Tolle

I took a deep breath, feeling the recent change in my belly. I pinched at my belly rolls. They were familiar, I’d had them before, but recently I had gone through a period of over a year where I was in a smaller body. Now I was gaining weight again.

I refuse to step on the scale, so I don’t actually know …

How to Just Be: 5 Life Lessons I Learned from Watching Sunsets

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“Never waste any amount of time doing anything important when there is a sunset outside that you should be sitting under!” ~C. JoyBell C.

“You need to just be.”

At the time I didn’t understand my teacher’s words. My identity entwined itself with my ambition.

I fought inner emptiness by overloading my calendar.

I fought loneliness by never leaving time to be with myself.

I fought depression by trying to do more.

None of it worked.

And the answer repeated itself, quiet and strong, “You need to just be.”

Fortunately, my teacher was too wise to only …

7 Ways Running Helps Me Live My Best Life

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“I don’t run to add days to my life, I run to add life to my days.” ~Ronald Rook

Growing up, I was always a bit on the tubby side, or, as my mum would say, “stocky.”

Old and grainy camcorder footage from the early nineties shows me at four years old, waddling sassily around the garden naked on a summer’s day. Watching the nostalgic home footage recently, I thought to myself, “Wow, I had a beer belly long before I began drinking beer.”

Apart from a couple of years playing football in my teens, competitive sports and exercise were …