Calming

I have been very busy lately and I notice how easy it can be to get caught up in negative thinking. Being tired or simply not having enough time to put away your laundry can slowly drag you down. It isn’t as if one day a piano falls onto your head and then you feel it, it can creep day by day until you find yourself observing your life more than living it. This is the crucial time to make some movements. Whether it is physically standing up and dancing around to a fun song or forcing yourself to smile alone thinking of everything you have to smile about. Now. You have to catch yourself in a net before you float downstream. Then you feel the feel the fingers cramming your head open and scooping out the things that shouldn’t be there. Self doubt, fear, anxiety, all that crap. Then imagine a warm water trickling down your back, cleaning and soothing your soul.

Slowly I can see the sun again. I can feel the beauty of life.

I feel gratitude for being alive. I feel grateful for water. I am grateful for everything I have enjoyed in my life. I feel calm.

Moxie

The sun lightens the bed and clock differently everyday,

Some days red and others softly subdued grey. Always coming thru my windows,

 waking me only with the help of the loud noisy pest.

The light usually isn’t enough on its own because I often cram my times into certain boxes

the ones that I am supposed to fit into with such moxie

and some of the hoops that I am jumping through keep me up long past my first inclination to rest,

Everyday is a lesson,

Some days are the test.

I am grateful for allergy medicine, sleeping, hot tea, beds, clean laundry

Heather Purser

I am so proud of my girlfriend!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43996502/ns/us_news-life/

 

I just wanted to dedicate this blog to my girlfriend (Heather Purser). She is the sweetest most loving person I have ever met.

She is amazing and I am so grateful that I met her. I am grateful for every day I get to spend with her.

I love love

I love that love is a possible emotion. I feel lucky that I experience this in my life and wish everyone all the love in the world. When refocusing your life and the priorities within it, usually thoughts will bring you back to the people you care about.

Few people think about their life when they are on their death-bed and wish that they had spent more time at work or worried more.

To stay in the present moment I try to remember all the people in my life that have shared joy with me.  It could be giving me the bigger cookie or a real quality hug. All these memories are part of my soul. I am so grateful for all the fun and laughter I have been involved in.

It is such a privilege to share in someones joy yet sometimes we get so bogged down with worry, doubt, self loathing or jealousy. Really loving someone means loving all of them. 

So to twist this, remember to love yourself too. Don’t be so hard on yourself. No one judges you harder than you judge yourself. And when you are judging,

 yourself or anyone, 

you are not able to share or experience joy —-or love.

—-so stop.

Be grateful that love is an emotion that is possible to experience.

I am grateful for clean water, rice, clean water, i-pods, cameras, brownies

Beautiful Day

On a sunny amazing day everything in the world seems possible. Then I think about it and the sun really has nothing to do with the feeling, even though it does.

The energy and excitement of people and yourself propel and move your day forward in a positive way. The sun represents fun in the park, time spent with friends and vacations. On sunny days people make a point to do something that makes them feel joyful and often they take time for themselves to just enjoy their day.

I was walking home and thought about how much happiness I felt running through my veins. I want to remember that I always have this capacity to feel great. My mood and attitude create my perception of everything. I smile more, I sing more, I laugh more, I am more generous and I just feel better.  Because I feel all these things other people get the best me and they are almost always reciprocal which in turn makes it even more exuberant.

The more you love, the more you are loved.

The more you give, the more is given to you.

The more you smile at people,  the more the more they smile at you.

The more you feel grateful, the more gratitude you will experience.

Sunshine is a mindset.

I am grateful for bright colors, sprite, celery, carrots, germinating seeds, daisies, yellow sunglasses, and ferry rides.

I am excited

Summer has begun for the year and I couldn’t be more delighted.  Every year it happens and every  year feels slightly different but this year I know it is going to be one of the most awesome summers of my life.

With the changing of the seasons there is always a slight relief because it signals to you that change is still possible. Just when you think the rain will never stop and the clouds will never part, you spend all day in the park in shorts and a tank top enjoying the heat from the sun.

Embracing change makes it more exciting and fun. Change happens to everything and everyone all the time. Often people try to resist it and seek ”security” only to find heartache and disappointment.  If you become friends with change and accept it you will feel far more secure.

This also applies to the people you care about the most. Sometimes in a relationship or friendship or kinship you think someone should be the same person they have always been. When you truly care for someone you encourage them to grow and change however it will be best for them, even if it means you may not have the same experiences that you are used to having with them.

Encouraging growth in others can be especially hard if we aren’t engaging in this ourselves.

Life is so precious.

Step #1

Figure out what you have always wanted.

Step #2

Figure out what steps you need to take to get it. Break the steps small enough so that they are not overwhelming.

Step #3

Do it. No matter what happens day-to-day remind yourself of step 1 and try the hardest you possibly can. Even if you have an off day, keep trying.  You will be very excited about the results.

I am grateful for my body’s ability to heal scrapes. I am grateful for vitamins and fresh clean water. I am grateful for my friends and how their smiles make me feel happy. I am grateful for my girlfriend who has so much beautiful pure love in her heart. I am grateful for rainbows and pride weekend.

 

Plants

I was meditating today and I pictured a patio yard area in the summer with all the people I love in it. I was hearing each person’s laugh and seeing their smiles and we were all drinking lemonade together. Then I started crying. It wasn’t because I was sad, it was because I thought about how lucky I am to have so many amazing people who I have seen smile and heard laugh.

Life’s moments are fleeting and I never want to forget to enjoy them. I never want to forget to be grateful for the time I get to spend with people I love. I am so grateful to everyone that has shared their life with me in some way. I am so grateful for every couch I have slept on, every meal someone has shared with me, every laugh, every tear, every hug.

I have such an abundance of joy and love in my life and I am so grateful.

Thank you.

Rainbows

I feel so grateful to be able to see rainbows when it rains.

I sit and try to find words to say.

Some days you can talk for hours about everything and some days it is hard to complete a thought. I am gonna do what I do when I need a boost, read motivational quotes. 

I remember being in Iceland when I studied there and the first few days were such a trip that I almost got  upset. Then I looked up quotes about being positive. It really does help. I read insights from other people and realize that I also feel these things.  People are all connected. We have all felt pain, we have all experienced loss and we all have known joy in some form.

“Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.”
- Mahatma Gandhi

Compassion and tolerance are not a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength.
– Dalai Lama

“When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we took so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened up for us”
- Helen Keller

“Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.”
- Dale Carnegie

“So many of our dreams at first seems impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.”
- Christopher Reeve

Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.
Dalai Lama

 

I am grateful for stir fry, workaholics (the show), patios, celery, veggie burgers, clean laundry

Yellow brick road

It seems like people talk about the yellow brick road figuratively by telling you the solutions to your problems. I think as people we sometimes seek these solutions from others as a way of stalling our own actual personal work.

I enjoy thoughts, ideas and input a lot but occasionally I think I get extremely wrapped up in other things to escape from myself. It is hard to admit when I am doing it because I don’t think I always notice. There is no true knowing, it is more about the feelings that creep up around the back crevices of my mind.  I get anxious, sometimes irritated for no reason, I get extremely picky with things I don’t really care about and  my muscles all feel tight. For me these are all symptoms of not getting enough alone time.

I think people can discount the importance of hanging out completely alone and checking in with your feelings. It is like having a relationship with yourself. If you don’t ask yourself how you feel about everything that you are doing, then sometimes you end up doing things you don’t really want to do. You can get stuck in a section of life that doesn’t speak to your soul and I think it can depress people without them even knowing what it wrong.

Any good relationship is built on trust and honest yet kind truth tellings.  So why do we keep promises to others but not ourselves? Why do we value others opinions more than our own at times? And lastly, why are we so much crueller to ourselves than we would be to a good friend? 

We need to be our own best friend. We need to keep promises and be kind to ourselves when we feel down.

If we communicated well with ourselves I think we would have a much happier time in life. Truthfully, I think people are only capable of loving other people as much as they love themselves.

I am grateful.

Creativity

So I am sitting in the park with my dog and I have a serious moment. I ask myself,

 

Q:Who do I want to be?

This is a question that any person from any walk of life could ask.

                                                            So what is the answer?

The answers and the complexities of the answers  will vary but is seems what they often have in common is either something or someone you apparently aren’t.                      Don’t get me wrong. It is important to have goals and be working towards positive progression but I feel too often we overlook wanting to be who we are

when we are.

I think if we could feel satisfied with our current states and we could focus more on enjoying them. Also remember that at some point in our life we will maybe look back to now thinking of it as “the good old days..”

What is the easiest way to stay in the moment and feel grateful for everything?

I have come to believe that trying to make a habit of expressing yourself somehow creatively or doing an activity that makes you feel happy, joyful and cathartic can help. Some activities to try:

                                       Writing, drawing, painting, singing, dancing, listening to music, stretching, finger painting, walking your dog in the park, playing dress up, debating, playing a sport; Anything where you decide you want to do it and you genuinely feel better after doing it.

Sometimes people don’t express themselves and they bottle up all their feelings and mask their emotions. And then one day, they explode. Or have a melt down or a break down, or worse, they simply die inside, never to reappear in this life. They let their spirit get so broken and beaten that they simply give up any hope of ever escaping the misery that they have accepted for themselves. Too many people box themselves into a category of being someone who doesn’t deserve happiness or love so they settle for unhealthy at times abusive situations out of comfort of the familiar.

Moral of the story, express yourself. Your thoughts, feelings and actions are important and you deserve to be happy. Allow yourself the luxury of being ok with who you are now and using creativity in your life to inspire new goals. People who don’t encourage you in these areas maybe are the people who don’t know how to do it themselves. Be strong and leave them behind. You discovering your peace could inspire them to find theirs.

A: I want to be me

I am grateful for cantaloupes, grapes, harps, basketball shorts, lemon tea, electronic pianos, buildings with lots of windows, and groceries.