Happiness Articles and Blog Posts

Take Care of Yourself From the Inside Out

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“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
~John Lennon

I don’t often write about my work as a therapist. But today I found myself giving the same suggestion to each person I met with. Maybe it’s the season, maybe it’s in the air. And maybe you can benefit, too. What I said repeatedly was, “Take good care of yourself.”

Somehow it’s seems so easy to forget to pay attention to our own needs. We push through, keep going, and ignore ourselves until the well runs completely dry. Then you wonder why you are exhausted, why you feel anxious and disconnected.

You Matter

Taking care of yourself means counting yourself in. You matter, you absolutely do. And your quality of life suffers when you neglect yourself. You lose a sense of your priorities, and you end up grasping for solutions just to keep your head above water.

Maybe you think that taking care of yourself is selfish. This is a common misconception that is patently untrue.

Being caught up in your own stress doesn’t serve you or anyone else. Commit to taking care of you for you, for your quality of life, so you can live with a full and open heart. Here is the paradox: When you take good care of yourself, you get out of your own way. You are less self-focused. You aren’t captured by your needs, dramas, and obsessions.

Start with you, and you will experience great freedom in being open, peaceful, and awake to your life and everyone in it.

Caring for Yourself Affects Others

Today, I told a client that learning to take care of your own needs and feelings is one of the healthiest things you can do for a relationship.

When you learn to acknowledge your feelings and tend to those fragile places inside, you can show up for your partner full, loving, and available. No longer needy and lacking, you are set up for the simple joys of pleasant conversation and emotional intimacy.

In fact, not taking care of yourself does a disservice to your relationships. You can’t be present for your children, you miss opportunities to support your friends and loved ones.

Tend to yourself, and you have the space to emanate peace and express love. You become a beacon of sanity in an overwrought world.

Takes No Time

There are unlimited ways for you to take care of yourself. Some of them take no time at all – they are simply a shift in perspective. A few months ago, I realized I was waking up thinking about my to-do list and anxiously making it through the day. Finally, I said, “no more.” I got curious about my thought process and saw so clearly that I was half-present while worrying about future events.

Now, when I feel the stress in my body, I happily focus on just what is in front of me. I refuse to put my attention into those anxious thoughts. And the stress has reduced dramatically. No time needed – just a willingness to see the truth and be aware.

Other means for taking care of yourself do take time. You get to spend a few moments in stillness or go to a yoga class or begin to follow a passion.

Obstacles to Self-Care

See what gets in the way of your self-care. You will find that the obstacles are beliefs.

Believing you should or need to spend your time in a certain way.
Believing that you have to come last.
Believing that the world will fall apart if you stop playing out the mental and emotional habits that don’t serve you.
Believing that you aren’t worth your own loving attention.
Believing that being stressed is a normal way of living.

The first step to taking care of yourself is to investigate these beliefs. Are they true? Do they bring you what you really want?

Are you willing to try the essential experiment – to let go of these beliefs and take the radical step back to yourself, into self-care?

Self-Care = True Happiness

You might notice that I’m not including a list of ways to take care of yourself. You can find those on countless self-improvement blogs, and besides, I trust that you know how to do it. More important is to wake up to the necessity of it, to understand how self-care unearths your potential for happiness, and how your happiness touches everyone and everything.

Tell yourself the truth about how happiness works, and you can’t help but start with the landscape of your inner experience.

Self-care is always on my radar, and I’ll share with you how I do it:

Being aware when I am triggered and meeting my experience with deep acceptance. (See “Oh, this.”)
Taking time to listen to the people I love, especially my partner.
Exercise – running on the treadmill and yoga. (Yoga is exercise plus so much more.)
Resting when I am tired or starting to feel sick. Not pushing myself beyond my capacity.
Letting go of stressful thoughts about the future so I can be present.
Being still.
Walking away from the computer when I’ve been on it too long.
Keeping my home in order; not letting tasks pile up.
Being open and non-defensive – even in hard conversations.
Planning enough time so I don’t have to rush and worry about being late.
Flowing with life especially when unexpected things happen.
Contemplating the true nature of existence, which puts everything into perspective.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture. Now it’s your turn. How do you take care of yourself? What are your obstacles to self-care? I’d love to hear…

10 Life-Changing Facts About Happiness

Note: This post is part of the Life-Changing Facts series. Check out the other posts on fear, attachment, habits, and healing the inner critic.

“The moment you move out of the way, you make room for the miracle to take place.”
~Dr. Barbara King

The number one desire for most people on this planet is to be happy. And I don’t mean the silly-smile-on-your-face version. True happiness is a deep sense of well being, the capability of abiding in a state of ease and peace that is present no matter what. Happiness is a way of being that can permeate every moment of your life.

The Problem

But for most of us, happiness seems to be elusive. Instead of simply being happy, we play out conditioned habits that distort our thoughts and bring drama and disappointment to our lives.

If you want to be happy – reliably, completely happy – then you need to see in great detail how your thought patterns and emotions make you unhappy. When you stop feeding unhappiness, you will realize a simple fact: you always have the option of being happy.

The Facts

Are you ready to get serious about happiness? Then consider these 10 life-changing facts. Contemplate them and apply them diligently to your own inner experience. You will know the happiness you long for.

1. Enduring happiness is possible. This is the essential starting point. You can have faith that enduring happiness is possible. How do I know?

I used to live with lots of inner struggles, wondering why I couldn’t be happy. Years ago, I heard about the possibility of ending suffering. I didn’t know how to achieve it, but I was set on fire to find out.

Now I know. If you make the choice to live a conscious life in every moment and investigate how you get in your own way, enduring happiness is possible.

2. You need to get serious about happiness. Moments of happiness may appear, but if you want to be truly, deeply happy, you need to get down to serious business. The power of habits is strong, so happiness takes a great willingness to be aware.

Make the commitment to happiness, keep it alive in every moment, and you will see results. Guaranteed.

3. If you rely on unreliable objects for your happiness, you will not end up happy. What is an unreliable object? A person, a situation, the future, a house, possessions, money, status. None of these can offer you a guarantee of happiness because they are outside your control.

And if you place your happiness in the hands of something you don’t control, you have set yourself up for disappointment.

Don’t look for happiness in anything outside yourself. Instead, turn your attention inside. Shed the habits and patterns that keep you unhappy, and you will discover the wellspring of happiness that is always here, unrelated to any objects or circumstances.

4. If you want to be happy, look at how you make yourself unhappy. Happiness is your true nature. It is here, always available, but is masked by your conditioning. If you want to know happiness, these automatic habits and patterns need to be untangled.

Don’t wait for happiness to miraculously appear in your life. Notice when you are unhappy, and investigate:

What are you thinking?
What are you believing?
What emotional reaction has captured you?

Become an expert in how your conditioning works and the ways it affects you. You will see that these habits are stressful and depleting. Then, you are faced with a choice. Make the commitment to no longer feed them with your attention. They don’t serve you anyway, so let them soften and dissolve.

When you stop buying into the patterns that make you unhappy, simply relax and feel the sense of well being that is possible.

5. Happiness breeds more happiness. When you incline your thoughts, feelings, and actions toward happiness, you create a happiness momentum. How to do that? Don’t be afraid to be happy.

Orient your life toward situations and people you enjoy. Notice what is already working, rather than what needs to be changed. Open your heart to recognize your many blessings.

6.Happiness is always present and available. You can spend a lifetime trying to work out your past so you can feel resolved. And sometimes these tangles need attention.

But don’t put off happiness one more second. Don’t delay happiness by thinking things need to be perfect before you are happy.

Instead, go deeply into the direct experience of this present moment, right now. Let all boundaries and mental structures collapse, including the idea that you are a separate entity in this vast universe of love. This is the doorway to the enduring happiness you are searching for.

7. Happiness is a word that refers to a state that can’t be defined in words. Many words point to happiness – peace, ease, well being, love – but none of them defines it accurately. True happiness is a state, an experience. It is life itself, the essential reality of all things.

Just for one moment, let go of your idea about what happiness is. In fact, let go of all ideas about everything. Drop any words, and notice what is actually here in your direct experience – the peace beyond peace. You have come home.

8. A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. These are the words from a recent research study that shows that people spend on average half of their waking hours thinking about something other than the task at hand and that these wandering thoughts cause unhappiness.

When you realize that your mind has wandered, shift your attention into the present. Simply see, hear, taste, touch, and breathe. Experience reality as it is unfolding right in this moment. There is no struggle here, only peace, ease, and happiness.

9. Thoughts undermine your happiness. Become very knowledgeable about the kinds of thoughts that undermine your happiness. Then, when you notice that they have taken hold, relax your attention away from them. Make a vow to say “No” to the thoughts, and say “Yes!” to happiness every time they appear.

These thinking patterns can’t possibly support you in being happy:

Self-criticism
Compulsive worrying
Regrets about the past
Stories of how you have been wronged
Thoughts about how things should be different than they are.

When they are present, you will know, as you feel heavy, tense, and depleted. Now you have the chance to make the essential choice. Just say no, every time. And as you do, you dip into the endless well of happiness that is here in this very moment.

10. Happiness is a choice. There are many things in life you don’t have control over, but you do have a choice about where you place your attention. You can feed stories that keep you afraid, despairing, and emotionally upset. You can convince yourself that you are unworthy of happiness. Or you can move your attention to the truth of what is present now.

I know these mental habits can be intense and consuming. But truth is more powerful. Love is designed to heal. Every time the habits arise, shift your focus to the present. Again and again and again. See what is actually true. Live here, and be happy.

What interferes with your happiness? I’d love to hear…

Note: I love the work of Tara Mohr. Tara has recently released a book of her amazing poetry with the most beautiful images, which you can find here.

image credit

10 Love-Filled Ways to Live From Your Heart

“I name it silence. Some people say self, or love, or fullness. It is actually life itself.”
~Gangaji

Living from the heart is incredibly relaxing. You stop using your mind to analyze, plan, organize, and figure everything out. What a relief! As you let go of all of that mind activity, you are able to relax into presence, where there is no trouble and no resistance.

When you live from the heart, you begin to touch into the universal experience of love. Love is the source of everything – the fabric which makes up our very existence.

Sure, there are many waves in the ocean, but they all are made up of the same thing. Play with letting go of your individual self and live from the eternal ocean of love.

Ask, “What would love do?” In any situation, look for the response that is peaceful and free of stress. Put aside your fears and conditioned habits, and let love guide you.
Let love pervade every conversation. Can you not take your relationships for granted and be more openly loving? Even when things get tense, drop away from your emotional reaction and melt back into love.
Treat yourself like gold. When it comes to love, you are included, too. Tune into what you need and let yourself have it. Live as stress-free a life as possible.
Be here now. Spinning stories in your mind about things that have happened in the past and what might happen in the future take you away from what is here right now. When you are stuck in your mind, it is impossible to be fully in touch with the love that is here. Let your attention explore this very moment. Open your senses, open your heart, and live from there.
Become aware of the oneness of love. Consider this: what is looking out of your eyes is the same as what is looking out of everyone else’s eyes. When you meet an “other,” you are actually meeting the essence of yourself. When you understand this, love is impossible to deny. Check it out with the next person you speak to.
Don’t obsessively plan. In fact, only plan when absolutely necessary. Planning is in the mind, and when you realize how little planning you actually need, there is space to recognize that you are alive right now. And in that aliveness, let your heart glow.
Make hard choices. When you live from the heart, you begin to be very honest with yourself. You may realize that certain situations or people aren’t working for you. Likewise, you will see your own tendencies that don’t serve. Sometimes, the most loving response you can make is a kind but firm, “No.”
Honor your personality quirks. A funny thing happens when you live from the heart. As conditioning falls away, your natural gifts and inclinations have space to be expressed. Let your creativity flow in whatever way it wants to. Go where you are guided, learn what you want to learn, enjoy yourself in all your activities.
Bring boundless acceptance to your moment-to-moment experience. Be a kind host to all the emotions and reactions that visit you. The more you resist, the more trouble you will have. Say, “Hello” and let it be.
Get to know the unconditioned, totally free you. When you relax away from all your conditioned habits, you will discover formless space that is clear, open, and inherently loving. Begin to become familiar with this space, as it is the essence of you. Listen, let it guide you. Live here.

In any moment you have a choice – the head or the heart, inauthenticity or truth, distraction or love. Play around with living more in your heart. Don’t be shy. Let love in, and life’s greatest treasures will be revealed.

What is your experience of living from the heart? Is it easy? Do you resist? I’d love to hear…

Bogged Down by Fear? The Two-Step, No-Fail Guide to Freedom

“Every moment of one’s existence one is growing into more or retreating into less.”
~Norman Mailer

Are you human? Then you are familiar with fear. But what you absolutely need to know is that you have a choice over how fear affects you.

You can listen to the voice of fear, letting opportunities pass you by. You can live an “if only” life that is small and safe. You can pretend you aren’t magnificent, creative, and capable.

Or you can thrive, with your light shining in all directions. The choice is yours.

The Courageous Choice

And it is a courageous choice that is asking to be made. Because fear can be powerful. It convinces you that you are unworthy and paralyzes you from moving forward. Yet it feels like an old, familiar friend – one who has overstayed her welcome and needs to go.

Are you ready to tell yourself the truth about fear? Are you prepared to take the sacred step to let the essence of your being be expressed in the world? (We’re all waiting for you.)

Then take on board this two-step guide. Open up to receive its guidance, and find within yourself the courage to roar.

Step 1: Get to Know All the Faces of Fear

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
~Joseph Campbell

Fear can be a wily character. You might be shaking in your boots. But just as likely, you will find yourself procrastinating, rationalizing, getting distracted, or losing yourself in judgmental and limiting thoughts.

I recently revealed to a friend a story that runs through my mind that keeps me from finishing projects I am passionate about. Rather than empathize with me, she said, “You’re comparing. It’s a sign that you need to return to your center.” She didn’t give the story itself a second thought – and she was right. I had momentarily lost my way – in fear.

Any mind activity that interferes with your brilliant self-expression is, at its source, fear. If it reeks of “No,” makes you doubt yourself, or persuades you to stop what you’re doing, it deserves investigation.

Approach it with tough love. Be kind, not harsh, but commit to seeing the truth about these thoughts. When it comes to fear, you can be sure that the mind will not support you. No fear-based thoughts are true.

Get to know intimately how fear arises in your experience. The subtle tightness in your chest, the mental fog that keeps you from carrying out your passions, the spinning mind that concludes, “I can’t.”

See procrastination, excuses, and getting lost in busyness as gifts handed to you on a silver platter. They are signals that fear has taken over. Recognize it. Acknowledge it. Then go on to Step 2.

Step 2: Choose Life

“Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.”
~Alan Alda

It is impossible to be aligned with life if fear is controlling your behavior. Fear will make you choose what is safe and known. It won’t stretch you or take you out of your comfort zone.

Once you recognize that fear has taken over, you are awake! Now you have a choice. Do you let fear drive you – or do you choose life? Do you hang out in what you already know, or do you venture out into the garden of unknowing?

You will never know what is on the other side of fear until you take the leap.

And leap you will – over and over. Fear may be a constant companion, offering you the opportunity to choose life time after time after time.

In choosing life, you say, ‘Yes!” to creativity, to intelligence, to the inner whisper of truth, to passion and wonder and delight. Who knows where it will take you? You can’t even begin to imagine. Nourish the glowing ember of You, and enjoy yourself endlessly.

Any comments, questions, or reports about fear? I’d love to hear…

The Three Vital Keys to Unlocking Yourself From Fear

“What worries you, masters you.”
~John Locke

If fear is still controlling you, then this post is for you. We all know, that a fear-driven life doesn’t work. It keeps us small and limited and deprives the world of our full and magnificent creative expression.

Living in fear feels bad – have you noticed? Decisions fueled by “I can’t” and “I shouldn’t” bring only confusion and dissatisfaction to our lives. We lose focus, let go of our dreams, and accept mediocre as good enough.

This is no way to live.

Yes, fear is scary. It looms large. We are afraid of losing people, money, health, status. We fear being irresponsible or risking everything. We choose playing it safe over wonder, potential, and possibility. Is this you?

Many of us are locked into a fear-driven life. We’ve convinced ourselves that we just can’t take the risk to put the fears aside and move forward. So here’s the solution: we need to take a very intelligent approach to fear.

It’s not enough to say you need to banish fears or overcome them. When it comes to fear, you need to break it down and understand it from the inside out. You need to become familiar with the way it shows up in your experience and develop a lifestyle that keeps you alert and present so it doesn’t sneak up on you.

Addressing fear takes intention and willingness. Do you want to unlock yourself from fear? Then seriously consider these three vital keys.

Key #1: Get to Know the Face of Fear

Fear doesn’t always hit you head-on. For years, I had many symptoms of fear before I realized that it was actually driving me. And once I did, everything changed.

The intelligent approach to fear begins with recognizing it. And here are the clues:

Obsessive worrying
Imagining negative outcomes about the future – “What if?”
Excessive mental activity that tries to analyze every angle of every situation
Doubt and indecision – “Should I or shouldn’t I?”
A low level of stress or anxiety, especially felt in your body
A sense of living in your head, detached from your body – maybe it feels like this:

If you experience any of these symptoms, be curious. Look deeply into your own experience, and I bet you will see that fear is at the root. This is great news!

Recognizing the face of fear is absolutely essential if you want it to lose its power over you. Every time you realize that you are worrying, ruminating, or doubting, relax and say, “Hello, fear,” then go to key #2.

Key #2: Feel the Physical Sensations of Fear

What is fear exactly? The answer to this question is fundamental to unlocking yourself from fear.

We experience what we call fear when we tell ourselves a scary story and feel certain bodily sensations, such as tension or contraction. Make this understanding alive for you – right now – by checking it out in your own experience. You will notice a fear response that shows up in your body along with thoughts that doubt, worry, analyze, ruminate, plan, project, etc.

Congratulations! You have just shone the light directly on fear. You see that whenever you feel fear, there are physical sensations and scary, anxiety-producing thoughts.

These thoughts are reinforced by your attention to them, and they keep you stuck in fear. They aren’t logical or necessarily even true.

So rather than thinking these thoughts over and over (a recipe for continued unhappiness), bring your attention into your body, directly to the physical sensations. Open up your awareness to receive the actual experience of whatever you feel in your body. Breathe and just let them be, even if they are intense.

In the moment of doing that, you have disempowered the fear. You have taken your attention away from the thoughts, and you are simply being with the physical sensations.

This is the moment of freedom. When you feel the bodily sensations without the pressure of the fearful thoughts, you have unlocked the door to freedom from fear.

Key #3: It’s All About the Moment

It’s really important to understand that the goal is not to get rid of fear. Why? Because it’s not possible. Remember, this is the intelligent approach to fear. We want to be very realistic and practical to support you on the road to freedom.

And freedom doesn’t mean feeling no fear. It means working intelligently with your experience so fear no longer controls you.

Once you develop a rhythm of feeling the bodily sensations every time you notice fearful thoughts, fear simply loses its oomph. It softens every time you move your attention away from thinking and into the sensations of the body.

Add up these moments, and here is what you will notice: more peace, greater clarity about people and situations, more choices that you never thought of before, a lightness and brightness in your being.

The only time you can do anything intelligently about fear is when it arises in the moment. When you notice it, stop, breathe, feel. Every time is a turn of the key to freedom.

Now What?

As I’m sure you know, fear confuses you. It clouds your thinking toward the negative and leaves you blinded to the full range of possibilities in any situation. And it keeps you on lock-down.

Keys 1, 2, and 3 invite you to let go of fear-ridden thoughts and breathe with the physical sensations right in the body.

When fear is no longer driving you, it might be present, but so is your innate wisdom. You acknowledge the fear, see the truth of it – simply thoughts and sensations, and step forward released and free.

Does fear trap you? What has helped you find freedom from it? I’d love to hear…

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