Getting All Those Ducks in a Row

Are you close? Do you almost have everything in your life lined up the way you want it?  Or do you still have a ways to go?  And how stressful is it trying to get everything just right?

Guess what?  Never going to happen.  Control is an illusion.  Ultimately, no matter how good you are at manipulating the ingredients of life, unexpected things will happen.  Challenges and changes that you could not anticipate, and which you think you do not want, will show up.  Little things, big things, and everything in between.

Does this mean that happiness is doomed or fleeting? NO.  What it means is that you must choose happiness first, and choose it again no matter what shows up.  This choice is your power point in life. 

Everyone wants to be happy, but most people have a detailed recipe for the experience of happiness.  In other words, we will be happy when we can check off all the required ingredients on our list.  Even if by some miracle this happens for you at some point in time, it will not last more than a nano second.  In the blink of an eye someone will be rude to you, or something will disappoint you, or you will experience loss, or you won't get what you want, or a crisis will appear.  Poof, your happiness is gone.

The path to lasting happiness, happiness as a way of life, is to toss out the recipe.  Choose to be happy, and choose it again no matter what shows up.  No requirements, no conditions.  Let nothing change your decision to be happy.  This is not a matter of putting on blinders.  Rather, it is an acknowledgment that choosing happiness is the one thing in life that is always under your control.  In the midst of life's greatest challenges, in times of heart breaking grief, happiness is still yours for the choosing.

The Biggest Decision

"I'd say the biggest decision of your life was not your career, your marital status, or your home . . . it was choosing to love as often as you have." Mike Dooley

Every true spiritual leader who has ever walked on planet earth was clear on this topic.  Love is the one true reality, and the most important decision we ever make.  It is the ultimate game changer.  If you desire any thing in your life to be different, figure out how to pour love into it.

Life is a continuous series of choices between love and fear.  Every choice for fear will bring us pain.  Every choice for love will ultimately bring us freedom.  The number of times you get to choose daily is virtually infinite.  You become a master of life when, in every moment, you are able to create the space to choose love.  No matter what the circumstances look like, there is always a way to choose love.

Wishing you a day of unbounded love and joy.

The Most Important Decision

"The most important decision we ever make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or a hostile universe."  Albert Einstein

Each of us is operating under one of these two beliefs - whether or not we have ever consciously contemplated the question.  Here is just a short list of how life shows up when you are operating from the belief that the universe is beneficent:

You see the good in others even when they are troubled or acting unkindly.

You laugh at life's little irritations.

When something goes not as you had planned or hoped, you look for the blessing in what showed up instead.

You seldom take yourself seriously.

You experience each day as an opportunity.

You expect success even when it has not yet arrived.

You give easily, knowing that the universe always gives back.

You greet strangers as though they are your friend already.

If you were to poll a group of people who believe the universe is kind, and another group that holds that the universe is hostile, you would find that each group has lots of proof for their position.  What you search for, you will find.  And what you expect will arrive.  What you believe you will perceive, and  that is how your reality is born.

And the universe is so generous that it always leaves the choice up to you.  And it always responds when you choose differently.

"The reason things always work out for the best is because this is actually the highest of all spiritual laws.  Any apparent exceptions are simply evidence that work is still in progress, whether or not it can be seen."  Mike Dooley

The Best Day of the Year

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year because it is so simple.  All you have to do is share the day with people you love, eat good food, and be thankful.  It is a day for giving thanks, a day for gratitude.

Gratitude is the most essential tool in creating a joyful life.  And it is one of the few things of which you can never have too much.  There are three powerful tools for creating more gratitude in your life: willingness, focus and perspective.

Willingness is the key to all change.  Most people want at least something in their life to be different.  But wanting and willingness are two different things.  Willingness is the oomph that moves you from desire to action.  It requires that you do something different or differently than you have been doing.  It often requires that you tolerate discomfort (mental, spiritual, or physical).  It always requires allocation of time and energy.

Focus is where you shine the light.  Imagine all is darkness.  Focus is the place you aim your flashlight.  In every person's life there is an infinite number of possibilities on which to shine the light.  We are always choosing our focus.  The quality of our lives is often determined by the direction of our focus.

Perspective is about interpreting the subject of our focus.  Human beings are incessant interpreters.  We assign meaning to everything.  We tend to believe that the things (people, places, events, circumstances, etc) have their own inherent meanings, but this is an illusion.  WE assign meaning.  And at any time, we are free to change that meaning.  THAT is perspective.

Let me illustrate with a short story from my childhood.  I was ten, my brothers were 9 and 12, and my stepsister was 4.  We were playing a football game along with my Stepmother.  Boys against the girls.  We girls had the ball and we drew up a play to give 4 year old Cathy the football and Renee (my stepmother) and I would block the boys to give Cathy a straight shot to the end zone.  It worked perfectly except that Cathy got turned around somehow and ran to the wrong endzone, resulting in a touchdown for the boys.  I lost it.  I was screaming, "Not fair, not fair, do over, do over." I was over the edge upset.  Meanwhile everyone else was rolling on the ground laughing.  My focus was on the scoreboard in my head that had just rung up 6 points for the boys; and my perspective was that this was a calamity!  The rest of my family was focused on the fun of the game and their perspective was that it had just gotten hysterically funny.  They were all having a much better time than I was.  The facts were the same for all.  The focus and perspectives determined the level of enjoyment.

In these days leading up to Thanksgiving Day, I invite you to investigate what YOU focus on in your life.  In any given day you can focus on what drives you nuts or you can focus on the things for which you are grateful.  Your experience of your day will be determined by your focus and perspective.  Are you willing to shift your focus in order to experience more joy in your life???  And here's something else to consider: whatever you focus on you create more of (yes I know that is a dangling preposition - feel free to laugh about it!)  Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

Come on Let's Get Happy

 

No matter what you want, what you really want is happiness!  I could list for you hundreds of different goals, intentions, desires, and things for which clients have hired me to Coach them in creating or manifesting.  In every single instance the real desire was and is happiness.  Every item on that list is nothing more than a stand in for the real thing.  Happiness.  And THAT is a good news/bad news fact!

The BAD news is this: There is no thing, person, goal, intention, achievement or desire that can bring you real or lasting happiness.

The (outrageously) GOOD news is this:  Happiness is already yours.

Happiness is your birthright.  You came into the world with it.  Unfortunately, from nearly the first moment of your arrival here on the planet, you have been unconsciously learning how to cover up and bury the happiness you brought with you.  Human beings pass on to each ensuing generation the misconceptions and misunderstandings that perpetually ensure that few individuals ever find their way back to an ongoing experience of the happiness that lives inside each of us.

We are so removed from the truth of our essential happiness that most people never consider that waking up each day in joyful expectation of every moment is actually the way we are meant to live.  Instead, we settle for momentary pleasures, and brief flashes of joy or contentment.  And we pursue people, places, things, events, and achievements in an ongoing attempt at more lasting happiness.

Attaining happiness is not about getting or achieving or having anything.  It is about letting go of the beliefs and behaviors that prevent your experience of the happiness that lives inside you and always has.  Almost every human on the planet has at some moment or another experienced an unexpected or brief interlude of joy that had no direct cause.  That delicious moment was your essential happiness leaking through to the surface.

Yes, you absolutely want to pursue your dreams and aspirations and give full reign to living out the life you imagine!  We are here to expand and manifest. Life is a vast playground.  There is no limit to the number and variety of experiences a person can have in the course of a lifetime.  In fact, part of being human is the capacity to continuously enlarge the possibilities for fun, expression and experience.  That is what we are here to do.  Enjoying the playground is not the issue.  The issue is in believing that happiness is found out there in the playground, instead of understanding that happiness is what we need to bring to the playground in order to fully enjoy it.

Human beings want to be happy.  More than anything else, we want to be happy.  And as long as we look for that happiness out there in the playground, it will continue to elude us.  When we focus FIRST on uncovering the essential core of happiness from which our dreams spring, manifesting our wildest desires and expectations becomes as easy as breathing.

Happiness is the gift you give both yourself and the world.  Happiness is highly contagious (proven by scientists), and your happiness changes the world around you and every person you encounter.  ONCE YOU LIVE FROM THE STATE OF HAPPINESS, ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE.

Living in the Present

The best remedy for a painful, troubling, or disappointing past is living in the present.  Today's experience of life will be determined by the lens with which you view the world, your life, and your circumstances.  Every single moment each of us is writing the story of her/his life.  What story will you create today?

Today you get to decide if you will experience the world thru the lens of your past, or thru the lens of the story you wish to create for yourself.  Who is the person you want to be?  What is the life you want to live?  Today you can begin a new story simply by being that person you envision and making choices congruent with the life you want.

The past no longer exists.  There is only now.  And now creates the nature of tomorrow.  IF you allow the past to be the past, it does not matter what mistakes you believe you made, what hurt you experienced, what you failed to do.  All you need to salvage from the past is a clear vision of what worked, what did not, and who, where, and what you want to be now.

'Living in the present' is more than being in the present.  You are in the present because that is all that exists.  Living in the present means bringing all you are and all you want to be to this moment, and leaving all the stories of the past in the past.  It means being, in this moment, the truth of who you are at your deepest level today.  

Today, begin your new story.  Forget all that has been.  Express all that your soul envisions.  Use each and every moment to write the life you truly want into creation. You and only you are the author of your life.

What You See Is What YOU Get

 

“Whenever conferring with another – either face to face or across the miles – whether a human being, departed spirit, or sentient tree, always speak to the highest within them.  It makes such a difference.” 

Mike Dooley

When you read this quote, don’t you intuitively know the truth of it?!  Yes, because whether you have consciously thought about this or not, you have experienced it.  We have all experienced the power of certain people to call out the best in us.  And this happens because those people see us in our highest light, speak to the best in us, and hold a perception of us that reflects all the goodness that we are.  And in the presence of someone who persists in seeing, honoring and speaking to the highest in us, we cannot but respond with our best.

This is the greatest gift you can give another person.  And in giving it you receive the greatest gift in return.  YOU get back from that person what you have insisted on seeing in them.

Of course this also holds true when you insist on seeing less than the highest in another person.  Whatever you consistently see and speak to is what you will receive.

When someone in your life is showing up for you in less than their highest version of themselves, you don’t have to wait for them to change.  YOU are the only person who ever needs to change.  Consciously search for the brightest expression of your friend (spouse, co-worker, child, family member, neighbor) and see and speak only to that person.  It makes all the difference.

Few people change due to our ‘judgments’ about them.  Nearly all will respond to our unquestioning belief in their goodness.

Happiness - The Choice That Never Gets Old

Did you choose happiness today? Sages, poets and studies agree: happiness is what everyone wants.  Yet so few of us live happily as an ongoing experience.  And this is a direct result of the fact that almost none of us were taught that happiness is a choice.

Human beings are choice makers.  We choose moment after moment, again and again throughout every day of our lives. We are choosing even when we are not aware of choosing.  Sometimes we choose consciously, more often we choose on auto-pilot. 

We choose our beliefs, our friends, our goals, our activities, and our actions. We also choose our clothes, our cars, our food, our toys and our pastimes.  And the prevailing hope/assumption is that the sum of our choices will create happiness.  When we fail to achieve happiness, we believe that we must choose new/different people, activities, work, recreation, cars, toys, etc., until we hit on the right combination that will create happiness.  This is good for the economy, but it is never going to produce happiness.

We get fooled into thinking these choices can produce happiness, because some of our choices do result in pleasure, and we are so unfamiliar with true happiness that we mistake pleasure (which is always conditional and transitory) as happiness.

Pleasure and happiness are not the same, but they are connected – just not in the way we have been conditioned to believe.  Most of us live our lives as if the more pleasure we can experience, the happier we will be.  This belief is backwards.  The way it actually works is this: the happier you are, the more pleasure you will experience in life, no matter what you are doing or what is going on around you.

Happiness is not conditional.  It is the natural state of all human beings.  Most of us don’t experience it as our natural state because nearly everything we have been taught about how to live our lives creates barriers to our moment to moment experience of happiness.

This blog is dedicated to helping you understand what is creating those barriers, and assisting you in making new life choices that will dissolve the barriers and allow you to experience happy day in and day out.  And, believe me, happiness never gets old.