Observation That Will Make You Smile
By · CommentsA lecturer teaching medicine was tutoring a class on observation. He took out a jar of yellow-colored liquid.
“This”, he explained, “is urine. To be a doctor, you have to be observant to color, smell, sight, and taste.”
After saying this, he dipped his finger into the jar and put it in his mouth. His class watched in amazement, most, in disgust. He passed the jar around. Eager to be good students, as the jar made its rounds, one by one, each student dipped one finger into the jar and then put it into their mouth.
After the last student was done, the lecturer shook his head:
“If any of you had been observant, you would have noticed that I put my second finger into the jar and my third finger into my mouth.”
: )
Now that I’ve got you smiling, I want to point something out. The students got fixated on the shock of what their prof was doing and stopped observing. That’s what we all do. We notice the shocking, the awful, the bad stuff and lose our awareness of everything else.
As I’ve mentioned before, the brain has a propensity to notice what’s wrong–that’s a defense mechanism from when we lived in caves and had to be on the alert for sounds and sights that could mean danger. But these days, we need to balance that brain tendency by keeping our awareness on what’s good –otherwise we’ll lose perspective and get depressed. With 1 in 4 people suffering from depression in our culture, it’s crucial that we keep a balanced point of view. So, today, ask yourself a few times, “What’s good in my life?” Or, “What’s good right now?”
This question will lead your brain to find good things. And when it does, you’ll feel happier. And feeling happier creates health–in our bodies, in our work place and in our relationships.Besides, happier people live longer!
So
Email this postHappiness Quizz
By · CommentsTake this simple test by assigning a number for each statement, ’10′ being totally true and ’0′ being not true at all.
1) Basically, I like myself.
2) I get regular exercise.
3) I have major fun at least once a week.
4) I limit the things I don’t like to do and the people I don’t like to be with.
5) Mostly, I love my job.
6) I have loving, supportive family/friends.
7) I rarely dwell on past hurts and disappointments.
I take 100% responsibility for my thoughts, feelings and outcomes.
9) I use my ‘higher power’/God/angels etc to help me.
I’ll explain over the weeks why each of these in important and give some ways to increase your score. But if you’d like to kick start yourself into much greater happiness now, despite what may be going on in your life right now, give me a call and I’ll give you a complimentary ‘Idea Session’. In it, I will help you develop a clear action plan for moving into far greater happiness and inspire you to embark upon it.
Fun Video for You!
By · CommentsI have a delightful video that will make you smile, but let me tell you about something first. It’s something I’m excited about.
I’m just putting the finishing touches on a course called ‘Change Your Energy, Change Your Life’.
I’ve developed this course because so many people I work with want to feel good even when other things in their lives (stress, relationships, health, finances) aren’t so good. Even if the rest of their lives aren’t going badly, most of them want to be in charge of how they feel not victims of the ups and downs of the world around them.
The ‘Change Your Energy, Change Your Life’ will teach specific practices –meditations, acupressure tapping protocols, special breathing techniques, affirmations and a host of other tools so people can change negative and energy-sucking thoughts and emotions into positive, life-enhancing ones. This course will teach people how to feel good from the inside out.
More about the course next week.
Meanwhile, click HERE for the great video.
Meditation & Happiness
By · CommentsDr. Richard J. Davidson, PhD, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has been studying the brain structures behind not just anxiety, depression, and addiction, but happiness itself!
Using brain imaging technologies, Davidson has been able to “map” the brain of people who were meditating. In this fascinating study, he mapped the brains of employees at a biotech company, more than half of whom completed about three hours of meditation once a week led by Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
After four months, the meditating subjects noticed a boost in mood and a decrease in anxiety, while their immune systems became measurably stronger. Davidson vividly showed that meditation produced a significant increase in activity in the part of the brain responsible for positive emotions and traits like optimism and resilience.
In another study that involved meditating monks, he found that during meditation, this area of the brain lit up like the lights in Times Square, showing activity beyond anything he and his team had ever seen.
These and other findings of Davidson’s have bolstered mounting research suggesting that the adult brain is changeable. Even for those who have a predisposition towards depression or anxiety, meditation can help our brains incline towards a happier outlook.
This new research represents a huge paradigm shift in the study of the brain and the actual sense of possibility for people dealing with difficult emotions.
If you’d like to experience for yourself how powerful meditation can be, I’ve posted a few audio meditations on this site for you to try. One of the ones I like best is ‘All Is Well’. It’s short sweet. To try it, CLICK HERE.
Or, go try out some of the others I’ve posted on the site. CLICK HERE
Letting Things Be
By · Comments“The shift in consciousness happens the moment you say ‘yes’ to what is, because the entire structure of the egoic mind-made self lives on resistance and opposition and on making the now into an enemy.” Eckhart Tolle.
Contemplating this quote takes me back to time when my father was dying. He had throat cancer and I spent a lot of energy being in an emotional turmoil about it, resisting/resenting the fact of his illness as strongly as I could. I spent a lot of time reading about his illness, researching options etc. It was exhausting.
Then I remember one day, just lying down and letting myself accept that he was so ill. Instead of this being hugely depressing and emotional, I was shocked at the calm it brought. From then on, I still did lots of his behalf, but the energy was completely different–I moved from a place of lovingness for him, not from any fight or drive for a specific outcome. After all, who was I to say what my father’s life was about?
It’s a powerful thing to know you can let something be. It reaffirms that you are big enough. That you have what it takes to simply abide. Simply abiding is what all great people learn to do. They abide until the right moment comes, then they take action with great skill. They can do this because they haven’t wasted all their energy reacting here, there and every where.
Try it. Let me know how it goes.
The Paradox of Choice
By · CommentsI’m reading The Paradox of Choice, Why More is Less by Barry Schwartz. Fascinating book. Schwartz contends there are 2 types of people: “Maximizers” and “Satisficers”.
Let’s say one of each type is out shopping for a sweater. They both have an idea of what they want, but when they find what they are looking for, they act differently. The “Maximizer” thinks, “Oh, this is nice, but maybe I can find it cheaper at another store.” Or, “Maybe there will be one I like better if I keep shopping.” The “Maximizer” doesn’t let him or herself buy the sweater that’s there, but moves on to look further.
The “Satisficer”, on the other hand, sees the sweater and promptly buys it. Why? Because “Satisficers” know that “more” is often “less”. They refuse to be seduced by the idea of a better deal. And if it turns out that something was cheaper somewhere else, they are not upset because they know that chasing after it would cost them time and effort and there’s more to life than a good deal.
I have something else to add. I think that the “Satisficers” of the world might just be happier people who don’t get so much of their happiness from outside themselves–therefore, they would be less likely to give much energy to going for something ‘out there’.
Think about those people who have to have things “just so”. They do that because they believe that will make them feel better. People who already feel good don’t have to bother with all that. They can be happier with what is.
We live in a time of abundant choice. We have all experienced clicking through dozens and dozens of channels on the TV and finding nothing on. Maybe we are finally coming to the realization that more isn’t necessarily better. That would be good– good for the environment and good for our levels of happiness.
If you want some ideas about how to do that more effectively, contact me. email karen
If you want to check out the book, click on the image:
LAST CHANCE FOR A GOOD DEAL:
Last year I took an awesome Website Creation Workshop. Christina Hills ran it and used a tele-seminar format plus videos and handouts to show people how to create and run their own web site. I not only redid my main site, but I created this one. All by myself! And I’m no techie!
If you’d like to make your own site, learn easily how to add photos, audio, video etc, check out this URL. Do it fast, the class starts Tuesday march 30th.
A Powerful Question
By · CommentsWe ARE what we think about all day long.
If you want to know what you think about, look at your life. Your life is simply the manifestation of all your thoughts over all the years of your life.
If you want your life to be different, you have to THINK differently. This can be a challenge because, as recent studies have shown, the brain is neurologically programmed to notice what isn’t working. In terms of our evolution, this has been a good thing. When you’re in a jungle, you have to look for what’s wrong in order to survive.
Now that we don’t have to keep an eye out for tigers and charging lions, we can step forward into a new way of thinking. This way involves scanning your environment not for what’s wrong, but for what’s right.
As psychologist Martin Seligman, the godfather of the positive psychology moment, has shown, we can learn to be optimists. Optimists consistently talk about what they are rather than what they are not, or what they have instead of what they don’t have. Pessimists talk about why things are not the way they should be and what they don’t have.
If you want to start “inclining the mind” as the Buddhists say, towards what is positive, here is a great tool. Ask yourself this questions throughout your day: “How might this be a good thing?”
This question will get you searching for the positive. It will start training your mind to work the world differently than how it’s been programmed to do. It’s a great start. Let me know how it goes.
Kindness & Happiness
By · CommentsHere is a wonderful story about a man taking a leap into kindness when he sees a drowning dog. The story is told in the pic below.
As studies show, doing random acts of kindness is a sure way to cultivate happiness. Why? My sense of this is that the Universe is essentially a benevolent place and when we, too, are benevolent, we are in deep attunement with it. That’s got to feel good. And it does.
Brain Evolution
By · CommentsI have been talking about how the brain has a neurological proclivity for looking for what’s wrong. In the past, that’s been an important survival mechanism. When we were in the jungle, we had to be on the look out for threat all the time.
But now that we’re out of the jungle, it’s time to compensate for this proclivity and remind ourselves to think differently–in the same way we have to remind ourselves that the world is round even though it looks absolutely flat.
We also have a brain proclivity to bond into groups and to view those who are outside that group as a threat. This isn’t something to be embarrassed about, it’s just something the brain does–it makes us favour our ‘home’ group, whether that’s our gender, our race, our religious affiliation, our gang of friends etc.
When we evolve and heighten our awareness, we can compensate for this. So the question isn’t, “Am I prejudiced?” –of course, you’re prejudiced! The question is, “How am I prejudiced?”
That’s the question that’s going to put new neurological pathways down in the brain. And give us the freedom to be happy that we’re all looking for.
Snapshots of Happiness
By · CommentsI am exploring tools and techniques for experiencing happiness more. Here’s one I am working with. Try it and see how it works for you. It’s a bit similar to the ‘FreezeFrame’ technique the HeasrtMath people have developed, but this one has a different focus.
Here’s how it goes.
When you are experiencing something pleasant, take an “sensograph” or “energy photograph” of how the event feels in your body. For example, this morning when I was in the shower, I took a “sensograph” of the experience of it in that moment. I heard the pounding sound of the water as it hit my shower cap, I felt the warm water sluicing down my back and arms and how it moved along my hands and fingers, I noticed the feeling of the hot water dribbling down my right ankle and the easy, happy feeling in my belly as all this was happening.
Once I had all the details in focus, I kind of ‘snapped the picture of it by taking in a long slow breath and breathing it into my memory. I know it’s still there because now, when I close my eyes, I can relive it. Just like one can relive a photograph.
I’d love some comment if anyone gives this a try!
