Creating Space for Happiness

… is the magic elixir of life.

In our society, we understand the importance of working hard to make the money but we seldom understand the importance of creating the space in our lives to enjoy what that money can afford us. 

It is so often that we work so hard to make a living that we forget our lives. We put ourselves in such time impoverished positions that we can feel our lives being sucked away from us minute by minute. Busying yourself to make the money yields you little to no reward.  We think money is its own reward, but we are wrong. Happiness is its own reward and it cannot be found if we are too busy to open up to it.

Happiness is not something that you earn or that you are “lucky enough to come across.” Happiness doesn’t just happen to you, it is cultivated from within. But you will never be able to experience true happiness if you do not slow down and create small moments to enjoy your life. 

You can make all the money in the world, but if you have no time to enjoy it, it doesn’t serve you. Finding the balance between work and self-joy is the key. When you can allocate enough time in your life to enjoy the money you have earned, it is as if you are giving thanks to the universe and showing gratitude for the abundance in your life. Abundance always draws more abundance to you. But if you are exhausted and feeling time impoverished, you will continue to feel as if you are chasing your tail. And where there is no self-joy, there will never be true abundance. We need to create real space in our busy lives for happiness to enter.

If you truly want to be happy, find the space in your life to ENJOY your life, to truly enjoy the fruits of your labor. Otherwise your life will always just be about the labor. The money will always follow. Self-joy is what will attract true abundance – not working endless hours in an office. Once you carve out the space for happiness to enter, the people, the relationships, the joy will all return to your life. They cannot live in a world where there is no space for them. Everything is energy and where there is no space, there will never be happiness.

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Letting Go Of The Old

… is the ONLY way to move forward in your life.

Somehow we think that keeping the old will enable us to open the door to the new. It never does. When a person or a situation has outlived its purpose, it is important to close the door on the old, so that you can create SPACE for the new.

Holding onto what does not serve you does not all of a sudden change. If you decide to pack up what didn’t work for you in 2012 and sling it over your shoulder and haul it into 2013, you will get the same nonsense in 2013. If it didn’t work for you then, I promise you, it will not all of a sudden work now.

Why burden yourself with what you know does not make you happy? When you learn to cut ties to the past and open up to a bright new future, you are creating space for the new future to come in. But when you hold onto what does not work for you, it is as if you are telling the universe you are content and you do not need something new. Look at it this way, if your glass if full of dirty water that you cannot drink, in essence, you are telling the universe that you do not need a refill of fresh water. But in actuality, you are dying of thirst. Pour out the dirty water and allow yourself to be filled with what you truly want and desire in life.

You cannot create change if there is no space. Don’t spend you life being “full” with what is making you unhappy. Be strong and allow yourself the opportunity to throw out the old and make room for the new. The rest of your life awaits. What are you waiting for?

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Think Before You Act

… you can’t take it back.

Believe it or not all words and actions have consequences. Some more severe than others. Sometimes when we are out of balance in our lives, we make impulsive decisions that may affect our futures. These impulsive decisions are made simply with the intent to make us feel better in the moment and NOT made for our highest good.

Life is meant to be led one step at a time. Every emotion is meant to be felt and dealt with, not run from. If you are making an impulsive decision to feel better in the moment and run from your pain, it will catch up with you. You cannot run from yourself and life offers us no “quick fixes,” that is for sure.

Slow down, take life one step at a time. Ask yourself before you make ANY decision, “is this decision going to bring me to where I want to be in my life” OR “is it going to sabotage my job, my love, or my relations with friends and family?” Once we slow down and process the implications of our actions, we may find that we are in a better place to make a different decision.

It is in a calm and centered space that we find the ability to NOT react hastily and make a decision we may regret. Life is too short to impulsively throw it away on a bad decision. No one needs to look back and regret something they have done. Stop. Slow down. Be in the moment and think before you act. I promise you if you live your life from this centered space, you will always make an informed decision NOT an impulsive one. We want to own our lives, not regret them.

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The Emotional Roller Coaster

… we have all jumped on board and gone for the ride.

How enjoyable is it really? For those of us who are emotionally balanced, it is NOT. For those of us learning the very difficult life lesson of “finding balance” in life, it proves to be an on-going ride of extremes.

This is how it works…. those who seek to be balanced will be continually drawn into high drama situations with high drama people and lots of crisis and chaos along the way. In other words, they undergo a type of life plan that continually sends them into high-highs and low-lows over and over again. This wild swing is meant to make them so miserable that they learn to stop reaching for what they think is going to make them feel better (a drink, drug, food, unhealthy relationship, travel escape, etc..) and begin to start slowing down the rate of the swing to find themselves at their own center-point.

The important thing to remember in life is that no one intentionally chooses to torture themselves per se. They choose to undergo this difficult learning lesson so that they can grow and evolve into a healthier and happier being – one who fully understands that his/her happiness will not be found in an impulsive reach for extremes.

By experiencing ourselves out of balance time and time again, we can begin to start finding our own center point.

It doesn’t end here… once you have found your own center point and achieved supreme balance in yourself, it is critical that you NOT impulsively jump on someone else’s emotional roller coaster ride! In other words, once you have learned this lesson yourself and you consciously decide to join forces with another who has NOT yet learned this lesson, you will be intensifying your own experience – you will now be on THEIR emotional roller coaster of life.

If you have already learned this lesson, it is important to find someone who possesses the same amount of stability, security and emotional peace you have already found in yourself. If you want life to be easier, calmer and more centered, learn to slow down your swing and for sure, learn to stay off other people’s swing sets.

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Know-it-All’s Never Know it All

… they never do.

Just when you think you do not need to learn anything new, you realize you know nothing. We’ve all been there. Sometimes our cups are full with “stagnant water” –  our jobs, friends, relationships, hobbies – our lives sometimes get stuck in a rut and a static film grows over our surface. But how do you open up to something new when your ego thinks it already has all the answers?

Complacency and arrogance undermine our worth and render us “too big for our britches.” When you build up your resources of knowledge to a certain point and stop, you shut down to new ways of thinking and you stop growing. Not only do you stop growing, but you start aging (mentally and physically) and ignorance reins.

Ask yourself… why keep a cup of water that is dirty? If your life has become stagnant to the point that drinking from your own cup will make you ill, why not take a chance and open up to something new?

It is the work of the ego that is afraid of failure. Often times, we prefer to never try and never learn something new for fear that we will look foolish if we do it. So we stay contented drinking from a toxic source and we wonder why life never improves.

One thing is for sure. Know-it-all’s know everything except the way out of the prison they have created for themselves. Know-it-All’s NEVER know it all. For it is in the certainty of having all the answers that causes us to stop asking the key questions. Life ceases to be exciting and worth living when we lose our curiosity.

Make room in your cup for new experiences. Tip out some of the old murky water and bring in some fresh water. Don’t worry about where the water comes from, take a chance and trust that from wherever it comes, it will be better than what is in your cup.

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You Have To Lose to Win

…as crazy as that sounds, it is very true.

This is a common theme in my counseling practice. It comes up time and time again. We fail to realize that situations that are not working and not making us happy will never somehow magically transform themselves to be what we need them to be. Sometimes we are just too close to the relationship to see what is really going on. A situation that is in a dysfunctional place will remain dysfunctional unless we take ourselves out of the equation so that the situation can heal appropriately.

This pattern shows up in many areas of our lives but especially in relationships. If you are in a relationship that is no longer supporting your highest good and the highest good of all people involved, then it is important to recognize that it may be time to take a small break from it. This is very hard for people to realize. We stay out of fear and desperation and we use force and anger to get what we want, but by doing so, we inadvertently end up beating the relationship to the ground. Relationships are like people, they need a break from time to time in order to gain proper perspective.

I always say that you have to lose what isn’t working to find something that will. Temporarily lose a toxic relationship now and you will win either a healthier version of that relationship once it has healed or you will win a better relationship with someone new. Either way you have to lose to win.

Beating a relationship to the ground by continually playing out the same drama and nagging will never heal an unhealthy dynamic. It will only contribute to a further demise of the relationship. If you are having problems in a relationship, love yourself and your partner enough to take a little breather from the dysfunction … once there is a degree of space, then both parties can fairly evaluate the relationship as a whole and and their role in it. That objectivity will lead to healing. I assure you if you “lose” the relationship now, you will only get a better version of it when you (or both of you) have a chance to heal from it. If you do not win a better version of that relationship, then no doubt, you will win a better relationship with someone new. Either way, you must lose to win in the end.

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Stop Thinking You Have All The Answers

… trust me you don’t.

If life was as easy as that, no one would ever have to come to this huge earthly classroom of learning. If we had all the answers to every challenge, what would be the point of going through that challenge?

Sometimes we get stuck on a page – the content is boring, we can’t get through the chapter, we have read the same passage over and over again, logic would dictate that we need to read on if change is ever going to be found. When we learn to turn the page and push beyond the boredom of that page, we bring new insights to the table, we breathe a fresh outcome into our situation. 

Certainty narrows and uncertainty broadens. When you stop thinking that you have all the answers, you free up the energy to bring you new solutions you have never even dreamed of. Don’t keep yourself trapped in your same habitual patterns. When you learn to think outside the box, new situations, new people and certainly new outcomes become more readily available. When you think you know all the answers and have seen it all and done it all, you lock yourself down in a repetitive pattern that is very dense and heavy. When you learn to abandon your “trusted remedies” life has a way of opening up in amazing and very suprising ways. Let go and surrender is the name of the game – the game that will undoubtedly yield you the greatest results.

Controlling your every move, and going through life with blinders on is akin to sleepwalking your way through it. Why bother? The point of life is to leverage every rich experience and to grow from that experience. We do not grow by repeating the same calculated strategies. Live your life with as much color and zest as you can muster. Stop thinking you have all the answers, you might just learn something new. Remember certainty narrows, uncertainty broadens. It is when you think you have all the answers that is just the time to abandon ship and learn to swim!

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Simplify Your Life

… by creating SPACE.

We make things harder than they have to be. We tend to create lots of physical clutter in our spaces and that always translates to mental and emotional clutter. We are energetic beings and we are highly sensitive to our surroundings. Everything is energy. The energy of clutter weighs very heavy on the nervous system and stimulates a level of discomfort and confusion in our minds. When we create space in our physical surroundings (by clearing off our desks or cleaning out our closets or throwing away knick-knacks from display spaces), we create a sense of space to breathe and BE. This newfound physical space translates directly into a mental space of ease. The less you own, the lighter you feel.

The way it works is that physical clutter stimulates the mental response of “confusion and chaos is near at hand” and the emotional response is generally a level of unease which roughly translates to either increased states of anxiety or the opposite - lethargy and laziness. Either way, as energetic beings, our surroundings dictate our moods. If you want to be happy and easeful in your life, SIMPLY THINGS. Get rid of clutter and objects that have no importance to you. Creating space in our lives helps to create space in our minds and hearts. Learn to lessen your load so life can become happier and much more easeful.

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