Life Is A Dance, There Is No Path To Happiness
I am realizing that life has no path to the “successful, happy place”. As Alan Watts says at the end of his video, life is “a musical thing and you were supposed to sing and dance while it was being played.” Life is about long hikes and hot cups of coffee with friends whom you love and admire. It’s about climbing mountains and kayaking in the ocean and exploring gypsy caves and running on wet foggy beaches. It’s about sleeping when you need to sleep. It’s about bonfires. It’s about growth. It’s about sharing all of the love that you can possibly squeeze out of your heart. Happiness is enjoying the dance of life, not reaching “the successful, happy place.”
(For full article, by Julie Brown)
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Stop Complaining All The Time
If you think about it, complaining is both annoying and exhausting, especially for the person who has to listen to you. And complaints are usually of two kinds – things you can change and things you can’t. To begin with the latter, if you can’t change something, complaining is futile. It might make you feel better to gripe but it might also make the situation actually worse than it objectively is. We all need to vent about the weather or how bad traffic is once in a while but maybe if we did it less or better yet changed our outlook on those things, we’d feel less of a need to complain about them altogether. Then there’s complaining about the things we can change, and this one is simple: If we can change them, why complain?
Complaining becomes a way of almost lessening that gratitude that I have.
I am no Pollyanna and I while I like to look at life hopefully, I am not blind to the pains of life. Bad things happen, annoying things happen, and complaining seems only natural. And maybe it is. But even so, I think that complaints endanger our experiences and the perspective we use to approach different experiences. And if we can live our lives more purposefully, more aware of what we say and do and put out in the world, and with more gratitude and grace, we’ll find that this need we have to complain is really a privilege, and one that should seldom be exercised.
(For full article, by Kovie Blakolo)
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Happiness This Very Second by James Altucher
When was the last time you felt like this little boy?
I’ve spent the past 20 years worrying about money. Worrying about what other people thought of me. Worrying about relationships, love, loss. Awkward about people, places, things, agendas Agendas. Thinking about the people who were angry at me. Obsessing on the people I was angry at. Scared to fail. Afraid to adventure. Thinking I had to achieve goals to alchemize unhappiness into happiness. Thinking I had to be the smartest person in the meeting, the room, the building, the city, thinking that the only way to I could ever be HAPPY was to get away far away far far away from HERE just so I could get THERE in the land of the “goals”. In the land of the “motivations”. In the land of “success”.
What a waste.
Now I hear the birds chirping, its not yet 5am. If I can picture it for a second – being a young boy, smiling, I have my bread. Picture what is in the eyes of that boy. Picture those are your eyes. Feel that moment of flight through the air, society hasn’t yet given me my orders, my goals. I’m free to run, to enjoy, to relax. Yesterday is long gone. Tomorrow will never come. I’m happy today, with my bread, with my smile, with both feet flying in the air. Like a bird. Like nothing I’ve ever felt before. For the briefest of moments happiness is the absence of everything that has happened to me ever since.
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10 Things Only You Can Give Yourself
1. The feeling of being truly healthy. If you are eating terrible food and not moving enough, or exhausting yourself drinking until three AM four nights a week, only you really know it. And even if someone touches your body and says it is beautiful, only you know if you are really treating it well. Being told you look slim or your skin is glowing is not a replacement for actually treating your body with respect.
2. Confidence to ask for what you deserve in a relationship, whether platonic or romantic. Perhaps someone will just happen to treat you well, but if you are not ready to demand it, you can never expect to find it in your relationships. And if you don’t feel that you are fundamentally worthy of being treated with respect and compassion, no one is going to convince you that you are.
4. A night of sleep where you can completely let go and know that every last thing on your list has been taken care of to the best of your ability. When you put things off or do them half-assed, only you know it, and only you will lose sleep of it.
5. Genuine happiness for people around you who are having wonderful things happen to them. Ultimately, being able to be supportive and content for others has nothing to do with whether or not you have the exact same thing as they do.
8. Approval over what you’re doing with your life. Because there will always be people in your life whose full support we will never really get, and constantly chasing after their love like we’re on some kind of emotionally-draining treadmill will only make us hate ourselves. If you want to feel good and proud and worthy for something you are choosing to do, you have to remind yourself that you don’t need anyone else to validate your existence.
9. A healthy amount of narcissism. If taking selfies or wearing extravagant clothes or spending two hours on your hair makes you feel good and beautiful and happy, there is nothing fucking wrong with that. At the end of the day, as you are the only one in your skin, it is really only your own opinion of your beauty that matters. And letting the world convince you that feeling good about yourself is cocky or shallow is a game you can never win.
10. The time to let yourself heal from things. When someone passes away, or breaks your heart, or abandons you, everyone will have something to say. They’ll all want to make you feel better, and help the healing process, and make things make sense. But some things are just going to take a long time to get better, and no one’s words are really going to mean anything, no matter how good their intentions. And there is no such thing as taking to long to feel better or not doing it in the right way. If you are still in pain, it’s no one’s place to tell you to get over it.
(For full article, by Chelsea Fagan)
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Peace Is Imperfect Acceptance
I’ve said this a dozen times and I’ll say it again: peace for the world around us has to begin within us. Individual changes in consciousness are what will propel the world into peace, love and truth. Forcing other people to follow suit will not further your cause. You have to lead by example. Change your own level of consciousness and watch how others follow by their own volition.
What does changing your consciousness mean? It means opening yourself and accepting challenges as nothing more than mere turning points and lessons. Seeing negative criticism as someone’s failed attempt at possibly telling you something important: they just didn’t know how to say it kindly. It is listening to what’s negative, and being with it, not running from it. It’s reaching, and loving and knowing that there is more than where you are right now.
It’s understanding what matters, and knowing that those things are not what most people think. It’s not reaching a place where there is no pain, it’s just learning to love through it. It’s where we can have our differences but talk through them and find a solution that’s not violent or pain-staking. It’s acceptance of what isn’t meant for us. It’s learning to not resist the way life leads us, knowing and believing that there are greater plans intact. It’s you and me stepping down from lashing out just once, and letting that wave tide over us and recess.
(For full article, by Brianna Wiest)
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