Gratitude – the Antidote to More

As an American, I’m pretty good at being a consumer. In fact, I think most of us are. Americans are constantly encouraged to buy. It’s how we fuel our economy. But the underbelly of our consumer economy is the never-ending quest for more.

More manifests itself obviously with technology since technology changes so rapidly.

I suddenly find myself convinced that I need the iPhone 6 even when my current phone works fine. Or I immediately want the Apple watch when I don’t even like wearing watches. And although I just bought a new MacBook, I now must have the lighter than Air model.

But it isn’t just with technology, it’s with everything partly because we strive to keep up with others around us. I need a pair of LeBrons or Timberland boots. I have to get some new Beats by Dre headphones. This April, I simply must have a purse for spring.

Sure enough, buying that new hobo handbag does make me feel happy and satisfied but only briefly because soon my pastel blue purse is passé and I’m hankering for a black one for fall…

This craving for more is a never-ending cycle. It’s a treadmill we get on of wanting more or better - a bigger house, a newer car- and on and on.

What’s the Solution? Gratitude

Gratitude Brings Us Back to Now.

Instead of focusing on what we don’t have -the apple watch, the new car- we focus on all that we do have - clean water, loving relationships, a closet full of clothing, 50+ pairs of earrings, a pool, fresh food, healthy children…

Gratitude is a Reorientation.

Think about yourself for a minute. How do you like yourself better?

When You’re in a Place of Wanting or in a Place of Thankfulness?

Does it feel healthier when you think: “If only I had a new office chair, I’d get so much more done…. If I had 20 clients this week, I’d feel successful.”

Versus when your thoughts say: “My office is filled with beautiful sunshine and my desk is large and holds all my work easily. My schedule is flexible and enables me to work with people as well as spend time with my family.”

The Trick is to REMEMBER.

Remember to look around our lives and see all the beauty, abundance, love and happiness that exists right now.

Gratitude is Recognizing and Appreciating What We Have in the Moment.

This way of thinking fills us up with happiness and contentment.

The cycle of more pushes us into a place of lack where we’re constantly left wanting and that pulls us into the future toward more or better.

Instead, if we can use gratitude as a tool, it can easily and simply bring us back to now. Back to feeling satisfied and whole, happy and content.

The next time you find yourself yearning for a new dress or a power tool that you might not need, check in.

Are you feeling happy and grateful for the life you’re living right now?

Or are you trying to fill an emptiness or void through materialism?

Remind yourself how good your life is. Look around at all the abundance you have right now and watch that desire for more slip away. 

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Feeling Afraid? Try Acknowledging It

When I was in my early 20s, I was offered a job in sales and design for a manufacturer in Hong Kong. My office was in a factory located in an industrialized and severely polluted part of the territories. After arriving and settling in, I quickly realized that it wasn’t the job for me.

They hardly had anything for me to do and had hired me primarily as a favor to my mother. Every day I sat at my desk in a windowless room pretending to work. It was pretty awful.

About six months later I mustered up the courage to quit.

I made a list of what I felt like I needed in my life. Things like: sunshine, variety, more than 2 weeks vacation, connection. Between my list and my language limitations -not speaking Cantonese- I decided I should become a teacher. In fact, it met all of my requirements!

And of course that’s what happened.

I was offered a position at an international high school. I was thrilled, my first real job. I excitedly began prepping for my English literature and language classes until the night before school officially began. That’s when it dawned on me.

My job was public speaking all day, every day and I panicked.

As a child, I'd loved performing but that had all changed in high school. I had a crisis in confidence resulting from being socially ostracized. Now I was shy and scared, and most importantly, had lost my voice.

I quickly ran out of my apartment and down to the lobby then took off walking. My building was located on a cliff overlooking the harbor and was dark and quiet. As I walked, my mind whirred.

“What am I going to do? I can’t believe this. How could I have been so stupid? I can’t public speak all day everyday.” That freaked out voice went on and on until another voice interjected.

This new voice said to me, “It’s just fear. Can you do it anyway?”

Recently I’d read William Faulkner’s acceptance speech. The one he had given upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. He’d spoken about the pervasive fear in the United States caused by the Cold War and the impending doom of nuclear annihilation that hovered over us. He went on to say: “[the young writer] must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever…”

Huh. I began to reason with myself. Fear is just an emotion. Was I going to let it stop me from teaching? Could I go through with it anyway, even though I was scared?

And the answer was, “yes, I can” and that’s exactly what I did.

In that moment, I realized that I was bigger than my fear. I had allowed myself to recognize it, and then put it aside.

Shortly after this, I saw a film that reconfirmed what I had experienced. In the movie, one of the characters quotes a Spanish proverb.

Translated it was: “A life lived in fear is a life half lived.”

Sitting in that movie theatre, I resolved that I would not live a half-life. I wanted to live a full, rich, complete life; truly experience being alive. And if that meant learning how to deal with fear, then that’s what I was going to do.

That was more than two decades ago but I still feel the same way today. Of course, fear keeps knocking and every time, I have to pay attention.

And in that time here’s what I‘ve learned:

Just because I experience fear, it doesn’t mean it has to control me.

If I acknowledge it, then I can manage it. When I try to push fear away or drown it by eating too much, drinking or avoiding, it comes back even stronger. Instead, when I recognize the fear and face it, just like I did on that dark cliff in Hong Kong, then I can disable it. I relegate it to the back seat instead of allowing it to be the driver. This way fear becomes my fellow traveler and not my boss.

What have you found helpful in managing fear?

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Who Are You?

In the last 40+ years I’ve asked myself this question, Who Am I?" countless times. Sometimes when I hear it I see the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland, smoking his hookah and looking sagely down at Alice. He pointedly and stiltedly inquires, “whoooo are youuuuu?”

Sometimes I hear Roger Daltrey’s voice belting it out “tell me who, who, who are you...”

When you’re asked, "who are you?" what’s the answer?

Is it an automatic default with responses like: “I’m a woman (man), a wife (husband), a daughter (son), a mother (father), a student… “

It’s pretty common to identify with roles we play in our lives because, to a large extent, they define us or we allow them to define us.

Once I really committed to a spiritual path though, this question seemed to haunt me. I say this because it was like I had to go deeper with it, deeper than the external roles I play and that I thought defined me.

I am a body- a female, blonde, tallish… or am I?

Am I really a body, separate from everything? But I am more than just a body.

I’m a soul, a part of the one-ness of the Uni-verse.

I’ve been tricked into thinking I’m a body. But who I am, my soul, is eternal, never dies.

There’s a famous Indian saint named Sri Ramana Maharshi who is often quoted as asking his students that question, “Who Are you?"

I used to imagine him asking me that question and staring at him blankly, feeling completely empty and void of a single idea.

Apparently, though his goal in asking the question wasn’t necessarily to get an answer but to encourage self-reflection.

In other words, to go deeper.

Not to have it be a ‘mind’ exercise but to really contemplate our basic consciousness, our true nature or essential being. And as we do this, we see that we are not a role, not a body, that we are part of the whole, infinite one-ness or God, the Uni-verse or whatever word you like.

In fact, it isn’t actually a question at all but a statement, “I am…”

And therein lies its power.

If we know that we are part of God, that we co-create our world, then “I am” becomes how we define the vastness and greatness of who we are. The limits, definitions or roles are simply ways we make ourselves smaller, not believing that we are indeed capable of greatness.

As Marianne Williamson so eloquently stated in A Return to Love:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

So, the next time you hear the question, “Who are you?” what will you say?

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Happiness Is...

After spending the first 8 months of 2011 grieving and trying to get my life back together after losing both my sister and father in 3 months, I realized it was time for me to focus on me. Having been a pleaser and caretaker most of my life, this task felt daunting and I didn’t even know where to begin.

But as most things go, the Universe helped me out. A friend lent me a book about happiness by Dr. Robert Holden and immediately I knew I wanted to learn not only more about his ideas BUT also how to facilitate this work. Next thing, I was signing up to attend his happiness coaching certification in New York. I was finally ready to learn precisely how to be happy.

There are different kinds of happiness (who knew?)

Robert defined happiness as pleasure, satisfaction and joy.

What’s pleasure?

Pleasure is a great piece of chocolate, a superb glass of wine. It’s what we enjoy through our senses, our bodies. And it feels good!

However, pleasure relies on a stimulus. I need to drink my coffee in order to feel pleasure and then when my coffee's gone, so is that pleasurable experience. It’s also exclusive to me. For example, I like dark chocolate but my daughter likes milk chocolate. Pleasure exists in duality too meaning that it has an opposite… pain.

We’ve all experienced pleasure, right? And pain…

The second kind of happiness we experience is satisfaction.

Satisfaction is the type of happiness most researched. So for you what’s satisfaction? Is it a job well done? A task completed? That feeling after you’ve finished a work out?

Satisfaction again is a result of something else. It’s causal like pleasure. "I am happy because…I ran 2 miles, got an A on that paper, have great friends…”

The cool thing about satisfaction is that it feels good AND it increases our ability to access gratification helping us be receptive to more satisfaction. We also experience it emotionally and mentally.

Satisfaction has a few problems though. Again, it’s short lived and exists in duality with its opposite being dissatisfaction. It can also be influenced by expectation and comparison and is largely based on our emotions.

The third definition or kind of happiness is joy.

What does joy mean to you? I like to think of joy as happy for no reason. It shares some attributes with pleasure since we feel joy physically. We can also experience it mentally and emotionally like satisfaction. But it’s more than any of those things in fact joy is simply bigger that our bodies, our egos, our personalities.

It’s pretty hard to define joy but we sure can describe it!

It’s happiness that bubbles out of us effortlessly. It’s the smile you can’t take off. And joy has specific qualities to it.

The first one is constancy.

Joy never goes away. WE wander away from joy when our attention and awareness strays but joy is always there for us to access.

Joy is the source of creativity.

It's the fountain. For those of us who grew up with the idea of the tortured artist, this is a big reversal. Turns out that joy feeds our creativity way more, hmmmm.

Joy is unreasonable.

That’s the “I’m happy for no reason.” Simply because. I'm choosing to tune into joy because it feels so good.

Joy has no opposite nor is it subject to mood swings or the craziness of the world.

Joy has a twin, which is love.

There are people who describe experiencing true joy or love in the midst of terrible suffering. People like Victor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist imprisoned in concentration camps during WWII and a holocaust survivor. He writes in Man's Search for Meaning:

“For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”

Joy is enough.

We can experience a fall out from pleasure or satisfaction because they are temporary. But this never happens with joy. It's constant and completely fulfilling.

Turns out that true happiness is JOY.

The good news is, we can still appreciate and embrace pleasure and satisfaction, and joy. We can have it all!

But if we don’t work on connecting to joy, no matter how much pleasure or satisfaction we have, we’ll never feel happy. And if we fixate on pleasure or satisfaction, it can turn on us- making us into workaholics, addicts or create other excessive behaviors. Why? Because both pleasure and satisfaction are temporary.

If we tune into JOY it will enable us to have even more healthy pleasure and worldly satisfaction.

Here’s a quick video to re-enforce these concepts.

What do you think of these 3 definitions?

Leave a comment with your thoughts below.

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Don’t Let Time Pass You By

As most of you know, I’m teaching a happiness workshop this fall. In fact, it started last night and we will be meeting together, exploring what happiness means to us for the next 8 weeks. I am thrilled to be on this adventure!

For the past couple of months leading up to last night I spent a lot of time reading and researching to see what the “experts” can tell us about happiness. One of the books I came upon is called, The Happiness Project written by Gretchen Rubin. In it she describes how she spent a year doing a research project in her life, planning various activities and behavior shifts each month to increase her level of happiness.

One of the truisms she discovered during this year of exploration is “the days are long but the years are short.”

I really resonated with that.

Sometimes a day can feel interminable, never ending especially when I’m stuck doing things I don’t particularly love like housework. But when I look back to even this past year, now that it’s September, I think, “holy smokes, where has the year gone?”

After reading that line, I’ve decided to really make an even greater effort to enjoy my days, relish them, fill them (as much as I can) with all the things that make life worth living.

Things like:

• Appreciating the sunny day

• Noticing the flowers blooming next to my car

• Bending down and taking a few moments to pet my dog

• Relishing time spent with loved ones

• Carving out an hour to be creative – in whatever way that is- dancing, collage, beading, cooking

• Calling an old friend

Because  I don’t want my year to end only to feel like I haven’t fully lived it with passion, determination, fun and caring.

The days are long but the years are short.

So even if the day seems long, what can you do to bring some sunshine into it?

Can you take a 5 minute break and listen to an uplifting song? Can you smile at a stranger for no reason? How about waving at the mail carrier or picking up a chocolate or some flowers for your honey?

Let me know if you have a good idea to brighten up your day.

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Wait for the Answer?

I don’t know about you but when I have a question or am unclear about something, I always want it resolved immediately. Yup, you can call me impatient. I want to know, to be clear, sure, certain.

Part of why I’m like this is because I’m an action oriented person and can only act once I know what to do. When I don’t know it’s like being on an airplane circling the airport in a holding pattern. I don’t like that feeling on in-action, confusion, or lack of clarity. It is uncomfortable.

Lately, though, I’ve been toying with this idea of allowing for space.

What I mean by that is to ask a question and be okay with not immediately knowing the answer, being okay with allowing room for possibility and for answers to percolate up rather than be instantaneous.

It’s almost like being more patient with life, allowing it to unfold rather than be pushed along.

I suppose being comfortable with space means that I’m okay with uncertainty or not knowing. And when I think about it from that perspective, it’s about trusting. Trusting that an answer will be revealed. Maybe not on my timeline or schedule, maybe not even my predicted outcome but an answer that is divinely perfect.

What’s interesting is that as I allow myself to relax into that space, I find ironically, that I’m less anxious!

And I actually forget I’ve even asked a question! It’s like being in a space where life is okay no matter what. Where I don’t have to be so vigilant and work so hard. Where I can relax and enjoy myself more, knowing that it’s all fine.

As I think more about this idea of space, I realize that here –in the in between place- is where all the answers lie, where creativity lies, the place of pure potential. And thinking about that makes me feel excited to be in that space- the birthplace of creativity.

So instead of feeling worse, anxious or stressed, I actually feel more excited, more alive, more in harmony with life and divinely guided. Who would’ve thought!

What do you think? Are you willing to allow for more space in answering your questions?

Let me know your thoughts by leaving me a comment.

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Is the Answer Yes or No?

Is your answer YES to life or NO?

How many times in your day do you find that you say yes to life? Maybe you get invited to lunch with a friend or it's a beautiful day out, perfect for a walk on the beach. Is your response a resounding yes? I hope so. I know for me sometimes I say yes and sometimes I don't. And there may be a reason why I'm not saying yes. These are some of my personal selections. Do any of these sound familiar? "I don't have time. Today's my chore day. I have to work. Maybe another time." Or my absolute favorite, "I don't feel like it." (Usually this one is reserved for me and I come up with a more lofty excuse to say out loud.)

 Life is always offering us opportunities to expand and to grow. To reach out of our comfort zone or complacency and connect more deeply be it with one another, with nature and even with ourselves. Invariably when we do this, what happens? We feel more fulfilled and engaged. So why is it that we don't always do it?

Sometimes we simply can't because we do legitimately have prior commitments. I have appointments to keep, deadlines to meet, tasks to complete. We all do. And yet it's important to remain vigilant to our own choices - how we may or may not be limiting ourselves. It can be insidious. Work and "busy" can take over pretty fast. 

Lately I've been watching my pattern of saying yes to life or saying no. And here is what I am observing. In general, when I say yes and then do it (have a meeting, teach a class, complete my to do list, go birdwatching, work out, play...) I feel great! I truly do feel more engaged and present in my life. I feel alive and happy. When I say no because I don't think I have time or maybe feel too stressed or simply don't want to, here's how I usually feel - worse.

This got me thinking about my life in general and it seems to me that essentially, in each moment, we are being asked to open, open to life, open to love, open to the moment. Feel the sun on my face, hear the sounds of the lawnmowers in the distance, smile at the cashier at the bank. Or not. It is always my choice, to open to what is happening right now or to close off, hunker down, disconnect.

That is my practice for right now, to recognize that in EACH moment, I am being asked to open. And then to become the witness as much as the actor and simultaneously open to possibility as well as observe my choice.

Ultimately our lives are filled with the choices we make in each moment - to open or close. All of us know people on both sides of that spectrum. People who say yes and lots of people who say no. Most of us are somewhere in the middle. Yet we all know that when we do open, it feels natural. We are connecting to who we truly are. We just seem to need a moment to moment reminder.

I Am Here To Be Seen

In 2011, I signed up to attend a 5-day professional training called "Coaching Happiness" with Dr. Robert Holden. I arrived in New York City in November, a year after my father and younger sister had died. A year of grieving that had left me emotionally spent. It was time for some happiness in my life after so much sadness. I was excited about the workshop but nervous too. I had been reading Robert's book, Be Happy and knew right away that his message was for me. My husband had bugged me to sign up for the workshop. "It's gonna sell out." They were only taking 100 people. So instead of procrastinating like I usually do, I went onto Hay House and booked it.   

Robert Holden with me in November, 2011

The workshop was held in a hotel in Times Square, not exactly my normal hang out when in New York. But I was reminded of something my friend Jeff had said to me a year or two earlier. His office is in Times Square. When I asked him how he coped with all the annoying tourists he smiled. "I like it actually, it's invigorating. Sometimes I just come out and walk around, breathe it all in." 

Okay, I thought, I will try to channel my inner enthusiast instead of donning my grouchy New Yorker face. Almost immediately, I made friends. The seminar had a relaxed and festive atmosphere and the audience, 90% women, were clearly excited to be there. One of the activities we did as a group, one we did every day was a greeting. It's of African (Bantu) origin and the concept is that we bring each other into existence by seeing one another. Two people participate by holding hands, facing each other, and looking into one another's eyes. One person starts by saying, "I am here to be seen." The person listening then responds, "I see you."

So we began. I was initially nervous and tended to allow my partner to go first, taking the lead. It was easy for me to see my partner and hold a space of patience and loving kindness but it was harder for me to utter the words, "I am here to be seen." Sometimes they felt like they got caught in my throat and my eyes all almost got watery. Nevertheless, I participated, repeating the exercise 5-6 times every morning with different partners. 

By the fourth day, heading into the seminar, I was feeling tired and emotionally raw. Sitting on the bus watching the gray streets go by, my mind was already anticipating the upcoming seminar. "I don't want to do that exercise this morning," I heard my inner brat whining, "I don't want to be 'seen' today. I just want to be left alone."

Then my wise self, observing the mental commotion reflected, "isn't that interesting, what you said, you don't want to be seen." Well, that started a whole internal dialog and a realization of how I have spent a good part of my life hiding in the wings, afraid to go on stage and "be seen."

Gretchen Laporta, Valentina Savelyeva and Louisa Nedkov from November, 2011

At the workshop, I participated in the morning greeting (I am here to be seen) after which we were asked to make groups of 4 and share how we were feeling and what we were experiencing. I decided to out myself. So I told everyone in my group the story of my ride into the seminar. My self disclosure seemed to surprise some of the listeners (maybe because I had acted my part so well) but everyone was loving and supportive. It was a cathartic moment for me, to realize consciously that I have been hiding.  

I decided it was time to come out. Not just to that group at the workshop but in my life.

This week Brene Brown tweeted, "So excited to finally launch The Daring Way™ - it's all about showing up, being seen, and living brave! And that got me thinking again about being seen. I'd been reading her book, Daring Greatly, in which she says "Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen." 

In September I launched my own coaching and therapy business, Decide Differently. I watched how the fear arose as I transitioned from being an educator, which I had been for over two decades, to a new field, where I felt like a fledgling. The mind chatter of "who are you to tell people what to do" and "why would anyone listen to what you have to say?" haunted me but I did it anyway and am even outing myself more with this blog!

Because the truth is that I have a lot to say and to share, we all do. I agree with Brene. When we "out ourselves" when we allow ourselves to be seen, when we invite ourselves to show vulnerability, we are alive. We are pushing beyond the comfort, beyond the known, we are allowing people to see all of us, the parts we like and the parts we like not so much. And this, too, also comes back to the happiness course I did two years ago. As Robert says, "Happiness is when we dare show people our original face."

Even though sometimes I don’t want to be seen and I still want to hide, I am recognizing it more and more and working with myself lovingly, gently, and encouragingly, just exactly as I would a small child in one of my classrooms. "You can do this, there's nothing to be scared of. We are all here to support and love you." And what I realize is the power that being seen has. It gives us the gift of feeling alive and connected, experiencing the love and joy that are all around us and within us. 

So thank you Robert and thank you to all of the brave men and women who shared that 5-day coaching happiness workshop with me. I am a different person because of all of you and I know you see me.