A Blog for Your Month

What a Difference a Word Makes ~ A Reaching Happiness Blog

Lately I’ve been changing the thought “I have to” into the thought “I get to.” You’d be surprised what a difference that makes. I have to do the laundry becomes I get to do the laundry. I get to smell the clothes and touch my face to their warmth when they come out of the dryer. I get to have clean clothes to wear. I get to do something productive that really doesn’t take that much time. I get to use a washer and dryer conveniently located inside my home instead of cleaning my clothes in any manner of ways that other people do. Washing them in a stream for instance.

What can you come up with when you change “I have to” to “I get to?” One of my definite “get to’s” used to be driving my son to school in the mornings. We had a routine. Pop his oatmeal in the microwave, toast his bagel, stir his instant breakfast, and most importantly, brew my coffee. Juggle all that with his books and whatnot out to the car and strap ourselves in for breakfast (him), coffee (me) and radio (KFog). What a great station. Not only did they play good tunes, but they had great conversations, which sometimes led us into great conversations. And the mountains! As we headed in the direction of the hills surrounding San Jose, the sun would be just cresting off the mountains. I loved that sight. The whole experience was lovely, which was not to say that I never wished I was sleeping in or that he went to a school closer to us. But most of the time, I definitely felt like “I get to. I get to drive my son to school and it’s alright.”

What about now? I get to pick up the dog’s poop? That’s a tough one. I was complaining inside my head about it today in fact. Let’s consider. He is still alive, two years after we were told he wouldn’t be. That’s a definite get to. He does tend to go in one area, which is really quite considerate of him. How long does it take me to pick it all up? Five minutes? That’s not too bad. Not as good as the sun on the mountains, but maybe I could take in the garden for a moment while I’m out there.

What else? I get to write these to you, and many of you tell me you like what I say. I get to help. That’s such a plus in my life. I get to make a difference. I am so grateful for that.
And I get to laugh. Almost every day I laugh with someone about something. So work is great. I get to work.

And I get to break up my work day with a walk. I love my walk! There was a time when that was a definite “have to,” mainly because of the dog. Now it feeds my soul. Even after the dog was too old to do it, I’ve kept going. It keeps me in shape, and it’s become a form of meditation. When I occasionally have to miss it I can’t wait to get back to it.

I urge you to try this simple change of words. It’s amazing how just spending a few minutes playing with this can change your outlook and your mood. And that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Enjoying this life as we are living it. Not waiting for it to get better, but creating it better, right here and now. I get to, I get to, I get to. And just see how much better it gets.

with love and light ~ Janet   www.reachinghappiness.com

More Than Just a Body ~ A Way More Woo Woo Blog*

I keep telling myself that I am not a body. But I’m having a hard time believing it. According to A Course in Miracles most of our problems come from identifying too closely with our physical selves and not identifying enough with our spirit selves. I like to think of our spirits as ambassadors from another plane. (Plane and planet are pretty close as words...interesting.) Anyway, I think of our spirits as here to spread love. I picture us, in this other dimension where we’re not bodies, saying “me, me! I’ll go! I just know I can remember that I’m made of love this time!” Then we get here and we get schooled in the reality of being a body. By the time we’re two we can tell everyone what our name is, who our mommy is, how big we are, and where to find our nose and our toes. We are taught the curriculum of the physical world.

I once went to a psychology lecture where the instructor said “without an ego you can’t get on the bus.” Our physical, bodily selves are necessary for moving around in this world, so I don’t want to discount them. But somewhere along the line in life we lose the knowledge that we are more than physical. We lose the knowledge that We are the thing that animates the physical, the Life within. I think our physical lives would flow better if we identified more with the non-physical.

You could call it Presence. I’m in a Covenant Group studying Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth. This will be the third time I’ve read it. I keep rereading it because I keep forgetting about Presence, the same way I keep forgetting that I am not a body. If I really focus on being still for a moment and feel the breath coming in and out of my nose, I can fleetingly sense the Presence within and beyond my body.

This is good news when it’s not going so well with the body. My husband was up quite a bit last night, in pain, and my sleep was affected by my awareness that he was in pain. We have discovered that our sleep is often marked by tension. I hold mine especially in my jaw. I know I’m not alone in this. As we age, the stresses of life seem to accumulate and our bodies hold it all. When I wake up in the morning and feel the effects of tense muscles it helps to know that I am more than just a body. When my husband is in pain, it helps to know that he is not just a body. It helps me, anyway. I'm not sure he would agree. But if I can remember that I am not a body and I can click into being that ambassador of love, I believe it helps him, too.

(*this blog is especially for the clients and friends who like to explore the bounds of reality with me)

For Better or For Worse ~ A Living Happily Ever After Blog

I’ve begun writing a blog each month and I’m just getting this one in under the wire here at the end of March. This month features a “Living Happily Ever After” blog, highlighting my speciality of working with professional, spiritually minded women who want to find the love of their lives and love him for a lifetime.

So let me start this “happily” ever after blog by saying that last night I had a fight with my husband. Well, not a fight really, more like a disagreement. One of our classics, about furniture and home decorating. I wonder how many couples argue about that. I also wonder what I’m going to say about it that will make me sound like an expert, but hopefully that will come as I write.

After almost 25 years of marriage, we don’t disagree much anymore. I tell people that we have most of the kinks worked out. But every once in a while it happens. One minute we’re having a nice dinner conversation and the next moment we’re at odds. I found myself wondering “how did this happen? How did we get here? And how do we get back out?” Since I meditate and read spiritual material daily, I’ve gotten pretty good at being aware of myself in the moment. At that moment I was thinking, “is this my ego? Have I really been as unfair as he’s saying I am? Should I just give in? How will I feel if I give in?”

One of my husband’s biggest complaints about me is that if he criticizes me, I can find a gazillion things to criticize about him, lickety split. As I was staying in the moment, I was aware of my urge to do that. Internally, I watched my ego’s refrain of  “may day, may day. Red alert. Must deflect all blame back on to him.” I’m so glad I meditate, because I resisted that urge. I’ve come a long way.

I have also learned over the years that just giving in isn’t the answer. As I tell client couples, each person has a legitimate point of view, and it is important to discover what they both are. Often my husband and I reverse positions after we have really heard one another. Of course that means that we’re on opposite sides again, but by then it’s easy to come to the middle. We have learned that we don’t want to feel right, or vindicated, as much as we want to feel better. And we can’t feel better when the other person isn’t feeling better, too. As my husband said afterward, his “chipperosity” had taken a hit. And I was feeling low, too. We really don’t feel happy unless we’re both happy. That’s one of the secrets of our success.

We haven’t worked out the decorating dilemma yet, but we’re back together, looking at the problem from the same side instead of opposite sides. Life looks so much better when you’re on the same side. Marriage doesn’t mean you won’t argue; it just means that you’re in it together, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. But I’ll tell you, the “worse” doesn’t seem so bad when you know how to come back together.

Valentine's Day ~ A Reaching Happiness Blog

My three most memorable Valentine's Days were not about romantic love. The first was in my childhood. On Valentine's night my mom put a little party favor at each of our places at the table. I don't remember what the special treat was, but I remember that it took an ordinary, middle of the week on a school night dinner and turned it into a party! I must have needed a boost. Either that or we didn't get many out of the ordinary treats back in the day, because it made quite an impression on me ~ so much so that I made sure to have a party favor at dinner every Valentine's night of my son's childhood.

My second most memorable Valentine's Day was in 8th grade. We went straight from elementary school to high school and in 8th grade we were classified as "subfreshmen"... definitely the low kids on the totem pole in a huge school with way bigger kids! That year the school spirit club decided to have a Valentine's "Mr. Irresistible" contest. The girls bought construction paper hearts for 25 cents and pinned them to our blouses. The hearts read "I resist." Then all the boys, in every grade, would knock themselves out to get us to talk to them. If we said anything at all, they "won" our heart and they pinned it on themselves, turning it to the side that said "I'm irresistible." I mean to tell you, as an 8th grade girl it was really something to have all the boys, even Seniors, doing anything they could to get you to talk to them. They even picked us up!

My last special memory was one year when I was single and I decided I didn't want to feel left out on Valentine's Day. I made cards for all my friends and family, everyone I loved, and delivered them. That Valentine's Day was so amazing. I learned that my circumstances didn't dictate my experience of the day and neither did the conventions of my culture. 

I am not meaning to imply that Valentine's Days with my husband are not lovely. They are. But I think it is worth noting that each of my significant memories is about a different kind of love ~ a mother's love, the love of kids having a good time together, the love of community. I would like to suggest that if we broaden our definition of Valentine's Love, the day would be one of inclusion rather than exclusion. Instead of emphasizing flowers, dinner, chocolate and sex we could use the day as an opportunity to add love to our human family. And every one of us could celebrate in style. Because we are all loving and we are all worth loving, whether we are in a relationship or not.

Here's to you. I hope your Valentine's Day is memorable, and I hope you make it yours.  ~ Janet

www.reachinghappiness.com

 

 

 

Quiet and Happy

I live in a quiet house. My husband has a vocal cord disorder that makes it difficult for him to speak for any length of time. For years I've been thinking of this as temporary, but recently I've begun to think of it as a disability, something that you live with and adjust your lifestyle around. We've definitely made adjustments over the years. We write letters to one another. He brings a notepad to the dinner table, and he's gotten very good at miming. Even though I speak just fine, it's weird to have one sided conversations, so I find myself keeping quiet, too. I'm basically an introvert, which turns out to be a good thing.

Other people I know have had to make concessions for maladies that have come with age as well. My sister is living with impaired vision. My brother-in-law has MS. Another sister-in-law lives with almost constant pain. And they simply carry on with their lives. I am inspired by people's ability to live with disability. When you find ways to carry on, you take back your power. You're only as impaired as you think you are. 

My husband used to resist accepting social invitations. Now he just comes along and brings his notepad. It's fun to see how quickly people respond to his thumbs up/ thumbs down manner of interacting. One family decided that they were going to write on notepads, too. Even waitresses get into the spirit of reading his order from a pad. And he's gotten very expressive with his gestures. His natural sense of humor comes out in his mannerisms and his written notes, which I'm very grateful for because I love his sense of humor.

I guess the one thing we can't do is have long philosophical conversations. But how many people do have long philosophical conversations after 24 years of marriage? I tell myself that when he retires he may be able to talk to me more because he won't be using all his voice power at the office. That's something about old age that I can look forward to. There is a sweetness about how we are with one another, what we appreciate because of what we don't have. Life is funny that way. Age makes you lose things, by definition. And as you lose the advantages of youth, you don't take life for granted in the way you used to when you were young. I'm finding that what made me happy then is different from what makes me happy now. But I'm still happy. And I think my husband is, too.

The plum tree outside my window is exploding with fruit. It is so heavy laden that my husband had to prop up a branch so it wouldn't break before the plums were ripe. As I was sitting at the kitchen table, eating one of the super sweet plums and looking out the window at how many more were there to eat, I thought "this is truly a picture of abundance."

I think about abundance often. In my work as a Marriage, Family Therapist and Life Coach I consistently think about attracting abundance to my private practice...an abundance of clients, abundant ideas and good will to share and of course abundant financial success for us all. Increasingly I find myself helping clients and colleagues attract their financial abundance. It is becoming sort of a specialty of mine, probably because I have such an interest in it.

Yesterday in my Adult Ed class at church, we were reminding ourselves of God's promise of abundant resources as an expression of God's abundant love. Some of you may prefer to substitute the word "Source" or "Force" (as in "may the force be with you") for the the word God, but we all get the same idea. Why is it so easy to believe that a plum tree can bring us fruit in abundance and so hard to believe that the Universe can bring us abundant wealth?

I suspect that the difference lies not in the actual amount of plums or dollars available but in our belief about them. When I looked out the window at the plum tree today, I knew that the same force is at work within both, dollars and plums, and we can attract them both equally. Money is just a much more charged concept than plums. My sense of my self, my identity as an ego and a person living in this world, tends to get wrapped up in how much money I have. My ego is not too invested in my plums.

Somehow when our ego, our concept of self, gets over involved or invested we seem to short circuit that force of abundance flowing through. The trick is to see and appreciate the abundance flowing through and know it is larger than our small, personal selves. It is much more helpful to think of a larger "S" Self, connected with God, Force or Source. I'm sure that's what the plum tree does, without even thinking. It is just connected Self. And that's what we can be and are, truly.

You could be eating cat food...

I should be cleaning my house right now (my brother-in-law will be arriving in the morning), but the truth is that I feel like I'm getting a cold, and all I want to do is sit around and do low key Christmasy things. I just finished writing cards and then I turned my attention to this Christmas blog.  As I write, my son is out driving around on his own in my new Prius. He's had his license for a week, and I notice that I've gotten much better at taking his driving in stride over seven days' time. My dog is snoring at my side, which is comforting because on Tuesday the vet said he had a heart condition, and I thought I was going to lose him. It turned out to be his thyroid. I think that's when my immunity dropped, the minute the vet said "it's his heart."

Does that happen to you? When you hear bad news, something that shocks your system, do your reserves lower?  I used to listen to Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit, and I still like to quote her saying, "You can eat cat food if your spirit is in the right place." I've always loved that line. She was talking to her audience of New Age, tofu eating, vegetarians and basically telling them to get their priorities straight...that if they're holding on to grievances or feeling unrest of some sort, tofu isn't really going to help in the long run.

So what am I thinking about Christmas this year? Has my spirit been in the right place? It's been a bustling month as always, and I haven't felt my holiday "click" yet. I've been indulging in worry, about my niece and her social security, my son and his college applications, my son and his driving, my dog and his health...for someone who ascribes to positive psychology and appreciative thinking I sure have been worrying a lot lately. How can the message of Jesus' birth, or light in the darkness help me? Do I really have the faith that all will be well?

I guess that depends on how I define "well." When I get stuck on "well" looking a certain way (for example, is your house decorated as well as you would like?) I can feel my spirit taking a nose dive. When I step back and broaden my perspective and remember that the love is what matters, my spirit comes back up. Personally I like to consider the messages of Christianity more metaphorically than literally, and it seems that the story of Jesus in the stable (or the Hanukkah story of the Jews crossing the desert) definitely didn't start out looking like all would be well. But then it was. In fact, it worked out better than we could have imagined.

I guess that's the message that I want to remember this Christmas. That I can have a little faith that things will work out better than I can imagine. I can't force things to work out, as hard as I might try, but I can relax and allow things to work out. And they will, when all is said and done. They will.

Then the trick will be to not get involved in worrying about something else. But that's a blog for another day.

Joyous Christmas to all of you who celebrate it, and happy holidays to those of you who are just celebrating!

Thoughts on Marriage

My niece is getting married this week. She met her fiance in 9th grade and they started dating on her 14th birthday. Now they're 22 and they won a contest for a "no pay wedding day," probably because their romance is so sweet and inspiring. They've never broken up or wanted to be with anyone else.

I was telling their story to friends the other day and the man said "Why would they want to be married?" I had forgotten that he has chosen not to marry his partner of 22 years, even though they have a child together and own a home. I think of them as married.

It reminds me of visiting my parents with my husband before we were married. It was Christmastime and I was so hoping for a ring. But my husband wasn't ready to make that commitment. I knew we'd be sleeping apart because that was my parents' policy for unmarried people in their home. At the airport when we arrived, my dad said to me "You and Peter will be sleeping in your room." Shocked, I said to him "Dad, we're not married!" (as if he hadn't noticed) He shrugged and said "Some people just seem married."

My friends seem married, but don't choose to be. They say their relationship is better than most of the married people they know, as if marriage would ruin it. My niece and her intended are over the moon that they're finally tying the knot. What's the difference? I don't think the difference is marriage; I think the difference is the people in the marriage, their choices and intentions. I believe my friends would have the same relationship they have now, even if they did marry, because of who they are and what they want together.

I believe a good marriage brings out the best in us, enhances us, makes us more than we would be on our own. In my work as a Marriage, Family Therapist and Life Coach, I often see the results of marriages that have torn people down, diminished them and left them hurting and bitter. Over and over I see and read in the news about people who have so completely lost touch with themselves and the other person that they convince themselves that happiness can only be found outside of their union.

But happiness is an inside job. And deep within, we are all longing to love and be loved. Great marriages grow over time from an ongoing choice to show one other who you really are and find ways to feel fond of what is seen there. And even when you zig and the other zags and sparks fly as a result, you both find ways to come back to being kind and heal the rifts before they become chasms.

I think that people who don't choose marriage find other ways to love and be loved. Personally I love being married. I love living with my best friend, someone who knows me better with each passing year, with whom I have shared almost half of my life. By now we've worked out most of the kinks. He's got my back and I've got his. We aren't completely similar and we each have parts of us that get fed outside the marriage. But when we come home and we climb into bed at night, we know we're with someone we respect and admire, someone who matters. And that means to the world to me.

(This blog was inspired by a quote that I read in Time Magazine ~ "Adultery is not about sex or romance. Ultimately, it is about how little we mean to one another." If you'd like to receive my Quote of the Week, please e-mail me ~ janet@reachinghappiness.com.)

Forgiveness

I've been going through the lessons in A Course in Miracles day by day. Yesterday's message was "Forgiveness is the key to happiness." Even though I was having a perfectly normal, respectable day, my mind inside was starting to make noises along the lines of "you could have done that better; don't be late; you've been eating no carbs for a week and you haven't lost a pound."

I think that's what the Buddhists call the monkey mind - the chatter that the ego creates to keep us from feeling our stillness and our wholeness, or as I like to call it, our holiness. The Course says the ego is an ancient thought that we are separated from God, and it also says that this can't be true. We are never, ever separated from the Source of all Life...we can't be, because we are Life. My friend Steve, who died a few months ago, saw this in his final days. He said something to the effect of "It's all just love." I try to remember what he saw as I attempt to counter the nattering of my human, in the world, physical mind.

Another line from the Course - "The unforgiving mind sees no mistakes, but only sins." I heard that the word sin is an archery term meaning "to miss the mark." I like to think of a mistake as a "missed take." We look at something and miss seeing the love that's there, probably because our perception is so affected by what we expect to see. Our unforgiving mind holds mistakes against the person. It indicts them and declares that the mistake is evidence of who they are, the sum total of their identity. Our minds can get very locked in to this perception.

Yesterday my mind was doing that, about itself. Why? It might have sensed that I was seeking to loosen the lock that my unforgiving mind has on my being. Forgiving doesn't mean condoning everything that happened. Forgiving means looking through what happened and seeing "some little spark of brightness shining through the ugly picture you hold of it, him or her." (Again, from the Course.)

When I told my husband I was working on holding no grievances, he said "I'm working on untraceable explosive devices." I tend to be serious and spiritual. He's humorous, which I love about him. Humor loosens the lock of our unforgiving mind, too. When we can see humor in a situation we're on our way to forgiving the moment of all its seriousness and allowing that there might be lighter, more loving perceptions worth considering.

Please feel free to comment here. I love comments, and I'd love to send you my Quote of the Week, if you don't get it already. Just e-mail me at janet@reachinghappiness.com. Thanks for reading.

Don't worry; it's benign

Dear God (my journal entries almost always start this way),

Please help me to see social security differently. That's my prayer for the day. I am the representative payee for my disabled niece, and the system is driving me crazy! She can't get the benefits she needs because their computer says she has more money than she does. I can't reach a real person to change it in their computer, even though I spent half an hour on hold yesterday. Checkmate. I'm sure you all have similar situations in your lives, things you need that you appear to be blocked from getting by some cosmic hand being held up, saying "Screw you. We scoff at your request."

But the spiritually seeking part of me thinks " surely that can't be right. There's not a cosmic hand determined to thwart my progress. That's all in my mind (even if everyone else can relate because all our minds agree)."  I can change my mind, which gives me the possibility of changing the results. Thus the prayer "please help me to see this differently." The line that I'm currently studying from A Course in Miracles says "Above all else I want to see." I want to see Jennifer, my niece, as the spirit that she is, not disabled but light-filled. I want to see social security not as a bureaucracy but as a network of people who are ready to help. In another context they could be my friends.

Taking this one step further, A Course in Miracles encourages us to see that everything that happens is not an attack upon us. The other day when I was writing in my journal about a frustration regarding my husband I heard myself think "don't worry; it's benign," and my body relaxed instantly....See it differently. See it as benign, harmless. It can't hurt you. Cosmically it can't hurt you. It may appear to beat up your body (think cancer), but your spirit won't be harmed unless you believe that what is happening is harmful.

That's tricky, if not impossible to do, especially with cancer. It's benign? Yeah right. But what if, when the doctor first pronounced the diagnosis..."cancer, not benign" we could keep the feeling of benign even through the treatments (this is for you, Steve). What if we held in our minds the sweet feeling of being unharmed. I wonder if it would affect our recovery, our cells' ability to create health.

And if the person going through the perceived threat, whatever the threat is, is too immersed in the threat to feel the possibility of benevolence, that's what friends are for. "Whenever two or three are gathered...." Whoever can hold the space, the feeling of no harm on behalf of their loved ones and themselves is superbly helpful. That's really what prayer chains are about...not so much "oh God, please don't make something terrible happen" but more "dear God, thank you for your promise of no harm. Please help me to see how benign this truly is. Please help us to see this differently."

Wish me luck today on my next foray into the network of friends I have there at the social security office...and if you send up a prayer or visualization that all is benign, I bet I'll get better results.Thank you; blessings back to you (and prayers for Steve, too).     ~  Janet

(to return to my website, go to www.reachinghappiness.com and if you'd like to receive my quote of the week, e-mail me at janet@reachinghappiness.com)

Keeping Christmas

This is a journal entry that I wrote last year. I came across it when I was sending cards, and I thought I'd share it with you. My New Year's goal is to start writing blogs once a month again.

Christmas, 2007...What is my gift to the Christ child? My gift is to love my husband when he's taking a nap instead of sitting out here by the tree and the fire with me. My gift is to love the people who send an in your face fundamentalist card with no mention of love. My gift is to love my cat, purring next to me, even though he bites everyone who touches him.

The thing about love is, we just have to do it, not think about it. Just love no matter what. Love and love and love some more, whether we're getting love back or not. Love the way our dogs love us. Love irresponsibly, extravagantly, with abandon.

What would our inner being ~ our non-physical, eternal, all about love, connected to the Christ child, connected to every child, God-self feel about life right now? That all is well.

A sleeping baby, so full of innocence and promise. God came and said "Pay attention to this one. This one is special." Personally, I don't believe it was quite like that. In my belief, God is saying "Pay attention to this one" about all sleeping babies all the time. I believe that God would say "All are special. All are expressions of the Life and Love that I Am." I think Jesus was elevated to Christhood because of how he lived his life. He told us that what he did, we can do also. To let everything fall away but the love. We can do that. To see God within every person, every situation. We can do that. It heals us to do that, to see God in the terrorists and anyone else who feels so far away from love that they think destruction is God's will.

God's will is only love. Jesus the baby was a seedling ready to sprout that message. There is only love. Any other thought is just a mistake...a missed take...a perception that missed something. And even mistakes can't cancel the love. Even if we don't see the love, it's still there. To me, that is the message of Christmas, that we are reminded of every year, during the darkest days of the year.

Blessings to you and those you love this Christmas ~ Janet