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)

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.

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!

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.

The Secret

There's a new book and movie out that's got people talking. It's called The Secret and it's about the Law of Attraction. I have been studying the Law of Attraction for years, most recently through Esther and Jerry Hicks and their Teachings of Abraham. Here are some of my thoughts on the subject.

Many years ago when I first heard that our thoughts create our reality, I rejected the notion. It made simply thinking seem way too important. If you didn't get it right you could really screw up your life. Plus, many people struggle with horrendous things in their lives that they weren't consciously thinking about. That hardly seemed fair.  So I put the subject out of my mind and didn't pick it up again until I heard someone talk about our innocence. We create our reality innocently. Somehow that helped me. For generations we haven't known we were doing it. (That's why they're calling it a secret.) If we find ourselves in a situation that's not to our liking, we haven't done anything wrong, and neither has anyone else. We had no idea we were creating it. Our thoughts don't always create in direct correlation - sometimes we're affected by the thoughts of the mainstream and we're along for the ride. Or we have a general tendency to think a type of thought and then our life reflects that trend, without our specifically having given rise to that particular event.

Here's an example. Let's say you watch the news nightly. And they always start out with a disaster that's happening somewhere in the world. You bring someone else's disaster into your living room, night after night, and the next day you dwell on the fate of those poor people. And because you're a caring and compassionate person you feel how helpless they must have felt. And you wish you could help them, but there doesn't seem to be much you can do, except be with them in solidarity. The next night you watch the next disaster, think about it the next day and so on. Without realizing it, you are building up a groundswell of helplessness in your own energy field, such that eventually you magnetize a disaster to your life, not in the same proportion to the ones on the news, but enough to mirror the feelings that are present in your energy field. (They call this your vibration or your frequency.)

Now, let's say you watch that news nightly and feel indignant anger on behalf of those people. Then you are likely to attract situations that mirror your indignation, rather than helplessness. You might find that you are annoyed again and again - you get stuck in traffic, your co-workers are impossible and your kids just won't cooperate.

Now,  let's say that you've heard about the Law of Attraction, so you want to be mindful about what you're creating. This time, when you watch the news and you see and hear the people's anguish, you consciously decide on your point of focus. This time you pay attention to the resourcefulness of the people, even in the face of daunting odds. You notice that the woman was someone's mother and the man was someone's beloved son and you find yourself thinking about the family of humanity that connects us to one another.  As you deliberately dwell on that thought for a few moments, it occurs to you that our oneness is way more powerful than our ability to be destructive.  With that thought, you are filled with a sense of hope. Now through your thoughts you have become part of the solution. Your thoughts are transformative; they create a new reality. Not only do they attract circumstances that are hopeful and positive into your life, but they contribute to an uplifting of the global consciousness.

Having said that, I have to admit that I'm in a funk, and I've been in a funk for a few weeks. Luckily it takes a long period of sustained thought to bring  major "funkiness" to my life as a result of these thoughts.  But because I believe in the power of Law of Attraction I'm trying to turn my mood around. I really want to feel better. It just feels better to feel better, you know? And the more I try, the less it seems to work. So what do I do? Anything that gives me a break helps. Enjoying the flowers, giving my thoughts to God, slowing down and breathing, doing something delightful. I can also ask my wiser, broader perspective, the part of me that's connected to the entire world spirit for its thoughts. I call that inspiration. The tricky part, the part that confounds our human selves, is finding a way to feel better when the situation hasn't changed. When we really, really want something and it hasn't happened. To feel better anyway? That's tough to do.

When we really want something and it hasn't happened, and we don't even see it in our foreseeable future, we feel the human experience of lack or limitation. Lack and limitation can feel like states of being. We can easily start to define ourselves by that reality. We believe that the lacking circumstance in which we find ourselves, the one we don't want, IS our reality.This is when the Law of Attraction does not seem like our friend. Because the more we see our circumstance as reality, the more it will be our reality. However, if we really understand that we create our own reality, then  we know that NO reality is cast in stone. Any reality can be changed with our thoughts at any time. Some may be pretty entrenched and therefore take a while to turn around. And the dominant public opinion about your reality may be that its hopeless, which makes your task even harder. But regardless, the power to create and re-create your reality lies with you and you alone. This is good news. It means that if you want something, and you purposefully and repeatedly feel the fullness of having it (rather than the lack of not having it) and you look for any little indication that it's on its way, and you look for evidence of life's benevolence in other areas of your life and you feel moments of gratitude...then voila...you will create what you are wanting. It takes time, and maybe faith while you are waiting...faith that it is working, that you are magnetizing the money or the health or the love (the big three) to your life. It's tough to do, but it's so worth it. And it gets easier.

There, I feel better...energized and refocused. I knew I would. Thanks for listening.   Janet

my remodel and the dash

I just watched a short little movie that you can find if you go to http://www.thedashmovie.com. It was very moving, especially since the woman who sent it to my sister is battling cancer. It talks about how we're going to spend our "dash" - the time between the date of our birth and the date of our death. It focuses on how we loved, how often we smiled, who we touched with our presence, what we created and  if we were kind.

Kindness is so very important to me. It is one of my main standards of judging whether or not I had a good day. Never has this been more challenged than right now at the end of my remodel. The work is going so slowly; they barely show up, and I've been told that I'm too nice. In fact, when they do show up, the men tell me that the other home owners are less patient than I am, so they go there first. Aaarrrggghhh! I tell them I am angry and discouraged. But I am still kind when I say it. I honor and respect the people that they are, the job that they're trying to do...because when all is said and done, when the remodel is finally finished, which it will be eventually...I want to look back and know that I was kind. If I allowed my frustration to cause me to tear them apart with my words or my energy, the cost of the remodel would have been too high for me.

This may seem extreme to you, and I'm curious to hear how you see it. The way I see it is that I set the tone of my own mood and direct the course of my own energy regardless of what is happening around me. John Bradshaw said that emotions are energy in motion ( e-motion). If someone else's actions propel me into a mood or an action that is not where I want to be, then they are creating my next moment. And I want to be the one creating it. I don't want to give them the power over my next moment. And so I choose to be kind.

And when I die, that's one of the things that will be incorporated in my dash --- she was kind. (Although she may have an unfinished remodel.)

Janet    (PS - thank you to my brother-in-law, Cameron, and to my sister, Peggy, for posting their comments...and thank you to my mom and my sister ,Katy, for commenting off-line. Keep reading!)