Reachout Blogs: January 2012

The Ten Keys to Happiness

1. Live on purpose . Joyful aliveness connects you with your purpose. Learn the skills you need to create happiness. Discover the activities and pursuits that make your heart sing! These engaging activities provide clues to your purpose and will assist you in finding happiness.

If you want to maintain desperation and unhappiness, then believe that life has no purpose.

2. Find Happiness right now. No other time exists for experiencing happiness. Only the present moment contains the spark of life!

You may also create misery by constantly wanting to speed ahead to some other time. Most people live their lives wanting to exist elsewhere and elsewhen.

3. Accept total responsibility for your life! You create your reality and your emotions. Your power and focus exceed your wildest dreams. See this short video about finding happiness through creating reality.

You can choose to blame and whine, pretending that your life situation came from without, rather than from within. As within, so without. Accept total responsibility for all.

4. Act in boldness. Take on challenges and pursue lofty goals. Overcoming difficulties and obstacles provide some of the most exquisite joys in life.

To create misery, play it totally safe. Never do anything scary or risky. Follow your fears and let them guide your actions. For happiness and joy - feel the fear, and do it anyway!

5. Expect happiness. Hope consists of a perfect expectation of desirable things to come. Picture desirable things to come. You choose what to think about, and what to visualize in your mind's eye! Imagine yourself finding happiness.

Despair consists of a perfect expectation of undesirable things to come. To increase despair, simply imagine in detail terrible things that may happen to you. The better your imagination, the deeper the despair. You get what you truly expect, so expect happiness.

6. Increase your awareness. Feel your emotions consciously. Identify your core beliefs. Constantly learn and grow from the inside. Your unhealthy attitudes, habits, and behaviors will start to drop away like fall leaves. Watch this quick video on identifying emotions.

To maintain apathy and misery, just remain unaware. Allow clarity to flee from you like a deer from a hunter. Remain in unconsciousness and cloudiness - afraid to explore your beliefs.

Error! Filename not specified.7. Build your connections. Our relationships give life meaning and happiness. All of us truly connect to one another in the inner world. Building connections in the physical world builds on this inner reality and helps us in finding happiness.

To create misery, simply separate yourself from others. Think that you exist as an independent entity, and other people merely drag you down. Insist on separateness and division. Deny the truth of connectedness and pursue unreality.

8. Learn and read daily. We grow in large measure due to the people we meet and the books we read. Did you read 52 books last year? Did you foster more friendships? We create happiness when we grow and increase our wisdom.

To prevent happiness, try not to meet any new people this year, and don't read any new books either. Simply stay just the same person with the exact same ideas. For optimal joy, go for optimal growth and learning!

9. Serve other people. Truly recognize other people as real people, with needs and wants just like your own. Think how you can bring a smile to someone, and then do it! Give increased life in every encounter. Service is a huge key for finding happiness in your life.

To create misery, ignore other people and totally concern yourself with your own needs. Don't think of other people as real.

10. Prioritize your actions. Know your goals and purposes, and put power and faith into every action. Do each action with focus and purpose, and know why you choose the activities you expend your energy on.

If you want to decrease joy, simply do as many things as you can each day. Never think of which tasks connect with your goals, simply busy yourself with work.

Enjoy the Ten Keys to Finding Happiness!

Twenty Secrets for Living An Optimum Life

I think most people would agree that we live in a time of lightning speed changes. And with all of the economic uncertainty and the troubling social and political times we are facing in the world , things can feel pretty darn scary.

Let me share with you the 20 secrets for living an optimum life:

1. Strive to always remain optimistic - look on the brighter side of things

2. Respect and treat others the way you would like to be Respected and treated. Be caring, considerate and empathic to others

3. No matter what, make your health care a top priority. Always nourish your emotional, physical and spiritual well-being

4. Value education, not only formal education but informal as well. Read lots, be a good listener and attain knowledge

5. Each day, make time for prayer and forever seek God's guidance. Take nothing for granted and maintain a grateful heart.

6. Pay homage to your ancestors and remember to respect elders. Also, never get too busy to spend time with the elders in your life.

7. Constantly discover ways for self-improvement. Exercise self-discipline, determination and appropriateness.

8. Be a visionary - live your dreams. Choose Faith over Fear

9. Avoid toxic and negative people. Surround yourself with people who are hopeful, positive and possess a renewing spirit.

10. Maintain a "light-heart," for laughter is good for the soul and humor is healing

11. Respect Mother Earth and do your part to preserve her beauty

12. Be charitable - share your time, wisdom and material possessions with those who are in need. Take time to give back to your community

13. Employ integrity, courage, atonement and love throughout your entire life. Remember to seek an understanding

14. Explore your creativity - sing, paint, sew, draw, dance, compose, design etc., etc.

15. Be humble and be careful not to demonstrated arrogance and false pride

16. Don't allow anyone to take the "J" from your Joy

17. Seek the wisdom of others and keep an open mind and heart

18. Balance the use of technology in your life - take time out from all of the electronic gadgetry

19. Find ways to help others in their quest for freedom, justice and equality

20. Lastly, always give your Mom and Dad the respect they deserve.

Constantly show and express your love to them. Never forget that you were created through love. Make every effort to establish and maintain a healthy and nurturing relationship with them.

Just Be Happy

You can be happy. You can live the life you want to live. You can become the person you want to be.

This is what I've figured out so far.

Stop assigning blame. This is the first step. Stop assigning blame and leave the past behind you.

You know whose fault it is that your life isn't perfect. Your boss. Your teachers. Your ex-lovers. The ones who hurt you, the ones who abused you, the ones who left you bleeding. Or even yourself. You know whose fault it is — you've been telling yourself your whole life. Knowing whose fault it is that your life sucks is an excellent way to absolve yourself of any reponsibility for taking your life into your own hands.

Forget about it. Let it go. The past isn't real. “That was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.” If we're not talking about something that is real and present and in your life right now, then it doesn't matter. Nothing can be done about it. If nothing can be done about it, then don't spend your energy dwelling on it — you have other things to do.

I may sound cruel, I may sound simplistic, I may sound like I'm saying you should just “get over it,” by suggesting that you should let go of your past. I'm sorry for that. But life won't hold still and wait for you to lick your wounds. The race is still being run. Get up and keep moving. You can't do anything about yesterday.

You can do something about tomorrow. And about the next day. Focus your energies there.

“I don't have time to write.” “I can't dance.” “I can't talk to new people.” “I'm not attractive.”

I hear this all the time. I always hear the people around me sabotaging themselves, drawing lines and borders and boxes around themselves.

To which I say, make the time; dance; just talk to people; be attractive!

Yes, again, it's simplistic of me to say that. But it's simplistic of you to so easily say what you cannot do!

We're excellent pattern-matchers. That's what the human mind does — it's a pattern-matching engine. So we look at ourselves, at our history, at our behaviors, and we draw straight lines between the points — we assume that just because we've done things a certain way in the past, we'll always do them that way in the future. If we've failed before, we'll always fail.

Screw that.

Surprise yourself. No — amaze yourself.

You don't have to keep doing the things you hate. Why go home and beat yourself up for, say, not going over and saying a few words to someone you find really attractive? Can any damage they could do to you by rejecting you possibly be any worse than the damage you're going to do to yourself for missing the chance?

Find the demon.

Do you know what I'm talking about? It's the little voice in the back of your head that's always whispering, “You can't.” You know the demon. You may think you hate the demon, but you don't. You love it. You let it own you. You do everything it says. Everytime there's something you want, you consult the demon first, to see if it will say, “You can't have that.”

What you don't realize is that your demon doesn't know anything. It's an idiot. It's nothing but a parrot, repeating back to you anything negative that it's ever heard, anything that makes you hurt, makes you squirm. If a teacher once told you “You'll never accomplish anything,” it was listening; it hoards words like that and repeats them back to you to watch you jump. It doesn't know what it's saying. It doesn't care.

Exorcise yourself.

You can take me literally or not, as suits you. But do, please, the next time you hear that voice in your head, imagine it, visualize it, as something physical that you can get hold of; tear it out of you, feel its fingers weaken and lose their grip on your spine, and grind it to dust, to nothing, under your boot heel on your way out to dance in the streets.

You can. You think you can't; but it's telling you that. You can.

You don't exist.

You just think you do.

We're nothing but the stories we tell ourselves. We know in our hearts what kind of people we are, what we're capable of, because we've told ourselves what kind of people we are. You're a carefully-rehearsed list of weaknesses and strengths you've told yourself you have.

(Self-confidence, for example, is a particularly nebulous quality you can easily talk yourself out of having.)

You owe no allegiance to that self-image if it harms you. If you don't like the story your life has become — tell yourself a better one.

Think about the person you want to be and do what that person would do. Act the way that person would act.

Amazingly enough, once you start acting like that person, people will start treating you like that person.

And you'll start to believe it. And then it will be true.

Welcome to your new self.

You are a product of your environnent.

Most people realize this — usually, in the form of having something else to blame — but they tend to forget one important fact:

Humans are the masters of changing their environment.

What this means is that if your environment affects you, and you can affect your environment, then obviously, you can affect yourself.

Your environment includes people. Figure out who in your life isn't good for you, whose presence tears you down more than it builds you up, whose nearness is poison to you — and get rid of them. Get them out of your life. I don't care if it's your best friend, your boss, your mother, your lover — if they are harming you, if they are doing nothing but reinforce everything bad you tell yourself about yourself, then your relationship with them needs to radically alter or it needs to end.

Your environment includes goals. Don't set yourself pie-in-the-sky impossible goals and then beat yourself up over not achieving them — set yourself goals that will be good for you, not a source of pain. Attainable goals. Set them and meet them. Don't tell yourself you can't — that's the old story, that story you used to tell yourself about what a poor sad victim you were and how you could never change anything about your life. You can meet your goals. This is the new story.

Trying to clean your house? Good for you — a clean house can really affect your state of mind for the better. But don't say “Today I'm going to clean the entire house from top to bottom,” when you don't have the time and energy to — don't set yourself up for failure; don't feed the demon. Just say, “Today I'm going to wash all the dishes and clean off the kitchen counter.” And do it.

Don't tell yourself, “This month I'm going to write that novel.” Tell yourself, “Today I'm going to write five pages.” And do it. Take your dreams and break them down into small pieces and you'll have them in your hands before you know it.

And you'll find, as you start meeting your goals, that you like it. That it feels good, makes you feel confident and capable. You'll develop a hunger for it.

Your environment includes yourself — your physical presence. Do what you know you need to do — treat yourself better. Sleep, eat right, exercise. This doesn't mean you have to stop staying out late at night now and then, it doesn't mean you can't have a candy bar, it doesn't mean you have to stop sitting around watching television — it just means start doing the things that are good for you as well as the things that are bad for you, every so often. It's not an all-or-nothing proposition; you don't have to devote your life to being a health nut. Just try eating more fruits and vegetables, the occasional vegetarian meal; go for walks in the park on the weekends. You'll feel better and be more alert if you're a little healthier, and once you start feeling a little better, you'll start wanting the things that make you feel better. You'll see.

Your environment includes your appearance. If you're not happy with yourself, if you're angry with the person in the mirror, it can honestly help to literally change who you see when you look in the mirror. Try a different hairstyle, new glasses, new jewelry, new clothes. It doesn't have to be expensive — there's a whole universe full of possible You's waiting to be found in thrift stores, if need be. If you're deciding to become the person you want to be, then decide what that person is going to look like. Dress the part. It's not shallow, it's not about vanity, it's about self-transformation — even the most primitive tribes understand the value of costumes and masks for ritual, for change, for becoming someone else.

You are not an object. You are a system. Like with any system, if you change the inputs — change what goes into it — you'll change what comes out.

Despite everything I've just said:

Self-examination can be paralysis.

Don't “remember to breathe” — just breathe. It's a Tao thing.

It's the paradox at the center of all this — remember that, “Am I living up to being the person I want to be?”, is not a question the person you want to be would ask.

If I can leave you with just one thought, it's this:

Stop wasting your time fretting over not being happy.

Just be happy!