Category: Happiness and other emotion

So What if You Don’t Know?

“Sometimes questions are more important than answers” –Nancy Willard It always amazes me how much meaning people attach to the innocent little state of uncertainty. Actually, “I don’t know” is an innately neutral statement of fact pertaining to a single moment in time. There is never anything inherently bad, scary, or ‘wrong’ with “I don’t

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Healthy Suspicion

“Thought creates the world and then says, ‘I didn’t do it’” –David Bohm   Your experience of the world is created by your thinking. Everything you see “out there” is not preexisting “out there” as you’ll experience it, just waiting for your gaze to meet it. You’re projecting it “out there” as it occurs within

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How to Avoid the Ups and Downs of Life

Stuff happens in life. You’ve probably noticed.  Stuff happens to you without your approval and beyond your control. That’s the way of it. Yet, most of the people I talk with want the ups and downs to stop. They are searching for a way to keep life in the “up” territory to avoid the “downs”.

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Why Bad Moods Aren’t as Bad as You Think

“Most of the shadows in life are caused by standing in our own sunshine.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson How many times have you heard “Follow your heart” or “Let emotion be your guide”? Too many to count, I’d bet. It’s generally good advice—it’s certainly wiser to follow your own feelings than to blindly do what other

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The Thin Line Between Focusing on Yourself And Depression

I remember hearing about some research once that linked self-focus—thinking about yourself a lot and making things that happen out in the world about you in some way—with depression. The more you think about yourself, the more depressed you are. There are obviously a lot of missing variables here. This doesn’t mean that focusing on

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Want to get Lucky? Here’s how.

Things happen to us that we can’t control. All the time. But we do have some control over what we bring to the table: how we prepare, our qualities, our attitude. And we do have some control over how we respond to those chance things that happen to us. It’s like the old joke about

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How Much Pleasure will you Allow?

Sometimes a quote just speaks to you.  This is one of those for me.  “When you die, God and the Angels will hold you accountable for all the pleasures you were allowed in life that you denied yourself.”  –Roger Housden I’ve read this over and over. I sound like Meg Ryan in that famous diner

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Does a Happy Life Really = a Better Life?

There must be a rumor going around. Virtually all of my clients tell me about it at some point. The rumor sounds something like this: We should nearly-always be happy. That it’s somehow unenlightened to have bad days. That negative emotion should be quite rare and reserved for only those times when something truly horrible

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What to do With the Pain. (Our True Nature).

When our thoughts drift to- and fixate on- horrible events in the world, we hurt.  If you pay attention, you’ll notice that your thoughts will also drift away from those things and you don’t hurt in those moments.  Even in the middle of unspeakable pain, thoughts part like the clouds and the sun peaks out

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