Take Your Joy Where You Find it ~ Then Savor It!

If it makes you happy, hang on to it!  Whatever "it" is, if it makes you happy, savor it like the delightful morsel it is!  Take your joy where you find it.  Collect joyful moments or thoughts and keep them somewhere where you can look at them often.

My friend Carol is a fan of Abraham-Hicks and was inspired to create this quote that makes us both happy:

She shared it with me and I threw it on a photo and added it to the collection I look at each day.  My collection grows ever larger because I am constantly looking for thoughts that make me happy.

I found the next one posted on a social media page.  It was a plain black square with pixelated white words.  I kept that crappy little gif on my desktop for weeks and looked at it often because it lifted my spirits every time!  Now I've made it awesome:

These are not my own words.  These affirmations will never grace the pages of my book.  But they are bits of joy I keep on hand to remind me that joy is an option I can choose every day.  Or to lift me on days when I have forgotten I have the power to choose joy.

My friend Melanie took this photo in Bermuda:

Melanie is a prime example of choosing joy.  Her life inspired the affirmation I added to her photo.  She has wanted to be a dolphin trainer since before I met her. Years of training and schooling on top of her 40-hour commuter, computer job led her to adventure in January of this year when she left her home and her pets behind for an 18-week internship at Dolphin Quest inside the National Museum of Bermuda.

Her husband was wonderfully supportive staying behind with their home and his work and visiting a few times while she lived the adventure she had dreamed.  Melanie has another internship lined up for late summer (husband and pets will be happily in tow) and is applying for work in her new career.

Marley & Melanie

She has graciously allowed me to share this joy-filled photo.  Marley was one of the seven female dolphins she worked with at Dolphin Quest.

This is Melanie's adventure, but I absolutely thrive on the joy of it!  That's why it's in my toolbox with the others.  I create joy wherever I can.  I treasure the joy others create.  I hold those joys in my heart.  When I focus on the joys steadily, I watch more and more joy being attracted into my life!

We absolutely must savor the joy wherever we find it.

~ Cyndi 

Practicing Happiness Daily

You deserve to feel amazing and healthy and relaxed and happy and vibrant every day of your life.

Happiness is a Choice

The other day one of my clients accused me of "being born cheerful."  I would like
to set the record straight.  Sexual preference is something you are born with. Happiness is a choice!

Like all humans, I emanate the vibration that I practice.  Happiness is a choice I make every morning.  Or not.  Some mornings I choose doubt, like most humans. The particular morning I was accused of being born cheerful was a tumultuous one for me, and I had felt pretty crappy in the early hours of the day.  But I know that happiness is my Divine birthright - as is free choice.  When something is bothering me, I stop focusing on it and focus on anything else, something that makes me happy.

That's where affirmations come in!  Instead of wallowing in the feeling of being unappreciated, I focused on my positive affirmations.  I think I produced 20 new pages for my next book that day.  I felt fabulous by the time I got to the office to serve my clients.  It's such a simple process, many dismiss it before they try it because they assume that feeling better requires something more!

Find or create affirmations to practice and practice them!  Use ones that others have written that feel good to you.  General ones are wonderful to start changing your vibration right away.  These are perfect if you are new to affirmations or if you are feeling generally melancholy without being able to name why:

Remember, a belief is just a thought you have practiced repeatedly.  If you do not believe the simple statements above, give yourself the gift of practicing them until you do believe.  Practice anything long enough and it becomes part of your vibration.

Finding Balance Brings Joy

I have a habit of falling in love with books and wanting everyone I know to read them too.  Here is the newest title on my "Oh my God you have to read this!" list:

Being in Balance: 9 Principles for Creating Habits to Match Your Desires

by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

From the minute I laid my fingers on this book I knew it was special.  The hardcover is supple and inviting.  The pages are many colors and adorned with pretty butterflies.  It makes me happy just to hold it!  Skip the Kindle edition on this one.

Besides being a work of art that pleases the senses, Being in Balance is an inspirational work that feeds the spirit.  Whether your "issue" is being misunderstood, ill-health, financial scarcity, loveless relationship, no relationship, addiction, overweight, fear, lack of faith, low self-esteem or distorted self-image, Dr. Dyer has a short concise, uplifting chapter to help you change your habits and bring your life into balance.

"You Can't Discover Light by Analyzing the Darkness" is the title of the chapter on "balancing your desire for prosperity with your habits of scarcity."  In it Dyer explains why "Scarcity isn't a problem because of where you were born or what your parents accumulated or the state of the economy."  He advocates a shift in thinking that can make a huge difference.  (Complete table of contents here.)

It's our habits of thought that define the life we lead.  If we are not happy in some aspect of the life we are leading, it is imperative to change our thought habits.  Let me state that again, because it sounds so simple.  If we do not enjoy what we are living, all we need do is change our thinking.

The book is beautiful and uplifting.  It inspires us to dream the life we deserve.

~ Cyndi 

Practicing Happiness Daily

You deserve to feel amazing and healthy and relaxed and happy and vibrant every day of your life.

Happy Where I Am

I am so happy that I am where I am.  I know my own worth now, and that's everything!

I used to doubt.  I used to worry what others thought or how they treated me.  Now I understand that anything that another person does is NO reflection on me, only on themselves.  Whatever they do or say is about them, not me.  How I treat myself is far more important than how others treat me, for they will follow my lead.  What I do and say are reflections of what I think, and I am learning to be very particular about what I think!

I used to think thoughts like, "I am worthless and unloved" and other equivalently self-hurtful and incorrect statements.  It wasn't even that I believed they were true most of the time.  Those thoughts were an indicator of my disconnection from Source, I just didn't know it at the time.

Now when I hear my friends voicing similar incorrect and self-hurtful thoughts I want to help them understand the same thing.  If we are thinking thoughts that manifest negative emotions, those thoughts are contrary to what we know to be true at our core.  Our core is pure positive energy - an extension of Source energy, the energy that creates worlds.  The energy that creates worlds is flowing through us at all times, unless we pinch ourselves off from that flow by thinking thoughts that manifest negative emotions.

If we find ourselves drowning in negative emotions, we have become disconnected from Source, or God. Nothing is more important than finding our way back to that connection with Source.  Nothing!

If we find ourselves in that place of disconnection, as we will because we are human, the quickest way to reconnect is the gratitude list!  If we are focusing our thoughts on things we love and appreciate and feel grateful for, we cannot feel sorry for ourselves in the same moment!

The very instant my thoughts stray to "that irritant" (be it job, kids, ex-spouse, health, politics, whatever the current irritant may be) in my life, I pull back from the irritant like a hot flame and refocus on things I love and things that make me happy.  I try to focus on positive thoughts all the time.  Period.  It just feels better.

If you are currently being swallowed by negative emotions, it shouldn't take long to prove that it feels better.  Focus on something you adore for just 5 minutes and prove to yourself that you do feel better!

Source is, well, the Source of all well-being.  We are all well beings that come from Source.  Wellness and abundance flow into our lives daily unless we pinch ourselves off from the Source of well-being.  Faith takes daily practice, but we are worth the effort.

I am so happy I know that now!

~ Cyndi 

Practicing Happiness Daily

You deserve to feel amazing and healthy and relaxed and happy and vibrant every day of your life.

Just Keep Dancing! or, What to Do When the Universe Creates Space in Your Apple Basket

My favorite book, Feng Shui Your Mind: Four Easy Steps to Rapidly Transform Your Life!, has an exercise on page 92 called "Five Apples" that the authors urge us to use when we feel that something has been taken away from us.  Imagine you have 5 apples in a basket.  One of them is taken from the basket and you now have 4 apples in your basket.

If you focus on the apple that was taken from you, it is easy to feel as if you lost something.  Thoughts about your lost apple could go like this: That was the best apple (job, relationship, adventure, financial boon, whatever you feel you "lost") I ever had and no other apple will ever be as good.  The apples left in my basket pale in comparison with my favorite.  I must be a real loser to have let the perfect apple be snatched from me.  The loss of that apple will color the rest of my days gray and I will never accept another apple in its place.  I won't even allow myself to be happy since that one is gone from me!

These are fear-based thoughts.

But what did you receive when the apple vanished?  Look at the basket.  It has 4 apples and - space.  That space can hold anything.  That space is ripe with infinite possibility limited only by your imagination.  Space has been created where something new can flow into your life!  You get to choose what flows into that space by choosing the thoughts you think.

If you focus on the space created in your life, it is easy to see that you have gained something.  Thoughts about your new space could go like this:  Perhaps I shall try other apples and find them tastier.  Maybe I was so focused on that apple that I failed to see my true calling: Now it has room to materialize in my life!  I am so grateful for the apples I still have!  There is a blessing in this transition from 5 apples to 4, even if I cannot name it yet.  I will not waste time looking back for the lost apple.  Instead I will envision wondrous possibilities flowing into my basket and remember that all dreams are possible!

These are faith-based thoughts.

Energy follows thought.  If you focus on loss, more loss is what flows to you.  If you focus on possibility and opportunities to create, then your life becomes full of possibility and opportunities to create!

Give it a Rest!

I feel GOOD!  I just took 4 days off work and it was sheer bliss.

Self-employed people need this reminder: Take a day off!

I know it's difficult.  We do not get paid for days off  like our employed counter parts.  Also unlike folks with W2s, we usually work part of our "days off" making it more important for us to take a break!  If you are a business owner, you know what I mean.  Days off often become catch up days for bookkeeping, cleaning, inventory, re-organizing, phone calls and all the other loose ends that don't quite get done on days I see clients.

Then, of course, there is the fact that business ebbs and flows.  Right in the weeks before my days off, I got super busy!  I have enough people on my waiting list to fill a couple of days with paid appointments.  It was tempting to think of the money I could earn and go ahead and book those days.  Luckily I recognized my cluttered mind trying to tell me that I am not worth the time off and I ignored the impulse to relinquish my vacation days.

The paycheck from an extra twenty clients could not purchase what that down-time bought me!  I spent 2 days catching up on stuff for both my business and personal life.  I finished my 1st quarter books, cleaned my fish tanks, filled my pantry, ran errands, paid bills, had an acupuncture treatment and a chiropractic adjustment.  I have two days off each week and that's basically what they look like with trips to the dog park thrown in for good measure.

Then I did nothing for two days.  We had planned to go to the beach or possibly see a movie, but what I did ultimately was nothing.  I stayed in bed late.  I walked in the sunshine.  I played with my dog, started a good book, played a video game and
re-watched season one of Game of Thrones.  Nothing thrilling or earth-shattering, but completely therapeutic and valuable beyond measure.

I returned to work on Monday refreshed and revitalized and eager to serve my clients.  I was physically rested and mentally recharged in a way I have not been since I took days off at Christmas.

So take a day off!  You deserve it and so do the people you love.

Whether you are self-employed or not, don't think of days off in terms of "lost" pay.  Think of days off in terms of benefits gained!  If you focus only on the financial, then something in your life or your business will be out of balance.

Reduce your work load by one day a month.  See for yourself how increasing your fun and relaxation can simultaneously increase your productivity, revenues and the joy-factor of your life.

Life is good and just gets better.

~ Cyndi 

Practicing Happiness Daily

You deserve to feel amazing and healthy and relaxed and happy and vibrant every day of your life.

One Fish. Two Fish.

Red Fish.  Blue Fish.

Blue Fish.  Red Fish.

Blue Fish/Yellow Fish.  That makes three fish.

Red Fish.  Four Fish.  How many more fish?

Just this White Fish.  Now we have five fish!

I love betta fish!  If you've never owned bettas, Google images for them.  

They come in gorgeous shapes and colors and each of mine has a distinct personality.

First we got Tokyo.  Why Tokyo?
The cat's name is Godzilla.

Godzilla vs. Tokyo.  It's hysterical.

Tokyo is quite feisty and is used to both cats drinking the water from his bowl.

Merlin was all white iridescent when we brought him home last year.

Now he's becoming more colorful!

Moonshine came home same time as Merlin.  His tank is an eighteen-inch cylinder.

The third picture in this blog and the one here above were taken last year.  

In the picture below, see how Moonshine's fins have become more lacy over time.

Moonshine has been known to take long naps curled up in that shell pictured beneath him.

Then two more fish came home along with a larger tank.  Godzilla approved.

For about a year, Moscow had a pink tank with a big conch shell.

We recently remodeled.

And added a castle.
Now he wants us to call him King Moscow.

He likes to hang out in the window of his tower and look down on the peasant snails.

I think Honolulu is the prettiest.  We call him Lulu for short.

Lulu was feistier when we brought him home.
When he gets agitated and puffs up, he looks like a full circle.  

Now he is very zen.  Honolulu is a half-moon double-tailed betta.

Merlin and Moonshine are delta-tailed bettas.

     

Moscow (above) and Tokyo (below) have distinctive shapes that identify them as crown-tailed bettas.

I think Tokyo has a small crush on this fairy.

While blogging the fish I have decided that a golden yellow fish is required
to round out my household.  Stay posted to this blog for updates!

I hope you enjoy the pretty fish!

~ Cyndi 

Practicing Happiness Daily

You deserve to feel amazing and healthy and relaxed and happy and vibrant every day of your life.