Creating a Better Life

How to Find Something to be Happy About

Brad Isaac of Persistence Unlimited made an important point in response to my previous article on affirmations and being happy:

“I think you hit the nail on the head when you said we can cut out the middleman and just be happy now. But how?

I read recently that unhappiness is over-focusing on the small things that are wrong. Something or someone is imperfect, so let’s get mad or unhappy.

Perhaps happiness is just over-focus on what’s right.”

And Vickie of Contemplate This (who I’ve come to think of as my unofficial coach when it comes to the Abraham teachings) wrote about a process from “Ask and It Is Given” that quite frankly, I don’t remember reading about before seeing it on Vickie’s blog.

The process is called “Wouldn’t It Be Nice If…”

Which brought to mind yet another resource that I recently found… the “What If Up Club.”

And I finally realized something: affirmations work.

I’ve been doing them over the past few weeks and didn’t even know it!

The Wouldn’t It Be Nice Process

When you say, “I want this thing to happen that hasn’t happened yet,” you are not only activating the vibration of your desire, but you are also activating a vibration of the absence of your desire — so nothing changes for you. And often, even when you do not speak the second part of the sentence and you say only, “I want this to happen,” there is an unspoken vibration within you that continues to hold you in a state of not allowing your desire.

But when you say, “Wouldn’t it be nice if this desire would come to me?” you achieve a different sort of expectation that is much less resistant in nature.

Your question to yourself naturally elicits from you a more positive, expectant response. And so, this simple but powerful game will cause a raising of your vibration and an improvement in your point of attraction because it naturally orients you toward the things that you want. The Wouldn’t It Be Nice If…? Process will help you let in the things that you have been asking for, on all subjects. - From Ask and It Is Given by Abraham-Hicks (and Vickie’s article)

Wouldn’t it be nice if:

• My debts were paid off?
• I was living a healthier lifestyle?
• My intentions for 2008 worked themselves out?
• I could be happy right now?

That I can do.  For me, because of my habit of having to “tell it like it is”, the energy behind asking the question is much more powerful.

What If Upping

I’ve always thought that rather than “When the student is ready, the master will appear,” the saying should be “When the student is ready, he’ll start paying attention to and doing what the master does.”

I first read “Ask and it is Given” quite a while back, but pretty much “skimmed” the processes.  A few resonated with me, such as Segment Intending… but most were passed over pretty quickly.

So the “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” process has been out there and available to me… but I never really gave it a go.

It took the idea of “What If Upping” to get me to try it, and it’s been fascinating to see the results.

There are physical manifestations (extra income has been a big one that’s been popping up lately), and there are also internal shifts that have been happening since I started this process.

No… I haven’t become some goofy Pollyanna… it’s a deeper happiness - a joy that I’m not sure the English language has a word for.

Or maybe it’s just that it’s becoming easier and easier to find things to be happy about.

Because that’s what I’m looking for.

Which finally brings us to the answer to the question…

How Do I Find Something To Be Happy About?

Look Around You.

Yes, I know that much of it sucks.

But so much more of it is good.

Do what you can about that stuff that sucks.

Can’t do anything about it?  Then why are you bothering?

Look at all of that other stuff that you can be happy about.

That’s really all there is to it.  I’m not saying it’s easy… old habits die hard.  But it really is just that simple.

It sure seems to be working for me, at least.

I Am - I Feel - There Is (Rotten Apples)

How do you describe your emotional state?

If you are angry, do you say “I am angry?”

Does depression automatically bring on “I’m depressed?”

The other day I listened to an interview with Hale Dwoskin, the creator of The Sedona Method, on the Boundless Living Challenge site.  One of the things that he mentioned was using “I feel” rather than “I am” to describe an emotional state a person is experiencing.

When we feel something, whether we call it positive or negative, all it really is is an experience - a moment in time where we’ve identified a single component of the myriad of things that are going on around us.

If we break our legs, we don’t say “I am broken” (while that may be somewhat accurate.)  We say “My leg is broken” or “I have a broken leg.”

So how about “My emotions are depressed” or “I have depression.”

Even better (at least for me) is the idea of just noticing - “There is depression.”

This completely separates my identity from the experience.  That way, I don’t have to fall into the trap of staying mired in the muck of the depression, but I can still acknowledge it is there.

I remember once asking a pastor of a Religious Science church about this… she had just given an outstanding talk on the power of the phrase I Am, but I couldn’t reconcile saying “I am Joy”  or “I am Wealth” when I was feeling depression.  Her advice was to just tell myself “I am Joy” regardless of what I was feeling.

Let’s just say that this didn’t resonate with me at the time.

I understood where she was coming from, but it was a little like (as Abraham-Hicks has said) putting a smiley face sticker over an empty gas gauge.

I needed to first disengage the depression from my identity before I could do anything about it, and recognizing that it was a passing emotion, one that could and would change if I would allow it to, and take the actions that would remove it.

Actions like moving, getting in the sun, meditating, eating something good for my body… simple little things that would allow that joy to rise.

Yes, there is a place for affirmations like “I am joy.”  But when they are used to simply mask what’s going on underneath, in my personal experience they can do more damage than help.

Back to that interview I listened to:

In it, Dworkin compared using affirmations and positive thinking to taking a barrel of rotten apples and putting a layer of fresh apples over the top of them.

Will the fresh apples make the rotten apples fresh?  Or will the rotten apples accelerate the decay of the fresh ones?  Obviously, unless something is done about the rotten apples beneath, all they will do is rot even more… and bring down the fresh ones right along with them.

We need to disengage the rotten apples from the fresh ones.

We don’t need to discuss the rottenness of the apples.

We don’t need to pretend that they don’t exist.

We probably want to take a look at just why the apples are rotten in the first place… but let’s remove them first, then discuss them.

“There are rotten apples. What can do to release them?”

What do you do to release your rotten apples?