So Many Blessings on My Head

So Many Blessings on My Head

As I stepped out the door today, I noticed a thought that almost got away. “How will the world delight me today?”

It was an easy thought today. The sky is bright, the birds were singing their little hearts out, the lilacs are ready to go. The recent rain has scrubbed everything fresh and clean. The world is very appealing today.

Wasn’t always the case. Use to be that “out” was scary. I was flinchy most of the time, and expected to “get got” pretty much every time I left the house. I expected horrible traffic with scary situations. I expected crabby, sullen, unhelpful clerks. I expect to get ripped off, that everything would be hard, that people would be jerks.

I was rarely disappointed.

How sad.

Thank goodness we understand our experience filters, and that filtering for crap, we will mostly just see crap, and filtering for delights, we will mostly find delights.

That Creative Question I posed at the beginning might be better phrased as, “How will I find the world delightful today?” Or maybe, “How will I be delighted today?”

Over and over, we find places where the difference between a wonderful time and a horrible time is just our point of view. Where the difference between a great day and a crap day is our attitude. Where delight and disappointment come up based on my expectations. Am I looking for the silver lining or the cloud, the doughnut or the hole, the dying worms on the sidewalk or the rainbow.

Recently, I have been seeing a lot of stuff online that is basically saying that happiness is overrated. As someone who has been desperately unhappy, and happy, I will go with happy. I’m not talking about the “I got a new car/puppy/cordless drill” kind of happy, but soul-happy, the kind that comes up from the core.

Those happiness-doesn’t-matter people talk about how important feeling on purpose is. They don’t understand that when I am soul-happy, I am on purpose. I am contented and satisfied at the end of my day. I am relaxed and joyful. I find bliss all over the place. And the world is out to delight me at every turn, from a subtle scent in the air, to happy critters, to a little bit of beauty tucked away somewhere.

How could nature empower me? Why would my environment support me? How else is all creation for my well being?

Now, I’m not just talking seeing pretty stuff outside, I’m even talking cash appearing when I really needed it, unregistered gift cards, magical parking spots. Thank you, World.

How have I changed from cringing from the world to enjoying it’s blessings?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2014 all rights reserved 05212014

How Do You Spell Success?

How Do You Spell Success?

Quick, off the top of your head, can you name three successes you’ve enjoyed in your life? How about three from yesterday? What are your criteria for success? Do you need to win something, or get acknowledged by us? Or do you determine your success by how you feel?

It can be a tricky thing, measuring our success. We get all sorts of rules as we grow up for what constitutes success. Some of them support us, and some really don’t.

Years ago, when I was struggling with the whole concept of success, I found myself thinking about the bad day I had. I was praying for a miracle to snap me out of my blues. The thought I had was along these lines:  What if, during my bad day, I was protected from all sorts of other things that were a whole lot worse than my bad day? What if I didn’t get hit by that turning car? What if I left the bar just before the two crazy guys started to fight? What if I stopped just before the mugger got to me? Well, you get the idea.

It was a small shift in my point of view, but it worked. It also gave me a cartoon movie in my head, where anvils and pianos fell on the sidewalk just behind me, and those grates in the sidewalk for delivering waited until I passed to open. It made me feel lucky.

That sense of being lucky can be a nice part of feeling successful. Especially when we take responsibility for our luck. So much of being happy is about feeling fortunate. An old friend used to talk about feeling lucky, or fortunate, with a sense of shame, like she was lucky, but didn’t deserve it. She dropped the last part, and has been enjoying great success in all areas of her life.

Why am I fortunate? What makes me successful? Why am I lucky? How do good circumstances find me?

What would your day be like if you kept your eyes open for all the luck that surrounds you? What would your day be like if you kept finding nice treats, happy coincidences, serendipitous events all day long? What if finding that nickel made a difference? Or getting an email from your old pal you hadn’t heard from in a while? What if you felt like finding that parking spot, or a coupon on the shelf for something you needed was just for you?

As we start looking for good things to happen, we find them. All over the place. And things will often work out for us in ways we might not expect, but in ways that we like.

You can call it luck, or the Law of Attraction, you can call it living each day successfully.

When we start to expect those nice things, it shifts our mood. We get a bit more smiley, and we find that people smile back at us. Sometimes, a smile from a stranger can feel like a miracle. We start expecting nice things, and we find ourselves doing little nice things, just because it feels good.

How do I spot good things? What makes me notice little kindnesses? How do I see that my life is sweet?

Loosening our definitions of success can create a big shift in our point of view. Some days, I may count getting dressed before 3:00 being successful. With that attitude, I may find a pocket of motivation or inspiration that I might have missed if I berated myself for lounging around so long.

How have I changed from judging my success on old criteria to finding successes every day?

(c) 2014 Pam Guthrie all rights reserved 02062014

How to Win

How to Win

We are so interesting, us people. We love making rules, then we love to bend, or break those rules. We love to compete with each other, or we hate it and avoid it at all costs. We love to have power over each other, or to be overpowered. We praise, extol, and laud the ones who end up at the top, often without regard for how or why they got there. And sometimes we mock and jape at the ones who didn’t.

So with all that stuff going on inside us, in our groups and families and communities, it’s small wonder that we have a lot going on around the notion of winning and being a winner.

I’ve watched people who valued the laurels so much that they were willing to dump friends and hurt loved ones, and themselves, to get them. Others who would sabotage themselves, wreaking havoc around them,  to avoid winning.

Wow.

Life is so hard when we let the outside dictate how we think about ourselves. One of my old favorite bad creative questions was, “Why am I such a loser?” Yikes.

I could ask that question a hundred times a day, get a hundred different horrible answers, and never notice it. Insidious! I would feel awful, not even want to try at anything. I felt like the whole point of my communities was to make me feel bad about myself. And if I did well, it was either a fluke, or not well enough. I lived in a very unpleasant place.

It’s all in how we look at it. So simple, so challenging. It’s the superpower of my point of view.

Some of us tighten up and fight that loser feeling by working our poor little bottoms off to prove that we are winners. We run races, strive for the top, put our names up for all the awards and honors we can find, and, even though we may win and win and win, we find that we still don’t feel like a winner, we still can’t be convinced.

How do I feel when I am a winner? How else do I feel when I am a winner? What makes me a winner?

When I go inside with Creative Questions like those, and really apply them, I am a winner. I see wonderful, strong reasons why I am a winner, and I feel different out in the world. It’s like a miracle. I see that I cannot be made to feel winner-y from the outside in, but that I need to own it from the inside out.

When I redefine winning as achieving my best self, I can be a winner all the time. When I challenge me to do my best, I can accomplish amazing things, and I can feel satisfied with my accomplishments. And If I want, I can always make up my own certificates or trophies, and I can enjoy celebrating my successes with my loved ones. Or even by myself.

Using my good Creative Questions will make a big difference. So will relaxing. Unclenching the need to beat others, or to let others beat us. Softening, doing our best rather than striving for perfection.  In my natural life, I am always a winner.

How have I changed from feeling like a sucky loser to knowing I win whenever I do my best?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 12242013

Why do I choose to share this contemplation? ;)

The Lap of Luxury

The Lap of Luxury

Being a human is so cool. For one thing, I have language, which makes a huge difference between me, and say, my snails, or even my cats. Having language means that I can think about abstract concepts, work my way through knotty problems, imagine like crazy, and totally change my experience of the world with a few thoughts.

In my training, we called it “reframing” and that’s a fine term. Basically, it’s changing our point of view. Cultivating our imagination superpower will change our whole freakin’ life.

Feeling glum because I got scolded at work today for a mistake? I can work it and work it until I am depressed and pissed off, resentful, and bitter. And I can go home, bring it in with me, and take it out on my loved ones, stomping and moping all evening, maybe even getting wasted because I “deserve it.” Then, I wake up feeling crappy because I over-indulged, and still cranky. I wonder what kind of a day I will have?

Feeling glum because I got scolded at work today for a mistake? Well, mistakes, happen. I will correct it tomorrow, and let that glum go, because I have a pretty decent job, and pals to chat with on the bus, and enjoyable plans for my evening. I get to go home to my cozy house full of my loved ones, and life is good, and I sleep like a top. I wonder what kind of a day I will have?

How have I changed from feeling buffeted by my feelings, to being on top of them?

You may already be good at this. I sure wasn’t. I thought my feelings were kind of fixed. I thought they were True. And I certainly didn’t get the difference between feelings and emotions. Emotions are the physical manifestation of my thoughts. Feelings are the moosh of emotions and thoughts that I have been running and running, often based on mis-learnings through my whole life.

What makes me the boss of my thoughts?

Feeling comfortable, enjoying my life, making room for luck; these are things in my control. I get there by using my super powers of imagination, choice, and action! Wahoo!

Three little things to do, and I can change my life. Instead of focusing on the things that drive me crazy, or annoy the pants off me, I can notice the things I love about my job, I love about my family, I love about my home. Instead of hating my commute, I can turn it into valuable time for reading audio books, learning my music, or a new language, or use it to practice stillness.

I can use my super powers to turn my focus to what is so great about my life. to put my problems in perspective, to choose to act and feel like a grownup rather than a tantrum-y toddler.

What makes my life meaningful? Why do I love my life? How do I enjoy?

When I can imagine the gloriousness that is my life right now, when I can see my life without all my negative emotional judgments, I feel fortunate. Feeling fortunate makes me feel grateful. Feeling grateful makes me appreciate what I have. Appreciating what I have feels luxurious. I like feeling luxurious.

How have I changed from bitching about the ring to appreciating the toilet?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 11222013

Reeling Tyche

Reeling Tyche

The last few weeks have been full of car, um, situations. It’s been super interesting to me for one important feature, namely, I have felt extremely lucky.

On the one hand, it culminated in $800 worth of repairs. On the other hand, it could have been as much as $2300 if my shop weren’t so honorable, and thrifty. On the third hand, two of the things that went wrong could have been deadly.

I am so lucky.

It got me thinking about luck, our attitudes about luck.

I used to think that luck, like happiness and connection, came from outside me. I really did.

I thought that there was some force like, Tyche, the blind goddess who reels and staggers around whomping into folks and changing their lots in life. Some people always seemed to get whomped goodwise, and others always got whomped badwise.

Heh.

Turned out I was wrong. Again. I love all the crappy stuff it’s turned out I had wrong.

Luck isn’t a blind and tipsy goddess, luck is an attitude.

Why am I so fortunate? What makes things go my way? How do things always work out for me?

When I am all focused on how awful stuff is, that’s what I sort for, that’s what I put energy into, and that’s what I notice I’m getting. I start scanning my world for awful, I scan my body for aches, pain, and dis-ease. I scan my activities for draining, or abusive. Oh, yes, I do. And I am one unlucky sombitch.

When I start running Creative Questions that imply good fortune, things shift. I sort for good things. I seek silver linings, I notice how good I feel, I see nice things happening for me, I notice all the things I do that are fun or rewarding. I feel so blessed.

And the more I do, the more I do. Feel lucky, that is.

So it turns out I am my own lucky charm.

The day the car stopped dead in the parking lot, not on the freeway, not in the middle of the busy street during marathon celebrations, I had twenty minutes sitting in the car in the rain, to think about my attitude. I could easily have gone all pissy. My plans for my day were shot. I knew a new alternator was gonna cost.

And then I remembered that I had drawn the “Playful” card, and decided to have fun instead. And I ended up noticing how lucky I’d been, the rain cleared so I could do my errands shanksmare, and felt satisfied at the end of the day.

I am the only one who can decide how my life goes. Things happen to everyone. I decide if I will be beaten by them, or thrive.

How have I changed from wallowing in adversity to showering myself in blessings?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 10272013

Bring On the Bling

Bring On the Bling

If you want an instantaneous way to go from rags to riches, let me tell you this secret. Change your point of view.

I know, it’s sappy as all get out, letting a smile be your umbrella kind of thing, but it  works.

When I flip from feeling resenting what I don’t have to appreciating what I do have, I feel good. When I feel good, I see good around me. When I see good around me, I see opportunities. When I see opportunities, and take them, I expand my world, and when I expand my world I get a little more of everything I want.

I love that.

Feeling satisfied with what I have. Recognizing and appreciating my resources. Valuing my possessions, valuing my skills, talents, and gifts, valuing my family, friends, communities, and co-workers.

I love that I love that we have plumbing that can bring me hot water on the top floor.

I love that I know people who, when I feel sad, or stuck, or confused, or lonesome, will help me with open hearts and loving minds and tell me very nicely when I’m being an idiot, not their word.

I love that there are people to help when my car breaks down. I love that I have a car when I need one. I love public transportation. I love that I can walk when I want and where I want.

Are you sensing a pattern here?

When we let ourselves relax into appreciation, the world is so lavish, so deluxe and opulent, that just looking out the window at the view we see each day can fill our hearts.

When I claim and value my resources, something magical starts to happen. I find myself with more resources. I find support in unlikely places. I am offered generous help, and seemingly magical things happen for me with astounding regularity.

Some people call it luck. As you can see, it’s not really luck, it’s all about appreciation, gratitude, openness, awareness, and action.

Why do I appreciate what I have? What makes me thankful? Why do I choose to be aware? How am I open?

By choosing to live a life that is conducive to attracting resources, I will attract resources. When I am grateful and generous, when I value and appreciate, my life gets really nice.

Allowing my life to flow, relaxing into my flowing natural life, I take things in stride with joy and satisfaction. I see all kinds of challenges as opportunities, I find myself choosing to change my old crappy habits and patterns, and I have more fun.

How have I changed from living a scarcity mindset to revelling in my lavish and splendiferous world?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 10152013