Happiness 24/7

Happiness 24/7

Find happiness using this one weird secret! Professionals don’t want you to know this! Call now for the secret to happiness! Only $99.95!

Kidding!

But I do have a secret to happiness, and you know how I feel about secrets: Unless they are yours, I’m tellin’!

Happiness is inside each of us all the time. I’m going to say that again because it’s really important. Happiness is inside each of us all the time.

We are born with it, like brains, or skin. I think that is so remarkable. It’s right there. Maybe happiness holds our spirit, like the coating of a cell. Or maybe it is the nucleus of our spirit. Maybe it’s just a special part of our brain, like the optic nerve, or medulla oblongata, but it’s there, just waiting for us.

Whatever it is, all we have to do is find our way to it.

Happiness is available regardless of our circumstances. It’s a 24/7 service, so to speak. It is available whether we think we deserve it, whether we think we’ve done anything to earn it, whether we think we are good enough for it. It’s like our brains, or skin, we don’t have to deserve ‘em to have those, we don’t need to be something remarkable to enjoy the benefits of our dermis; we take our brains and skin for granted.

Tibetan saints get it. Enlightened beings get it. Grownups, yeah, we get it. I can be having intense physical experience, like the saint I met in Kathmandu, who couldn’t want from the intensity of his physical experience, and yet was peaceful and oozed joy and bliss. Or the people held in prisons who maintain their happiness, from their core, not from their outsides.

Happiness is not a prize to be won, it’s just a place inside us.

How do I feel when I feel happy?

That question is gold. Here’s how to do it. Become aware of your feet, become aware of your bottom, become aware of your breathing. Focus on the question, How do I feel when I feel happy? You might want to ask it several times. And notice changes in your physical being.

First thing that happens for me is that I relax my physical body. My posture often shifts upward. I find that my chest feels more open, and my heart-space feels light. I often notice that I smile.

This is what I mean when I talk about being able to change feelings as easily as changing socks. We can ask a good “how do I feel” question with focus and presence, and our physical experience changes. And the more I go to happy, or peaceful, or relaxed, the easier it is for me to get back there. And that’s a fact.

When I choose happiness, I choose soft, I choose vulnerable, I choose peaceful, too. It’s like a nice set. It comes with joy, ease, bliss, and satisfaction. I love that!

I live that a lot of the time.

How have I changed from thinking that happiness was happenstance to knowing happiness is always with me?

(c) Pam Guthrie all rights reserved 02232014

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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

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I Do Believe

I Do Believe

We’re right, you know. We’re right about all sorts of stuff. We’re right about all the stuff we think we are right about, except what we aren’t.

Huh?

We are so cute.

Right and wrong are fundamental to our being happy in the world. We need to know the difference, as our schoolteachers used to say.

Thing is, there is a certain degree of subjectivity involved. Morals, ethics, ethos, law, doctrine, dogma; we have a million ways to dictate our ideas of right and wrong to each other. The big strong ones are often the ones who get to decide on the law. They are often the ones who decide in our families, too. This can make things skew, putting some before others. It can create a lot of troublous situations for us down the road.

I have some fundamental ideas that I will share with you. Take what you like, and leave the rest, as the saying goes.

Truth is only Truth with a capital T if it is true for everyone. Every. One.

It is one thing for me to believe you are mistaken. It is another thing to believe you are bad. We are not our behavior.

People, at our core, are amazing and wonderful. Sometimes we get very far from our core. The farther we get, the stranger our behavior.

Thing is, we all think our beliefs are right.

It’s the nature of belief.

Thing is, a lot of our beliefs are bull bananas. (Do you like that, bull bananas? I made it up just for you.) We know that’s the case when our beliefs say that we suck, or that we are better than each other. We know it when our beliefs say that someone‘s self is bad because of what they believe, rather than their beliefs are bad.

Think is, while we can have really awful beliefs, still, we can change our beliefs. Really. We can decide what we want to believe. Really. A belief is an idea that we have rehearsed so much that it has gone deep into our unconscious minds, and affects our behavior and feelings from there.

We don’t much think about what we believe, because we believe it. we know it’s true. I need to start to pay attention to what I believe about how the world works. When I notice that I think the world sucks in some way, I have found a fixed delusion, a bad belief. I can poke around in it and find the deets, then I can dismantle it, and replace it with a belief that supports me, supports us, in living our natural lives of joy, bliss, satisfaction, contentment, and happiness.

Creative Questions are the easiest, cleanest, fastest way to get a new belief into play.

How have I changed from believing awful things to believing my life gets more wonderful all the time?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 12232013

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The Fountain of Daily Bliss

The Fountain of Daily Bliss

How do I feel when I am alive? What fills me with vim? Why am I vibrant?

You know, every single one of us has being alive in common. We also have being born, so we share that experience, going from liquid to air breathing. What a change that was!

Then we come to the quality of our lives. And that’s where stuff gets interesting. We get our circumstances, and then decide how we are going to go with them.

How do you live your life? Do you see your days as a chore to get through, slogging along in the mire of circumstance, weighted down by responsibility, and drained by the wants and needs of others?

Do you see your days as a string of blessings, opportunities, and challenges, nourished by the milk of human kindness, thriving in contribution to family and community, and growing in spirit and maturity and bliss?

I slide around on that continuum. Most days are toward the bliss end, fewer and fewer at the slogging end.

I will tell you, also, that some days it takes me some thinkin’ to scooch over to the bliss end.

Why do I choose to be happy? Why do I choose to be positive? Why do I choose lighthearted?

Feeling crabby, or grouchy, or a little scared, or anxious; those are familiar feelings to me. They grew up with me, kept me company. Thing is, they are not supportive or nurturing feelings. They chew on my nerves, suck the juice out from my immune system, and otherwise drain me on all fronts.

That means it is in my best interest, when I notice I’m in there, feeling one of those feelings, to break that habit loop. I need to change my thinking. Asking a good Creative Question is the fastest way to do it that I know of.

We all ask creative questions all the time, mostly bad ones. Why is it so hard? Why am I such a loser? How could it get any worse? Why don’t things ever go my way? Why am I so unlucky? A creative question is one with the answer built in to the question.

When we ask creative questions, our subconscious mind goes to work to find answers for us. Each time I ask, why is it so hard, my subconscious comes up with reasons for me.

When we think thoughts, our mind/brain converts the thoughts from thought energy to physical energy, and we read that as emotion. When the emotion is repeated often enough, we have a physical sensation. Depending on the flavor of the emotion, we end up feeling happy, or scared, angry, sad, surprised, contemptuous, or disgusted. Then we put thoughts on top of that, and that complicated soup becomes feelings. Wow.

Asking good Creative Questions shifted all that into a place of light. Where stuff can heal in safety, where topics can be addressed from a resourceful space. Where bliss can be a daily occurrence.

How am I tapped into the fountain of daily bliss?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 11122013

Unhobbling the Cash Cow

Hobbling the Cash Cow

Resistance. I know none of you have any kind of resistance to change, but I must confess that I do. Sometimes I think of it as my stubborn streak, and from time to time it does serve me well, but, well, it’s all those other times.

Today I drew the Cash card, and had a flare of “no!” show up. Resistance.

Resistance is a gift of ego. It’s ego’s way of maintaining the status quo. Ego likes the way things are. Ego will fight change all the way. Ego doesn’t care if you are suffering with the way things are, that’s the way ego wants things to stay.

So what do we do? Are we doomed to be flattened by ego over and over, never making progress, always feeling bad?

Of course not! (Play superhero theme music here.) Enter the Power of Choice!

Choice is the ego’s worst enemy. When we remember to choose, and then choose, ego is quieted. When we remember to choose, and then choose, we are powerful. We effect change. We create the world we want to live in, and ego be damned.

I have had resistance around owning a surplus of money. I have changed many aspects of this, I’ve made wonderful progress, and continue to do so. It is one of my ego’s strongholds. And the more crap I get out of my emotional basement, the more I notice it.

Creative Questions help so much to transform resistance into our desired change. When we find some resistance to a Creative Question we really want to accept, there are a lot of things we can do to soften our egos up.

We can add the words “would” or “could” to our Question. When I am working with a Question and I’m getting a “NO!” response to it, adding would or could to the Question makes just enough wiggle room that I often can dispel the “no” just that easily. And when I add the word, “else” to the mix, step outta the way, Sally!

Why else would I have a surplus of money? How else could I have my own savings? How else could I personally channel the unlimited supply of extra cash?

Powerful, dynamic, comfortable, easy.

When we decide to release our resistance to the possibility of a nicer life, we start to have one. When we decide to release our resistance to more enjoyment, we find it. We can find ourselves delighted with our transformation, and surprise ourselves with the ease of transition.

We can send our ego off to count the leaves on the trees, or grains of sand at the beach.

Owning that I am resistant is the first step. It is very different from saying, “I just can’t do it.” If you want, I will give instructions for a Creative Questions Acceptance Train exercise. Just let me know.

How have I changed from resisting something I think I want, to accepting the transformation with grace and joy?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 09102013

How to Put Out the Put Downs

How to Put Out the Put Downs

So many of us have a favorite put down we use on ourselves. We call ourselves “loser, screw up,” and worse, we tell ourselves that we can’t do anything right. We tell ourselves we that we are stupid. or lazy, or fat, or ugly. We talk to ourselves in such awful ways that it breaks my heart to think of it.

We can recite our failures with ease, but brush aside our successes with a casual wave of the hand. We mark our failures with even more negative behavior, like getting drunk or otherwise bingeing. And then, in addition to the first failure, we now feel like crap. Awesome.

We are asking, and answering, terrible creative questions. Remember, what makes a question a creative question is that the result is built into the question. So when we are asking questions like, “why am I such a loser?”, or “what’s wrong with me?”, I’m totally setting myself up.

It’s a funny way to think of it, but these are lifestyle questions. They set the tone for our decisions, our choices, our behavior. I know, it’s wacky. So, now the question is, do I want this lifestyle, where I am putting myself down, medicating myself, flirting with depression, or chronic anger, fear, dis-ease.

When I beat myself up, for whatever reason, I am not only doing myself a disservice, but also you, because I am spending all that energy on being awful instead of spending it on my wonderful gifts, gifts that benefit all of us.

How would I feel were I successful? How would I feel were I competent? How would I feel were I accomplished? Why do I live the lifestyle I want?

When we are making big changes with Creative Questions, we have a huge advantage over many other healing modalities for the simple reason that Creative Questions help us change the habit. And therein, my dear, is the gold.

When I am making big changes, I know that using my Creative Questions will support me in making the tiny changes I need to make to allow the big changes to take hold. When I am making big changes, the old habits run wide and deep, so I like to ask a nice variety of Creative Questions to pull up all those weeds, and make room for a good, solid foundation for my new life.

In many modalities, we can experience instant change, but we are screwed unless we can break the old habits that supported to old behavior, or the old circumstances. This is why so many of us fail with losing weight, and regain all we lost. We shed the fat, but not the underlying habits.

Why do I support my new body? How do I care for my body? Why am I so successful?

Why are you so successful? What makes you accomplished? How do you recognize that you are a winner?

When I choose to see myself as successful, competent, a winner, I behave differently. I carry myself differently, and you will see me differently. How cool is that. When we change our thoughts, we pull out new parts of ourselves, aspects of our personality that have patiently been waiting their turn to shine. And we will shine, we will feel successful, and we will be satisfied, happy, peaceful and enthusiastic about our lives.

How have I changed from thinking old, icky thoughts to choosing to see the best me?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 09062013