Cultivating Happiness For
Times of Hardship
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
~Unknown
We all experience events that cause deep pain or hardship. During these times, our energy is contracted, scattered, negative, and our thoughts are out of control and paralyzing. We feel the pain at a visceral level in our minds, in our hearts, and in our bodies. Though we can’t change the outer event, we can choose how we respond, thereby changing our experience of it.
Are you feeling:
- Saddened by news that has had an effect on your ability to function?
- Caught unaware by a new situation and unprepared for the circumstance?
- Confused and at a loss as to what action to take next?
- Devastated by a catastrophe?
- Depleted emotionally and physically?
- Worried to distraction over an issue or issues?
- Empty having lost a loved one?
- Overwhelmed by despair, fear, and lack of control?
No matter how horrible or seemingly inescapable our hardship, we always have a choice–not whether we endure but how we endure.
Cultivating happiness may seem impossible when threatened with the loss, illness, or the pain we or a loved one may be suffering. Yet, using the strategies for cultivating happiness is the single best and most empowering thing that we can do for ourselves and those we love when faced with a hardship.
As you practice cultivating happiness from within, you learn the art of coping in a healthy way. Through mindfulness, learned optimism, and purpose, you will learn to find meaning in the pain, which will shift your energy and strengthen your ability, resolve, and resourcefulness to navigate what has befallen you.
Through Our Work You Can Achieve:
- Inspired Goals: Harness the mindset to brave adversity with acceptance and peace. Unleash inner strengths to overcome difficulty and sustain growth through spirituality
- Ideal Self: Discover and articulate a clear image of how you want to brave the adversity, and take the steps to embody that vision, beginning now.
- Mindful Action: Determine and establish the steps necessary to develop the mindset and behaviors that you can employ day to day to feel empowered over the challenges of hardship.
- Energy: Observe what is depleting you and discover and employ generative rituals that will preserve and fuel your energy.
- A Sense of Control: Learn to differentiate those things that are within your control and those things that are not, and focus valuable energy on what you can control.
- Equanimity: Use mindfulness to reduce stress, broaden perspective, gain clarity, find gratitude–all of which will enable you to show up for yourself or loved ones more powerfully.
- Purpose: Summon spiritual principles to find meaning, connection, compassion and fortitude.
- Joy: Learn to remain open to moments of joy that are always available to you, even in dark times.
You have the power to cultivate happiness during times of hardship, and to shift your energy and your perspective to find the meaning behind the pain, and use that meaning as the keystone for strength, action, and joy.
Cultivating Happiness For
Embracing Change
When one door closes, another opens;
but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the
closed door that we do not see the one that has opened for us.
~Alexander Graham Bell
Change is fundamental to life. Still, when predictability disappears so does our confidence, security, and sense of control. Rather than be disheartened and discouraged by the ambiguity and uncertainty of life, what if we accept it, relax into it, and embrace it? A closed door is our signal to look for the portal to new possibilities.
Whether you are facing:
- Becoming a new mom, or an empty-nester
- Sudden or planned retirement
- Divorce or a new relationship
- Relocation
- Financial shifts
- Aging and/or loss of health
...change in any form disrupts our equilibrium, and worse, leaves us stressed with feelings of fear, doubt, emptiness, uncertainty, anxiety. We feel disoriented. If we are operating from paralyzing feelings, it is difficult to progress, solve problems, or see the opportunity for growth and the possibilities that lie ahead. Discomfort doesn’t come from change. It comes from resistance to change.
Cultivate happiness and learn the art of accepting life "as is." Acceptance allows you to release your fear, doubt, and resistance and redirect your focus and energy on the possibilities within your new situation. As you shift your thoughts and energy, you are less stressed and able to explore and pursue what matters most to you.
Through Our Work You Can Achieve:
- New Goals: Freedom to embrace change and evaluate what you want from your new situation.
- Action Plan: Determine and establish the steps necessary to develop the mindset and behaviors that you can employ day to day to shape and create your new reality and new goals.
- Ideal Image: Define and articulate your ideal version of yourself as you navigate your new situation and beyond, and embody that ideal image, beginning now.
- Obstacle Elimination: Identify obstacles to peace and how to remove them. Discover methods to eliminate fear, confusion, paralysis, and distrust that often accompany change.
- Stress Reduction: Understand and challenge the thoughts and beliefs that are causing your resistance to the change. Learn to make peace with “what is” and release perceptions about how things should be.
- Change Resilience: Become more flexible. Become more adept at shifting your thoughts and energy around change for more creativity. Learn to focus on what you want from the change, not what you fear about it.
- Successful Change Evolution: Capitalize on the opportunities that accompany change to engage in the process of awakening, evolving, and growing toward a higher dimension of living.
You have the power to create greater happiness beginning now and to use that happiness as the keystone to embrace and employ change as a positive force to shape your new reality.
Cultivating Happiness For
Peaceful Parenting
The attitude that you have as a parent is what your kids will learn from,
more than what you tell them. They don’t remember
what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.
~Jim Henson
Research shows that children imprint our unexpressed thoughts and feelings.
They learn to think and feel what we think and feel–what we do on the inside.
This is great motivation for us to clean up our internal game!
Do you find that:
- You have little patience with your child/children and are prone to hair-trigger responses?
- You often go tit for tat with your teen and find yourself in frequent arguments?
- You worry and judge incessantly about what your children are doing and not doing, how they are doing it, with whom are they doing it, will they be okay, will they be happy?
- You experience chaos, frustration, guilt or regret?
- You feel guilt and regret that you are not showing up at your best for your children nor doing your very best by them?
We’ve all been there. The pain can be unbearable at times. Sustained pain, guilt, and anxiety over our parenting can cause us to lose our bearings and ourselves completely. Endless judging of ourselves and our children drains us and harms our children.
If your aim is to create a happy family, you must first learn to choose and then cultivate happiness for yourself. As you practice the skill of cultivating happiness, you model a powerful message that we are each responsible for our own happiness–this is a profound gift to bequeath your children. Children learn that happiness comes from within and is not dependent on our external circumstances.
As you become happier:
- Your energy increases.
- Your resourcefulness and creativity for problem-solving increases.
- You experience greater clarity of thought and become more efficient.
- You are more loving and less fearful, more peaceful and less anxious.
- You feel your best and are more resilient to the ups and downs of daily life.
- You foster a natural and quiet confidence, rhythm, and knowing to your parenting.
This has direct impact on how you show up for and parent your children. The positive energy that you broadcast is absorbed by your family.
Through Our Work You Can Achieve:
- Clarity on Parenting Goals: Develop a clear and conscious intention and philosophy for your parenting and parenting goals.
- Action Plan: Identify and establish the steps necessary to develop the mindset and behaviors that you can employ day to day to achieve your parenting goals.
- Ideal Parent Embodiment: Discover and articulate your ideal version of yourself as a parent, then create a plan to help you live that ideal image beginning now. Learn to embody the very qualities you wish to instill in your children.
- Conscious Parenting: Become aware of the beliefs and hidden fears stemming from your own parents’ cultures and dictums and other external influences. Uncover patterns of parenting that are not serving you or your children.
- Rational Response: Identify your trigger points–why and when your buttons get pushed and how to respond when they do. Recognize fear-based reactions so that you can respond from a place of love, not anger.
- Mindful Awareness: Be in the moment without judging and reacting. See your children as the blessing they are and not children who need to be fixed. Learn to see their perfection so that they can see it in themselves.
- Peaceful Parenting: Learn the basic underpinnings of the law of attraction and begin to experience it for yourself and your family.
You have the power to create greater happiness beginning now and to use that happiness as the keystone to be a more conscious and empowered parent.
Cultivating Happiness For Success
Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.
~Albert Schweitzer (Nobel Peace Prize, 1952)
Advances in neuroscience and positive psychology (the science of happiness) show us empirically that happiness is the precursor to success, and not the other way around. However you define success, cultivating happiness can help you get there.
Think about anything you have tried to accomplish:
- Eat healthier, lose weight, exercise, meditate
- Create life balance
- Be more patient with your children
- Advance in your career
- Be more loving to a family member or friend
- Increase and sustain your energy
- Get organized
- Manage stress
- Focus on a new business venture or home project
Chances are you’ve noticed that your energy and track record for achieving a goal is greater when you are coming from a place of happiness and optimism. Lack of happiness keeps us stuck in old patterns and prevents us from moving forward, causing frustration, chipping away at our motivation, perpetuating non-achievement, affecting our self-image, and fostering unhappiness–which perpetuates the cycle.
Happiness makes you more motivated, creative, productive, resilient, and efficient. Happiness moves you forward with the thrust of energy, positivity, and possibility–all which provide the edge to pursue and achieve what matters most to you.
Moreover, as you practice the skill of cultivating happiness from within, you connect to a deeper sense of meaning and purpose. The result: when you achieve your goals, your success is met with a sense of fulfillment and a feeling of happiness that is abiding.
Through Our Work You Can Achieve:
- Goal Clarity: Discover what you want, and most importantly, why you want it.
- Action Plan: Determine and establish the steps necessary to develop the mindset and behaviors that you can employ day-to-day to achieve your goals.
- Ideal Self: Define and articulate your ideal version of yourself and your life, and embody that ideal image, beginning now.
- Obstacle Elimination: Identify hidden obstacles and how to remove them.
- Energy Awareness: Discern what is fueling and what is depleting your energy, and channel that energy toward achieving your goals.
- Effective Mindset: Pinpoint disempowering thoughts and beliefs and learn how to turn them around. Identify and reverse bad habits.
- Success Attraction: Learn the basic underpinnings of the law of attraction and begin to experience it for yourself.
You have the power to create greater happiness beginning now and to use that happiness as the keystone to achieving your goals.
