Daily Happiness: Setting your day to create a happier life

"Happiness is the spiritual experience of living
every minute with love grace and gratitude"            
                                                  Dennis Waitley

Life is meant to be fun, and we have the power within to make it that way every day.  According to Andy Baggot, who wrote a book, "Blissology - The Art and Science of Happiness", all it takes is five minutes at the beginning of each day to plan how you want to feel that day.  Source Energy only matches your dominant feelings, so if you start the day with good feelings, the events and encounters you attract will begin to match, and soon you will have that perfect day.  How you think and feel at the beginning of the day has a strong tendency to set the tone for the day.  If you wake up feeling worried, anxious or stressed, your day is more likely to be flavored with those feelings throughout - unless you do something to change the way you feel.

Here's a suggestion on how to do this.  No matter how we're feeling, the first thing we should do when we get up is spend five minutes setting our day.  This will be your cornerstone of your happiness practice.  Baggott suggests that you:

1.  Find a quiet place to sit and take three relaxing breaths
2.  Think about all the positive things in your life.  Sit in appreciation of your amazing body, your friends, your home and anything else in your life that makes you feel good.  Really get in touch with those feelings of gratitude.
3.  Imagine your day unfolding in the very best possible way.  Don't hold back - think big.  If you can imagine it, you have the power to make anything reality.  Whatever you have planned for that day, imagine everything unfolding perfectly.
4.  Smile to yourself as you visualize having a day filled with consistently improving feelings.
5.  Now go and enjoy your day.

Every time you set your day, you're practicing happiness, and with practice comes the realization of your dreams.  The more you work with this simple technique, the more your life will change for the better.  Soon you will marvel at your own power to create your life in a way that consistently expands your bliss.  So ask yourself, "how do I really want my day to be?"

Closing a Cycle

One always has to know when a stage comes to an end.

If we insist in staying longer than the necessary time, we lose the happiness and the meaning of the other stages we have to go through. Closing cycles, shutting doors, ending chapters or whatever name we give it, what matters is to leave in the past the moments of life that have finished.

Did you lose your job? Has a loving relationship come to an end? Did you leave your parents house? Gone to live abroad? Has a long-lasting friendship ended all of a sudden? You can spend a long time wondering why this has happened. You can tell yourself you won't make another step until you find out why certain things that were so important and so solid in your life have turned into dust, just like that.

But such an attitude will be awfully stressful for everyone involved: your parents, your husband or wife, your friends, your children, your sister, everyone will be finishing chapters, turning over new leaves, getting on with life, and they will all feel bad seeing you at a standstill.

None of us can be in the present and the past at the same time, not even when we try to understand the things that happen to us. What has past will not return: we cannot forever be children, late adolescents, sons that feel guilt or rancor toward our parents, lovers who day and night relive an affair with someone who has gone away and has not the least intention of coming back.

Things pass, and the best we can do is to let them really go away. That is why it is so important (however painful it may be!), to destroy souvenirs, move, give lots of things away, sell or donate the books you have at home. Everything in this visible world is a manifestation of the invisible world, of what is going on in our hearts, and getting rid of certain memories also means making some room for other memories to take their place. Let things go. Release them. Detach yourself from them. Nobody plays this life with marked cards, so sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Do not expect anything in return, do not expect your efforts to be appreciated, your genius to be discovered, your love to be understood. Stop turning on your emotional television to watch the same program over and over again, the one that shows how much you suffered from a certain loss: that is only poisoning you, nothing else.

Nothing is more dangerous than not accepting love relationships that are broken off, work that is promised but there is no starting date, discussions that are always put off waiting for the ideal moment. Before a new chapter is begun, the old one has to be finished: tell yourself that what has passed will never come back. Remember that there was a time when you could live without that thing or that person, nothing is irreplaceable. A habit is not a need. This may sound so obvious, it may even be difficult, but it is very important to close cycles. Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because that cycle no longer fits your life. Shut the door, change the record, clean the house, shake off the dust. Accept what you don't have. Stop being who you were and change into who you are.