teddwebb

I have so much in my life to be grateful for – there is so much that is going well for me – so much that feels right and good.  I have worked hard to know a feeling like this and today I will let myself have it.  I really believe that the purpose of life is to be happy.  In my lack of awareness of myself I have perpetuated an old habit pattern of focusing on the negative.  Things can be basically good, but if there is one thing going wrong, that is what will take my focus and occupy my attention.  It is time for me to accept being happy.  At one time in my life, I lost happiness, and since then I have never trusted life enough to relax and accept good and grace.  I want to trust that my days are meant for me to enjoy as I did when I was a child before I learned differently.  I want to trust life as I did when I was young.

“Just try to be happy.  Unhappiness starts with wanting to be happier.”

Sam Levenson

We all have an internal conversation or dialog with ourselves that we tend to carry on constantly.  Often I find myself projecting what the outcome of a situation is going to be or trying to predict what is going to happen given the situation at hand, and generally, I “catch myself” thinking negatively, and predicting conflict, or bad outcomes and expecting the worse.  For the past 6 months, every time I “catch myself” going down the road of having negative internal dialog, I STOP myself abruptly, and remind myself that negative thinking just causes stress, resentment, anger, frustration, and unhappiness, and I stop thinking about the situation entirely altogether, or I go back and rethink the situation, but from an all positive perspective this time and with a positive outcome this time and not a negative outcome.  Additionally, when things do go wrong now, instead of flying off the handle, I examine the situation thoroughly and look at all aspects involved to determine which ones were unavoidable, which ones were accidental, and which ones were the careless, uncaring ones that are the root cause of “the thing going wrong” in the first place.  This helps me see everything from a larger perspective and understand the world more harmoniously, and it reduces the amount of negativity that I do feel because I peel away the layers of ill feelings one layer at a time as I work my way down to the actual, root cause.  So instead of a whole large onion’s worth of anger and frustration, I now only have just the itty bitty little core of the onion’s anger and frustration.

I find myself looking forward to tasks from a negative standpoint, always expecting the worst outcome, expecting everything to go wrong and fail, which unfortunately, quite often tends to be the case – when you’re rushing and trying to take shortcuts!  So in the past few months, I have tried to catch myself when I am expecting the worse and stop that train of thought, and think of something else, think that everything will run smoothly, go over the details to try to remember everythng so that it all runs smoothly, or just visualize everything turning out well.  I’ve done a lot of positive visualization in the past 6 months and I’ve found a lot of peace in the process, and a lot of happiness too!

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