Tag: Joy

Finding Steady Ground

Achieving Goals, Happiness, The Pathway To Fulfilment

For a while now I’ve felt a little lost, in the sense that I didn’t feel like I was living up to the purpose I had found for myself and I was just coasting. It felt as if I had a purpose but no motivation to work towards it. Having Fibromyalgia I feel exhausted most of the time, so taking the time to work on my purpose is hard. Though I do need some sort of steady ground to keep me centred and from which to build.

I have a Buddhist faith, although I would also class myself as Unitarian, and I haven’t meditated or prayed at my shrine for a long time and watching this interview with Shia LeBeouf shifted something in me. He is someone who has hurt people and this recently spilled out into the public eye, which brought him to rock bottom. However, he found a way forward through a Catholic faith, as well as doing the work with other groups to get sober and make amends for the hurt he caused to others.

I guess seeing his transformation through faith I have realised the importance a daily religious practice has on giving you structure and a steady ground on which to move through the world. It has to be a daily practice though. My approach of prayer on an ad hoc basis has not worked. This is part of the work of finding fulfilment, to have daily practices that nourish the soul and clear the mind. I will try again.

Building Joyful Energy

Happiness

When we think of people with lots of energy we often think of hyper individuals who can’t sit still or who talk a lot. When we think if the opposite we think of people who are down in the dumps or who are mostly negative.

When I talk about joyful energy I am not talking about being hyper, what I mean is the energy we get when we are joyful; and being joyful is a state of mind. When we think of things that bring us joy our energy level goes up.

With practice we can become joyful more often and be filled with positive energy. Being joyful is a choice, it is a matter of what we focus on and how we choose to see the world. Go be joyful.

Improve Your Life

Happiness, Health, The Pathway To Fulfilment

When a person is depressed we give them antidepressants, which changes their bodies chemistry into a happier state. Our body chemistry is changing all of the time from situation to situation. If we are sleeping it will be one way, if we are exercising it will be another, if we are having an argument it will be another.

What we are physically doing has an impact on our body chemistry, but our thoughts more so. A happy thought and a sad thought create very different states in the body. If we change our thoughts we change our body’s chemistry and we can elevate ourselves to a state of joy or excitement, all with our thinking.

Our thinking patterns have been hard wired into our brains by our beliefs about a variety of things. If we can identify the limiting beliefs and then prove to ourselves that they are untrue, we fundamentally shift ourselves towards a more powerful state of being.

Improve your beliefs, improve your thoughts, improve your life.

Questioning Our Beliefs

Happiness, The Pathway To Fulfilment

Beliefs are conclusions that we assume to be the truth. We often say that beliefs come from faith, but a belief unquestioned becomes a closed door. When we say we belong to a particular religion we are often identifying with a belief system which has institutionalised beliefs into a specific way of seeing the world.

Though the guidance from religions can be beneficial, if they go unexplored and unquestioned this is not a spiritual journey, it is a spiritual roundabout. Beliefs are important, particularly religious ones, because they deal with the nature of reality. However, I feel these beliefs should not go unquestioned. If beliefs are seen as a working model of how the world works, we can then repeatedly test it to see if it produces joy, happiness and fulfilment. These are the measure of a life well lived.

Opportunities In Life

Happiness, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

I work as a complaint handler for a bank, which to many may be the last job they would ever wish to do, but I find great joy in doing it. The important question to ask ourselves is what opportunities are we looking for?

Opportunities to be rich, beautiful, happy or healthy. There are many things we seek for ourselves, but the most profound joy comes from seeking things for others.

With a complaint something has gone wrong, it may be the fault of the bank or the fault of someone else. The opportunity is to help reduce the customer’s suffering, to put right a wrong and rebuild the relationship between the customer and the bank.

I spoke to a customer recently who was so unwell and in pain that his Wife was talking on his behalf. His Wife was also suffering to see what her Husband was going through. During the call I managed to make the Wife and her Husband laugh and resolved the complaint successfully.

If you do your work with compassion and the intention to bring joy to other people’s lives, you will enjoy your work, and it will give your life purpose.

Choosing Joy

Happiness

“I don’t think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains.”
― Anne Frank

Recently I have been suffering with what appears to be Sinusitis and Labyrinthitis, which has caused sinus pain, painful ears, dizziness and Tinnitus for the past four months. I have been through several stages of dealing with this seemingly unending suffering. First I thought that it cannot last that long. Then it did and I became somewhat unhappy and a little depressed about it. Then I remembered the words from Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor E Frankl, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

I began to seek out reasons to be joyful. I work in telephone customer services, so I speak to a lot of people. Some of which, as is normal in customer service, are unhappy and take it out on you. I began asking customers how their day was going and having really lovely conversations about the ups and downs of life living through a pandemic. I focused on how lucky I am to have a Wife and Daughter, to still have my parents, to wake up each morning. The pain, dizziness and noise in my ears remained constant, though subdued through medication periodically throughout the day, but my attitude to how I was physically feeling changed. I decided not to let how I was physically feeling determine how I was mentally feeling. This helped a lot, I began to feel that there is a way to master how we choose to feel each day, joy being the best feeling to aim for.

I then moved into a phase that was reflective. I reflected on how I miss silence and being pain free. I realised that the simple things in life are really important. The ability to sit and meditate without the constant buzzing of Tinnitus will be something that I will savoir once I recover from whatever is going on in my sinuses and ears. It is important to be grateful for everything that we have, as well as the tough experiences we have. The valleys we go through serve to highlight the euphoria of the mountains we climb. We all have, to varying degrees, the ability to choose how we want to feel, by choosing what we focus on. If we are unwell do we focus on how that is making us feel or do we focus on still having the ability to do the things we enjoy, even if the illness reduces these options. We all have the ability “…to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”