Celebrate Happiness

I feel like I'm in a confessional, "Bless me Father for I have sinned because it has been a few weeks since my last blog post." What can I say? Family and home pressures too numerous, not to mention the time I have to give to my clients, and actually it is right that I give more time to family and clients than to my blog.

Onwards with the blog!

My subject today is to celebrate happiness. I have a couple of very worthwhile clients at the moment who have both suffered difficult childhoods and difficult subsequent life experiences. If I let them dwell on these they could feel pretty depressed don't you think? So we are trying to stimulate their happy neural networks. Every day they have to think of and dwell on a positive memory or experience or feeling.

Thoughts are only flases of electrical stimulation and they go round the brain through networks. These networks are the ones they know, the ones they have been used to taking and using. A person who likes dogs will have a neural network set up so that each time he sees a dog he feels positive, happy, perhaps a nice memory may be sparked. Someone witha dog phobia would have a diferent, negative network of thoughts activated by the same stimulus. Each of these networks are in part habits. The brain is used to responding in this way os it always responds in a similar manner.

So if we keep prodding and stimulating the positive networks then we can develop more positive habitual ways of thinking. And if we have a habit of thinking positively then we become more positive overall.

Despite the tough times, everyone does have some positive memories or experiences to draw on. Any tiny memory will do - playing in the snow, a funny time with a friend, enjoying a certain TV programme - anything at all. If you train yourself to consider a happy or positive memory or a positive thing about yourself as a person every single day, you will be compounding and strengthening your positive view of yourself. You will improve your self-esteem slowly but surely.

There are positive parts of everyone and we need to strengthen these sides of ourselves in order to learn how to deal with the negative parts of life. Even something that started off badly will have a bit of good to build upon.

If you have been born into an unfortunate situation, it is not necessarily your destiny to stay in that mould. You CAN change your stars. I would like to recommend a film called "A Knights Tale" starring the late Heath Ledger, which describes how the unlikliest situations can turn around.

And remember, in your darkest hours, "I may be lying in the gutter, but I am looking up at the stars." I wish Heath Ledger had been able to see those stars.

The stars ARE there. All you need to do is open your eyes and look up.