I just finished reading Gretchen Rubin's book The Happiness Project and I loved it! Check out her blog here. There are a lot of her ideas I'd like to share....one little idea is to find a Place of Refuge
To sum up, basically Gretchen says most of us have a 'negativity bias,' we spend more time dwelling on problems or unhappy feelings than good ones. To offset this, we need to develop our own little storehouse in our mind of happy memories or favorite images. Think Maria in Sound of Music - 'when the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I'm feeling sad...'
Even though I'm a cheery person, I completely have that negativity bias, and I haven't created that mental place of refuge. I'm working on it now.
This weekend was not the greatest. I've been fighting something and napped like it was my job (with bad dreams to boot) and dealt with the lovely time change. Now of course, I can't sleep. Here are images I'm working on conjuring up..
*The latest here
*Sitting at the beach with friends
*A trip with E in which we sat outside in the sun and read our books in nature for about three hours
*Two recent conversations with a co-worker in which I died laughing, one I actually stood up in my chair and pushed her in 'shut up!' style.
*Sitting by the pool my first summer after teaching, pre-child, feeling not a care in the world
*A fun, spontaneous trip to Monterey two years ago with E and Miss P
How about you? Do you have a place of refuge? What do you switch to thinking about??
1 comment:
When I was about 15 we had a church camp and the leader took the older girls on a hike. She took us up to the top of the mountain and we all just sat there and looked around. Felt of our Heavenly Father's love for about 10 mintues. Then, she told us that someday we will not feel is His love as strongly as we do now, we might be weighed down by kids and a job and we needed to capture that moment in our brains and remember back to it.
I often think about that moment. I think about when times were MUCH simpler and all the beauty that is around us.
I should write my own blog about it... :)
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