Daily Gratitude: When you’ve spent most of your life without control of your emotions and being regulated by them, this is an important quote. It’s taken me a long time to realize that you will feel all these emotions and they will come and go but that it’s then my responsibility to decide which ones, if any, I will act on. It goes along with the fact you can choose to be happy. I never understood that until recently. I have also learned that you need to feel all your emotions and let them flow through you. If you continue to suppress them because either you’re afraid of them or don’t know how to deal with them, they will eventually come out. They will manifest in your body as disease. I have told you all about how that happened with me so I won’t repeat it here. Just know that I am the perfect example of that. So pay attention to the message in this quote.

Daily Gratitude: It never ceases to amaze me how some of the more complex ideas are actually pretty simple. This is another example of that. And Wayne Dyer is so good at helping us understand. When we talked about change we addressed this too. If we look at something as a good thing instead of “why not keep doing things the way we used to?”, it makes you excited to see what’s going to happen next. There is a preschool and also older grades where I used to walk every day. They had a nice big grassy area where the kids could play. Then a few months ago, they closed off that grassy area and started some sort of new building. Initially I was disappointed wondering why they were doing this and why they couldn’t leave things the way they were. Then I caught myself and I found myself wondering what they were building and would it replace what they already have or just add to it. I became excited to walk by and see how it was progressing. I had to make the effort to see things differently but it was worth it. The excitement I created for myself far outweighed the grouchy mood I was in when I wanted it to stay the same. Like they were going to listen to me anyway. Take some inventory in your life and see if there’s at least one area you can try this out in. I think you’ll be as happy as I was.

Daily Gratitude: I am sure I’ve written about this before but I truly enjoy new takes on old concepts. It’s all about perspective and our interpretation of things that happen to us and around us. If we look at something as an annoyance, then its impact on us won’t be very big. It will just be another thing in the course of the day. If we look at it with major drama, then it will become a significant event in our lives and perhaps all else will have to stop until that one thing is resolved. This can be the same thing but looked at so differently by two different people. How do you view things? Are there some categories that invoke significant responses and some that don’t? That would not be surprising but it might be worth looking into to see if it can provide any clue as to why certain events stimulate your nervous system more than others. You can find a lot about your past as well as your present but checking out your responses and reactions. We should aim to be able to put an event or occurrence objectively into a table where we can simply examine it and use logic (not emotions) to evaluate it. When we can do that, it will help our entire bodies not respond with illness and stress. Practice with simple things – lay them out and go through what’s happened using logical objective criteria. The more you practice the easier it will become.