Uncovering Your Joy: Using a Personal Journal to Discover a Life Filled with HappinessWritten by Patti Testerman
You have permission to publish this article electronically or in print, free of charge, as long as bylines are included and resource box is left unchanged. A courtesy copy of your publication would be appreciated. Uncovering Your Joy: Using a Personal Journal to Discover a Life Filled with Happiness Copyright 2004 Patti Testerman Journal Genie, The Website That Talks Back http://www.journalgenie.com Uncovering Your Joy: Using a Personal Journal to Discover a Life Filled with HappinessAuthor Tristine Rainer wrote “Happiness within a diary has less to do with events you encounter in life than with way you experience process of living.” Because a diary mirrors how you perceive and deal with events, it can be used for developing capacity to more fully experience joy. Do you use your journal only for problem-solving, dark days, sorrowful feelings, or depressive thoughts? If so, why not start recording happiness’s as well. In fact, why not keep a special Joy Journal? That way, when you’re having a bad day, just pull out your Joy Journal and re-experience small happiness’s. Will keeping a journal actually bring you joy? No. However, many diarists have used their journals to alter their perceptions and in process achieve a joy filled life. For example, Rainer cites one woman’s first attempt at writing positive emotions, after years of negative entries:
| | Training Your Mind To Help YouWritten by Stephanie Yeh
TRAINING Your Mind to Help You ================================================== Our friend, singer and songwriter Chuck Pyle, likes to say, "The mind is like a bad neighborhood-you should never go there by yourself." If you're mind hasn't been trained to help you, via methods like meditation, shamanism or NLP, it might really be a bad neighborhood. Our minds constantly absorb thoughts, behaviors, and responses from our environment. These various thought patterns and responses may or may not be in alignment with our goals. So, unless we actively train our minds to be responsive to our needs, we may be in for a wild chariot ride (and 6 out of control horses)! From a shamanic point of view, we say that each person is a spirit with a mind and body. In other words, we are spirit and mind and body are tools that we, spirit, can use. However, just because we have mind as a tool doesn't mean that mind, in its current form, is a good tool for us. The untrained mind is a lot like an untrained animal-be prepared for unexpected! Have you ever sworn to yourself (say on New Year's Day?) that you're never going to fall for wrong kind of mate again? Or you're going to lose 10 pounds this year? Or you're going to . list is endless. Then what happens? We forget what we've promised ourselves, or we find other priorities that are more important. That forgetfulness is a sign that mind isn't trained to help us with our aims. Mind is doing its own thing. So what can we do to train mind? Segment intending, one of our favorite exercises from Abraham-Hicks, is a simple way to train your mind to help you while also accomplishing a lot each day. Here's how you do it:
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