FIND YOUR HAPPY: An Inspirational Guide to Loving Life to Its Fullest (3 page)

Part One: All Clear

The book is divided into two parts. The first is “All Clear.” “All Clear” is the aspect that helps you dig deep into the nooks and crannies of your life to help shine light on what isn’t working. We will get real honest with ourselves. It will be fun, challenging, and rewarding. You want results, I am sure, and I am confident you will achieve them by starting with the “All Clear” method. Just as a plane must have safety checks before liftoff, you must do a spot check, remove clutter, and ask the tough questions to regulate your safety, because when you do take off it will be a big blast off.

Each chapter focuses on a separate issue connected to breaking through barriers and living your life fully. I will give you step-by-step guidance on how to apply each new idea. Please visit my website playwiththeworld.com for additional guidance. Each chapter also has an audio component called Motivational Mantras that you can find on my website, playwiththeworld.com, under Shop. Each chapter has a vlog to accompany its message, on playwiththeworld.com/vlogs or go to YouTube and follow
Play
with
the
World
channel. In fact, there are many juicy goodies on the website designed to help you to stay connected to your happy before, during and after this process.

Each chapter is divided into mini sections to help you create lasting results. Each chapter starts with an inspiring quote; this will help get you into the mindset of what is to come. It always makes for an awesome feel-good moment to read positive things. In each section, I will share a technique, suggestion, and idea about how you can shift your perception and move towards happiness. Since this book is a guide about finding and keeping happiness, it is also structured as a workbook for you. Most chapters will have an Awesome Opportunity section, which is basically a chance to try it out for yourself. I called them Awesome Opportunities because you have a choice to do as much or as little as you see fit. It’s like extra credit, and if you answer the questions in each section you will see great results in your own life. This book is a guide to help you break through barriers, so it is highly recommended that you do all of the work in order to get and keep your happy for good.

Part
Two:
Take
Off

After you have done all the hard work in Part One and removed the clutter that has kept you from being the awesome shining you, you are ready to Take Off. When I say hard work, I am not trying to scare you off. Don’t worry at all; it’s not bad. In fact it’s fun because you get to learn about yourself and you will learn what really makes you happy. You will be in a position to blast off and live your life fully present, excited, and full of love. The second half of the book contains suggestions, ideas, and ways to apply your happy in the world. By being true to yourself, your happiness will manifest into greater opportunities. The “you” at the end of this process will not be the same “you” sitting here right now.

Take a moment and step back from the situation and look at the “future you.” What does she/he look like, sound like, and seem to know that you don’t know? Look to the “future you” for guidance because that “future you” will be full of confidence, light, love, and acceptance. The “future you” is reaching out to help you take a step towards happiness. Are you ready?

Motivation:
Play
with
the
World

Throughout the book I will mention playwiththeworld.com. I set up this author blog site to help inspire others to love life fully. It is the sister site to this book, where you can go for complementary messages, vlogs, lectures, articles and motivational mantra meditation CDs. Everything on the site has been created for you to help you find lasting happiness. Visit the site and make sure to sign up for the free “Love Your Life to the Fullest” guide.

I will mention
Play
with
the
World
and to the community of members and site often.
Play
with
the
World
is more than a website, or a guidance portal — it is a mindset.
Play
with
the
World
is a lifestyle and a community of like-minded people who believe in the power of self and following their heart. It is for adventurous souls who know there is more to life.
Play
with
the
World
is a mission, a journey for all who seek everlasting happiness and want to love their lives fully. If you haven’t already done so, make sure to check it out, so you are already familiar with it especially since I refer to it through the book.

Now that I have given you the nitty gritty we are ready to embark on the journey. Get ready for awesome you to come out and play!

Par
t
One
:
Al
l
Clear

Clearing Space so Fun Can Be Effortless and Abundant

Chapter One

Stri
p
Down

“To
become
learned,
each
day
add
something.
To
become
enlightened,
each
day
drop
something.”
— Lao Tzu

D
o you ever get to the point where your world is out of control, spiraling downward as you crash to the floor, flooding the tile with dripping tears? That was me just a short time ago. I was drowning in a deep depression and surrounded by chaos. Everything I did was uncomfortable. My relationships were superficial, abusive, and demeaning. My job was pointless and I couldn’t look in the mirror and see anything good. One night I burst into such an intense burst of hysteria that I was forced to stop before drowning in my hot tears or suffocating.

I splashed water on my face, stood up and said, “I can do better than this.” I looked around my ridiculously overpriced loft and saw clutter. I saw dirty, stained clothes that I hadn’t worn in a couple of years; I noticed things that didn’t represent me or the person I wanted to be. I grabbed a trash bag and started where I assumed it would hurt the most: the closet. I pulled out everything that wasn’t working. I didn’t know what else to do but clean, unclutter, organize and remove the crap that had piled up. All I really knew was what I had been doing had not been working. Albert Einstein famously said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Insanity had driven me to a static state of numbness piled high with stuff that didn’t feel comfortable. It didn’t take me long to recognize that my outer environment mirrored my internal state. Over the past years I had packed on 30 pounds by shoveling toxic sweets and deadly drugs into my body, mingling the process with obscene compulsions. I would trade one addiction for the next in search of my perfect potion, but it all left me feeling cold, abandoned, and lifeless. I was treating my body like a trashcan and it didn’t take long to reflect in my outer world. As
A
Course
in
Miracles
states, “Your outside world is a reflection of your internal state.”

It was obvious that if I felt unloved, lonely, uncomfortable, and unworthy, then my home, relationships, and opportunities could only reflect the same. The process of starting fresh, getting back to basics, and stripping down was the first and most critical step to helping me to regain my life. It represented a declaration that I was in control of my life and choosing to embrace goodness. When we clean out clutter, it removes the blocks to every other aspect in our lives. It becomes a gateway to let more life in. Think about it. If you have a door that is blocked with junk, you can’t open it. The same thing is true in an energetic sense. When we have emotional, physical and material trash piled high, it drains us, slows us down, and blocks us. So the first step to playing with the world and living life to the fullest is to strip down.

Clear Out Clutter

There is no escaping the fact that retail therapy is one of the most fun things to do on the planet. Gather up the girlies, get gussied up, buy new clothes and neat things to make us feel, look, and act prettier. All of this is fabulous until we get our credit card bill, but that’s another chapter. Shopping is one of America’s favorite pastimes, but what happens to all the stuff we buy? Don’t get me wrong: shopping is rewarding and therapeutic but when anything is attached to the word “therapy” we should collectively take note. Retail therapy is shopping with the primary purpose of improving the buyer’s mood or disposition. If we use shopping to escape, then we are hiding out behind the glass windows. Items purchased during periods of retail therapy are sometimes referred to as “comfort buys.”

So what happens to all those comfort buys? This section is not about making us feel guilty for buying all those awesome treasures, but simply to recognize patterns that might be counterproductive to our ultimate goal of peace and happiness. In 1986 the
Chicago
Tribune
wrote: “We’ve become a nation measuring out our lives in shopping bags and nursing our psychic ills through retail therapy.” In 2001, the European Union conducted a study finding that 33% of shoppers surveyed had “high level of addiction to rush or unnecessary consumption.” This causes debt problems for many and the results are particularly bad for young people.

Trust me, I love shopping, but I think Lao Tzu said it best, “To become learned, each day add something. To become enlightened, each day drop something.” This brings me to the first rule of adding more fun into your life: Strip down to add more fun. I bet if you took a look at your closet you may find things that just don’t fit anymore. I don’t necessarily mean whether they fit in the physical sense; I mean whether they fit you, who you are as a person. We have all bought that crazy fun “item” we thought for sure we could pull off. We wore it once and felt so uncomfortable that it was immediately retired to the back of the closet. It’s okay to take risks, but not all of us can pull off Lady Gaga’s latest look. Step one is to go to your closet and remove all of the things that don’t fit anymore, physically and/or emotionally. Seriously take time to try everything on and examine yourself in the mirror. Pop on some party pumping hits and strut around. If the outfit doesn’t make you feel alive, vibrant, and comfortable, it gets tossed into the Goodwill pile ASAP.

I also have a rule: If I haven’t worn something in over a year, it automatically gets tossed. The goal here is to make room in our lives emotionally, spiritually and physically. Cleaning out the closet is a very good tool to help us unclutter and reboot our lives. Every transition I’ve been in, where I felt stuck and trapped, I would ask myself, “What could I do right now to feel a little better?” Since I can control my own environment, I will unclutter it starting with things that aren’t working. I will clean out my closet. Would you guess that every time I have done a deep, down and dirty clean, within a week I get some great news? One time it was a promotion, another time an offer to my dream job, and another the first date with a man who still makes my heart sing. If you don’t believe me, try it. Clean out your closet and watch what happens in the upcoming weeks. You may be surprised how cleaning out your own living space clears out space in every other aspect of your life. More space equals more opportunity. Goodness gracious, let the awesomeness flood in!

The goal of stripping down and returning to basics is to help you feel lighter and more connected to your true self. When we are bogged down with stuff, it isn’t just a visual distraction, but also an emotional drain contributing to our low energy. Start with your living space. A closet is the best place to start because we usually start and end our day there. When it is clean, organized, and up-to-date, our mood every day will reflect that.

No More Junk in the Trunk

This may seem obvious, but junk mail is junk. It fills our mailboxes with clutter and we feel stressed with all the extra “stuff.” Usually when things come in the mail that we don’t want, we just get rid of them immediately, but what about our email inboxes? As far as adding chaos to our lives, email is as big a culprit as it is a friendly pal on printed paper. Our overstuffed inboxes confuse, frustrate, and stress us out. How can you possibly have fun in life when you are trying to read an avalanche of email? I get over 50 emails every day from people and companies that I don’t even know. Chances are, you probably do, too. It didn’t take me long to realize the connection between my lack of time to do fun and fulfilling things and the amount of items in my inbox. The more messages I have, the less time I have to enjoy the day. I am too busy trying work my way through the junk email maze.

There is an easier way. I started to track how many emails I had each day (on average 75) and how many were from close friends, family, colleagues, etc. (maybe 5). Over 85% of my messages every day were unsolicited junk. When you sign up for a mailing list or click on that web ad or browse a new site to enter your info for a sweepstakes, that precious personal info gets filed into a system and then shared. You are now a target for marketers of new companies and organizations. How do we stop this madness? We smile and just say no to mail flow.