Mar 26 2012

Start Being Happy Now

jumptosun

Don’t wait for a vacation. Don’t wait for a holiday. Don’t wait for tomorrow. If you don’t feel good right now then you need to.

Now

We live our life on the weekends, vacations, in retirement. This is not how life is meant to be. I doubt any of us are happy all the time, but the problem is we aren’t happy most of the time. You have to get out of the mindset that you will be happy sometime in the future. That you will be happy once X happens. Guess what, you will still be unhappy once X happens. You can’t base your happiness on events, instead happiness is a mindset. You can be happy anytime . You don’t need a new car to be happy. You don’t need to sit on a beach in a foreign country to be happy. You simply need your mind to be happy at any time. You can still be excited about things, but don’t feel that you need it in order to be happy.

In the movie Click with Adam Sandler, the main character finds a remote that can pause, fast forward, and rewind his life. He is under stress from his job and family. Soon he starts to use the remote to fast forward through fights with his wife, then he starts to use it to fast forward through life. Finally he fast forwards through years until he has finished a huge project for work. He finds that has missed out on a large part of his life. Soon he regrets even fast forwarding a little.

This is the problem, you miss out on life. You have a very limited amount of time, so why would you want to skip parts?

All Play and No Work is the way to go

The biggest thing is work. You spend a huge chunk of your life working, so why not enjoy it? If it is so horrible that cannot enjoy it then put a lot of effort into finding other work. I find myself often bored with my work, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t feel good. I can be more mindful and enjoy the world in general. I can try to make the best out of it. Joke with co-workers, talk to customers, try to achieve something. There are many ways to enjoy work; I just have to find ways to do it. So do you. It is a shame to not enjoy 40 hours out of your week.

The same goes for school. I might sound weird, but I enjoy school. I enjoy homework. I just don’t enjoy the stress. I have to overcome this problem of becoming far too stressed out. This stress starts to overflow into other areas of my life such as work, and my social life. I find myself far too uptight around my friends and I dread working because I can only think of the next essay that I should start the moment I get home. Thanks to procrastination I can safely say I rarely start that essay the moment after work. There have been many times I didn’t enjoy working through an essay, but that doesn’t mean I have to feel totally bad. I can at least enjoy the process. I can enjoy the feeling of getting something productive done. I can enjoy the difficulty because if everything was too easy then it would also be boring. Find ways to make the time more enjoyable, but make sure you do something to make it a good time.

Daily Life should be exciting too

I hope that your daily life is never boring enough that you want to fast forward through it. You don’t need a vacation to have fun. You can do exciting things all the time. Go rock-climbing, slacklining, try a martial art, learn something, start your own business, write. There are endless possibilities, but you have to be willing to take them. Start saying yes to things you wouldn’t normally do. Sign up for all those things you never would do. Sign up for a yoga class, learning Korean, guitar lessons, meditation groups, anything! A simply look around, a college bulletin board will give you endless possibilities for groups to join and things to try. You simply have to take a peek outside your normal routine to find something new and exciting to do.

Hard Times

When something goes wrong then you really want to fast forward. There are ups and downs, but you can’t just have ups. If you only had good things happen then you couldn’t appreciate the good things as much. There will always be disappointing times, but you don’t need to dwell on it. Sometimes it is just too hard to really be happy such as the death of a loved one, but that doesn’t mean you need to continue to be sad about it for a long period of time. Be aware of your thoughts and don’t continue to allow yourself to be sad. Replace them with happy thoughts when you are able to. Don’t feel like you need to skip this, instead just accept it.

Don’t wait for a future moment to be happy. There isn’t a better moment to be happy than now. You are constantly in the state of now, so you can’t make an excuse to be happy tomorrow. You can’t base your emotions on external circumstances, because they are too unpredictable. You must rely on yourself to be happy because you are in control of your emotions. Your emotions are not in control of you.




Photo by Vramak

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Sep 9 2011

How to Lucid Dream, or Trials and Errors of Me

Imagine a night life filled with fun and impossible things. Flying, visiting countries you have only seen once, overcoming fears. We use a quarter of our life sleeping, so why not make that time more exciting? I am going to try this through lucid dreaming. I have always been interested in the benefits of it. So I am going to put it to a thirty day trial. I am going to make it a goal to start lucid dreaming in the next thirty days. I will blog about my progress and my methods! We will have to see how this goes. If you want to learn how to lucid dream then follow along and hopefully I can stumble over the mistakes so you don’t have to make them yourself.

What is Lucid Dreaming?

Lucid Dreaming is ability to be awake within a dream. You are conscious that you are in a dream and once this happens then you have the ability to control the aspects of the dream. So, you can live out fantasies in your dreams because you get to control what happens.

What is the use of Lucid Dreaming?

As I have listed before. In a lucid dream you can do whatever you want! But some other possible uses of Lucid Dreaming is:


  • Performance: If you need to review test material, then do it in a dream. You can practice your dancing in a dream. Or you could even do practice a sport.


  • Overcoming Fears: Shy? Practice talking to strangers in dreams. Want to ask someone out in a lucid dream? Go through the motions and then when you actually do then you will have more confidence. If you are scared of heights, then fly high in your dreams.


  • Nightmares: If nightmares are a common occurrence in your nights then taking control might be a great solution. Once you know that you are in a nightmare then you have the ability to stop it and change it into a pleasant dream.


  • Problem Solving: Maybe you have some issue in your life that you need to overcome. Lucid dreaming can help you problem solve by giving you the ability explore your subconscious for solutions. You can focus on the problem fully and explore new ideas.


  • Health: Stress is a problem, and creating pleasant dreams will help you lessen your stress a bit. I have read that it can help you heal your body. I am not sure of its validity, but there are claims that lucid dreams allow people to overcome illness and disease faster. I might try to test this later in my study.



My journey through lucid dreaming

This is just a short list of the benefits, but even if just one of these benefits is true then that is enough reason for me to try it out. So I am going to conduct a thirty day study of lucid dreaming. I have only had one lucid dream that I can remember. This dream was when I was around 12 or 13. I didn’t know what was going on or that I could control the dream. I just found myself stuck in the dream without a way. I remember trying to pour water over my head in a vain attempt to exit the dream. I am excited to be able to control the dreams with my new found knowledge.


My Methods

I am mostly relying on the book Lucid Dreaming: A Concise Guide to Awakening in Your Dreams and in Your Life for information on how to start lucid dreaming. I will be documenting the process in this blog so that others can use it as a reference point when they begin to lucid dream.


Dream Recall

I need to increase my dream recall so I will start keeping a dream journal and focusing on remember dreams every night. I will record dreams in the morning when I awake. Once I can remember at least one or two dreams a night consistently then I will begin only recording dreams that stand out and lucid dreams.



Reality Checks

Well, this could be a dream. So I am going to be do reality checks multiple times a day to get in the habit. It sounds crazy to have to reality checks, but dreams seem so real until you do a reality check. One way is to check a watch and then check it again. If the time is different that is a sign of a dream. This works with books also. If the content changes, then it is a dream. You can also try use reason. Are you flying? Yup a dream. So on. Other reality checks: Check for abnormalities, such as on your body.



Intention

I am going to repeat over and over I will have a lucid dream to myself before going to sleep. I will continue to this night after night until I achieve three lucid dreams. This intention will help me to focus on becoming lucid in a dream. I am hoping it will remind me to do reality checks so that I can become lucid.


Emergency Measures

If I have not had a lucid dream after two weeks then I will begin waking myself up 5-7 hours after falling asleep and then staying awake for 30 minutes. After being awake I will go back to sleep. This has a high percentage of success to inducing lucid dreams. I do not want to resort to this because it is not sustainable and my girlfriend might kill me for waking her up.


I am excited to have my first self-induced lucid dream! I have big plans for self-improvement with lucid. I want to see how far I can take it. Let’s see. Now it is late, so I am off to bed to pursue a lucid dream

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