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  • Home
  • About
    • The Happy Fan Club
  • Offerings
    • Redesign Your Life 2.0
    • Get Creative
    • Personal Coaching
  • Creativity Conversations
  • LET'S CONNECT!
  • Blog
    • Live Free Your Way
    • Seeing Things Differently
    • Mistaking Assumptions for Truth
    • How Humor Keeps Us Sane
    • Know Thyself
    • Peach Pie for Breakfast
    • Explore Experience Express
    • Should You Be Downshifting?
    • Stop the Hustle!
    • Do Your Habits Serve or Sabotage
    • Settle Down? Down Where?
    • What Lights You Up?
    • Saying Yes When Your Mind Says No
    • Independence From What?
    • Letting Ourselves Off the Hook
    • Letting Go of Assumptions
    • Is Kindness Allowed?
    • How to Throw a Wrench in the Works
    • Happiness
    • Daring to be Lighthearted
    • What Happens When You See Things Differently
    • Find Delight in Everyday Life
    • Are You Saying What Needs to Be Said
    • Is Your Life in Alignment
    • Are You Trapped by Your Past
    • Can You Love Your Life
    • The Hallmark of Creativity
    • Out Of Ideas?
    • Waking Up to a New World
    • Are You a Possibilitarian?
    • Want to Love Your Life?
    • Is Creativity Necessary
    • What's Stopping You?
    • An Unexpected Discovery
    • Free Your Mind
    • Is Your Creative Genius Hiding
    • Empty Headed or Clear Minded?
    • Is Stress Really Necessary?
    • Will Creativity Improve Your Life?
    • Is Creativity In Your Future?
    • Replace Fear With Love
    • How to Get Out of Your Own Way
    • Just Take A Moment
    • You Don't Have To - You Get To
    • The Good News About Being Stuck
    • Interested in Inner Freedom?
    • Are You a Hoarder?
    • What Remains
    • Co-vid 19 Free Pass to the Roller Coaster
    • Grace Under Pressure
    • Now is the Time To Notice
    • Hanging With the Wrong Crowd
    • Make Your Life Simpler
    • What Could Be Different For You
    • Everything is a Miracle
    • Do You Have A Negativity Bias
    • Are You Really Seeing Or Just Assuming?
    • Happiness and Resilience
    • Wherever You Go, There You Are
    • Is Stress Making You Sick?
    • What I Wish My Humans Knew
    • Looking Backwards
    • Daring to Change Course
    • Lost in Thought or Taking Action?
    • Still Can't Focus?
    • Do Your Thoughts Get Dark and Gloomy?
    • Can't Focus?
    • An Instant Formula for New Ideas
    • Talk Yourself Out of Another Great Idea?
    • Is Your Busyness Keeping You From Getting Things Done?
    • What's that Feeling In the Pit of My Stomach?
    • How Cool is This?
    • How to Make Your New Year Happier
    • Why Be Open To Life?
    • Simple Ways to Transform Your Life
    • Get Clarity and Confidence
    • Are You Driven by Fear or Love?
    • The Number One Way to Keep Your Vision Alive and Well
    • Why Stop Trying to Figure it Out?
    • What Are You Trying to Prove?
    • Do Your Goals Reflect Your Hearts Desire
    • Why My Cat is My Spiritual Teacher
    • Surviving the Holidays
    • 3 Convincing Reasons
    • 3 Secrets to Enjoying the Holidays
    • 5 Quick Steps to Get Your Mojo Back
    • 3 Ways to Keep Your Energy High
    • 5 Reasons to Do Good
    • Pain Relief for the Soul
    • Tired of Living by the Rules? Go Rogue!
    • What? You've Made a Mess? Excellent!
    • Why You Need to Be Inspired Now
    • Change Your Life in Just 48 Hours?
    • The Cure For Mental Overload
    • 5 Infallible Ways to Stay Inspired
  • Newsletter

Do Your Thoughts Get Dark and Gloomy?

5/13/2019

1 Comment

 
Picture
Mine do, from time to time. As a matter of fact, mine are just clearing up. I was in a low place emotionally for a few days, as if my mood was deliberately matching our weather in the northeast: dark, cloudy skies punctuated here and there by a few patches of sunlight, but otherwise gray, gray gray. In the past, my moodiness would have lasted for weeks rather than days, and I would have gotten horribly tangled up in an endless loop of trying to figure out how could things ever have sunken so low and what I should do to change my life. And then, because of all the training I’ve had in fixing things and thinking I should know better, I’d judge the heck out of myself not only for entertaining negative thoughts but allowing them to appear in the first place.

We all have our ups and downs. It’s part of being human, but when our mood is low we get very uncomfortable and somehow forget this fact of life so we put lots of effort into maintaining the highs and avoiding or denying the lows. But what if trying to control and manage is a reactive strategy and actually makes things worse? What if a proactive understanding could significantly reduce how long we stay stuck in a bad mood that keeps us from doing the things we want to do in our lives?

It’s a fact of nature that, regardless of cloud cover, the sun is a constant and will eventually reappear. We don’t (and can’t) do anything about it. We may want the sun to come out, telling ourselves how much more we could do or how much better it would feel, but that doesn’t change the basic fact the sun is always behind the clouds and powers our world.

The same fact of life is true about us, too. We have our own internal sun that powers our lives - that’s who we really are. The sun we see in the sky is unbelievably resilient, powerful and strong. It’s beyond our capacity to understand or even describe it very well. By it’s very nature it’s not affected in the least by the coming and going of clouds and storms no matter how severe or long lasting. The external sun isn’t afraid or incapable of handling changes in the weather, and neither is our internal sun.

We forget about the amazing capacity of the sun when we get distracted by the clouds - how thick they are or how dark or what’s coming out of them. We forget that the light of the sun, although obscured, is always present - otherwise we couldn’t see the clouds at all and we’d be in total darkness.

So, for me, when I realized I was caught up with the dramatic display of my own thought clouds and had forgotten the simple constant of my own internal sun, I relaxed. I saw, once again, that clouds by their very nature will move out on their own. And despite the lightning or thunder that may be accompanying those clouds, all that noise isn’t predictive of the future (or the present) - it’s just what’s passing across the my sun at any given moment. I was able to get on with living my life and not give those clouds more attention than they deserved. Yes, there was a certain momentum to the attention I had paid to them, but that, too, came to a stop of it’s own accord.

The truth is that you are incredibly resilient and strong at the core of who you are. You don’t need to keep reaching for strategies to put you in a better mood. The moods will pass. Beneath all the moodiness in our lives is an innate wisdom and creativity that's always available to power our lives. This is true for every human being on the planet. And this is the starting place for all of us, to notice what’s really true. From there, our inherent wisdom will show us the way forward.
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