High on Happiness

Posts Tagged ‘Imagine’

Envision yourself being your best.

Name your primary roles in life, however you happen to see them:  partner, parent, student, salesman, accountant, business owner, seeker of truth.  Now imagine you had perfected that role, become the very best at it that you could ever be. Picture yourself as the best parent, the best partner, running the most successful business, enlightened.

Wrap the image in light.  Make it big in your mind, and radiant.

Stare at it for awhile.  Watch it move through its day.  See how it moves, what it does, how it walks, how it interacts with others.

Imagine how it feels.  Pretend you feel that way: confident, at peace, aware, responsive, at ease.

Now imagine what you’re seeing is a true image of yourself a little distance down the road.  Then see the road, bathed in light, leading right back to where you are right now, and connecting to your heart.

Ask yourself what one thing you could do to advance yourself farther down that road.  Ask yourself what one thing you could stop doing to make the journey smoother, surer.

Repeat.

“Make believe.”   Check out its definition at dictionary.com and you’ll see that when you use it as a noun, it means “pretense, especially of an innocent or playful kind; feigning; sham.” And when you use it as an adjective, it means “pretended; feigned; imaginary; made-up; unreal.”

Well, that’s pretty much what I learned growing up.  Imagination, the capacity to make believe, is a function designed for our amusement, a kind of built-in toy.  It is great fun to imagine.

Yet if you read about the word “make,” the definitions say:

“to bring into existence by shaping or changing material;” and “to produce; cause to exist or happen; bring about.”

(Hmmmm.  Sounds like some kind of alchemy to me.  I think we have a clue here.)

Leaping over to “believe,” we find “to have confidence in the truth, the existence, or the reliability of something, although without absolute proof that one is right in doing so.”

So if you’re doing make believe, you’re causing something to exist or happen and you have confidence in the truth and reality of it.   And what was it that Napoleon Hill said?  “What your mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”  That’s some pretty heady stuff!

I say grab your big shiny “What If” hook and go fishing in the Cosmic Soup of Possibilities.  There’s no telling what you might find.  Imagine!

“A rock pile cases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”
~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Five weeks from today, we’ll be celebrating January 1, 2010.  It may still seem a long way off, but blink and it will be right in front of you.  Between now and then a whole slew of articles about New Year’s Resolutions will start filling the blogs with advice on whether and how to make them, how to keep them, how to feel when you don’t.

All too often, we make our New Year’s resolutions at the last minute, without giving them any real thought, and, to be honest, without any real resolve.  We half-heartedly name things we think we should begin doing more of, or things we think we should stop doing.  And we go to bed thinking that somehow the next morning we’ll magically wake as a transformed being, filled with steely determination to make it so.  On average, most people make it a whole week before they toss their resolutions to the wind.

Well, what if this year was different?  What if you began now to evaluate your life and to think about the things you could do that would give you a soaring feeling of gladness just because you were doing them.  If you were going to build a cathedral of your life, what would it look like?  If you were going to create the juiciest, liveliest, most satisfied version of you, what kinds of things would you have to do to make it happen?

Positive psychology studies show that we’re happier when we have a sense of purpose in our lives, and when we’re moving toward meaningful objectives.  Joy comes from growing, from learning new skills, from broadening our mental, physical, emotional and spiritual horizons.  Why not start casting about in your imagination right now for possibilities you could move toward materializing, potentials you could develop, areas of your life you would like to develop, expand or explore?

Park all the “shoulds” on the sidelines, and start imagining the things that would be fun to do, the things that would really grab your interest, the things feel attractive and enriching and satisfying to you.

And once you get some ideas about what those things are, here’s a hint:  You don’t have to wait until New Year’s to begin them.  You can get going in their direction right this very now.