Hi All, I hope this finds everyone well and feeling great!
Last month we explored breathwork techniques to help with movement. Hopefully you found these helpful and though practise, you are noticing a difference in how you feel and perform.
As many will know, movement not only keeps us mobile and strong, it is an amazing way to help us process emotions, manage stress and ‘move’ into the states of how we want to feel.
This provides us with a nice opportunity to transition into exploring values, beliefs and visions.
This month we are going to start looking at how we can develop a strong combination of actions, thoughts and environments that create the states of being that we wish to experience more often.
As a young man, I used to think that I was working towards the ultimate state of ‘Happiness’. One day, when I had enough and I had done enough, Happiness would arrive in my life. I would be blessed to be Happy from that point on. I had my plan, but I just wasn’t sure exactly when Happiness would arrive, or really how Happiness would arrive, but it was the goal.
The thing that I missed was that happiness was not the goal. The goal should have been to fill my days with actions, thoughts, people, work, food, exercise and all the things that made me FEEL how I wanted to feel. I didn’t understand that happiness is a verb. It happens everyday.
It comes and it goes and it exists and fluctuates through the lived experience of feeling how you want to feel.
That said, yes, it is super important to have a vision and goals in order to grow and have purpose. However, happiness does not reside on the other side of achieving these. Yes, an experience of a state of happiness sits on the other side, but there is a lot of happiness to be experienced on the journey towards them as well. (NB It’s inevitable that states of hardship and sadness will be experienced as well, but they too are transient states).
Many people already know this, and it may be nothing new. It just took me a long time to understand it. However, if you can see part of yourself in my experience, I hope that this may form an interesting ‘launchpad’ for your own happiness exploration.
If you can, please try to take some time each day for a week, or the whole month, to just jot down an honest and raw list of how you want to FEEL each and every day.
Do you want to feel Challenged? Loved? Adventurous? Powerful? Included?
Keep it simple, don’t complicate it. Just start observing your daily routines, and take some time to ask yourself ‘How do I want to feel in the morning? How do I want my food to make me feel? How do I want to feel when I hop into bed?
How do I want to feel as I go through the moments of my day?
That’s it. And whilst hopefully a simple exercise for you, I also hope one that may start to change your thoughts on your own experience of happiness as we move forward. Next month we are going to explore the answers and develop methods of bringing more happiness into every day, every week, month, year (ie our life).
Have an awesome month,
Best wishes, Chris
If you would like some further ideas regarding breathwork or general wellbeing, please feel free to contact Chris via email: chris@weretreats.me
Chris is a Phuket-based Wellbeing Coach. Chris is a certified Oxygen Advantage breathwork instructor, certified PT and clinical nutritionist. Chris specialises in providing holistic wellbeing programs for individuals seeking an enjoyable approach to sustainable change. Together with a team of health professionals, he operates Wellbeing Experiences providing wellbeing retreats and events focused on creating sustainable health and wellbeing (weretreats.me).