I’ve heard it said, and I’ve said it myself on numerous occasions: The longest journey you will ever make is from your mind to your heart.  This morning as I had a little pep talk with myself in the mirror, I replaced mind with negative thoughts and replaced heart with a state of happiness:  the longest journey I will ever make is from my negative thoughts to my state of happiness.

This is helpful to me.  This mysterious influence of thoughts have the power to  defeat every attempt in allowing happiness.  Negative thoughts can be like gray clouds that form and make visibility difficult.  Like clouds, these thoughts often go unnoticed until the cold or rain interfere with our lives, our feelings of well-being.

The way we translate the experience of people, places and things, the way we perceive the world around us, is through our five senses.  Thoughts are interpreted through senses, past and present, and are the gatekeepers to our happiness.  Our thoughts act as guards to how we feel at a particular time.  If we want to feel better, we can always consciously change our thoughts by sensing something more pleasant.

For instant, we may be thinking about something at work that is unpleasant.  Perhaps our boss talked to us about how she thought we were not performing as well as we used to.  We are home and feeling bad and don’t feel like doing anything but complain to our dog about how bad our life is.  Once we become aware of our poor feelings, we can choose to experience something new with our senses, quick before we think about it.  Perhaps we go out and water the flowers.  We feel the warm air outside.  We smell the beautiful roses.  We begin digging around the flowerbed and sit down and feel the warm dirt .  We choose to feel better by doing things that make us feel better and our thoughts are focused away from an experience at work.  When the old thought comes back, we gently remind ourselves that we will change what we can change but we have no power over the opinion of our boss.  We will accept the conversation as what it was and realize it is now in the past.  We will do what we can to improve.  But for now, we are going to enjoy this moment with the outdoors.  We are going to choose to do things that make us happy.

Now, as we become more aware of our thoughts and mold them into friendly greeters and facilitators between bliss and our existence in our bodies, the easier we  move about the earth.  This is important to me.

Here are five ways to help mold your thoughts into friendly greeters:

1. List five activities that consistently bring you into a happy state.  Examples:  taking a nap, listening to music, doing the laundry, rearranging the furniture, taking a walk, going to the beach.
2. Put this list on a business card for your wallet or print it on a post-it for your bathroom mirror, or on the desktop display.
3. The moment you realize you feel poorly, congratulate yourself for being alert, and move toward that list
4. Pick one and do it.  If you do not feel better, cross that item off your list
5. Revamp your list for better feeling activities.

This journey is the never-ending journey.  We are destined to move forward to better and better ways of feeling, of living in our hearts!