Take Paradise with you
I always go back to that expression: Go to your happy place. I did a google search for "go to your happy place" and it turns out that wikihow has a 10 step process laid out with pictures. I glanced through it, but I think I've mastered the process on my own already. And that was before I arrived on the beach on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica in the tropics. Getting here sure improved things though! For the rest of my life I will always have these clear images of the happy moments and beautiful images of Samara beach.
Paradise isn't Samara beach though. It's deep relaxation and profoundly peaceful moments. I'm just glad I'm back here, instead of having to look at my calendar on the wall of tropical islands. I really believe that having those beaches to stare at every day of the year is part of how I got here. Do you want to go somewhere? Surround yourself with the idea. Get the calendar. Name your dog after the place. Have your passwords on things be reminders of what you are preparing for.
In the 3 years before I accidentally semi-retired to Costa Rica I had 2 grown kids and 2 teenagers, and super stressful jobs. 3 jobs in the 3 years before I came. The first one was super stressful and not even fun, working at a call center with multi-tasking a dozen computer systems on every call, and having to try and sell internet packages on every call - even though I was in customer service for a cell phone company. I made it 4 months. And I was the 3rd one left of our training class. It was an awful job. I got in trouble because I smiled at someone, and they thought I was mocking them, and I was reprimanded for it. I didn't last a week after that.
Then it was a job where I worked with people with severe disabilities including high aggression and high anxiety, and I became a manager in charge of the clients and the staff and the paperwork. I worked a 17 hour shift twice, and this job has no "breaks". You eat when you can. There is no break room, there is no leaving the client for half an hour while you prepare your lunch or dinner. I loved this high demand job for the 2 years I worked there. I needed to go to my happy place a lot!
Then it was another awesome job as an instructor for a program that helped people like my former clients to get and keep a job. I was thrown into it and told to just go for it. I has an outline and I had to reinvent the program as I went. So I had these extremely challenging students, and I was new to my setting and all the requirements that went with the job. I worked there for 6 months, before taking a one month trip to Costa Rica that turned into 7 months. How did I do this? Through no merits of my own. It was through having an awesome husband and an awesome mother who already lived in Costa Rica.
I lived in my happy place today. No matter what happens in life from here on out, I will have paradise with me. This morning I woke up to my husband luring me out of bed with my favorite big mug that had my favorite hot breakfast drink in it. Now this next part I'm writing out for my future self who is 10 and 20 years in the future. Future Self, do you remember that mug? You drank from it for at least 4 years, every morning. It's orange on the outside and yellow on the inside, and has 2 things on it, a big elephant and some flowers on the other side. Full of chamba chai.
So I got up and drank my chamba on the back porch with Ron, and then remembered I had plans to go swimming with a friend after she taught her morning yoga class on the beach. I walked over there and saw that it was the first perfectly sunny morning since we arrived a week ago. It's been grey and overcast a lot, which is ok by me because it's cooler weather. It was super sunny and blistering hot when we left in April.
If you don't have a physical happy place, create one. Create a happy morning routine for yourself that you really enjoy. Before going to bed, clean your bathroom and organize a morning ritual of a fabulous toothbrush and the best toothpaste you've ever found. Set out your make-up or your razor and cream or whatever you need and love to do in the mornings. Wash the mirror so you aren't looking at water splatters and things on it.
Here was my physical (AND mental) happy place today, if you need to borrow one for a bit - come with me this morning. Some people say create a peaceful place for this where you can sit and relax, and that's well and fine for some people. For me, I couldn't wait for this magical space to open up where no one was calling me, or asking something of me, or I wasn't hyper busy try to re-schedule my entire day and week because something important just popped up. I went to my happy place when I was in the chaos of it all, even if just for 10 seconds to let that image appear in my mind. To remind myself that I had to take the good stuff with the bad. If it hadn't been on the verge of raining all week, I wouldn't have enjoyed the sunshine as much today. If I hadn't spent those years facing tough decisions, I wouldn't be such a good Tough-Decision-Maker now.
This morning I walked to the beach and enjoyed the sunshine pouring down on everything. It made the green things greener, and the sky was a brilliant blue instead of cloudy grey. The first minute of walking I saw a shadow pass by me. It was a squirrel crossing the road on the power lines, and we were about to intersect. His beautiful red-brown self would be about 10 feet above my head in a few steps. I stopped to watch him and his amazing balancing act for a second. I noticed some huge cobwebs between the power lines too. I was glad I couldn't see the actual spiders in them, and hoped they hadn't mutated into something bigger and scarier than they already were. I noticed a few cobwebs on poles and spattered here and there, some catching the sunlight very well.
Then the next minute of the walk I watched a good sized lizard cross the road, he was probably as long as my arm, with his tail. I love how they have those dinosaur-like fins on their spines, and this one had stripes only on the spiky part over his back. He crossed and walked in front of my by maybe 5 feet as we each went on our way. I walked on the road that has a ditch in it and usually has hundreds of orange and purple crabs in it. I guess they were all sleeping in, I only saw one. But they are the coolest looking things. Then I arrived and sat on a bench in the shade, waiting for the yoga class to end. Then I saw a pair of baby doves, cute little guys on the path in front of me.
I watched the waves, and I enjoyed the new color of the ocean. For the last week it was reflecting a different kind of sky, and today is was bluer than ever. Which means the white waves showed up even more dramatically. I saw a dog with a collar on it, who was wandering around. It was a cool looking spotted dog, probably part dalmatian and part Australian cattle dog. It finally came and sat 4 feet away from me, it's tongue hanging out. Then it came and laid down right underneath me under the bench. When it sat up, it's ears tickled the back of my legs. And I just sat there and grinned, it was so funny. I would watch the waves, and then watch the army of teeny tiny ants going in and out of a piece of wood at my feet. I would watch the sky and see flocks of brown pelicans go by, and then watch butterflies that would flutter by less than 3 feet away.
It was so peaceful. One flock of pelicans had 22 in it, flying in a lopsided V formation. A black vulture flew over me by about 15 feet. There are moths that are the size of hummingbirds and from a distance I can only tell them apart by their flight patterns. Moths are much more susceptible to the breeze, and they can't hover. I tried this mental exercise where I would think about something that usually causes me some kind of anxiety, and then when the emotion came - I would throw it out to the ocean between the mainland and the island out there. My goal is to learn to think about things without all the negative emotional attachment. Being more objective can be very helpful with many things in life.
Let's see if I can find some pictures that show my happy peaceful moments.
The squirrel I saw looked like these guys.
The lizard I saw looked like this, except he had a taller more majestic spine on him.
When you create a "happy place" for yourself, go all out. The details are fun.
Paradise isn't Samara beach though. It's deep relaxation and profoundly peaceful moments. I'm just glad I'm back here, instead of having to look at my calendar on the wall of tropical islands. I really believe that having those beaches to stare at every day of the year is part of how I got here. Do you want to go somewhere? Surround yourself with the idea. Get the calendar. Name your dog after the place. Have your passwords on things be reminders of what you are preparing for.
In the 3 years before I accidentally semi-retired to Costa Rica I had 2 grown kids and 2 teenagers, and super stressful jobs. 3 jobs in the 3 years before I came. The first one was super stressful and not even fun, working at a call center with multi-tasking a dozen computer systems on every call, and having to try and sell internet packages on every call - even though I was in customer service for a cell phone company. I made it 4 months. And I was the 3rd one left of our training class. It was an awful job. I got in trouble because I smiled at someone, and they thought I was mocking them, and I was reprimanded for it. I didn't last a week after that.
Then it was a job where I worked with people with severe disabilities including high aggression and high anxiety, and I became a manager in charge of the clients and the staff and the paperwork. I worked a 17 hour shift twice, and this job has no "breaks". You eat when you can. There is no break room, there is no leaving the client for half an hour while you prepare your lunch or dinner. I loved this high demand job for the 2 years I worked there. I needed to go to my happy place a lot!
Then it was another awesome job as an instructor for a program that helped people like my former clients to get and keep a job. I was thrown into it and told to just go for it. I has an outline and I had to reinvent the program as I went. So I had these extremely challenging students, and I was new to my setting and all the requirements that went with the job. I worked there for 6 months, before taking a one month trip to Costa Rica that turned into 7 months. How did I do this? Through no merits of my own. It was through having an awesome husband and an awesome mother who already lived in Costa Rica.
I lived in my happy place today. No matter what happens in life from here on out, I will have paradise with me. This morning I woke up to my husband luring me out of bed with my favorite big mug that had my favorite hot breakfast drink in it. Now this next part I'm writing out for my future self who is 10 and 20 years in the future. Future Self, do you remember that mug? You drank from it for at least 4 years, every morning. It's orange on the outside and yellow on the inside, and has 2 things on it, a big elephant and some flowers on the other side. Full of chamba chai.
So I got up and drank my chamba on the back porch with Ron, and then remembered I had plans to go swimming with a friend after she taught her morning yoga class on the beach. I walked over there and saw that it was the first perfectly sunny morning since we arrived a week ago. It's been grey and overcast a lot, which is ok by me because it's cooler weather. It was super sunny and blistering hot when we left in April.
If you don't have a physical happy place, create one. Create a happy morning routine for yourself that you really enjoy. Before going to bed, clean your bathroom and organize a morning ritual of a fabulous toothbrush and the best toothpaste you've ever found. Set out your make-up or your razor and cream or whatever you need and love to do in the mornings. Wash the mirror so you aren't looking at water splatters and things on it.
Here was my physical (AND mental) happy place today, if you need to borrow one for a bit - come with me this morning. Some people say create a peaceful place for this where you can sit and relax, and that's well and fine for some people. For me, I couldn't wait for this magical space to open up where no one was calling me, or asking something of me, or I wasn't hyper busy try to re-schedule my entire day and week because something important just popped up. I went to my happy place when I was in the chaos of it all, even if just for 10 seconds to let that image appear in my mind. To remind myself that I had to take the good stuff with the bad. If it hadn't been on the verge of raining all week, I wouldn't have enjoyed the sunshine as much today. If I hadn't spent those years facing tough decisions, I wouldn't be such a good Tough-Decision-Maker now.
This morning I walked to the beach and enjoyed the sunshine pouring down on everything. It made the green things greener, and the sky was a brilliant blue instead of cloudy grey. The first minute of walking I saw a shadow pass by me. It was a squirrel crossing the road on the power lines, and we were about to intersect. His beautiful red-brown self would be about 10 feet above my head in a few steps. I stopped to watch him and his amazing balancing act for a second. I noticed some huge cobwebs between the power lines too. I was glad I couldn't see the actual spiders in them, and hoped they hadn't mutated into something bigger and scarier than they already were. I noticed a few cobwebs on poles and spattered here and there, some catching the sunlight very well.
Then the next minute of the walk I watched a good sized lizard cross the road, he was probably as long as my arm, with his tail. I love how they have those dinosaur-like fins on their spines, and this one had stripes only on the spiky part over his back. He crossed and walked in front of my by maybe 5 feet as we each went on our way. I walked on the road that has a ditch in it and usually has hundreds of orange and purple crabs in it. I guess they were all sleeping in, I only saw one. But they are the coolest looking things. Then I arrived and sat on a bench in the shade, waiting for the yoga class to end. Then I saw a pair of baby doves, cute little guys on the path in front of me.
I watched the waves, and I enjoyed the new color of the ocean. For the last week it was reflecting a different kind of sky, and today is was bluer than ever. Which means the white waves showed up even more dramatically. I saw a dog with a collar on it, who was wandering around. It was a cool looking spotted dog, probably part dalmatian and part Australian cattle dog. It finally came and sat 4 feet away from me, it's tongue hanging out. Then it came and laid down right underneath me under the bench. When it sat up, it's ears tickled the back of my legs. And I just sat there and grinned, it was so funny. I would watch the waves, and then watch the army of teeny tiny ants going in and out of a piece of wood at my feet. I would watch the sky and see flocks of brown pelicans go by, and then watch butterflies that would flutter by less than 3 feet away.
It was so peaceful. One flock of pelicans had 22 in it, flying in a lopsided V formation. A black vulture flew over me by about 15 feet. There are moths that are the size of hummingbirds and from a distance I can only tell them apart by their flight patterns. Moths are much more susceptible to the breeze, and they can't hover. I tried this mental exercise where I would think about something that usually causes me some kind of anxiety, and then when the emotion came - I would throw it out to the ocean between the mainland and the island out there. My goal is to learn to think about things without all the negative emotional attachment. Being more objective can be very helpful with many things in life.
Let's see if I can find some pictures that show my happy peaceful moments.
The squirrel I saw looked like these guys.
The lizard I saw looked like this, except he had a taller more majestic spine on him.
These guys are a sight to behold, and only around part of the year.
This was my view on the left side (except during a cloudy sunset last fall), where my I tossed my negativity. We went on a boat ride out there once, and saw some extremely cool dolphin pods. I imagined the dolphins jumping up and catching my nuggets of negativity and chomping them into smaller pieces that would disperse easily. The island actually looks much closer if you sit on the bench with me, but this picture was the first one I found to give you an idea.
When you create a "happy place" for yourself, go all out. The details are fun.
They were flying less like a V and more like a giant check mark. Talk about a good omen.
All these amazing things, and I haven't even started to chat with my friend yet!
love it! thanks for sharing...
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