Creating a Sense of Gratitude in your Life. Every Day.

To start the year off right, try these simple practices to cultivate gratitude.  When you're feeling blue or frustrated, use them as tools to get you back to a positive head space.

Stop Complaining.  About people, situations and events that make you unhappy, sad or depressed. Nobody can make you unhappy.  No situation can make you sad or miserable unless you allow it to.

Commit To Your Goals.  When we look for positivity in the little things that make our lives worthwhile, we leave no room for negativity and our goals come to the forefront. Instead of recounting all events of the day, filter out only the positive ones and make a note of them. It could be anything trivial, from your bus arriving on time, your mom cooking a delicious breakfast, to remembering to pay the bills on time. You would not believe how this helps you achieve your goals — by clearing the mind.

Be Kind.  To yourself and others.  It's scientifically proven to make you feel good.  Helping someone selflessly releases serotonin in your brain and hence makes you feel good about yourself almost instantly. Try doing one act of kindness every day to flush out the toxins of depression from your system.

Practice Forgiveness.  Hatred is a negative feeling and harboring it will have nothing but negative effects on your well-being. Stop thinking about the hateful emotion/person and let it go. Remember to forgive yourself too.  

Release The Past.  When you find yourself thinking that the past looked so much better than the present and the future looks so frightening - Stop.  Remember that the present is all you have.  Be present in everything you do and enjoy life. After all life is a journey not a destination. Have a clear vision for the future, prepare yourself, but always be present in the now.

Be Optimistic.  Treat failure as an opportunity to learn a new and better lesson from life.  Never give up trying. Once you start harboring an optimistic attitude towards life, success will automatically follow.

Don't be Afraid to Dream.  Dreams motivate, inspire and expand our sense of self. They also make us happy because they give our lives a sense of purpose. Happy people usually love what they do, and if they don’t, they love who they are. Dreams remind us who we are.

Care For Your Body. Your physical condition has a direct connection with your well-being. A fit body and healthy mind is reflective of happiness. Start working towards the
health of your physical, mental and emotional energy by caring for your body.  Exercise and meditation help calm your nerves, soothe your mind and elevate your mood.

Give.  Cultivate a habit of sharing with others — your money, knowledge, service, wisdom, care, love.  Giving has many unexpected benefits from attracting more happiness into your life, to inspiring others, and changing the lives of those you touch. In the end the whole world is made into a better place. Ask, “how can I serve?” Pay it forward. Give freely.

By practicing these steps daily and being conscious of them, you will learn gratitude at a level you could never appreciate before. You’re made out of love, and there’s an opportunity at every corner to show it.  Excerpted from wake Up World

 

“Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.”  - Denis Waitley

Lessons from the Wild #3

This perfectly sums up what I feel after just returning from a week hiking in Yosemite National Park on the John Muir Trail -

"You didn't come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here."  - Alan Watts

Only one week, and I feel reborn, refreshed.  And, I feel a deep gratitude for those that fought the good fight, and still are, to protect and preserve our wild spaces.  This last was hit home strongly by a German friend who joined me on this trip.  This is a guy I'd met trekking in Nepal 7 years prior.  He's fortunate to be a tour guide and has spent a lot of time in majestic mountain landscapes all around the world.  After a brief trip here in 2009, he was eager to come back for more, and set his sights on a 4-week hike of the legendary John Muir Trail.  I joined him for the first few days and was inspired at seeing the California Sierras through his eyes.  One observation he made really struck me - that in the Alps, or Himalayas, or in most other mountain ranges, you generally begin in a town or village, hike up a mountain, then descend back to another town.  Not only that, but, particularly in the Alps, on many of the ridges you'll see gondolas, and lights, and roads snaking through all the valleys.  But here, in the California Sierras, you can look as far as the eye can see, and walk for a couple days (or more) in any direction, and still be in wilderness.  WOW!

And it's true.  As we sat in the evenings, watching the light fade from the sky and be replaced by countless stars, I realized that I couldn't even detect a dim glow of some distant town anywhere on the horizon.  Yes, this is rare I thought, and to the great credit of the founder's of our country's national park system.  And countless others who have fought for their continuing preservation, against great odds. David vs. Goliath type battles.

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.”   - Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water

There are many organizations doing amazing work to protect and preserve these vitally important places for all to enjoy - wild animals included.  Start by checking these out and consider what you can do to help - sign a petition, donate, volunteer, spread the word.

National Parks Conservation Association
Friends of the Earth
The Wilderness Society
Save Our State Parks
The Sierra Club
The Nature Conservancy 
Campaign for America's Wilderness
California Wilderness Coalition
Earthjustice
Save the Redwoods League

I also highly recommend the Ken Burns documentary - The National Parks: America's Best Idea - that not only tells the amazing story of our parks foundings, but is beautiful nature porn too.  Most importantly, get out into the Wild!

“It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.”   - Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

My Story

So, you've been reading some of my posts about simplicity, social responsibility and change.  And, you're wondering...  why am I doing this?

Over the past 10 years, I've made major improvements in my own happiness and have grown enormously.  I'm not an expert, or a life coach, but I do feel it's important, and valuable, to share my own findings through personal experience and research on my path to growth.  My hope is that anyone reading this can know that they're not alone, and learn from my mistakes.  This helps me to continually clarify my path, but is also in answer to friends, acquaintances, and perhaps now strangers too that ask why I'm so happy, or how I can enjoy living so simply, or afford to travel for almost 3 years. 

Though not the first step on my path, one of the most profound was my decision in 2005 to leave the field of architecture and travel with my partner in the developing world for an undetermined length of time.  We rented our home and bought a one-way ticket to India.  It was terrifying and exhilarating.  Our aim was to live simply, experience life at the local level, gain an understanding of other cultures, trek in the Himalayas, see the World!  We chose to travel slowly and almost exclusively overland.  Over this time I read profusely, journaled extensively, met scores of incredibly generous people, had hundreds of unforgettable experiences.

The time I spent in the developing world made a profound and lifelong impact on the way I think, feel and want to behave as a citizen of this planet.  During a period of this time we served as Fellows for Kiva.org in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.  This volunteer work gave me intimate access into the humble homes of families borrowing money to sustain or grow their businesses.  With the help of the local microfinance officers, who acted as translators, I was able to ask any question I wanted and learn fascinating details of these people's lives.  I wrote about my experiences and discoveries on Kiva's website for lenders all over the globe who helped finance these small business expenses. 

Here is a sampling of some of their stories:

Channa Ven, mini-mart owner

Channa, 41, is a tiny woman. She seems very shy at having a barang (foreigner) visit her home. We sit on a woven mat on the front porch of her thatched home - also tiny at only 10'x12', and housing 8 people!. Channa has been running the little open-air grocery stand in front of her home for the past 7 years. She says she's happy with this work as it allows her to be home and take care of her 6 children. Her husband used to work in an office, but after he had an operation a few years ago he's been working at home with her. They also raise pigs and work for neighbors during the rice harvest.

Channa's loan of $400 has enabled her to purchase new items for her store, and a small freezer, to better compete with the other village stores that have recently opened. For several years, she was the only store in town, carrying a variety of items - bread, sugarcane, noodles, fesh produce, and rice wines mixed with different fruit juices. Now she tries to keep an edge over competition with her homemade butter, ice cream and sweets.

Channa talks a lot about her children and the difficulty of keeping them in school. Of the six, her oldest is 19 and will now be working with them as college is too expense and far away. Her youngest child, 4, was very ill with fever when she was young and suffered brain damage so that she now has to take care of her at home. More optimistically she speaks of one daughter who is learning English and is "very clever". Channa hopes that with increased income she'll be able to provide for her to attend secondary school.  An opportunity she never had.

Siem Morm, farmer

Siem, a widow at age 53, smiled broadly as she welcomed us into her home the other day. Her loan of $500  has enabled her to purchase fertilizers and pesticides for her farm.  Like her parents before her, and their parents, Siem is a farmer. She's been doing it for over 30 years and says the work comes easily for her as it's all she's ever known. It's very hard work though, and prices are constantly fluctuating, so that the income is often only enough to cover the family's basic living expenses.

Of her eight children, 2 daughters are married and live away from home. Another works in the local government-run garment factory. Her youngest daughter, 14, is still in school and helps her in the afternoons. All four sons are living at home and farm with her. Her main focus now is for improving the business and providing a better education for her youngest. She hopes that when this loan has been repaid she will take another to build a new outhouse and make other improvements to their home.


Saroeurn, 56, greeted us in front of her small mini-mart the other day. The "store" is simply a couple of tables with items displayed on them and others hanging from above. She cleared a spot for the loan officer and I to sit and motioned for her daughter to take over. As we asked her about her life, family and the effects of her loan, several other children and grandchildren who were sitting nearby gazed at us with open curiosity.

Sarourn, mini-mart owner

Saroeurn's loan of $1,000 has enabled her to purchase new items for her store to better compete with the other village stores nearby. The mini-mart is stocked with a variety of food and sundry items - fresh produce, sugar, seasonings, rice crackers, cigarettes, eggs and ice. She tries to keep an edge over competition with unique items like homemade wine and shrimp cakes. Saroeurn also used a portion of her loan to purchase jasmine flowers which her daughter, 24, resells in Phnom Penh. 

Saroeurn's husband is a construction worker. Of their nine children, ages 10 - 24, five have stopped school and work to help support the family. One son is still in school and studies English in Phnom Penh on the weekends. With their combined income, Saroeurn feels her family is doing well. She hopes that in the future, if business continues to improve, they won't have to borrow money again and may even save enough to buy a moto-scooter for the family.

Hong, woodcarver

The experiences I had among the disadvantaged taught me about traveling lightly through life.  It's an amazing sensation for one so used to structure and schedule to be mobile and flexible... and to lighten your load of "stuff"!  That was the beginning of my simplification at home.  It's strange, but excess possessions seem to weigh you down in the same way that excess baggage on the road does.  All those "things" have an attachment and begin to own "you".  So, it goes to reason that the less you have, the more free you feel.  

Liberate yourself!  

Nouern, weaver

Another important lesson that traveling taught me was to slow down, take your time, and take a deep breath.  You're not on this journey alone, so be polite to your fellow passengers - smile and assist when needed.

And finally, be flexible!  Things often don't go as planned, but anger doesn't help.  Again, breathe.  Sometimes, the unexpected can bring about the best in a situation, or in you.

"A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving."  - Lao Tzu