Happiness │Inspiration │Abundance │Lifestyle

I Discovered Life Wants Me to Live in Happiness, Peace, and Abundance.

We can create a beautiful, rich life day by day and moment by moment.

“I’ve never seen a day so beautiful” — Maya Angelou

I woke up Sunday morning with one thing on my mind…

Joy.

While breathing, meditating, and filling my body with love and peace, I contemplated and intended a day filled with joy.

And let me tell you, I got it!

What if we awakened each day intending beauty, joy, creativity, love, abundance, and peace?

What if, in a moment when things don’t entirely turn out the way we want or in our favor, we can choose peace and gratitude anyway?

How different would our lives be?

What would new opportunities for more abundance, peace, and joy manifest in our world?

Yes, life is built one day at a time. Likewise, we created days one moment at a time. What we bring to each moment will make our day. Those days add up to years, decades, and a lifetime.

As such, I’d like to share with you 4 Meta-practices that have helped me create better moments and days while drawing goodness and beauty into our life.

1️⃣I’ve Learned to Let Go of What No Longer Serves Me.

In the past, I spent far too much time and energy carrying around stuff that no longer served me.

We drag it from one stage of life to the next, and it gets more challenging to align with beauty, peace, abundance, joy, and freedom.

All the extra we carry is throwing us off course in our self-awareness journey.

And yes, “letting go” is easier said than done, but I’ve discovered a few practices can help.

Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to be.

I lived the strong black woman trope. I had to be every woman to be considered lovable, intelligent, successful, and worthy.

Through life circumstances and challenges, I discovered I must let go of who I thought I was “supposed to be” for who I am and who I am becoming. Oh, it’s always present tense.

In life, we are in a constant state of Being and Becoming. And yet, our Being and Becoming process is distorted when we follow the path of who we think we “should be.”

We listen to the chatter around us and forget who we are and where we want to go in life.

As our world evolves into a distorted mess, we try to contort ourselves to fit into it. We wrest ourselves until we don’t recognize who we are.

We can work to let go of this “false” self each day. Not all at once because it is a shedding procedure. While shedding layers of a false identity, we need time to recover and heal.

Therefore, it is good practice to be patient with ourselves.

Let go of relationships that no longer serve you.

In the past, I thought this was selfish talk.

It doesn’t sound very empathetic. If a relationship no longer serves you, it no longer serves the other person. Letting go of a relationship that no longer serves you is an act of kindness.

Perhaps you need to forgive that person and let go. You may even need to thank that person and let go. You don’t have to do it face to face. You can sit in a space alone, think of that person and say aloud “______________. I forgive you for _______________. You are not off the hook for __________________, But I choose to forgive you and let you go.

Similarly, you can thank a person by saying _____________________, I thank you for ______________. But I let go of you because______________.

Because of other relationships, the person may still be in your life though you’ve let go of the relationship. It’s not always about not seeing that person again.

Most importantly, we are letting go of a relationship’s impact and influence on our lives. We don’t enjoy our days when we allow people to live rent-free in our minds.

Conduct a Life Inventory

Other times, we may need to remove some things from the hard drives to have room for that, which does serve us more.

Hence, we must take personal inventory of various domains of our life. What one may perceive as a life domain may vary from person to person. Those domains may include:

• Health
• Finances
• Relationships
• Vocation and Profession
• Spiritual or Personal Practices

Next, you will personally evaluate each domain by probing your…

• beliefs
• values
• habits
• goals
• commitments

… concerning each domain. I created a workbook for myself with this exercise, which was life-changing.

Learning to detect thriving over striving

Hustling, moving, shaking, pushing — yes, striving — used to get my adrenaline going. I didn’t realize I was getting rushes of dopamine and not thriving in life.

Our adrenalin can fool us as if we are making things happen in our life. The risk/reward game can trick us. A dopamine rush can feel like a success, and we won’t know if we are thriving or striving.

When we are thriving, we are growing, evolving, and expanding through efforts. Our growth, evolution, and expansion can be seen and experienced in many domains of life because they affect one another. A thriving relationship can be good for our mental health, for example.

Contrarily, when we are striving, everything feels hard. So much extra effort has to be used and put out, but there is very little return.

And struggling in one domain of life can affect others. For instance, striving to succeed financially by putting in long work hours can impact our physical and mental health or relationships.

To find peace and live beautiful, happy days, we must let go of what we are striving for and embrace areas of our life where we thrive.

2️⃣Let Go of What You Can’t Control.

Our days can draw the worst moments to us from a bitter Earth, exerting energy attempting to control what we can’t control.

I was exhausted and frustrated, trying to keep the dominoes from falling.

Through growth and maturity, I’ve learned coping mechanisms for life uncertainties.

The truth is, we can’t be sure about everything. When we want absolute certainty, a need for control over everything increases.

But there are things you will never have control over. Now, how do you deal with that actuality?

This answer may seem so simple that you may want to roll your eyes with dissatisfaction with my brevity.

You let go of what you can’t control by focusing on what you can control. I cannot control who likes me and who doesn’t. I can control how I feel about myself and whether I will surround myself with fun and uplifting folks or team killjoy.

I cannot control whether or not other people will see me as successful, intelligent, and lovable. But I can develop my ideas of what success, intelligence, and love are for me.

Moreover, I choose to surround myself with people who display these qualities because they will recognize and appreciate these qualities in me.

3️⃣Expand your Consciousness Daily.

A Living Soul is multidimensional; therefore, we have the power to explore life mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. While exploring our soul’s potential, we learn, grow, and evolve in a conscious state of self-empowerment on a self-awareness journey.

Accordingly, I learned that the commitment to expand my consciousness daily is a commitment to “doing the work” so that I may experience my full potential and actualize the greatest and best version of me.

Expanding our consciousness makes days richer, fuller, and brighter on our soul trip and self-awareness journey.

Take time to Reflect on your day.

You can do this by journaling in written form. Another way is to record your thoughts out loud on your phone. Reflection is a crucial practice during our self-awareness journey.

When I reflect daily, while my activities of the day are fresh on my mind, my perceptions are much clearer.

Question Your Intentions

When I began questioning my intentions, I learned some grown-ass woman responsibilities. Questioning your intentions makes you take full responsibility for your actions.

It’s easy to question everyone else’s intentions, but it is a sign of personal growth and evolution when we can examine our own.

We may question our intention by probing what’s on our minds and hearts.

For example, Am I doing this because I think it’s productive and serves my well-being, or am I doing this to please others? Do I want to start a business, or do I hate my job?

If we question our intentions, we expand our consciousness and self-awareness.

Improve Your Intuition

Intuition is direct access to unconscious knowledge, unconscious cognition; inner sensing; inner insight to unconscious pattern-recognition; and the ability to understand something instinctively, without any need for conscious reasoning.

Two ways to improve intuition are:

• gaining knowledge and applying it to create a treasure chest of wisdom.
• improving our ability to access what we know without laboring our conscious reasoning.

Here, the University of Minnesota and The Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing provide this exercise to help improve your intuition,

Focus your love.

Find a spot to sit comfortably.

Identify something you really love to do or a place that you love.

Using your imagination, allow what you identified to ‘fall into’ your heart area and nest there for the duration of the exercise.

Inhale on the count of ‘1’ and exhale on the count of ‘2’ however imagine that it is your heart that is breathing.

Allow your ‘heart breath’ to caress your thoughts as it moves in, through, and around the nest.

After 5 minutes of caressing the thing or place your love, invite your thoughts to return to your head area.

Focus on your breathing heart.

Use your intuitive senses to know what gift of understanding has been left or been born in the nest.

If nothing is there, let it go for the moment.

We are creating our lives day by day and moment by moment. I like what Henery X, a writer here on Medium, said in his “offering” entitled The Circle of Life

Each second is like a jewel, so if we treasure every moment, the end of the day will be priceless. — Henery X

Let’s live a life so rich and full, it’s priceless.

Fam, I’m curious. What do you practice to ensure you attract more peace, joy, love, and abundance to your life?

Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

And Hey, why not check out these great stories by excellent writers and storytellers on Medium:

📖My Efforts To Reach My Goals Set Me Up For Failure In The Past by Stephanie A. James

📖Saving For A Rainy Day by Vidya Sury, Collecting Smiles

📖Dear Sensitive Soul, Keep Going by Hannah

📖Dare Each Day to Be the Amazing Person You Are by Art Bram

📖The Sun Sets On Ten Years Marie A. Rebelle

📖Achieve Success Faster By Doing This Thing That Most People Don’t Do by Danish Fikri

📖As a Man Thinks by Barefoot Grace

📖Finally Moving to My 55 and Older Community Today and I’m a Nervous Wreck! by Klara Jane Holloway