“The finest thing in the world is knowing how to belong to oneself.” ~Michel de Montaigne

Most of us are plagued with some degree of unworthiness. Even after close to 250 days of active work at creating a positive life, I still find the tendrils of connection to a belief that seems to be part of my genetic code. It equates my pain in life to something wrong with me. I know I am not alone in this most fundamental experience we have of abandoning ourselves. I have found a Buddhist teacher, Tara Brach who addresses this issue in her book Radical Acceptance.

She equates our belief in our unworthiness as a trance-like belief in a false self that is inherently separate and on some deep level not worthy. Her teaching on radical acceptance encourages not only an honest acknowledgment of what is going on inside, but also a courageous willingness to be with life as it is in the moment. She writes: “There is an increasingly well-known adage that says “What you resist, persists.” Your identity gets hitched to whatever you are not accepting. And the more you push something away or run from something, the more your sense of self is linked with that experience.”

The leap comes from giving yourself the opportunity to accept an experience without having to like it. It is the combination of acceptance without resistance that gives freedom. Often it is hard to tease out the pain from the resistance which is usually some form of judgment we make about ourselves or the situation we are in. The layers melt together and what gets lost most immediately is our ability to hold onto ourselves. Exchanging our judgments for a devotion to mindful attention opens our ability to relate to our own pain. Our sense of being becomes larger than the feelings that felt too big to hold; suddenly it becomes manageable. Freedom is not escape from painful feelings, it is having the room to experience it and move through it.

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“If I have the belief that I can do it, I will surely acquire the capacity to do it, even if I may not have it at the beginning.” -Mahatma Gandhi

I have been thinking of making a vision board all summer since first reading Martha Beck’s article in June’s issue of Oprah at the doctor’s office. The idea of collecting images and words from magazine pages and cutting them up into a collage isn’t new for most of us. Many middle school projects start this way and for many of us, putting together a collage of what and who we loved was wall décor. The whole topic came up this weekend as I finally cleared out years of old magazine titles that I have been saving next to my bed for a couple of years.

As I went through them, I knew I couldn’t part with them all without taking something that had made me hold onto it. When I shared the idea with Emma, my 12-year-old daughter, she was on board.  She cut as I continued to clean and before long we had a huge pile of images and words that felt like us.  Martha Beck said,  “When you start assembling pictures that appeal to your deepest self, you unleash one of the most powerful forces on our planet: human imagination,…Virtually everything humans use, do, or make up exists because someone thought it up.”

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“The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together”  ~Erma Bombeck

Today I interviewed my kids on my radio show. I asked them how it was for them to have a mother who makes love products and calls herself a loveologist. I asked them their best advice about relationships in families. I asked them how they felt about the boundaries that I crossed every time they came home sad and troubled and I forced them to talk about what happened. I asked them whether and how they felt that all the processing of their feelings impacted their lives today.

We all raise our families with the best intentions and the worst, or at least the most challenging attributes we possess. For me, the issue of boundaries played heavily on both fronts. In my own childhood, privacy was a punishment in an already isolating family structure. I never knew what was really lurking behind someone else’s silence, and often it was untapped rage. Raising my own children, I sacrificed their need for privacy for my belief in the emotional health of disclosure.

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“When people think of ‘science’, they naturally think of atoms, planets, robots — things they can touch and see. They know that subjective experiences such as happiness are important, but they believe that such experiences can’t be studied scientifically. That belief is dead wrong.” – Daniel Gilbert.

I often think about Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness when I find myself in exactly the situation he described in the book. Based on his work in the research science lab at Harvard in “affective forecasting,” which investigates how well people make predictions about the emotional impact of future events, the results of our collective capacity on knowing what we want and how it will make you feel is not promising. Humans are not terribly successful at predicting the reactions of our future selves to our current desires.

Our brains and our eyes mislead us. They conspire together to support each other in believing the distortions of reality to fit our expectations. Gilbert explains: “Distorted views of reality are made possible by the fact that experiences are ambiguous­, that is, they can be credibly viewed in many ways, some of which are more positive than others. To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants. The conspiracy between these two servants allows us to live at the fulcrum of stark reality and comforting illusion.”

What this all means to me tonight is that like most of us, it is hard to remember that the life we are having is precisely the one we choose, and frequently have worked very hard to maintain. But then you look around and realize that you thought it would feel differently, having achieved what you wanted. I am on the brink of some big changes in my work life and with my family. My children growing up and away still need to be attended as much as they want their freedom and the balance of contact is precarious and unpredictable for both sides.

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“All that we are is the result of what we have thought.” -Buddha

One of the mantras of my life that has continuously proven more true all the time is the idea that what we focus on multiplies. This is true on every plane of existence, whether it is the mental, physical, spiritual or emotional internal states or the many ways we interact with the world. This is in fact one of the primary laws of the positivity quest and is backed up by every scientific study that has been done on positive psychology.

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“Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.” -John Milton

Long ago, when I first imagined selling love products I called them Sacred Moments. The first labels had a picture of a lit candle surrounded by ancient quotes on the power of physical love to heal the world. My thinking was that there is no moment closer to our source than the moment of deeply physically loving the person you love. Shared orgasmic experience is as close as we get to the divine. That kind of love is awe inspiring and acts on the body like a system reset button.

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“Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all” –William Faulkner

I like the idea that gratitude exists in the world like an electric current. The more that it is expressed and experienced, the more energy that gratitude builds. I know I am not alone in having felt appreciation for someone’s help or effort and not expressed my gratitude for their thoughtfulness or trouble. Do other people experience our gratitude when nothing is shared? It has been said that silent gratitude isn’t much use to anyone and as I think of the moments when I walked away without communicating my gratitude it did feel a little like a short circuit in the energy of life.

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“When something does not insist on being noticed, when we aren’t grabbed by the collar or struck on the skull by a presence or an event, we take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude” -Cynthia Ozick

I was searching for the feeling of gratitude for much of the day. I let it be a slow day, not jumping out of bed early to exercise, letting myself have quiet writing time at home, taking the dogs and kids on a walk through my favorite nature park. I accomplished the necessary and left early for a late afternoon swim at the lake. When the kids all took the floatie out, I lay gazing up at the blue sky and heard the warm summer breeze on the banks while the dogs resting on either side of me.

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“All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.” -Havelock Ellis

Today was a closet purge. I finally packed up all of the size 10 pants and jeans that no longer close around my waist. I have been waiting to fit into these clothes for at least two years now, if not three. Some still had their tags on, so I know I must have been close to that size not long ago. It is a little discouraging, given my regular exercise routine and that I actually am conscious about what I eat. It is alas the inexorable march into midlife; my body, like the skin on my neck, is changing, too.

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“I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” -Walt Whitman

I have been reflecting on half a year of positivity questing this week. Trying to organize what I have learned in this time and trying to marshal it to step up when, even now I can forget how to be positive. Happily because I talk about it so much, when I can’t quite get there, I have many reliable reflectors in my family to remind me where to look

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