Tea is one of my gates to happiness. Yesterday’s teabag told me the gate to happiness is …
… self-compassion.
My gates to happiness also include:
significant relationships,
therapy groups, and
observing what’s around me.
A gate to happiness for me and Oscar would be a child-proof gate for those deck stairs going down to the street.
What are your gates to happiness?
Another gate to happiness, for me, is singing songs I love. I plan to sing along to Pat Metheny playing “A Lot of Livin’ To Do” tomorrow night at an Open Mic.
I’ll let you know on Saturday whether I made it out of the starting gate.
Happy thanks to all who helped me create this Gate-to-Happiness post and to you — of course! — for entering this blogging gate today.
Yesterday, I told people in therapy sessions not to judge themselves for being self centered. How could we not be self centered? If we don’t put ourselves in the center of our own lives, who will?
I, myself, constantly witness people judging themselves very harshly for being self centered, labeling themselves too selfish, too self-absorbed and even narcissistic. This is what I tell those selves:
“If you worry about being a narcissist, you’re not.”
I know my self well enough to know I’m not a narcissist, even though I’ve stopped worrying about that.
Here are some self centered photos from yesterday:
Michael himself centered that delicious food on a plate for me last night after my self-centered therapy group.
Earlier this year, I wrote a post referring to John Koenig‘s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which is “a compendium of invented words” “to give a name to emotions we all might experience but don’t yet have a word for.”
Yesterday, in my therapy group (where I’m always on the lookout for obscure sorrows and other feelings), one of the members brought in three entries from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.
While some things in those photos might be obscure, people in the group last night noticed that two of those obscure words were real and only one — Altschmerz — really belongs in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. People did not obscure their appreciation for the relevancy of the real word Weltschmerz:
Weltschmerz is the depressing feeling you get when comparing the actual state of the world to the picture in your head of how the world should be, and knowing that the picture in your head can never exist.
We also discussed the obscure sorrows created by the cognitive distortion of comparisons, especially when we compare ourselves to how we used to be or how we think we should be.
Do you see any obscure sorrows in some recent pictures in my head (and in my iPhone) that can exist in this blog?
I feel self-compassion as I admit that I sometimes obscure sorrows with lots of pictures.
Here‘s John Koenig giving the TED talk “The conquest of new words” (which was in an link obscured in the first paragraph of this Obscure Sorrows post):
Are there any obscure sorrows or other feelings you’d like to share in a comment, below?
I will not obscure my thanks to all who helped me create this post and to you — of course! — no matter what obscure feelings or thoughts you’re having, here and now.
