SOLD: Beautiful Happyzine

The self love series

I’m Charlotte and I run this Kiwi good news website Happyzine and I would just like to officially announce, boys and girls, I am no way happy all the time.  Due to the fact that I highly value joy and happiness, I’ve been studying happiness for the past six years, working out what works (and doesn’t work) for me in order to feel good, or at the very least: get through my day!

Here’s what I’ve discovered over the years about my own happiness.

1.  Acceptance – Being rigidly focused upon feeling happy and denying the parts of me that aren’t feeling happy, is a recipe for disaster.  I’m a sensitive, emotional person and there’s no point denying this. I’m much happier if I acknowledge the sadder/angrier/less happy parts of myself and make peace with these these emotions.  They’re all there for a reason, something happened, at some point in my life, to trigger those emotions, and when I welcome them, life gets easier.  When I validate these aspects of myself, I don’t feel great, but I feel happier because I’m not being so hard on myself.

2.   Fair pace – If I try to be super woman and achieve everything on my list with a smile each day, for days on end, I will crash in a puddle of tears and possibly be grumpy at the those who happen to be nearby.  So it’s best to pace myself and do what I can, within the context of my day to day life and keep the pace sustainable.  By the way, the grumpiness is at myself, for asking too much of myself and (importantly) denying myself the pleasure of creating something at my own natural pace.  When I listen inwards, and stop when I need to, I’m able to keep moving forward in a healthy state.

3.  Balance – You know the basics – food, exercise, spirituality, sleep, social – if one’s out of whack, everything else does tend to suffer too.  Life really is a continual balancing act.  I’ve just gone hard on the food front over Christmas, and my body’s telling me to ease back on the rich, sugary, fatty food, so I’m trying to do just that.  When I work a really long week, I really do need to take the weekend out to relax, or schedule some time in when I can let go and relax.  When I bike for an hour and a half after not biking for ten years in attempt to bike off all the pavlova I ate  over Christmas (ahem …) I need to allow some time for my body to rest.  If I don’t, as my husband puts it “the dragon shall awaken”.  The thing with balance is it’s an action word, as in, it’ll never be completed, so it’s best to just accept this and patiently carry on coming back into balance.

4.  Kindness – This one’s a biggie.  If I find myself struggling to be kind to those closest to me, it’s time to look inwards and assess my personal kindness levels.  It may be that I just to turn some kindness upon myself for a while, before I can feel happy enough, or fueled up enough, so have anything positive to give some one else.   I also like to check out how kind people are being to me, as a nice wee reflection of how kind I’m being to myself.  There can never be too much kindness in this world.  I find that “kindness to thy self” easily ripples out to compassion and kindness to those who need it around me.  And this, in turn, comes back ten fold in all sorts of minor miracles.

5.  Finding your wise inner mother  – Ok, I have this inner guidance thing.  It’s kind of an inner voice.  I guess you could call it the wisest aspect of me.  If I listen to it when it says wise things like “go to bed” or “go for a walk” and do what it says, things go a lot smoother in life and happiness is far more likely to prevail.  So the inner Mother voice (aka the quiet inner voice) been known to say the most banal things, in the calmest of voices when I’m at the peak of drama such as “you need to eat”.  If I listen up and do what the voice advises, things defuse and calm down.  If I ignore her, well let’s just say the drama prevails.  She doesn’t give up though (thank good ness) and can be generally relied upon to offer similar useful words and phrases 24/7.  I find when I drink alcohol I can’t hear her.  And when I get really excited, or very busy, it’s harder to tune in.   But the older I get, the more I learn to trust that inner voice.

Charlotte Squire founded Happyzine in 2007.  She runs Happyzine with her husband in Golden Bay, New Zealand.  

Tags: mental health, self love