How do we find happiness? What is it in life that makes us happy? How do we maintain happiness? How do we remain positive?.... We choose it.
What an annoying and cliche line hey? Happiness is a choice, positivity is a mindset, confidence is an energy that we create, we've heard it all so many times before, but as annoying and cliche as it may sound, it's true. We make the decision to be happy, we make the choice to act confidently, we create an energy through our ever day routine, rituals and mindset that allows us to maintain a frequency of positivity. How do we do this tho? Well my angel it is a lot easier said than done.
Before we dive any deeper into this discussion lets talk about the dangers of false positivity and ego. Choosing happiness does not mean foregoing or over riding other emotions with toxic amounts of positive energy. We must feel the full spectrum of emotions and allow ourselves to understand our pain, shadow, shame etc. When we experience these lower vibrational emotions, its important to explore their depths, their origins and their triggers - so that we can begin to heal. Life can be incredibly difficult to navigate and there will be times in your life where happiness and positivity feel impossible and thats ok! We are meant to be happy all the time, however, happiness is a state or feeling that we are constantly seeking. It's through our understanding of our pain and how that pain relates back to our quality of life that we begin to understand our happiness. Now when it comes to building confidence, one must tread carefully to ensure they don't end up in the energy of ego or narcissism. In our journey to confidence we must always seek to remain grounded, down to earth and humble.
So back to happiness being a choice. Happiness is a choice that we make through other smaller choices, through our daily routine, practice and ritual. Happiness is found directly in the middle of discipline and surrender. We often get overwhelmed by life and its demands, emotionally drained or exhausted by our day to day living and sometimes, we even wait to allow ourselves to feel happy. We wait until we're on holiday or until we've finished a project or until we've moved house or until we've secured the dream job - we wait. Part of this is because society has glorified suffering, it has made us believe that we are undeserving of happiness and if we are happy, keep that shit quiet because others are suffering and its not fair that you're not too. This mindset or societal standard is incredibly damaging to the health of our souls, minds and bodies. This mindset almost brainwashes us to believe that we have to achieve something in order to celebrate life, we have to work in order to be rewarded with happiness, we have to be living up to a certain standard to be content and grateful with our lives - but we don't. I've said it before and i'll say it again, the meaning of life is simply to live it, as long as we are alive on this planet we are living successful lives. A lot of happiness stems from gratitude for the little things, we decided to reincarnate as humans to experience earth and practicing gratitude for even the smallest things can create huge mindset shifts.
Once I started to practice gratitude daily i came to the realisation that, i want to live a slow, patient life. To take my time walking through it, enjoying every moment, every little breath of wind, every little flower, every drop of rain, every beam of sunlight, savouring it. To enjoy the heat of the sun on my skin and marvel at its defenses to the cold. To sit with nature and thank her for being the home to my soul. I want to run just to feel my feet moving faster than my mind. I want to sing so hard my voice cracks and laugh so hard my ribs hurt. I want to paint just to see the colours and make terrible art just to make the art. Don’t get me wrong I have big plans, big goals and dreams, moments that will define who i am. But when it’s my last day here, when i think of all i did, all i was on earth, i won’t want to see my career, my bank balance, my house or my car… I’ll want to see the breeze in the grass, a butterfly dotting the light on the ground as it floats by. I want to see the waves gently lap at the shore, the trees groan with their age and height. I’ll want to see a flower bloom and a bird take its first flight, to see an orange sky or lightening at night. So you see, what i want to take from this life, isn’t my achievements or the things that i collected. I want to take a little piece of earth, a reminder of mother nature. As she is, without the noise or the drama or war and the pain. I want to take a breeze in the grass, a beam of sunlight, to take gratitude. To live life with this mindset and not wait until its over to realise that happiness was always there, in every little moment, joy was present.
Now, let's talk a little bit about confidence. Confidence is a huge fake it till you make it game. I used to be a very insecure person and made choices/changes to my lifestyle and mindset that helped to turn me into the confident lil bby you see today. A great way to begin a confidence journey is to start with affirmations, if you can practice them whilst looking in a mirror, even better. Affirmations are sentences or mantras that we repeat to ourself over and over again until we actually believe what we are saying to be fact. For example "I am beautiful, I am powerful, I am magnetic, I am confident" is an amazing affirmation to being your confidence journey with.
When practicing affirmations we are training/rewiring the neural pathways in our brain. Our brain is a muscle and just like any other muscle we can train it to look/think a certain way. Our brain is not actually responsible for the way that we think, our consciousness is and it’s our consciousness that trains our brain and determines how we think or how we see ourselves/the world around us. When our consciousness engages in affirmations it is training the brain and changing our neural pathways definitively. So when we practice affirmations, we are in essence tricking or training our brain into believing whatever it is we are affirming. For example, if we affirm “I am beautiful” to ourselves consistently over time, the neural pathways in our brain will respond to this information, re-wire themselves and believe it to be fact. You (your consciousness) will be aware that you have tricked your brain, however, you have now trained a neural pathway to believe what you have affirmed - in turn meaning, that you now believe that affirmation to be fact as well. Affirmations genuinely change the way we think by re-wiring the brain, so stick with them my babies and train your brain to believe whatever it is you’re wanting to affirm into your life. This belief will bring with it a new mindset that is mired deeply in self love and self confidence.
Another great thing to remember when practicing confidence is that literally no one cares. Everyone is so caught up in their own world, with their own insecurities and their own issues to care about what you're wearing or how you look or what you're doing. Think about it this way, how much time do you spend worried about what others think of you or about how you're being perceived? How much time do you spend lost in your own little world or in your own head concerned about how you acted and how others interpreted those actions, now think about the fact that literally everyone is doing the same thing. We are all usually too caught up in our minds or too focussed on what others think of us to ever do a deep dive on our perception of others. So if you're worrying about how others think of you, don't, they're probably too busy thinking about how others think of them to even think of you at all.
If you're worried about embarrassing yourself, don't, embarrassment doesn't even exist, cringe is not real! When we find someone cringe or embarrassing we actually aren't reflecting their actions, but instead reflecting a deep internal shame/wound that lives within our shadow. Most of the time that shame is linked to freedom of choice or action, when we see someone doing something that we find embarrassing we are often interpreting their behaviour as unsafe, reflecting our lack of freedom or our own ability to feel safe or to express ourselves fully in the given environment. So if someone finds you embarrassing it actually has nothing to do with you and every thing to do with them so keep shining bby, keep doing you, don't let the wounds of others stop you from healing and living to your full capacity.
Combining crystalline energy with gratitude practice & affirmation is a surefire and powerful way to tap into your happiness/confidence and begin to understand, feel and revel in the frequency of joy and freedom. Work your crystals into daily meditations, focussing on the frequency of joy, program them with your gratitude/affirmation practice or keep smaller stones on you throughout the day to tap into their energy on the go.
Crystals for Happiness:
+ Citrine
+ Ocean Jasper
+ Pyrite
Crystals for Confidence:
+ Carnelian
+ Honey Calcite
+ Hematoid Quartz