My friend and fellow Yoga Teacher Candice Wu is a Holistic Healing Facilitator, aka one of the most calming, supportive and caring people you'll ever meet! She's shared 5 Self-Love Practices with us here and now she is sharing the secrets to happiness that everyone wants to know! She and I joke around about how the title for this blog post doesn't actually feel quite right, because happiness isn't about just trying to be happy all the time, it's actually about feeling and being open to all the feelings and sensations you have. The more you accept yourself as a whole, the happier you are! I'll let Candice, the Happiness Expert ;) do the talking, read on below!
3 Ways to Cultivate Inner Happiness
By: Candice Wu
Inner happiness is a result of a connected and healthy relationship with your whole self. Instead of pushing forward faster, genuine happiness comes from going deeper. Try these three tips to cultivate an inner happiness to support you in a natural optimism, vibrance, satisfaction, and zest for life.
1. Get quiet and be in your body
When you ally with your body, body sensations, emotions, thoughts, and images by witnessing and feeling, you can open to a plethora of wisdom, healing, and self-knowing. Your body wants to support you and provide you information. Your true nature is to be happy. Respect your body by taking good care of it and spend the time listening and being aware of what is happening inside.
Yoga, meditation, and tuning in when done with compassionate awareness all support you in standing behind yourself and embodying yourself. Internal happiness requires us to feel all of the possibilities and emotions of being human with grace and understanding instead of with resistance.
2. Dialogue with your uncomfortable emotions with compassion
Brene Brown states, “’We cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.” Instead of ignoring or avoiding the challenging emotions, face them with love. In doing so, you reclaim the energy that is loaded up in them and has been taken up by fighting against them. The body stores emotion and unresolved past experiences as tension, blocking the digestive flow and other important systems of the body.
Talk to the parts of your body that feel sensation, or the emotion that you’re noticing as if it could talk to you back. Imagine this part of you and notice it, sense it. Journal and write to this part of you that is feeling this challenging emotion and ask what message it has for you and what it needs from you (without filtering or judging what it says). Offer the antidote. When you clear up what is unresolved or needing something, flow and ease in the body are restored.
3. Get to know your essential self
Honor what lights you up and what makes you feel most like yourself. Write a letter to yourself from your higher self, soul, spirit, inner guide, or future self. Dialogue with your true self through a visualization or Constellation exercise and ask for any wisdom, comfort, love, or messages it has for you. Get deep and truthful with yourself and journal with this inquiry:
-Who you want to be?
-What would you do today if you loved yourself?
-How you are connected to the wellbeing of yourself and the whole?
-What makes you feel energized?
-What do I need to know or hear at this time?
While these are simple exercises for inner happiness, they are not always easy. However, the more you build your capacity, the easier it becomes over time. Find the compassionate support of a loved one, therapist, or healing facilitator to support you in any deeper or overwhelming emotions that present itself, especially if you have had traumatic or previous overwhelming experiences.