Welcome New Readers!  Glad to have you aboard!  And a warm welcome to old friends, too; it wouldn’t be the same without you.

I brought hot chocolate and cookies today.  Come sit by the fire with me and have some.  The marshmallows are right over there . . .

So, how’s the New Year been treating you?  Are your dreams still shining for you?

I’ve had a roller coaster kind of week myself.  After four months of intense study, I turned in my final exam for my positive psychology coaching certification.  That was a high.   Then I got the news that a good friend I’ve known for 20 years may have an incurable illness.  And that broke my heart.

Mostly it was an ordinary week, with some good stuff, some not so much.  Some hearty laughs, some frustrations, some moments that touched my heart, some that riled me.  You know: life.

I’ve been keeping a “three good things” journal for several months now, writing down three of each day’s highlights before I go to sleep at night.  And I must say it’s a great way to keep your perspective when the balance of your day leans toward the “not so much” side of things.  Not only does it make you poke around through the hours until you realize that three good things did happen, but after a while, you’re holding a book in your hands that holds page after page of life’s moments of grace, accomplishment, beauty and joy.

I was thinking about the richness of emotions we experience in the course of a week, all the highs and lows, the varying in-betweens.   Sometimes people think that those of us who work on building our positivity shut ourselves off to the feelings that fall in the lower range of the scale. But that’s not how it works.

All feelings are valid; they all serve a purpose and provide us with information.  Even the negative ones.  Being positive doesn’t mean you throw the negative out.    It means that you honor them enough to welcome them at your table, to hear what they have to say. It means you stay open to their lessons so you they don’t have to constantly recur.

Yes, it means that you celebrate the positive feelings when they dance through and give them their rightful due.  And it means that you cultivate an outlook that nourishes and invites them so they’ll come more frequently and stay a little longer.

And when you do that, a magical thing happens.  The good feelings begin to outweigh the negative ones.  And when the balance reaches a certain point (Studies say it’s a ratio of 3 to 1.), you find yourself living on an upward spiral where the positive feeds itself and grows and grows and grows.

Sad things still make you sad.  Injustice still makes you angry.  Loss still makes your hurt.  You still have Murphy’s Law days.  You still get scared and feel your doubts and have your times of confusion.

But when you stop and look back at how the negative states feel now compared to how they felt before you began cultivating your happiness, you notice that the negativity isn’t devastating any more.  You feel it; but now it doesn’t own you.  It is what it is; it doesn’t generalize to color your whole day.

The yoyo of emotions still rolls up and falls down, but you’re riding the up escalator now, so the highs are higher and the lows are nowhere near where they were before.   And every level that you pass holds more beautiful treasures than the one before.

It’s worth the work.

And it’s even better when you have good  friends along for the ride.

So thanks for joining me.   I’m so glad you’re here!

More hot chocolate?