Falling In Love With Your Life Again
by Jomel Bajar, PT,DPT,MS
Are you one of those who wonders how to fall in love with life again?
There is a lot to think about our life today - our work, our family, our dreams, wishes, fears, and so on. Have you felt that so much of your life is spent wanting to be somewhere else or perhaps wanting to be doing something else? Or maybe you wanting to be with someone else?
It is very common for people to look back at their past and forget to appreciate the good things that is happening to them. People always spend countless hours chasing the future and at the same time looking back to the past, not able to appreciate the present moment.
We forget that “PAUSING” is really a way to appreciate the preciousness of our human life. Being thankful for the moment let us directly experience that feeling and what it means to be alone and genuinely grateful about our life. A simple technique to pause and be thankful for the moment is a specific technique that is highly recommended to enjoy life more. These short pauses in life are the things that we can so easily take for granted when we are caught-up in the busy-ness of our everyday life. It is important to remember that every minute of our lives has the potential to be both happy and healthy, if and only if we can explore deep in us during these brief pauses in life the power of gratitude and appreciation to fall in love with life again.
Have you sat with a group of friends and trying to solve certain things that were going on with their lives? Do you know of someone who closed their Facebook account because it made them feel lonely seeing lives of happy people? Do you know someone who is incredibly stressed in their lives because of their spouse was not the perfect partner they were wishing for? When these things happen try to pause and re-focus on appreciation and gratefulness. It will do you good to ask yourself, what do I appreciate in my life today? It can be as simple as a morning cup of coffee and enjoying the quiet stillness while drinking it on your own. Or it can be as complex as being able to hike Mt Everest with group of friends.
The truth is, we all have these moments of opportunity throughout the day where we can truly be more present and to feel a greater sense of appreciation and gratefulness in our lives. We must learn to dig inside ourselves what can we be thankful for that moment of pausing.
When it comes to falling in love with life again there are different ways of achieving it. One way is to begin with an “intentional mind” and by that, I mean is that you are intentionally looking for things that are going well in your life. It might be something that happens daily, might be a physical health, it might be the people around you, and it might be the environment or the place that you live.
There are so many ways that we can find areas of our life that are working well. One technique to remember is that it does not necessarily connect to the story that we have in our mind. Reach to a place within yourself where that feeling of appreciation and that feeling of gratefulness live. We have all experienced that before. We have had that moment where for whatever reason something or someone has touched us in a way that just allows us to experience that feeling of appreciation. Therefore, we need to create a space for that and search for that space within us.
In fact, when I think back to my childhood and my growing years; I was taught how to reflect on the precious nature of life. Some people call it prayer, some people call it meditation, and some mindfulness. There are different techniques that we can implore if we pause for a moment and be thankful. As you wake up in the morning, take few seconds just to pause and be grateful that you have woken up rather than immediately jumping out of the bed. Before every meal in the day, pause for a minute just to consider where the food came from and be thankful that it is in front of you. When you are spending time with someone else, try to be present with the other person and appreciating the time they are with you rather than thinking what is going on with your life.
So, there are so many different opportunities in the day to tap into that feeling of appreciation if we know where they are and how to search for it. Practicing this makes life starts to look and feel very different very quickly. Everyday try to reflect on this one question; What do I appreciate now? Make it a habit. The intention is to create an environment where we touch our emotion. Our goal is to be grateful about the preciousness of life, that we are alive. Science has shown that it contributes to our sense of happiness and a sense of overall well-being and how we can make us feel different about our life. In one study they asked participants at the end of each day just to consider three things in their lives for their grateful for and writing those things down in reflecting on those positive things. They've essentially discovered that taking the time to do this on a regular basis not only helps people feel better in the moment but also allows them to feel happier in their everyday life. Therefore, the results of this study essentially mean that if we can find a way of introducing that greater sense of gratitude at any time in our day it can significantly improve happiness and help us
learn to fall in love with life again.
How to Practice Gratitude - Mindful
Mindfulness | Psychology Today
Evidence Based Mindfulness: Research - UW Family Medicine (wisc.edu)