The Light Life Learn

The Light Life Learn

She learns, and then she creates a world she wants to live in. We are not a singular being, yet until we define who we are as individuals, how can we possibly become part of the whole, let alone become part of the greater good?  We are collectively giving in to the mass popular opinion. In trade for being socially accepted, without truly focusing on anything deeper, we acclimate ourselves to how those opinions align with our own values.  Are we learning anything if we also repeat the mistakes of our ancestors? Or, are we becoming an actual new and improved version of humanity? What have we learned about ourselves?  To Learn We have the knowledge, research, evidence, and technology to learn from our past. We know better. In some ways, we are doing better at this thing called, life. We have the ability to learn from our past. We can even learn from the past of our parents, or their parents. Why don’t we apply that to create an authentic happier, healthier life?  We get stuck in acceptance and perception, that’s why. We are mired hip deep in the opinions of others. We’ve taken the greatest advancement in civilized history, and turned it into a cage of other people’s values, views, peer pressure and visual approval. To Love While we in the positive psychology field have set out to focus on what is good in life, the social media megalodon of our lives have turned it into a gilded prison of popular opinion. We are pressured into tip toeing around our thoughts. Instead of becoming aligned with actual...
The Light Life Learn

Let the Light Life Sparkle

The Light Life will sparkle with joy, bliss and love. This new blog is my contribution to The Positive Psychology People. We’ve been living in some darker times for so many individuals. Some of us have lived in unabashed privilege and comfort while others have suffered in hardship and despair.  I hope to bring the concept of vision by illuminating the sky in a collection of light filled life lessons. The goal is, how can we adapt the research and science of positive psychology to best serve all.  I have just spent the better part of a year applying the principles of second wave positive psychology to a vastly underserved population of people in order to see if the system would accept it as equitable and just for that population. I learned a lot as I worked with individuals who rarely hear the uplifting messages we spread in our field.  New Normal  The new light, the new journey, and this blog are dedicated to the strong women and children who are scrambling to pull themselves out of a system of blame and shame. The inconvenient truth of our field is that it can’t easily be applied to individuals full of systemic challenges.  Systems sometimes forget who we serve. We get caught up in our autopilot way of doing things. Our leaders become comfortable using tried and true ways of servicing the system, but sometimes forget that no two humans are exactly alike. We use statistics but must not believe that people become them.  Vision When we clearly see someone for who they are; and when we treat them with...
Grit. Grace. Gratitude. Worldview?

Grit. Grace. Gratitude. Worldview?

My worldview is evolving. GGG @ TPPP is cutting back to bi-monthly as a result. Why? This writer is in a winter-hibernation-worldview-reflection time. The solitude is deafening, and yet necessary. Mastering contentment with silence is needed in order to truly know who we are in the big picture of how we can contribute. Our world is changing, or, maybe it’s just my lens on the world that’s changing, as I watch the world evolve. Change Happens   The things that excite us, upset us, scare us, or look forward to in our youth are swimming against the tide of world change. When we pay attention to history, we know that kindness vs selfishness; good vs evil; black vs white all end up blending into this never-ending influx of push back against our beliefs. We, my dear friends in the universe, are all the same. Why do we separate ourselves in order to feel like we fit in somewhere? When did the separateness become the stock standard of our various cultural norms? What compels the human condition to need to find an ego driven logic or competition? Silence   In the sound of silence, we become reacquainted with our soul. Our inner voice has its platform to speak from within. Everything we do, say, act like, believe and pray-to includes both ego and id. When we practice sitting in the stillness of our own thoughts, the world must quiet down. It has no choice. We let go of stress. We free ourselves of anxiety. We give our brain a day off from world concerns that the news would have us believe...
Grit. Grace. Gratitude. Worldview?

Grit, Grace, Gratitude. Philosophy

One philosophy tells us that our lives are predetermined. Another says that we have free will. Another still,  tells us that life is meaningless, and we are an accident of atoms smashing together in the great cosmos of a lucky toss of the dice.  So why do we continue, after many millenia, to figure out who we are or why we are here?  I prefer John Lennon’s take. Let it be. It is what it is. Therein we find joy, contentment, peace, love, happiness. Life fulfilled is a life we didn’t sit around thinking about but instead, we went out and lived it.  Philosopher’s stone Grace is the key to the master case that carries our grit on the path toward gratitude. Or, is it that grit is the key that opens the master case of grace upon which we are truly grateful? What came first, the chicken or the egg? Classic philosophy could keep us here all day. Thanks to the positive psychology of character strengths and virtues, philosophy is part of our empirical research. But it’s not all of it.  Philosophy and psychology often dance to the beat of a different drummer though, so why do we care or continue to study if nobody is paying attention?  One says don’t listen to your intuition, while the other says, you have a voice of reason built in that sends you signals on moral dilemmas. “What do we owe to each other?”, Tim Scanlon asked in theory.  Let It Be  We owe each other the recognition that we are all one. We have equality in theory, but never in...
The Power of Faith and How to Cultivate it

The Power of Faith and How to Cultivate it

Imagine a life full of hope, peace, freedom, acceptance, patience, courage and optimism, versus a life of doubt, agitation, restriction, blame, urgency, fear and worry. Though we’ll all experience the latter to some degree, only faith brings the former into my life. What is faith? The dictionary definition of faith is ‘complete trust or confidence in someone or something’. So, it could be about having faith in yourself, in those closest to you or even in strangers. More commonly, it’s associated with faith in God (whether in the religious sense or not), in Grace, Divinity, in the universe, the soul, the spirit and in life itself. Funnily enough, the more abstract, non-physical and non-provable constructs are actually the ones I find it easiest to have faith in! I struggle most to have faith in myself. I’m pretty good at having faith in other people – sometimes I have too much of this and can be left disappointed! But somehow, I find myself having a very strong faith in something that I don’t even know for sure exists. I have faith in what I call a non-religious God, or Grace, or ‘the divine architecture of life’. It’s the thing that created everything, including me. It’s within me, too. “Faith is the being able to cleave to a power of goodness appealing to our higher and real self, not to our lower and apparent self.” (Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, 1873). It is this type of faith that brings most peace, hope and gratitude into my life. How do we cultivate faith? I can’t think of a specific time, place or...