Laughter is the Best Medicine

“You have to laugh at yourself, because you’d cry your eyes out if you didn’t.”
—Emily Saliers

We take ourselves and life way too serious sometimes. We worry about tomorrow and yesterday and forget all about what we are doing at the moment.

Have you every done anything really silly? Maybe something that you cannot believe you would do by letting yourself be out of perfect control for one minute? Did you live through it? Did the world come to an end? Of course not.

And the best part is that when we do make mistakes or do something outside our ordinary boxed in perfect little lives and we can laugh about it, the world is a happier place because we’ve let go, even if momentarily, of perfectionism.

Someone said, and it’s been repeated often, that laughter is the best medicine. A good ol’ deep belly laugh can be one of the most healing moments we can have. We don’t have them enough, but if we think back to the last one we had we can see where it helped. Most likely we had tears streaming down our face and could not control the laugh or the tears.

It’s not always easy to get to that place. In the movie “Steel Magnolias” there’s a part where two usually crabby older women have just attended the funeral of a young, vibrant new wife and mother. They argue a bit and before you know it they are laughing. I did the same thing watching the movie; cried and then laughed.

Both crying and laughing can bring healing tears.

Find something to laugh about every day.

Patience is a Virtue

“One moment of patience may ward off great disaster. One moment of impatience may ruin a whole life.”
—Chinese proverb

I remember one time when I was young receiving as a gift a small plaque that had the Holly Hobbie dolls on it and the words “Patience is a Virtue.” The gift was from my aunt and I asked her what it meant.

“You’ll find out when you get older,” she said. That’s when patience became a conundrum to me and unfortunately, it tends to remain such.

It’s difficult to be patient. Standing in lines, getting stuck in traffic, waiting for a Web page to load, or a day to end, all require patience. But what about the big things: waiting on an answer to prayer. Waiting to meet and fall in love with your soul mate. Waiting on word that your book proposal has been accepted for publishing. These are a lot tougher.

What does it mean to be patient though? We don’t have much choice in some instances but to wait, but how we wait is the key to patience being a virtue.
Some words that are synonyms of patience include: endurance, composure, stability. It implies qualities of calmness, and persistent courage in trying circumstances. Sometimes we just don’t want to be stable and show courage and composure. But it’s just that calmness that will keep us sane during times where great patience is needed.

We can live our lives impatiently, but we won’t be able to have serenity. Patience takes a lot of letting go. It takes strength to see that we can’t control the outcomes of every part of our lives.

Give patience a shot; what choice do we have?

A Fresh Perspective

“Life is a continuous exercise in creative problem solving.”
—Michael J. Gelb

On any give day we may experience some problem for which we do not have an answer. We struggle and fight to come up with a solution on how to handle a particular matter at work, with friends, with our children or partner. The more we try to figure out a solution the more upset we get.

When that happens we can leave the problem or issue for a while and do something else. Often the answer comes when we aren’t trying to force it. The more we struggle, the more upset and anxious we become. Our mind becomes filled with too many options or no options and only fear or anxiety. Walking away from the problem often will bring an answer while we are thinking about something else.

Go take a walk or do something different than what you are doing and see if the answers come. Wash the dishes, do the laundry, do a different task at work, read your child a book, take a drive, pray, meditate, sleep, go to a Twelve Step meeting … try doing whatever you are not doing at the moment that is not working.

Sometimes even doing a different physical activity won’t bring the answers we are looking for, but at least we get a break for a while. Sometimes the answers come when we are just still and quiet. Forcing an answer is useless.

The answers will come when we stop trying so hard to get them.

What Brings You Joy?

“Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.”
—Thich Nhat Hanh

Those days when we feel good, when we have pep in our step or a swagger as some refer to it, those are the days we long for. And sometimes they seem to appear for no reason and regretfully disappear as fast as they came.

One of the answers to our happiness is to figure out for ourselves what brings those on and what makes them go away. Often it could be something that happened outside of us, someone giving us a literal or figurative pat on the back. It could be a small success that on any other day would have no effect on us. It might be internal joy over a small or large accomplishment.

Often we know what to do when we get down and have to work our way out of a depression. But do we know how to get the joy when we are having a regular time in our lives, when we are simply dealing with our day to day self-esteem issues?

The confidence that we have in the moments when the swagger is there is something that would be nice to bottle and keep for future use when we aren’t feeling so good. If we can figure out what makes us feel confident, we will be more successful at having the pep and swagger.

What brings you joy? Figure that out and you’ll find you have it more often.

Seeing Growth

“Whatever we are waiting for — peace of mind, contentment, grace, the inner awareness of simple abundance — it will surely come to us, but only when we are ready to receive it with an open and grateful heart.”
—Sarah Ban Breathnach

It’s not always easy to see where we’ve grown and we may not see it until we experience it. Perhaps we’ve been trying to let someone go with love. We care about them, but our relationship is unhealthy. We work on it and pray over it, maybe even fight letting go. And one day we see that person, we spend time with them and we realize that we still care for them, but we do not feel the same way, it’s a healthy love and not a needy love, or an attachment, nor a painful love; it’s just an honest caring for that person.

We may even discover that not only did we grow and that relationship is healthy now; we may find that our work has affected change in us so that we don’t get into unhealthy relationships anymore. Our work, all of the pain and struggle is paying off and we didn’t realize that until we were in a certain situation where our particular issues came into play. This is just one example of the many ways we grow and can see how far we have come.

Often other people can see our growth before we can. And often we will find that if we work on a particular issue it affects other struggles we have in life. Every part of who we are — mind, body, and spirit — is connected to the other parts. We focus on healing our spirit, and our mind gets healing. We work on our spirit and we become more spiritual, but we also find our mind cleared of some of its junk. When we take care of our physical self, we have clearer thoughts.

We will see our growth through later experiences, sometimes when we least expect it.

Struggles Make Us Stronger

“I trust that everything happens for a reason, even when we’re not wise enough to see it.”
—Oprah Winfrey

We are rarely able to see the reason why some things happen in our lives. Sometimes weeks or years later we look back and see that what happened made us stronger, or caused us to do something good, something healthy, that we otherwise would not have done had we not experienced what we did.

We gain compassion and understanding for others after we go through a difficult time and experience compassion and understanding from someone else. We learn patience from things that cause us to struggle with trying to be patient. We learn to let go when we have a broken heart. Most of it is not fun, but the learning process is there for a reason in our lives.

It’s a good idea to sit down sometimes and think back, to work back through what got us where we are. For some of us we may have hit bottom and turned our lives around by returning to and finishing college. Maybe just getting clean and sober was enough of a better place and we didn’t need anything further but to continue growing in sobriety.

Think back through some of the major events in your life and see how if one thing hadn’t happened that another would not have either. Some of them are easy to spot and some of them take a lot of wisdom.

Some of what we go through is hellacious and we may not want to think it through. That’s OK too, but if we are able to trace our lives back to some of our struggles we will see that they got us where we are today. Maybe next time we are in a struggle we will realize the lesson is being learned we just don’t know what it is yet.

Struggles teach us along the way.

Give Others a Chance

“We are afraid to care too much for fear that the other person does not care at all.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt

One of the things we may need to work on is not letting past relationships affect future relationships in destructive ways. We try not to put up walls that keep other people at arms’ length. Although at times it’s a good idea to be protective of ourselves going into any relationship since it takes time to really get to know another person.

We all bring so much “baggage” into relationships, especially as we get older and have more experiences. No matter how much we try going in not to carry the baggage from one relationship to another, we do, because it’s part of who we are and part of what made us the person that we have become.

Our perception about how much others care for us can be skewed by our own issues. We must strive to not shut people out who we “think” are feeling a certain way about us, because we just don’t always know what they think. We seek balance in caring for others. We strive not to be codependent in relationships. We try to give and take. We don’t control and we don’t allow ourselves to be controlled.

We need to keep in mind that the other person also has their own baggage that’s brought into the relationship, too, and be willing to be patient with them as they see if we are a fit in their lives just as we are with them.

We have to take time to see if our baggage is compatible with their baggage.

Let Your Light Shine

“And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
—Marianne Williamson

The quote above may bring back memories of the song that goes like this: “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine; let it shine, let it shine, let it shine,” that many of us sang as children either at church or camp.

We can let our light shine whether it’s our knowledge of God’s love, our freedom from oppression or fear, or maybe it’s having had a spiritual awakening. It could be we feel better about ourselves after working on self-esteem issues.

Anytime we overcome some challenge set before us we have the opportunity to share that victory with others.

When we share our lives in totality with other people, we allow others to be enlightened and strengthened. When we tell our stories whether that is in a Twelve-Step meeting, church, over the water cooler at work, or some other way, we allow other people to share our experience, strength and hope.

Our fear may be one shared by a whole segment of society. Remember it only took a few to open the way for women to vote and for Blacks to have equal rights.

Whatever fear you have overcome, share that with others. You can open a path for those who follow. Someone, many people, in fact, may be watching you without your knowledge. We find God’s message, we find strength in others in many ways. Someone needs your light to shine today.

Sometimes we lead and don’t even know it. Let your light shine.

New Eyes Open Our World

“The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”
—Marcel Proust

There are times when we discover that what we’ve been searching for is already there. The new job, the relationship, healing, love, it’s there waiting on us to be open enough to receive it. We must let go of our old thinking and look at things in a new way, with new eyes, not rose colored glasses, but with clear vision, new vision, different vision.

When we push too hard the answers don’t come. We block our own vision by locking ourselves in boxes and trying to always figure out logical answers for that which is not always logical. Love isn’t logical. Healing isn’t logical.

Relationships can be illogical. Our lives don’t neatly fit into tidy packages where we never experience highs and lows, or at least they shouldn’t. And if they are we aren’t experiencing life as it was meant to be experienced. We’ll miss the sound and smell of the ocean, the beauty of sunrises and sunsets, the comfort of hugs, and the ecstasy of love, if we don’t see the whole of life.

The world is a wide open place where we are each on our own path of discovery. Often we are on our path with blinders on and heads down. We trudge through the days always looking ahead to the next thing or the weekend. We miss so much.

Look up and around with new eyes and find what you’ve been longing for.

Growing in Recovery

“I am not now what I was.”
—Unknown

With just a short time in recovery we change quickly. Some of who we are will always be who we are, but oftentimes we grow into something better than what we were before.

The fears we felt before, perhaps about being alone; going without drugs, alcohol or some other addiction; taking positive action; whatever the fear was may not be there anymore. We have changed.

We should stop from time to time in our lives and evaluate who we are, especially when we are working on changing ourselves. We may find that we have changed and that the fears we still think we have are not even there anymore, we are just accustomed to the fear being there and continue mistakenly to live as if it were.

Stop and evaluate to see if you are the same today as you were before. Most likely you are not who you were.

Pause to check out who you are today; you may be more free than you know.