Well, it’s Easter time, already! Does that mean lots of chocolate and bunnies for you, or is it a time of greater reflection?
Maybe it could be both? Reflect and redirect your life while you eat chocolate and hunt for eggs with your children!
Every Easter in the USA, I am blessed to be able to spend time with my Goddaughter (age 4) and her wonderful brother, sister and parents. We arrive for the Easter egg hunt on Sunday morning after church and it is a time of great joy, discovery (of the eggs!), gratitude, family, love, excitement and obscene amounts of chocolate!
For Christians, Easter Sunday is a time of resurrection, rejoicing and a reminder to be grateful for the forgiveness of all our sins.
Resurrection, rejoicing and being grateful; they are great activities to be doing all year. Not just once a year at Easter, but every day in the year no matter your beliefs or religion.
Let’s think about rejoicing for a minute. Research has shown that people who have a high self-rating of happiness (in other words, people who, when asked ‘how happy are you,’ answer ‘very’) have much healthier hearts. It would seem that being happy is an actual way to keep yourself well.
I think being joyful is even better than being just happy!
We are all born joyful. Most babies are born inherently joyful, only when something is wrong does the crying outweigh the laughter and contentment.
As children grow older, life and living squashes that joy!
And I reckon, rediscovering the joy inside us is a useful life journey for everyone. We can find moments of joy in everything that happens to us. If you are in the middle of an argument with your spouse or some disaster that has happened to you, all you have to do is see the laughing face of a toddler and hear that laughter to experience a moment of joy.
Or look at the sunshine warming the earth, or notice that you are warm and have clothing and food to eat. There are many, many reasons for being joyful, and many reminders of joy, even in the midst of misery.
If we look for joyful moments they are everywhere. IF (the operative word) we look for them. Most of us are pulled into the vortex of busy, ness and having a million things to do so that we forget to consciously rejoice.
Become conscious of rediscovering the joy inside you, connect with it on a daily basis and notice how your life transforms! Sing! Dance! Celebrate! Do anything that constitutes rejoicing for you, and do it with your family, friends, strangers, and at work!
What about resurrection? For me, New Year’s resolutions are good, but new life resolutions are better!
Resurrection is about new life resolutions. It’s not so easy to make this sound light and fun, so bear with me!
Many of us lose our real ‘selves’ (would some call it our soul, or our dreams and aspirations, or even our ability to use our imagination?) as we weave our way through life’s trials and tribulations.
Our ‘selves’ are an extension of the joyful, loving and playful babies that we began life as. As we navigate growing-up and then have jobs and responsibilities and stresses and challenges, we find ourselves at some stage wondering “who am I?”
We look at ourselves in the mirror and see emotionless machines that get up, go to work, take care of the family, worry about parents, try to make money, arrive home exhausted, feed the family, wash, cook, clean, go to bed more exhausted and wake up to start the soulless treadmill again. (Does this sound familiar?! I hope not!)
Easter is as good a time as any to resurrect that lost self, the one that had feelings and could laugh and find joy in a leaf or beetle!
What can help you find that rejoicing, celebrating, laughing, grateful self and bring it out again?
Well, thinking about it and becoming conscious of WHO your ‘self’ is and WHAT it wants to be doing (this might be called a destiny path!) and HOW it wants to be doing it, would be a great start.
Do you need to stop the endless running on the treadmill to just take stock of where you are? Maybe it’s easier to allocate 3 hours one night or one weekend to thinking about this and exploring how joyful you are in life and how happy your ‘self’ is, once you find it!
Are you doing something that gives your life meaning and purpose?
If not, find something that will give you a sense of meaning and contribution in your life. And if you can’t find anything, ask someone else to help you!
Consciously construct a life that has fun activities and alone times of reflection within it, as well as work and family time. This helps to balance your life and creates opportunities to rediscover your joy. Watch comedy videos once a week or do anything that makes you laugh. Did you know that watching a comedy film increases your blood flow by 22% making you feel better…..and that watching a violent or distressing movie reduces blood flow by 35% taking away clarity and a feeling of wellness?
And now for the easy part which contributes to both resurrecting yourself and rediscovering joy, gratitude! Are you a gratitude junky?! Someone who loves to find reasons for being grateful and dwelling in that gratitude?
How wonderful would the world be if everyone focused on gratitude for all that happens in their lives, even the bad stuff.
That bad stuff often happens to help your ‘self’ get back to it’s destiny path. Or it is the beginning of the unfolding of something new in your life, it may not look good to start with - but who knows what blessings will emerge? If we look with gratitude, wonder and awe at the good and the bad, it’s easier for our selves to emerge again and for us to rediscover our joy.
So while you are exchanging eggs and eating chocolate, try digesting the above ideas of rediscovering joy, resurrecting your ‘self’ and being grateful! And of course laugh, laugh, laugh a LOT!
And if you do not celebrate Easter or celebrate it on a different date, make sure you still have a day of rediscovering joy, resurrecting and being grateful because we should all make time for ourselves…(even if it is not while eating chocolate eggs.)
PS: Perhaps now is a great time to find a copy of that great song by Louis Armstrong, ‘what a wonderful world’, and REJOICE! Sing it out loud while you hunt for eggs and every morning after that!
To help you rediscover the joy, rejoice, find that lost self and be grateful, we have put together some special kits so you can bring these messages with a lot of laughter to your workplace or home.
