Visit Your Happy Place
For my entire childhood, and well into adulthood, actually, I visited the same lake in Minnesota every summer with my mom's whole family. Since my mom is one of eight kids, we had quite a crew. It was a week packed with cousin-fun. Every day included swimming, running from cabin to cabin, waterskiing (often skiing doubles or triples with other cousins), fishing (we got to take out our own boat with no adults on board!), staying up late eating toasted cheerios*, painting our nails, playing board games, and laughing. There was a lot of laughing. My memories of that special happy place are a collage in my mind of all of those activities, but I think what it feels like to me is a combination of love and freedom. It was awesome to be a kid and be able to run back and forth from cabin to cabin. We got to sleep in a bedroom, and eventually a cabin, with just the cousins - no adults. We could never do that at home! There was absolutely nothing fancy about said cabin, in fact it was pretty sparse, but it was the BEST. The small bedroom with two sets of bunk beds meant we could easily go from top bunk to top bunk without ever touching the floor.
The actual lake I went to. Beautiful, right? I mean I never saw it this early in the morning, but I could have. Instead we usually slept until about 11.
Oh the fun we had sitting at this yellow plastic table . . .
Flash forward to this week, where I am in Minnesota, with my own kids, awaiting the arrival of my siblings to celebrate our Dad's 70th birthday. This year, we decided the "big cousins" get to stay in their own room. We put together a couple sets of IKEA bunk beds, and my kids spent the rest of the week decorating and preparing the room for the arrival of their cousins. I love decorating, so I had a whole design board planned out for exactly how it would look, which was something like this:
Then my kids did whatever they wanted and turned it into a hot mess. They emptied out boxes of Kleenex (and did neatly stack the box-less Kleenex in the bathroom for future use) and hung them from the bunks with tacks and some ribbon. One bunk Kleenex box contained salt water taffy, and the other held gingersnaps. Because what if you start to get tired and need some sugar? They built forts and made signs. My son hung his soccer jerseys in his bunk, which reminded me of when one of my cousins, who shall remain nameless, hung up her New Kids on the Block poster in our bunks at some point in the 90s. The actual room:
In short, my design vision went out the window in the name of my kids creating their own happy place. Last night at midnight, my sister and I decided to ignore the giggles from the kid room and let them have fun, while we went to bed. At least they weren't painting their nails, and so far the only tears came when someone laid down on a tack that had fallen from the hanging Kleenex box.
Think about your happy place for a moment. Where is it? What does it smell like? How does the air feel on your skin when you are there? What sounds can you hear? What feelings come up when you sit there?
If you can close your eyes while sitting in a quiet space, and you answer all of those questions, you can likely visit your happy place in your mind. It might take a couple tries, but the more details you can remember, from all of your senses, the better. Your happy place can be a childhood memory, like mine, or it can be an imagined place you haven't been yet. As long as you breathe in all of the details and focus on the feelings you did or will have in your happy place, you can go there in your mind. The magic of this free trip to happy place is that our thoughts create our feelings, and our feelings create our reality. If I picture my childhood happy place, I can immediately feel that that sense of calm, peace, freedom, and love. I can carry that with me when I open my eyes. My calm energy will then attract more of that into my life.
Give it a try! It only takes a few minutes and is likely to be a good experience that you can take with you for the day.
*PS Toasted Cherrios are awesome. If you have not tried them, https://sweetlittlebluebird.com/fried-cheerios-aka-classic-hot-buttered/.