The Beginning: Finding Your Happy Place

The Beginning: Finding Your Happy Place

Welcome. 

You are here and so we will assume you are on, or are considering embarking on, a path to wellbeing. 

Perhaps your hope is to deepen your connection with yourself. Or maybe you are hoping to improve your physical fitness and overall health. Perhaps it is both.

As with any journey, setting intentions is important. You will find that our Holistic Body Journal can offer support with this. Here though, we’d like to focus on how to begin and for that, adapting to the right state of mind is going to be essential.

Even children know that in order to fly you must first think happy thoughts. This is more than a fairy-tale notion, it’s actually a pivotal philosophy that can steer your path towards success.

There are two places from which most people begin their journey to wellbeing. Some begin from a place of self-love. They respect and care for themselves and therefore know they deserve to focus time and energy on looking after their mental and physical health. Some, however, attempt to work towards wellbeing from a feeling of unworthiness. They seek to break bad habits, fight negative thoughts and perhaps change their body too. Although on the surface these seem like healthy aspirations, when you are approaching them from a place of unhappiness it’s a weary battle to head into. One you are unlikely to triumph in.

There’s usually a very thin veil between feeling as though you are not enough and feeling as though you are not worthy. This is why it is essential to begin your well-being journey knowing that you are enough already. That you deserve happiness and fulfilment. If you have this mindset then staying healthy in mind and body will come naturally, because it will become an act of self-love. This, of course, is easier said than done. For many, this is the hardest part.

If you are exploring the world of wellness because you have felt you are failing in any way then you are not alone. Many people embark on this path for exactly that reason and it doesn’t mean that it won’t work for you. Yet, first, we need to help you get to a place where you are feeling stronger and able to approach this lifestyle with the knowledge that you are already worthy and deserving.

One practice we find effective is to think back to a time when you felt good about yourself. Not just for a moment but in general. A time when you made decisions without doubting your ability or looked into a mirror and didn’t pick apart the image staring back at you. For many, this may be childhood, but that’s ok. In fact, for this practice, it can be motivating. Hold this picture of yourself, back then, in your mind. Focus on how it felt to live in the moment. To do things without fear of failure. To know that you were loved and supported for who you are and who you were growing to be. How do you feel about this person? This child? Do you feel that they deserve happiness? That they should live a full healthy life? Now embrace this person, this other you, because they are still in you. You still carry them. What would they say to you about the things you sometimes tell yourself? About the ways you might expect to fail or the things you once wanted that now feel out of reach?

This is the you that you need to take on your journey. The raw, pure, well-intentioned, hopeful young person that was there before fear and doubt crept in. We live in a very busy, sometimes unforgiving, world and along the way we often get overwhelmed and allow toxic messages to infiltrate us. It is important to understand that that is something that has happened to us, not who we are. Now is the time to take back the power because you were not born to live that way. Think of those doubts, fears and feelings of unworthiness as rocks you’ve been carrying. Lay them down. They will only hold you back and make the road ahead harder to walk.

It is worth also now taking a few moments to contemplate the absolute miracle of you being here. Not on this website, though we thank you for that, but in the world. Whether you believe that a higher being placed you here or that out of all the ways the universe could have formed it did so in a way that supported life. Supported life for millions of years before it created you. You, who are made up of recycled atoms that have lived in many other forms across the universe before they came together to form you. So that your very body literally carries inside itself, fragments of former stars. If the reality of that does not make you worthy of a wonderful and miraculous life, what could?

Do you see now that you are already enough? That embarking on this journey is a form of servitude to yourself?

Beyond this, it is going to be important for you to enjoy the experience of getting stronger and healthier because it won’t necessarily be a fast or easy one. Some of the changes along the way can also go unnoticed and uncelebrated if you are too focused on an end goal. The truth is, racing towards a singular end goal that you believe will fulfil you and change your life makes it unlikely to do so. Coming from a place of self-love is also the only way you’re going to be able to pick yourself up, forgive yourself and keep going when you stumble or don’t meet certain milestones when you’d hoped to.

Ultimately, if you seek to repair yourself because you feel you are broken then you only succeed in fuelling that which made you feel that way in the first place. If fear and self-loathing are driving you then it is those monsters you’ll be feeding along the way.

We believe in a holistic approach to wellbeing and have seen first-hand the power of positive thinking. Having said all of this, if you can’t yet find a place of happiness and self-love from which to start, then start anyway. Only, make it a central goal to find this as you go. Gather things to be grateful for. Focus on what you do love about yourself, even if it’s just your intentions for now. 

Remember Peter Pan and the Darling children? All they needed was just one happy thought. One happy thought was enough to take them off on a whole new adventure!