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Posts Tagged: happiness

Accentuate the Positive

Posted by Marlene Anderson, MA, LMHC, NCC

“Ac-cent– tchu–ate the positive, eliminate the negative…” was a popular song in the 1940s.

We can look at any situation and see both the positive and the negative. If we choose to look at things from a positive point of view, we will see a glass half-full of water instead of a glass half-empty. Our perceptions affect our moods and emotional states.

Do we choose happiness or is it a result of external events?

And if we have so much control over our happiness, then why are we so unhappy?

“What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.”

—Leo Buscaglia

Hope Helps Us Move from One Season to Another

Posted by Marlene Anderson, MA, LMHC, NCC

eagle soaring

A time to laugh and a time to cry.

Every year we prepare for the traditional changes that occur with the different seasons – fall to winter, winter to spring, etc. We can also identify with the writer of Ecclesiastes when he talks about the seasons of life we go through. But we are not always ready to accept them, especially when that season exchange is out of sync with our expectations.

We want the pleasant things – we don’t want the unpleasant.

We don’t want to give up one to gain the other. We want life – not death. We want laughter and joy, not weeping and mourning. Yet both are necessary components to life.

I believe it is only within our difficulties, troubles and losses where we discover more about life and ourselves.

What Transforms Your Life?

Posted by Marlene Anderson, MA, LMHC, NCC

What Transforms Your Life? | FocusWithMarlene.com

Every day, we observe the wonders of our world and the transformations that happen throughout the seasons.

Who hasn’t been renewed and refreshed by a cooling summer’s rain or been moved by the beauty and quiet serenity of an earth blanketed in mounds of downy snow or snowflakes that shimmer like diamonds in the winter sun?

Who hasn’t witnessed the peace of a countryside bathed in the light of a full moon?

And what person hasn’t marveled at stars so dazzling and vivid, it seems we could reach up and touch them? At such times, nature is silenced and time suspended.

And yet, the snow is only frozen water, and the sun, moon and stars are nothing more than hardened, desolate, uninhabitable rocks and dangerous gasses.

Misfortune and hardship can take us out of what was predictable and comforting and place us in unfamiliar territory.