Wake Up to These Positive Thoughts

Inspiring Messages for a Happier Day

By Mina Parker

We often wake up with so much on our minds it’s overwhelming to think about what to tackle first. It is important to know that even when there is too much to do and too little time, or too many bills and too little money, we can live the good life.

How? We can embrace simplicity as a desired outcome rather than a hardship we can’t control. We can throw ourselves into new creation and transform our circumstances into new opportunities. Most of all, we can give back and move forward through a daily practice of gratitude and appreciation for the moments of joy that each day brings us. Here are thirteen inspiring morning messages.

Excerpted from Less Is More: Meditations on Simplicity, Balance, and Real Abundance (Conari Press 2009 )by Mina Parker with photos by Daniel Talbott. Mina Parker is a freelance writer/editor and mom whose other books include Half Full, Mother Is a Verb, and Her Inspiration. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son. Visit her website.

Photo by Daniel Talbott used with permission.

Add ‘I Will’ to Your Morning Vocabulary

You wake up, your eyelids stuck shut. You ramble through your morning routine, with a deep sigh. Caffeine helps. A shower helps a little more. Then you’re finally ready to face (sigh) another day. How did things get to be this way? Or better, how did you get to be this way? You wonder if there was ever a time when you didn’t feel so shut down, fearful, crazed, and diminished.

We spend all day trying to bend the “I cant’s” into “I’ll try’s” and hoping for the best. It may be that all we need is a single “I will.” It can be one of your choosing, or something like:

I will enjoy it. I will laugh through it. I will bless it up, down and sideways.

Make Sure You Have a Good Laugh

No matter what kind of thing makes you laugh, we all could stand to laugh more often. Laughing oxygenates our bloodstream, fills us with endorphins, and can even change our brain chemistry. Laughter is solace, medicine, and a tension-diffuser.

Perhaps more importantly, a cultivated sense of humor is the most direct line I know to finding balance in your life. It keeps your ego in check to laugh at yourself; it lifts your spirits to let yourself be tickled even on the darkest days. Laughing with friends gives us the chance to deepen our relationships and learn new things about each other.

Do your best to crack someone up today, and give in to giggling whenever possible.

Declutter and Rejuvenate

I have a friend who recently worked with someone to declutter and organize her home, and after a couple of months of biweekly sessions she was shocked to find she’d lost ten pounds without even trying. She mentioned it to the person she’d hired and the woman laughed, “Oh, that happens all the time! I should start including it in my brochures.”

I don’t know what kind of science might be behind this – burning extra calories as you clean? Replacing snack time with conscious energy aimed at cleaning and clearing out? Is an organized kitchen or fridge a healthier one? Probably it’s a combination of all of these, and this reminds me that we are whole beings, and what we do in one part of our life ripples into all the others.

Encourage yourself to simplify, simplify, simplify and strip away what’s unnecessary.

Find Happiness in Small Bites

Too often I catch myself in a thought pattern of scarcity: I don’t have enough of the things I think I need--like money, time, or happiness; and I have far too much of things I’d rather do without--like stress, fear, and dust bunnies.

Enough already! Cake eaten in small bites is still cake, just as happiness in fits and starts is still happiness. Every time you discount a moment of bliss just because of how quickly it comes and goes, you rob yourself of what could be a lovely experience, and drain the satisfaction that could otherwise refresh and renew you. Why bother? The next time you are happy, just enjoy. Simple enough.

Even if you want more, a little bit can be plenty.

Do Zero, Zilch, Not a Thing

When is the last time you did a whole day of nothing? Everyone needs some time and space; make a commitment to stoking your inner genius by doing nothing. And no cheating, either; you’re not allowed to sit around feeling guilty about what you aren’t getting done, because feeling guilty is a whole lot of “doing” if you ask me. You don’t have to do it for a week or even a whole day at a time, you can set aside an hour to do nothing. It might take some practice to calm your mind and will probably take a few sessions before you can naturally stop the flow of manic doing, but believe me it’s worth it.

Tell your to do list to take a hike. Sit down. Breathe. Repeat.

We Can Always Make New Choices

Feeling like we have some control over our destinies is one of life’s great necessities and pleasures. Feeling like we have no choice is the fastest route to disenfranchisement and misery.

The big secret is that we always have a choice. Always. Even when it seems like we don’t. We do. We can always do the thing we want to do. Yes, I’m talking about basic, everyday wants, but even more I’m talking about those deep, deep desires. We may not be able to do the thing we want to do in just the perfect way we’ve imagined in our heads right away, tomorrow, but if you break that impulse down it’s mostly about control and not about that original desire anyway. Get to the root of the desire and go for it. Make the choice.

Make decisions. Practice every day. Get in a habit of choosing, choosing, choosing.

When You Fall, Pick Yourself Up

I have always been terrified of failure, and have often relied on that terror as a motivating force to get things done, be thought well of, and force myself out of a slump. By indulging that fear of failure, I have managed to almost completely shut out and shut down the only thing that can save me from the inevitable failures I face in my life: the ability to pick myself up and move on.

Fear as a motivator can only take me so far. Fear elevates failure to the status of the grim reaper – always waiting, ready to cut me down and wrench me from my life and loved ones. But when I’m inspired, passionately going after something, failure can never have that kind of power—instead it becomes a stepping stone, a lesson learned, a warning, or even a new opportunity in disguise.

Reclaim the privilege of falling and failing, and learn to get up again.

Escape the People Pleasing Trap

Making everyone around you happier by trying to please them all at once is an insidious little trap. Our desire to please usually comes from a fear of not being liked. As we work to please we placate, we compromise, and we stifle our own and others’ feelings toward some perceived greater good. How could any of that lead to profound pleasure?

We’re better off remembering that we make people happy first by being happy ourselves, because joy spreads faster than a flu bug in winter. Second, we can only hope to inspire happiness in others by allowing room for our differences, even if they might occasionally flare up into disagreements. Third, we make people happy by paying attention and learning about what excites and inspires them, and figuring out special ways to nurture those feelings in a way that brings us delight at the same time.

You can’t please everyone all of the time, so work on your own happiness and that of the people you love the most.

At the End of Your Rope is a New Beginning

How many stories are there in the history books in which the tide changed at the last possible moment? Defeat, demise, and surrender were just around the corner and then suddenly everything changed? I don’t think it’s false hope to believe that things can change – and change radically – at any time. I know it isn’t crazy to believe in the impossible; I’ve seen the impossible come to pass too many times in my life and others’ lives to think otherwise.

When you are at the end of your rope, there is no better time to hold on with everything you’ve got. Success demands risk, and thrives on difficulty. So if you can muster the drive to keep going, to find a new approach to an old problem, to challenge yourself to rediscover the passionate impulse that got you this far, you’re most likely on your way toward glorious success.

Success often waits on the very brink of failure.

Find the Courage to Be an Optimist

You may have noticed that any pessimist can back up what he says with unassailable logic. Listen long enough and you’ll start to wonder why you ever thought the world was anything but a miserable pile of garbage, sinking deeper into filth every day. Never forget that a pessimist lives in a kind of self-made prison, a fortress that is strong and surprisingly high-maintenance—they have to work to reinforce their negativity all day long, every day. It is exhausting!

It may take even more work, and will certainly take more courage, to be an optimist. Optimism so often runs counter to our intellectual assessment of things, what we think of as the truth. But it’s not the whole truth, and certainly not a very useful one. Only an optimist can see beyond the facts and figures, see with an inner being that it smarter than the brain. Only an optimist can make the leap of faith that it takes to chart a new course, make a new discovery, change the world in a way that no one has ever imagined.

Pessimism may be our daily habit, but optimism must be our life’s work.

Own Your Life Rather Than Trying to Control it

Okay, I’ll admit it. I am a control freak. The further I delve into my state of controlling denial, the harder I get slammed when something unexpected or unwanted does make an appearance, which of course it inevitably does. The biggest gift I can give myself is a daily remembrance that there are no mistakes. Nothing that can happen to me can make me a victim, I’m the only one who has the power to do that.

The only things I can allow myself to control are how I look at things and how I choose to respond to them. Even then, replacing the word “control” with “own” might do me a world of good. I own my responses to negative events.

I own my fear. I own my mistakes. I own my forgiveness. I own my lessons and my blessings.

Find a Way to Offer Everyday Devotion

It’s not just prayer that brings us closer to our spiritual selves; we don’t turn of our soul’s work in order to do the dishes. Any action at all can be devotional in nature if it is done from a clear, loving place. Caring for your body, your home, and your family don’t have to be time away spiritual practice. They can be meditative, or they can simply be what they are: simple actions, repeated, toward a goal of living better.

I just saw a photograph of an elderly monk’s bare feet standing next to the impression made by his own feet in the wood where he has stood to pray for over half a century. I gasped at the power of simplicity. Nothing but standing and praying, repeated every day, and the man’s imprint was worn into the wood forever.

We leave spiritual footprints through our everyday intentions and actions.

Put Love in All Things, Great and Small

I don’t have to aspire to greatness in my everyday actions. In fact if I do I’m more likely to fail than not. Constantly thinking about trying to be great or do great things is like trying to harvest seedlings—quite a few important steps are being skipped in the process, and the perspective is all wrong. Instead of planning a great end product, our energies are best spent in careful attention to the here and now; to bringing our talents and enthusiasm to each task in its turn. To doing the right thing at the right moment. To doing the things we can do, brimming over with the most love we can muster.

Less doing, more loving.