"It's not how many times you breathe in your life time, it is the number of times your life takes your breath away"

Are you doing special things in your life to allow to enjoy life enough to take your breath away?

Finding serenity and keeping it, is one way to ensure that you never lose one of these moments.

1. Look for it! You are never going to find something unless you are looking for it in your life. You have to be open to the belief that you can be a serene person before you can actually be one.

2. Believe that you deserve serenity in your life. If you have low self esteem and feel that you do not deserve the best that life has to offer, then you are putting up walls that only you can tear down. You will deny yourself serenity if you don’t think that you are worthy of it.

3. Serenity comes from within. You are not going to find serenity outside of yourself. You create it from within yourself. Being serene has nothing to do with your environment; you create the serene environment as the natural result of finding it inside yourself.

4. Stop and think before you react! If you are merely RE-acting to situations in your life without thought, you are stopping the serenity before it can manifest. Most situations are only disturbing for as long as you allow them to be, and few are really going to matter a week or a month from now, let alone next year.

5. Look for the lesson in negative situations. Things really do happen for a reason, even if you can’t find the reason right now. Ask yourself how you contributed to the situation and what you can learn from it. Learn a lesson and you can move on, fail to learn it and it is just going to keep reappearing in your life until you do.

6. Establish serene habits. If you take time out for yourself and do serenity-inducing things for yourself it is a lot easier to maintain the serenity during the day. A candle-lit bath, meditation time, sitting in and appreciating nature, listening to soothing music… these all go a long way to helping keep you serene.

7. Try to weed out the people who cause conflict in your life. If you have people who are creating negative situations on a regular basis in your life, it may be time to reexamine their importance to you.

8. Realize that our past can dictate our present. People raised in a negative, abusive and/or chaotic family environment, often seek out the same type of people in their lives when they grow up. This is because we subconsciously tend to gravitate to what we are used to, even if what we are used to is negative. We feel comfortable in negative situations only because we have been exposed to them so much. This pattern can be broken by the realization that it has happened to us!

9. Wake up each morning and be thankful for the gift of a new day. Each day is filled with opportunity for blessings, and we need to see that. If you start each day with a smile and the expectation of blessings, you will end each day in a serene and peaceful manner.

10. Spend time every night, before going to sleep, taking stock of the day. Perhaps journaling will help you do this. Look for the small blessings that you given and say thanks for them. Think about situations that you may have been able to handle better, and resolve to do better tomorrow

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference!  Amen

Good Luck!!

Josey