Help Me Be Me

Are you in a state of “I hate this” or “people are morons” or are you just generally over something about life? Well this episode is for anger of all kinds – from crankiness to annoyance, all the way to pure hatred and ‘fuck this shit to hell.’ What I am really addressing is the mental and physical state itself – because it’s not what you want, it can wreak havoc on your body, those around you, and worst of all, it perpetuates itself. Unhappiness cultivates unhappiness. If you’re interested in listening to this I assume that’s because you are well aware this is bringing you down and it’s not what you want – but you can’t seem to help yourself out of the situation because there are external factors that make that impossible. Life is full of triggers – work, traffic, not to mention – other angry people, so this is to address how you can remove their affect regardless. So without further ado – there are 3 parts to this puppy – the what, the why, and the how: the tools. Yay. Let’s do this! Check out TeaspoonofHappy.com later this week for the blog version of this post. Smile friends! xo

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi friends, this is an emotional cleansing power up episode for clearing sorrow and stress and emotional muck. It's best to listen to it while you take a short walk outside. It’s a visualization meditation of sorts, one you can do with your eyes open. If you can’t do this while walking, I recco you do this while in a yoga inversion of some sort. It focuses on calming your nervous system with breathing exercises, and its one I do myself - quite often. I hope you like! xox Sarah May B.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For when you’re in the break-up zone that causes you to obsess over the person you just broke up with. This is for anyone who has just been broken up with or broken up with a person that they felt they loved – and now you’re obsessing and even Facebook stalking this person. Maybe you know this is not helpful but you can’t stop wanting to know what they’re doing, who they’re with, who they’re seeing now and what that person looks like. And that is hurting you even more! But it’s an obsession and you can’t stop. Firstly – I am so sorry you’re here! This time will end. You are in the hardest part right now – and the more you can do to be self-loving and be nice to yourself, the faster this will end. I’ve been here myself and it blows. But you can half the time you suffer if you do everything in your power to do what you know is best for yourself. And that includes some healthy tough love when it comes to policing yourself and what you allow your focus to rest on. This kind of a break up is way worse because it’s hitting you on multiple fronts – in other words, this is not just about the loss of love. With all break-ups, time is the greatest healer – but in addition to that, I want to empower you with some insight into your “why” so that you can begin to separate from the process you’re victim to, currently: the obsessing and salting the wound. So you can see the difference between the kinds of suffering: and see what is NOT truly coming from love. As usual there are three parts. The what the why and the how – the tools. This is for Chelsea. I heart you girl! Hang in there. X

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi peeps! This is an episode with a short meditation in part 3. It covers why soothing your body and reducing the chatter in your brain is the key to your ultimate happiness. As a society we tend to get hyper focused. We get into the groove of our job or our relationships – and we get stressed by how many things there are to worry about. Am I doing well as a person? Am I successful?” When will I get to the right level? How can I be more of what I want to be? Suddenly we’re looking straight down at our feet and trying to take bigger steps instead of keeping our eyes to the beautiful sunrise on the horizon. This is almost like an introduction to my podcast in that it is truly the KEY to every positive change you want to make in your life. It is also the key to happiness and also the key to finding your life’s purpose. What is it? Ready? Listen intently. Consciousness: Feeling the feelings that are going through your body as they come. Being fully connected to that awareness and not “occupied” be a roaring sea of thoughts or rapid firing fears and analysis. Sometimes it’s like facing a roaring lion because some terrible awful stuff lives inside us in many moments of our life. Feeling hopeless, or worthless or afraid of what if’s to come. And yet, we must allow ourselves to feel those things - it's the key to building your ultimate life. This is an episode with three parts. The general what, why, and then as a tool, I end with a meditation. Check out TeaspoonOfHappy.com later this week for the blog version of this post and I hope you enjoy this! Smile lovelies! xox Sarah-May

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This one’s for planet earth. We all have an internal self portrait –and that is created by the way we feel about who we are. There are SOOOOO many factors that control how we feel about ourselves – and what we perceive as our flaws. And that’s why BD is such a big problem: it looks and acts like “normal” self-image concerns. It walks and talks like vanity. And, yet, it destroys the average person’s happiness in so many ways across a lifetime, unchecked. Your self-image is a distorted hallucination – one heavily affected by your fears, vulnerabilities, your brain chemicals, and the way you integrate information from the world around you. AND when it comes to how we view our flaws, it has no connection to how the world views you or your actual physical appearance. That’s one reason this is such a powerful and rising problem is because it’s a kind of suffering that’s veiled as “normal.” An every-growing percentage of the population is dissatisfied with some or many traits of their physical appearance. When everyone you know obeys the same standard and marketing and media reinforce the irrational bar – how would you ever know there was another option? For the resources mentioned check out teaspoonofhappy.com later this week. Smile y'all! Xo

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is for people who are aware of when old issues are entering their present and they know they don’t want that to be happening. Our old memories operate like a trigger/pattern system. Think of it as a pinball machine called “My Pain Game” and it makes the shape of your brain with all sorts of memories that you allow to define who you are, what is allowed to affect you and what you focus on and feel. You have that little pinball that lies latent but when it’s triggered – it shoots around your brain and activates different zones of pre-set actions. Those zones are things like, “ There are two little paddles you get to control at the base of this game. Your emotionally driven reaction depends on where you choose to hit this ball. If you hit it hard, it shoots into “pain and drama.” When you don’t hit it at all, it drops off the board. The point being – you are the one who keeps the ball in play. So when it goes into a certain area, it activates new triggers that are not controlled by you. Those little “hot spots” that shoot it even harder – these emotional hotspots take over the game and the ball will shoot around the table at top speed. The ball makes its way around and back to our hands – and what we tend to do is shoot it back up again, causing it to replay the series of triggers we have all over our “memory of self.” Just like a pinball machine – often it feels in our mind like we have no control and we are not to blame for this patterned response. However – ultimately we have control, and we can choose to keep the ball in play or not. Our power comes into play when we actually choose to USE that control in the moment it counts. When we have the brief moment of awareness – that we are about to play out our game again. Aren’t you sick of the game? I bet you are – because what you’re losing right now is quality of life. If your old pain is old enough, it’s likely voiced by the rationale of a child – so the childhood logic, which is petty and small – is still operating you. Even if the situation is recent and totally unrelated to your childhood dynamics –the same baggage will pilot you when a trigger comes up. Don’t let it. You’re a grown up now. And grownups can look at things and put them down already. Old pain is totally unnecessary and the only person it robs is YOU. You hurt you by wasting your valuable moments in an old automatic loop of behaviors and thoughts and reactions. Who wants to play this now? It’s old, dusty and not fun. For more visit Teaspoonofhappy.com and please review me if you like this! xo

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jealousy, or a perception of your insecurities come to life. How does it sneak into your mind? Your darkest thoughts in your most fearful voice begin scratching at your feelings, dragging you down and causing you to act as your lowest self. You assume you are less than and life is against you somehow. You're either not enough, or something else outside of you is not enough. What is this emotional state? Your lowest form of self, the self that is motivated by fear and hate, put in a threatened defensive position. Think of it as You minus your awareness of what is good and loving in this world. This low emotional self is also called your irrational self. Most of jealousy acts as a hallucination. It does not show you reality it shows you insecure self-loathing reality: in that world, no one likes you and all the fears you have about yourself are true. For many of us it is clear that we are in an emotionally charged, irrational state – however, we cannot stop ourselves from wanting to “solve” for the perceived insult. “Is it true?! If so, how true? I need to know!” Nothing will quench the irrational need to compute “why” we have been betrayed: we go into loops of solving, calculating, tallying, replaying. And jealousy has a very potent ability to madden us for that reason: it’s all consuming, it belittles us, and we are aware it’s inside of us and us alone. A self-inflicted pain with the power to torture and haunt our every moment. You will never arrive at your truth through jealousy - you can only do that from a calm, objective vantage point - so this is all about stepping back from the emotion so you can regain your sound thinking. The power behind jealousy is also the key to undoing it: it does not live in reality – it lives in our reaction to reality. So we can indeed help ourselves when we struggle in the triggered moments. Hopefully, I will offer you a few tools to help you navigate out of it and back to your true and highest self: grounded, making decisions from a balanced and sane mindset. There are three parts: The what. They why. The how: the tools. This one is for Fran - thanks for writing me and I hope you likee! xox Sarah May B.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For when you can’t stop feeling worried or obsessed with what is threatening your stability in life – a stress response based on past traumas or recent ones, for that matter. In this episode, ‘survival mode’ is the term we are giving a pervasive sense of fear and stress and anxiety over issues that are not a real threat, though they are experienced in hypotheticals. Survival mode drives people to obsessively think about painful things: things past, things to come, analyzing and solving endlessly. In other words – like the worst version of brain overdrive you can imagine and all the time. It’s so powerful that it takes over your life. This can come in varying degrees – from intolerable writhing panic to manageable but potent worry. Regardless, it’s always something that keeps you outside of your life – unable to truly engage and enjoy it as you see others do. Living in survival mode, you want to run and you don’t know where. This one is for Heather! I heart you girl – hope this helps the teensiest bit. For more of my writing head to TeaspoonofHappy.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is for anyone who has conflicts with someone they care about who wants to figure out ways to get out of those conflicts fast and productively. It’s about our emotional baggage – specifically the unmet needs from our childhood, and how those block us from being able to see and receive the love from people in our life currently. I will focus on how to get out of conflicts and pain and move into happiness and get more of what you want. How to better love others and better encourage love back. It’s a set of tools to stay out of blaming and resenting and let go of what you think they should do. So that you can empower yourself to get to more of what you DO want – which is shared affection and happiness. Hi friends! I’ve been away for a bit because I got hitched! It was awesome and wonderful. And now I’m back! I will do the usual 3 parts: The What, The Why, The How – the tools. And to be clear – this is about all relationships that involve conflicts between the needs of others and your own. About relationships that involve needs of others and your own – and when those don’t match up. For more check out TeaspoonOfHappy.com Smile peeps! xo This one’s for Lara from Spain – thanks for writing me girl! :)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is about noticing negative thought patterns when they’re happening. What are negative thoughts? Bad habits. They’re not You – they’re the voice of a bad computer framework operating through you being fed by a chemical addition. You are now used to the chemical results of this thinking, so your brain wants to repeat it. They are the trained in ways of being – basically muscle memory but in your brain. So based on old experiences, just like a river wants to flow down the lowest path, so do your thoughts follow existing trained in currents. The more often you have these thoughts – the stronger the habit becomes. In other words, you have trained in the path of the river with repetition. As a result of that – you now perceive and look for this thought habit in your everyday life – like if you’re thinking of mean people who hate you, you will see mean people who hate you. Because it’s your mindset now. Plus, now that you are looking for this thing, you find it – so negative thinking becomes self-fulfilling. What is most important about all of this: it’s all totally unconscious. The fact that they’re unconscious is also the key to stopping these thoughts! This episode is broken up into three parts. What. Why. How aka Tools. For the blog version, check out TeaspoonofHappy.com later this week. It also has my book references for anyone who wants to read further. Smile friends! xox For more of the Buddhist psychological types – check out “The Chemistry of Joy” – linked here: https://goo.gl/diu91t

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices