First Step. Do a Happiness Project

I just finished reading the book The Happiness Project and it recommends making resolutions instead of goals. The difference between a goal and a resolution is that a goal, once you do it its done. But a resolution is something you can stick to for the rest of your life, or for how ever amount of time you'd like.
So this is my first resolution: post on my blog every Tuesday & Thursday, and write every Monday & Wednesday that way I have time to edit.

As part of my new Leaf on this Blog, I want to start it off by doing my own version of the Happiness Project as a means to discover more aspects of myself and to enjoy life more.
I will start planning for it now and start the project in January 1st, 2011 until December 31st, 2011.

What do I want to accomplish with my Happiness project?
I want to be able to not get so upset when a stranger shows no patience toward me, when they are rude and nasty on the street. Currently when this happens I feel the urge to curse back, although I never do anymore, and this holding back of emotions causes my chest to tighten and pressure builds up and I get pissed. Like today, I was writing on this diary & I reached the last stop on the train. I was not paying attention so I stayed on my seat. The lady train conductor screamed: "Last stop! Hellooooooo?!" Pa' que fue eso! It got me SO pissed! In the past there have been times when I've fallen asleep in the train and in that stop a conductor would yell: "Last stop!" and this would wake me up, I would get off the train and that would be the end of it. But the hello at the end made me feel like the woman was saying to me: What are you an idiot? Don't you see that the train stopped? Didn't you hear me say Last stop before from the other train car? I guess what I want to work at is at not hearing the unsaid insults of other people. Because every time I get angry it is because I hear these insults even though no one is saying them. So in essence it is me who's insulting me.

My second resolution is: Do not take things personally. Do not say to myself insults that other people have not said.

This is a good start. My original idea for this blog was it to be a journey of self discovery, something that would help me to discover my True Identity and help others find theirs through my experience. But identities are harder to come by than say a year long happiness project. I believe this is a good start to my much longer True Identity project. So the first step to my true identity project will be to do a happiness project. Now i have to do some more research and start working on my happiness project. Hope you join me for the ride.

If I don't start I'm never going to start it!

I haven't written in a while, I've been studying, remodeling my house, etc. I've been thinking and re-thinking about all the things I want to put into this website. All the things I want to write about. About all the things that get in the way of people's true identities and of the things that can help find it. But it's so much info that I'm also just recently learned and that I'm still trying to digest that I feel overwhelmed and don't know where to start. But the same way that I started my very first Blog entry I just had to say: Just DO IT! (and I'm not referring about sneakers here :P)

So, not so long ago, I would say less than a year ago I noticed how my oldest daughter who is now 8 seemed to get overwhelmed easily, how she would throw tantrums when tired or hungry, how she gets bored easily and over stimulated easily as well. I kept thinking: Is this normal? I kept thinking she was highly sensitive but had no clue that High Sensitivity was an actual thing. I kept thinking she was sort of empathic as she was able to feel deeply other people's feelings. I felt like I needed to help her learn how to deal with her trait, and felt really unprepared to do it. So I went online and searched books on high sensitivity and discovered the book The Highly Sensitive Child by Elaine Aron I bought it right away and as I read the book I kept seeing myself in the things it described, and I started to wonder if I was highly sensitive too. So I went and bought The Highly Sensitive Person and I started to notice that I was highly sensitive. I haven't finished either book because every time that I was reading about something a topic came up in the book that would make me want to seek more info on the subject. I knew that Elaine Aron had written a book called The Highly Sensitive Person in Love but I kept thinking that I wasn't really in love (even though I've been married for about 11 years) so I thought I didn't need it at all. However I kept feeling like I needed more info, I needed to know how to deal with people who don't seem to "get" my sensitivity so I started to find out more about this book and I read that it not only helped with romantic relationships but many aspects discussed in the book also applied to other kinds of relationships like same sex friends or family members so I decided to give it a try. And let me tell you that I have learned so much about myself through reading the pages of these books and I know there's so much more to learn. By discovering my High Sensitivity I have been able to discover the entrance to the path I want to take on the journey that it is my life. I always felt like I was supposed to go somewhere, do something I felt like I was walking through life with no direction, no purpose and I felt so empty. I had no goals in life, no where I wanted to go, so I never felt like I had to work toward something. I was just living an empty life of surviving and providing for others but not for myself. But by discovering this about myself and my child I have found a clue to the path I want to take in life, and that is a very good thing after all.

To find out if you or your child are highly sensitive try the Highly Sensitive Person's Self Test or the Highly Sensitive Child Self Test.

About Dreams...

It is curious that today I read 1 article about dreams and it's meaning. I get updated in current events by whatever is in the Yahoo Main Page (sad, I know) but today there was this article about Dreams and how they believe that there is a relationship between dreams and good emotions. My interpretation of this article, was that dreams when undisturbed are beneficial in exposing bad emotions and stripping away the bad feeling of them making it possible for the person dreaming it to move on from whatever bad experience they had still lurking around in their unconscious. They also say that sometimes the dreams aren't able to strip away the bad emotion, either because the sleep was disturbed or because the emotion was too deeply set in, or too traumatic to be stripped of the negative feeling of it, for that reason people with deep set traumatic experiences tend to have recurring dreams, it would be the body's way of trying over and over again to strip that bad feeling from the bad memory or event. This makes a lot of sense for me. I've always been very interested in dreams and it's meanings and I used to have notebooks and notebooks written of my nightly dreams, it was so fascinating! However I stopped doing this when my first daughter was born, as I no longer had a few minutes to myself to write in the morning, but I would be awaken by my daughter and had to go about my day with her as a priority and by the time I had time to sit down and write, my dream had already been forgotten... :( But sometimes the dreams linger for a little bit longer, long enough for me to write them on a small piece of scrap paper and get lost in my piles of papers...
However last night I had an interesting dream, one that I still vaguely remember, I was at the outside of my old elementary/middle school and there was this truck selling candy in front of it. I come outside through the gates of the school and walk toward the truck with my daughter. I seem to know the guy from the truck and I ask him what kind of candy he got, and if he has any ice cream. He shows me the kinds of ice cream and I buy one for each of my daughters and one for me and one for my mom. I give my mom her ice cream, and she says she doesn't want it, as she says that, I open the wrapper and start eating it myself. Then I ask the guy: "How much do I owe you? and he says: "Forty Bucks." I freak out in my head, but try not to sound shocked and start looking in my purse for the $40. Then my mom asks how much are the ice creams. And the guy says: "$2 each except the last one, that one has cake in it and it's very expensive, that's $40 on itself. I'm not charging you for the cheap ice creams only for the $40 one." I take the expensive ice cream from my mouth after only one lick and think to myself: If only I had asked for the price I wouldn't have bought it.... And here I am eating a $40 ice cream with cake that I had chosen for my mother who ended up not even wanting ice cream in the first place...an ice cream that I wasn't even hungry for because I had already finished my ice cream, an ice cream that now I was going to eat just because I opened it and had to pay $40 for it and there was no way to return it any more, and there was no way I was going to waste a $40 ice cream!

This dream made me think about my own spending and how I'm spending too much money in lunch or take out food in general, pizza for the girls at Pizza Hut on Saturdays is like $18 and I'm not even ordering for myself! From now on I'm buying a Large Pizza for $12 at the local Pizza Shop and we are all going to eat from it, and that is that. :)

Also I'm going to start trying to bring my own lunch to work, I started today, I can save from $5 to $10 a day doing that!

By the way, if you are interested in reading more about what I was reading today about dreams, here's the link:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20090616/hl_time/08599190456100