There are many take-aways from Rubin’s book, but one thing really stuck with me: the idea that the pleasure we take from an event  is only partially derived from the event itself; the balance of the pleasure comes from the hatching of the idea, the planning of it, the anticipation of it, and the afterglow. It’s just another way of saying, ”It’s the journey that counts,” but with some measure of happiness research mixed in. While reveling in the  pleasures of anticipation seems suspiciously like not living in the moment at all, Rubin’s point—and the point of everyone from Tolle to Chodron to Thoreau to LaPorte to God–is that every moment is a moment. Or, to say it the same way only differently, every moment is a moment.

Which brings me, rather longwindedly, to what I actually want to address, which is how easy it is to let celebratory moments go by without celebrating. It’s something my husband and I were talking about last week. I have a publishing job that goes on hiatus two months every summer, and last week marked the beginning of my two months’ time-off. Feeling celebratory, I gathered up 3 friends and my husband and we went to our favorite dinner spot, Canyon Grill, on the back side of  Lookout Mountain, where I ate wood grilled trout and fire-seared red cabbage and a baby lettuce salad that I could have made myself but didn’t, and we drank three bottles of wine and laughed for three hours and then went home. I loved it. I also loved the entire week leading up to it, and my husband and I are still replaying funny stories from it four days later.

Was it such a big deal, reaching the beginning of my summer, that it needed to be marked by dinner out with friends? Not really. And yes. The point is  not to assign worth to moments but to attempt to live fully inside of each one. When I fully “got” this, I stopped being in a huge hurry all the time. I lost my impatience, my agitation, and my dissociative states. I even stopped tailgating. You don’t have to send up a huge hurrah every minute you don’t die. It’s really about being here–quietly or loudly, whichever brings you the most fully alive–for the ride.

The post Congratulations! Let’s Not Celebrate appeared first on Dana Shavin.

A little spark of anxiety ignites at the base of your spine. You put down your sandwich and look up from your magazine. Because you’ve just realized something incredibly important: what you do isn’t what you were meant to do. And unless you want to live a life of constant regret, you must chuck it immediately and pursue the [profoundly fulfilling] thing that is your true calling. Stephen Cope, in his book, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling, calls this living along the spine of your dharma.

But there’s something else, too. It isn’t just that you’re doing the wrong thing. It’s that you’re doing the too big thing. The thing you now know you should be doing is (you believe, because you have no real understanding of it) deliciously, delightfully “small”. What could possibly be involved in being a chocolatier (even one who takes a cue from primitive societies) besides throwing together some cocoa and milk, stirring it up, and then hanging out in your shop all day in the hippest part of a hip town, selling to hipsters? Although to clarify, it’s not the alleged “easy” part that lures you. It’s that you know the profoundest satisfaction sprouts from the belly of single-minded purpose.

And it is, of course, an illusion, a fantasy, a hold-over from the days of childhood when all that was required to be a superhero was to dress like one and all it took to be a mommy was to carry a plastic baby around by its hair. There’s a reason stories about simplifying our life, and movies about romantic love, get to us, and it’s precisely because there’s no “there” there. We don’t hear (or we don’t listen to) the parts about the ego pain or financial struggle or long hours involved in retrofitting a career. And lovers in movies never go the bathroom, run out of dinner conversation, or pluck chin hairs.

Which is not to say you should go back to your Oprah magazine and your sandwich and blot out the voices in your head telling you to make a change. One of the funniest things my father ever said was something he didn’t intend to be funny: “Everything means something to you, doesn’t it, Dr. R.?” As Dr. R. was a shrink, this kind of went without saying.

It’s the same with the chatter in your head. Listen, but maybe don’t take it literally. I’m thinking the chatter is more like dream imagery: messages couched in symbolism, waiting to be unravelled. I’m actually pretty happy doing what I do, and certain I don’t want to chuck it all to source chocolate. But the idea that there’s some other part of my life “seeking the spine”? Now that’s something worth considering.

The post I Meant To Be Something Else appeared first on Dana Shavin.

“Well,” said the therapist, “You could just upset the apple cart completely.”

As I recall I stared at her in disbelief. Did people really do that? Decide that so little in their life was working that the only recourse was to chuck it all and start over?  It was the emotional equivalent of yanking the plug on some misbehaving, little-understood piece of technology and then plugging it back in with great expectations.

It was a terrible idea. But as a depressed, anxious, recently de-fathered 26 year-old, I couldn’t see this.  At that time, I believed PhDs didn’t have terrible ideas, or if they did, they used them for making hideous sofa choices. And so, three months after my father’s death, I said goodbye to my boyfriend, my best friend, my job, and the horse farm I lived on and adored, and moved to what was then the middle of nowhere.

Do I have to tell you the plan stunk? That I missed the boyfriend, the best friend, my coworkers, and the horses intensely? That what I had done, far from hitting the reset button on my life, was to heap sorrow, loneliness, and unemployment on top of grief, anxiety and confusion? I have to wonder: what did the therapist think might come of this apple-cart overthrow? Had she thought it through at all? If so, what did she think was possible?

Which brings me to one of my all-time favorite questions to ask or be asked: What’s possible?  It’s a great question to ask yourself (or someone else) in times of  stuckness or uncertainty. I often wonder what would have come of my young self and my supposedly dispensable “apples” had the therapist taken the time to ask me, What’s possible if you upset the apple cart? What’s possible if you don’t? She could have even followed it with the deliciously abstract, often maddening, but almost always revealing, What else?  I might have still tossed the apples, but maybe I’d have at least salvaged the cart.

The post The Worst Advice I Ever Got appeared first on Dana Shavin.

The Desire Map, LaPorte’s book upon which the interview he heard was based, is about arriving consciously at the doorstep of our lives. It’s about putting considerable thought and intention into how and what we want to feel in our lives. LaPorte talks about gratitude lists (something my life coach has been hammering into me), goal setting, and a letting go of the kind of ambition that blinds you to what you have actually already achieved. We feel 900 feelings in the course of a day, LaPorte says in her podcast (which I ran home and  listened to immediately), but she encourages us to come up with a list of no more than 5 feelings we WANT to feel, and that we are willing to commit to feeling,which we do by consciously showing up in our lives on a day to day, hour by hour basis. Got your list of 5 desired feelings? Now what can you do that will make you feel them? If one of your desired feelings is joy, what can you do today that will bring you joy? If one of your desired feelings is connection with others, what can you do today that will make you feel that? Hour by hour, day by day, we build our lives through conscious intention.

LaPorte is youthful-sounding and accessible and her insights tie directly into the concepts and cornerstones of my life coach training. I’ve downloaded her book on Kindle and I’m reinstating my gratitude lists and I’m going to make a list of “accomplishment” goals and “feeling” goals. Right after I put away the malted milk balls and the Prilosec.

The post 900 Feelings and Five Feelings appeared first on Dana Shavin.