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[The Wifey]

Something interesting that someone sent me:

Researchers found that happiness is most strongly associated with character traits like gratitude, hope, zest, and the ability to love and be loved. According to Nansook Park, Ph.D., one of the research study authors, “Relationships with other people are what make us the happiest.”

The Positive Psychology Center website states that Dr. Seligman’s research “has demonstrated that it is possible to be happier—to feel more satisfied, to be more engaged with life, find more meaning, have higher hopes, and probably even laugh and smile more, regardless of one’s circumstances.“

Check it out for yourself at http://www.authentichappiness.org, where you can also rate yourself on a variety of questionnaires.

If you’re not happy, there’s hope—there are specific changes you can make to create more contentment in your life. For example, a group of participants in the research project who were asked to spend a few minutes each night recording three things that had gone well that day felt happier for the full six months of the study.

The good news is that instead of always focusing on what you don’t have or what’s wrong with your life, you can retrain yourself to become more positive.

As author Denis Waitley reminds us, “Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.”



The following is very powerful. I hope it helps someone else.

How the Law of Attraction Affects Your Marriage
By Nancy Wasson, Ph.D.

Which of the following sayings have you heard before?

“What you sow, you reap.”
“What comes around goes around.”
“What you give, you get back.”
“Like attracts like.”

These sayings are all different ways to express the Law of Attraction that’s always in operation in every area of your life. According to the Law of Attraction, you attract those things into your life that you focus on.

In other words, you invite into your life what you are predominantly thinking about and feeling. It’s as though you’re a magnet, and you attract back into your life the exact type of energy that you’re vibrating or giving out into the world.

You’ve probably had the experience of being furious about something that happened and then having angry run-ins with other people afterwards. It starts a negative chain reaction.

You might have a disagreement with a co-worker and leave work upset. Then you end up shaking your fist at another driver on the way home. You stop by the grocery store and get into an altercation with another customer or the clerk. When you finally get home, you then get into a fight with your spouse.

In this scenario, your angry energy is attracting anger back to you—remember, like attracts like. If you’re angry, you’ll attract people and situations that will bring even more anger into your life.

The interesting thing is that you get back what you focus on and put your energy into, whether it’s wanted or unwanted. So if you spend a lot of time and energy thinking and talking about what you don’t want in your life (or your marriage, your relationships with others, your job, your finances, etc.), then that’s what you’ll be attracting more of—what you don’t want.

For example, if Tom says he wants a happy marriage, but he constantly focuses on what his partner does that dissatisfies him, he’ll just keep finding more and more reasons to be dissatisfied. The energy of dissatisfaction is at work.

As Tom continues to gripe to himself or others about his spouse’s negative traits—she’s not the best housekeeper, she’s often late, sometimes she doesn’t give him enough attention, she talks to her friends too much on the phone—he begins to overlook his wife’s many good points. Over time, Tom will begin to devalue his spouse and the marriage.

And as Tom’s wife senses his negative energy and negative feelings toward her, she will likely find herself pulling back emotionally and feeling less positive toward him. It only takes a small increase in the amount of negative energy present for a marriage to begin to be less satisfying for both partners.

According to Lynn Grabhorn in Excuse Me, Your life Is Waiting (a book I highly recommend about the astonishing power of feelings), “...as long as we’re glaring somewhere else—past or present—at all the stuff we don’t like, not only are we inviting more of the same, we’re blocking all the good things we’d like to see in its place.”

She continues by saying, “...if our partner...has some dorky little habits that annoy us (Don’t Wants), and we focus on them...all we’re doing is perpetuating the dorky habits we’d like to erase, because we’re holding them in our vibration.”

Grabhorn says that giving continual attention to disagreeable conditions creates a downward spiral in the relationship. Our constant grousing enlarges the petty thing we’re griping about.

She states that “...not only will that infamous toothpaste cap never get put back on the tube, but every irritation has the potential, with our constant negative focus, to escalate into an unwanted extramarital affair, a fender bender, a layoff, even a divorce.”

Grabhorn summarizes the point she’s making by asserting that “...focusing on what you don’t want in a relationship is never going to get you what you want.”

Furthermore, if you view your spouse as “needing to be fixed,” you’re judging and sending the message that he or she is “wrong.” This swamps your partner with negative energy and takes away any desire to want to change.

One of the worst kinds of energy you can send to another person is the energy of blame. That will always make the situation worse than it already is.

Instead, direct your attention to what you appreciate and like about your spouse and let that positive energy and good will grow and spread. As you concentrate on your spouse’s positive traits and contributions, you’ll feel more positive toward her (or him) and will be more likely to elicit positive feelings in return.

Spend time visualizing what kind of loving relationship you’d like to have with your spouse. Then, work on keeping yourself open to the kind of energy you want to have more of in your life—such as peace, harmony, love, joy, and kindness.

Focus on becoming more patient, understanding, tolerant, and forgiving. Cultivate and nurture the traits that you want to grow in your relationship.

Remember, you have the choice to expand the positive energy in your relationship or to expand the negative energy. It’s the difference between fertilizing beautiful flowers or fertilizing stinging nettles—you always grow more of what you focus on.