Category: Personal Development

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Ingredients for Happiness

Although we experience temporary positive or happy emotions, tapping into a happy state of being comes with awareness and work. Years of introspection, intensive life challenges, self help and study, human observation and research into happiness has aided me in writing what I believe to be the 14 prime ingredients to help an individual connect with a deep state of happiness.

Happiness is engaging with every bit of your life, through both the struggles and the ecstasy with the same state of presence and gratitude

Hannah Kern, Happiness Activist

PRESENCE

Connecting with your current reality is essential for bringing happiness into your life. Yesterday is unchangeable, the future is constantly reshaped by things that are often out of your control – now is all that’s guaranteed. Putting your conscious intention and focus into what’s happening in your present moment allows you to get the most out of it and not let precious moments pass you by.

TRUTH

Honesty is essential for any relationship to work – the most important one being with yourself. It is only within a state of trust that we can achieve true happiness; living in willful ignorance traps us in a state of denial. We should not fear the truth but rather embrace it to help catalyse our evolution.

ACCEPTANCE

When we stop forcing our ideals and surrender to our flow in this reality, we remove the pain that comes with resistance. Resistance requires energy and acceptance stops you spending energy on things you don’t need to.

OPENNESS

Our journeys are constantly unfolding and our fears often block us from going down some paths. Openness allows for the free movement of both good and bad things into your life. The good flows in to bring you blessings, the bad flows in to teach you strength. Having the self belief to know you have what it takes to overcome everything is the key. Don’t stop love because you’re scared to lose it. Don’t stop chasing your dreams because you’re afraid of what might go wrong. Look past fear and feel the thrill of true liberation – something only you can give yourself by being open to receive and share. 

SIMPLICITY

Putting our focus into less things allows us to build healthier relationships with them – to take more time giving our focus and gratitude to those things as something of a variety of greater value than in abundance. 

CHALLENGE

Life will give it to you whether you like it or not, so taking control and challenging yourself in a healthy and intentional way helps you grow in ways you want to. Incorporating intentional challenges into your life is a part of discovering your true purpose; this helps to give you meaning and direction. After all, the more you overcome in life, the more resilience, strength, faith and knowledge you collate helping you to live more objectively and compassionately to yourself and others. 

EXERCISE

Activating your muscles and connecting with your body releases endorphins and is proven to have positive effects on balancing your general mood as well as your physical fitness. Building physical strength and resilience is empowering and healthy, the more you become one with your physical body, the more you unite your physical, mental and emotional wellbeing. Physical health enables deeper self worth, confidence in one’s own abilities and increases brain function. It also tends to drive us outside more, helping us to connect with nature, another healing principal. 

NATURE

The overdevelopment of modern society has created a huge disconnect between us and nature; it’s time to stop separating ourselves and forgetting we are a type of SPECIES! The more we realise we are all part of the same vibration, the more we benefit as both individuals and a collective. It’s humbling to know we are so tiny and insignificant yet also make up the precious and intricate details in a habitat so incredible. Connecting with that humility makes up a significant part of the road to happiness. 

LOVE

It is sold to us as a crazy dream they show in the movies but love is so much more than just that specific ideal! It’s noticing the sun shining after a cold, rainy day. It’s smiling at the stranger sitting at the bus stop who’s had a hard shift at work. It’s noticing the patterns on the beautiful rug that someone rescued from that skip on the corner and your wonderful, empowering friendship that holds you close and offers support when you need it most. Fall in love every day with the little details of your life; with both the bountiful bliss and heartbreaking hardship. At any point in your life, love is the most powerful healing you can find. Welcome it, give it, feel it, share it. We are all LOVE. 

FUN

Welcome joy into your life. Play, be silly, don’t take life too seriously. Discover what makes your soul sing and release all your excess energy into engaging activities that make you SMILE! Make time for new things and surround yourself with people who make you grin till your face aches and laugh till your belly hurts. 

COMPASSION

Empathising with others frees you from making negative judgements. By removing blame and shame we enable all forms of healing; for both ourselves and others. There is always a reason for someone’s behaviour and to give compassion is to allow ourselves to forgive and remove resistance and tension preventing our happiness and peace. 

COMMUNICATION

Communication helps you be authentic and receive people in their authentic form too. The connector to all other factors and the prime approach to help release pressure and rebalance in healthy, artistic and inspiring ways. Being confident in communication bridges gaps, helps establish connections and enables you to give love. 

SERVICE

There is no such thing as selfishness or selflessness, only oneness. When we realise that another person’s pain is also our pain and another person’s joy is also our joy, we can see that to give to another is to give to oneself. Similarly to connecting with nature, by removing this sense of ‘I’, or sense of ‘self’, we become more grounded and humble and feel fulfilled knowing we are living our life with good intentions and positive actions. 

GRATITUDE

Life is a journey and there will be inevitable ups and downs but channelling gratitude for both our blessings and our lessons is essential to achieving balance. Gratitude keeps us grounded in our own experiences yet also tethered to all influences around us in a positive and nurturing way. When coupled with communication, expressing deep gratitude is the easiest way of gifting love. Gratitude is the element that ties together all ingredients for happiness. It’s the part that provides context to unsettling moments and enables our inner peace when we experience turbulence in life. 

What would you consider the most important ingredients for happiness? I’d love to hear from you!

Love and hugs, Han ♥

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How to use fear to your advantage

Does this image fill you with fear? What does it say to you?

It’s a photo taken in Bangladesh with complete strangers – men. These men were curious; wondering how I’d got there and why I was there – they were happy to have a photo with me. They were not there to hurt or attack me, they were just existing, in the same place I was, at the same time, surprised to see me…

Cycling 10,000kms throughout Asia as a woman alone raised many questions, the most common one being, “Aren’t you scared?!”

My response was always, “Of what…You?”

And the person would be horrified that I’d asked such a daft question as they were always only approaching with genuine interest, fascination and curiosity – they had no intention to cause me any harm.

The question was so open-ended, how could I possibly respond? Of course there are moments of fear, that’s an everyday reality. Fear pops up everywhere in the world whether you’ve got a random person who seems to be staring at you strangely at the bus stop or a car that drove past you that little bit too closely… What one person considers ‘scary’ will differ to the next person.

Some types of fear come from what we have experienced in the past, often centred around our own traumas and other fears will come from the stories we’ve heard from other people. Either way, it’s a defence response from our bodies to protect us from what we perceive as a threat.

That’s the key word there, perceive. Fear comes from the narrative that we are telling inside our own minds. That narrative is derived from what ‘evidence’ we choose to focus on to help us subconsciously determine the risk.

Many people think I’m crazy for camping or cycling alone as a woman but I like to challenge people on what they think I should be scared of exactly? Being attacked or raped by a malicious stranger is the most common origin of that question in this context. Well, let’s think about this… The vast majority of humans internationally are decent people – they want to help when they can and they certainly don’t want to hurt you. So what would the chances be that a psychopathic rapist would just happen to be in the exact remote place that I unexpectedly decided to camp at sunset? And that that person would know that I was female inside my tent? Unlikely.

Sometimes, feeling fearful can distract us from consciously assessing the risk of an action/event/experience and it can prevent us from taking part. Other times, it can prevent us from making dangerous or irresponsible decisions. As we continue to navigate life, the presence of fear will always have some impact on our choices – for some, fear spurs them on and other fear holds them back…

So when someone asks me, “Aren’t you scared?” I try to explain that fear of anything doesn’t serve as a barrier to me. And to be honest, I am not scared. I recognise moments of fear and use them to help me work through challenging situations whilst simultaneously working on myself, using fear to highlight where I need to do more shadow-work to become stronger and more resilient.

Just like all other emotions, we should not suppress fear but instead witness it and use it to understand ourselves better. With that, comes personal development and overall progress.

This is not an article to help you remove fear from your life, it’s about how to conquer using fear as a positive signal; to help you engage with yourself in a more challenging way and utilise fear as a drive for personal progress.

1. Radical Acceptance

What is coming up for me?

Plucking your rawest emotions from being held tightly inside you is your first step to emotional ownership. Drawing your most challenging feelings out allows you to acknowledge them, take responsibility for them and actively work through them. Whilst fear tends to be highlighted by inaction, guilt and shame may also come up following an emotionally driven action and can contribute to the development of fear later on. Rather than regretting what has or hasn’t happened, taking responsibility of what IS will be the only way to make effective progress as you give yourself the chance to un-work emotional blockages which not only clears your path but also builds resilience within and empowers you as you come to realise your ability to tackle adversity.

Techniques to help with this can include writing them down on a piece of paper to actually visualise them or perhaps talking them through to hear them out loud with a friend, loved one or therapist. This approach helps us to take accountability of our emotions in order to listen to the message within them. As we remove resistance, we allow them to pass and are free to witness and absorb the lessons in the process.

TIP: Identify your problem by answering WHAT is coming up for you emotionally.

2. Honest Reflection

Why do I feel this way?

Working through the roots of your feelings you will begin to understand which traumas you need to pay more attention to unravelling in order to have better internal balance and stability. Identifying these traumas with openness and honesty is the only way to tackle them; maintaining a narrative of denial will keep your triggers buried until they’re inevitably called to resurface again at a later point.

TIP: Approach yourself with an honest WHY… WHY did this happen? WHY do you feel this way – WHY were you triggered? WHY did you lose control? These questions will help to identify what’s getting in your way so that you can work around them in step 3.

3. Pragmatic Approach

How can I improve this situation?

Now you have identified the cause of your rising emotions, you can work out how best to navigate around them. Knowing your obstacles can be more important than knowing your path as identifying what is blocking you will prepare you to find necessary solutions. First establish which of your blockages come from a basis of fear and which come from real risk. Fear is a projection whereas risk is calculated based on facts. Working out what the actual risks are will help you to mitigate them and through honest reflection, dissecting your fears as mere projections will mean that neither fear nor risk remain as obstacles. Make sure you take some time to think about where you want to be and what you want to achieve. With this clarity, build yourself a realistic and manageable route around your problem(s).

TIP: Approach with HOW: ‘HOW can I improve this situation?’ When dealing with fear, guilt or shame we must use our accountability to drive us forward into positive resolve. Write all your ideas as a list so that you can easily work your way through until you find the best and most effective approach.

4. Positive Progress

I have and I am…

After coming to terms with your emotions and seeing opportunities to excel past your blockages, the final step is to put your intentions into action. Implement the lessons you’ve learned from the previous steps into your reality by taking your list of your intentions that you wrote in step 3 and tackling them one at a time. I recommend making a detailed to-do list so your tasks seem more manageable and less overwhelming – cross each item off as you complete it for satisfaction and recognition that helps to keep you motivated.

TIP: Partner this practice with positive affirmations which keep you focused, learning and help to build self-confidence. Here are some examples: ‘I HAVE ALL THE TOOLS I NEED TO ….’ or ‘I AM IMPROVING ON … EVERYDAY’

So there you have it, a short and easy step-by-step guide to help you understand, rationalise and overcome your fears so that you can use them to your advantage. I hope it helps!

Love, Han x

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5 Easy Tips on How to Stay Grounded When the World Feels Unstable

We’re all living through a peculiar time; one that’s testing our mental resilience and emotional toughness in so many ways. We’re being forced to look at ourselves in a metaphorical mirror and sit with what we see. Some of us aren’t used to that, and finding ourselves confined to solitude or even just having significantly more time to reflect on our own internal states can be extremely triggering.

The consumer driven capitalist world has taught us how to distract ourselves from ourselves, but what that has done is kept us busy instead of grounded. As our physical lives have now slowed down dramatically, we’re learning not how to be busy but rather how to truly engage and that is the real secret behind staying grounded during unfamiliar circumstances creating unstable surroundings.

Check out below my 5 easy tips to help you stay engaged, proactive and grounded during times of uncertainty:

1. Maintain a daily self-care practice.

This can include yoga, meditation, having a superfood smoothie, dancing for 10 minutes to activate your body, a morning facial cleanse, stretching for 10 minutes or any other positive mind/body activity. These practices help you to enhance your self-awareness; observing the relationship between your spiritual being and physical existence. By becoming more mindful, you enable greater connectivity to everything around you alongside improved emotion-regulation. By actively working on yourself you maintain the empowering feeling that comes with acknowledging your continued growth.

2. Eat well.

Nourishing your body and mind with good and healthy food helps improve your mood, give you more energy and think more clearly. Preparing food from scratch also allows you to put love and intention into your meals giving them a positive energetic charge. Set your space and sing or speak lovingly throughout the cooking process to infuse your spirit, purity and intention originating from soul, transitioning to food then back to physical self.

3. Drink lots of water.

Herbal teas are also great. Up to 60% of the adult human body is water, so it’s super important to drink lots of fluids (3 litres per day for the average man and 2.2 litres per day for the average woman) to keep everything working to its highest function. Good hydration helps us do many things including regulating our body temperature, creating saliva and digesting food. When our bodies are working efficiently, we feel more energised, less down and generally more equipped to tackle problems that happen to us or around us.

4. Set your intention(s) for the day.

Setting yourself a purpose and feeling fulfilled at the end of your day keeps you motivated through small accomplishments. These intentions can be anything from doing the food shopping to going for a long nature walk. Setting small, realistic tasks like washing your hair or even simply deciding to spend some of your day resting helps you to tackle your everyday with more conscious thought. As written about by Psychology Today, turning your wider goals into healthy habits comes down to implementing consistency. Regular small intentions help you to stay on your path to making progress and successfully turn your broader targets into part of maintaining your everyday balance through intentional practice.

5. Share something you are grateful for.

Taking some time to recognise your privileges, blessings and lessons help you to remain honest with yourself and connected to your reality in a healthy manner. Gratitude also goes hand in hand with humility and according to Harvard University, is strongly associated with greater happiness. Journaling one thing you are grateful for each day helps you to feel fulfilled as you make time to recognise the things that are best serving you, inspiring you and truly nourishing you.