Reflections: It's Been One Hell Of A Year

I remember it like it was yesterday; it was October 11, 2013 and my whole family was in the Outer Banks, North Carolina celebrating my cousin Hillary’s marriage to her soul mate Nick.  I was supposed to be there, but instead, I found myself walking around my neighborhood with my dog asking myself one question:  Krystal, what the f*** are you doing?

If you’ve ever asked a woman how old they are chances are they answered with “29”, so naturally when I turned 29 I thought that it was going to be my year; after all, I had Key West on my side this time.  I had just moved back to the island and into the Girl Cave.  So anyways, 29 was going to be my year, aaaaaaand then my sister died.  And as if things couldn’t get shittier a guy I dated for years got engaged.  So there I was, drowning in grief and single.  It was seriously like someone had taken a machine gun to my ego.

Overboard, one of the greatest movies of all time…
Annie: “Dean, how old am I?”
Dean: “29”

Now I’m going to try to put my “aha moment” into words so try to stay with me here… note the date above, October 11. I was born April 12, 1984; so October 11th was exactly one day before the 1/2 way mark of my 29th year.  I don’t know what it was that made it click but I literally had a light bulb moment on that walk.  I realized that my 29th year wasn’t even half way over, and if I made a conscious effort to change I could still salvage the year and make it my best ever.  So that I did.

Please refer to my previous blog post, Any Day Can Be Day #1 for more inspiration on fresh starts…

The first thing I did was download a shit-ton of spiritual self-help books; sounds cliché but I had nothing to lose.  Then I tuned into Super Soul Sunday on the OWN channel and got to work.  I started taking notes about my thoughts and behaviors and started looking for the good in everything.  I started a gratitude practice where I made sure to focus on the people, places, and things that made me most happy and I started writing in my journal again, religiously.  The results were astounding.

I literally became my thoughts.  I became a genuinely happy and grateful person and it’s pretty awesome.  Another pretty cool side effect to being happy is losing weight.  Once I got happy, I mean genuinely happy, my body just changed, it was so weird but I’m not complaining.  People in my life started to take notice of my spiritual/ emotional/ physical changes and it felt pretty damn good.  So I just kept the ball rolling.

Since last October I’ve made so many changes in my life but the most influential change I’ve made came within the last few months.  August 1st I started going to a Buddhist Sangha twice a week and introduced meditation to my daily routine.  The effect that silence has on your mind and body is hard to put into words but its calming effect is unmatched by anything I’ve ever done before (including pot).  Meditation has helped me tremendously with my anxiety and now when I don’t make the time for meditation in my day I can physically feel the effects.  Crazy!

If you are interested in starting your own meditation practice I recommend signing up for a FREE guided mediation lead by Deepak Chopra.  It is a 21-Day Meditation Experience that you can do at your leisure whenever and wherever you would like, try it out, whattaya got to lose?!  https://chopracentermeditation.com/experience

I could seriously sing from the mountaintops about how awesome my life is and how happy I am living it and if you don’t feel that way about your life I suggest making a change. If I could give one piece of advice it would be to count your blessings, not your problems.  Everyone had hardships, it’s how you handle them that counts.  Being happy starts with yourself, once you get that down the rest just happens, like magic!

So Happy Super Soul Sunday and cheers to new beginnings and happiness!