Do you believe that you deserve love and happiness in your life?

Many of us who grew up in alcoholic/dysfunctional families have a complex relationship with happiness. If we get too close to feeling good, we worry that something bad is going to happen to us.

As a child, I’d go about my day, play with my toys, and have fun, but events outside my control would then wreck things. I never fully understood all the problems that were occurring around me. I only felt their effects.

Now, as an adult, the shadow of my past hangs over me like a specter. Working to unlearn reactions to good situations takes time.

It’s not easy to retrain our brains to think differently when we’re used to having negative events affect us.

The first step is to understand that we deserve to be happy.

But taking a step toward healing and overcoming our pasts, can make us feel vulnerable.

To start my day off today, I listened to one of Deepak Chopra’s meditations, and he focused on the mantra om kleem shreem.

I had never heard of this mantra before, but he explained that the mantra “affirms that you deserve the fulfillment of all your deepest desires.”

Oddly, we become what we believe. If we don’t believe we deserve fulfillment or happiness, then we fall into a self-fulfillment prophecy and succumb to negative thinking.

Yet if we were to turn things around, we’d focus on the beauty and abundance of joy and love in life. That might sound a bit too much new-age talk to you, but let’s put things in perspective.

If we are walking up a hill and keep thinking, “I can’t do this, I just can’t anymore,” well, we’ll want to give up and stop. But if we not only change our thinking to be “I can walk up this hill,” we might also allow ourselves to see that a path on the right can take us away from the hill.

Being open to positivity and new opportunities can break the cycle of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If we think differently, we can choose differently and more options in life will become available.

There is plenty of happiness and love for everyone.

The challenge is if whether we’re open and receptive to receiving it.

Are you?

Like what you’ve read? Be sure to check out my other posts in my Let Go and Be Free blog.