So much of joy and happiness in life comes down to gratitude and perspective. If we change our perspective, if we look at life as happening for us rather than to us, if we take moments to be grateful for everything we have and everything we are, we open ourselves up to a completely new way of living. We live in abundance rather than scarcity. We live in gratefulness rather than selfishness. We live in calm rather than chaos. It’s simply a matter of taking a couple of minutes to be grateful for the miracle of you being alive, of you being able to breathe oxygen and have feelings and thoughts.

If you need some help, here it is. Once you learn how to access this feeling, you’ll be able to find it even in the midst of chaos. 

• Find a quiet space where you’re not going to be disrupted. Sit or lay down in a comfortable position and just breathe for a minute. Start with the deepest exhale you can manage. Wring out your lungs of all the stagnant air sitting in them. Then take a deep, cleansing breath. Now start box breathing, (breathe in for the count of 5, hold for the count of 5, breathe out for the count of 5). Do this for a couple of minutes until you feel calm and clear. 

• Now, connect with your soul and find your joy. I know, it sounds weird, but just give it a try. Picture where you imagine your soul sits in your body. I picture mine in the center of my chest, but if yours sits in your pinky, so be it. Now focus on that point and really breathe into it and connect with it. Picture a bright light radiating from it and lighting up the room. Now remember a feeling of joy and lightness and love and let that feeling glow from within you. Feel it. Really feel it. And then sit with it. Hold onto it for as long as you can. Often, you will feel it start to fall away, but you can bring it back. Feeling this feeling of joy and connection is like a muscle. You’ll fatigue after a moment and slip back down to where you started, but just consider it a weightlifting rep and do it again. Take yourself to that high euphoric state again and hold it there for as long as you can. It’s going to be a struggle at first. But the more you do it, the better you will become at it. 

• Now, before you let that feeling go, associate it with something. It can be a color or a number or a word – anything that feels like it’s locking it in. You can simply picture the word joy radiating from you, or gratitude, or the color white or the number 7 – whatever you want to use as your trigger, solidify it in that trigger. And then slowly let it fade away. 

• You’ll probably still feel the residual feelings of joy for a moment so rest in it and enjoy it. And then take another deep breath and slowly come back to the world around you. 

It’s a five minute exercise, but the more you do it, the easier it is to access that emotion and that feeling of euphoria and joy. Soon, you’ll find yourself being able to access this feeling even in the most stressful moments and you’ll learn to shift your emotions around certain things. 

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