A while back I wrote the blog Neuroplasticity, Gratitude, and Your Mental Health: Food for Thought and thousands of people viewed it and were reminded of the really powerful effects of counting blessings over burdens.

This made me think of two critical elements that can help shape our happiness and success.The first is proactively looking at what it is we actually want in life. The second is looking at a key element that can help prime our minds toward the happiness and success we are looking for.

Throughout our lives we’ve been interpreting and making meaning out of all kinds of events. Every event by itself is just an event, but the way we see it, the importance we give it, how it weaves into the fabric of our cells makes all the difference. This meaning that we make then goes on to affect how we interpret other things, it informs the choices that we make and the behaviors that we conduct.

For example, if I were to get pulled over by the police for speeding I might think “the world is out to get me” or “I need to slow down.” I may miss the possibility that this may have saved me from an upcoming accident. Some people say life is like a blank canvas, go ahead and paint your masterpiece.

The problem with that statement is that life is not like a blank canvas because we bring all of our past experiences, woundings, traumas, and triumphs with us to the seat. These inform that immediate snap judgment that occurs beneath our awareness in any given moment.

Every moment of our lives our brains are rapidly taking in information and making snap judgments, interpretations and decisions based on what we see, hear, smell, touch, and taste. Depending on how we’re feeling we’ll interpret it differently.

Even though we believe our thoughts represent reality, the truth is, our thoughts are not facts. A lot of us live without an awareness of this, operating mostly from a state of auto-pilot, sleepwalking through life.  The good news is we can train our minds to become more aware of this automaticity, get perspective and tune into what really matters.

Here’s an example I often do with my own patients to illustrate why we don’t need to believe everything we think:

Here’s what I’m thinking about when starting this next year of 2012:

“May we all recognize in this New Year that the moments of our lives are rare and precious. Open to them, Bask in them, We are alive.”

The reality is we often hold things that are rare in our world to be precious. These rare things are held to a high value, whether it’s gold, an unbroken sand dollar on a beach, or the short time that a baby is a baby before growing up.

If you peel the lens back for a moment you can see our lives in this very same way. We’re a blip in time in relation to the life of this planet we stand on and this Universe we live in.  All the moments of our lives are rare and precious and it’s incredibly important to bring that awareness back to our lives.

What happens when we start seeing our time on this planet as rare and precious?

Christy Matta, MA is a fellow Psychcentral blogger, has worked in mental health for almost 20 years and has a confession, “I am an anxious traveler.”

Millions of people struggle with anxiety around traveling in one form or another and right now we’re in the peak period of the year in regards to air travel. I have a tip to help find freedom from anxiety that comes out of the new short enhanced eBook (fancy term that refers to an eBook including video instruction within the book available on IPad, Nook, and Kindle) Mindful Meditations for the Anxious Traveler. I created this $.99 enhanced eBook to be a mindful companion along the journey to more peaceful and restful travel:

Here’s the tip:

With the moments of life seemingly becoming more fleeting, there’s never been a more important time to cultivate or become more aware of the meaning in our lives. Therese Borchard, author of Beyond Blue: Surviving Depression & Anxiety and Making the Most of Bad Genes, wrote a past post 7 Ways to Prevent Burnout. In this blog she summed up a book by one of her favorite authors, Robert Wicks, who laid out a path toward integrating spirituality into daily life in an effort to prevent stress and live the lives we want.  Definitely worth the read and if you have any aversion to the word “God” or “spirituality,” just replace that term with “higher self” and see how that works.

In 2005, I conducted a national study in an effort to see if people could in fact cultivate what I called “sacred moments” and see what effect that had on their stress and well-being. Lo and behold, in practicing 5 minutes a day for 5 days a week, for 3 weeks, there was a significant positive effect in stress reduction and well-being. What was so fascinating to me was that for many it allowed them to touch a sense of spirituality when they felt they had never been able to do this before.

A quote from one participant:

There is no doubt about it, today’s business is a round-the-clock atmosphere. We are hounded with external pressures, overwhelmed with information overload, asked to deliver more with less, work longer hours, and have less personal time for renewal activities. What is the result?

Self-inflicted attention deficit disorder, exhaustion, lack of focus, reduced health, and burnout. This leads to lower job satisfaction, morale, and productivity. Hardly the results we want.

Did you know that over 50% of the workforce in the US says Job Stress is a major problem in life? This is twice as much as ten years ago. We also have 50% greater healthcare expenditures and corporations are losing over $300 Billion annually because of work-related stress! What’s going on here?

In an age of so much distraction, the old approach of time management at work is being thrown out the window in favor of attention management.

It’s no secret that for a long time now there’s been an increasing pressure from parents to push kids in the direction of achievement. In the past if you’re kid got into Stanford, Harvard, or any of the top schools the parents could rest and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. Right now, more people are graduating from top schools and finding there’s nowhere to go.  They’ve been trained to achieve all their lives and are now finding a massive void in the market and perhaps in their perception of what really matters in life.

I’m not saying that being straddled with large student loans and the inability to get a job isn’t a real stressor. But today more parents are finding themselves wondering if they made a mistake in not focusing more on the non-achievement oriented things in life that lead to simple pleasures and happiness.

A short while ago I opened an opportunity for people to send me stories of mindfulness that can show the rest of us how it has had a practical impact on a particular event or their lives. I’m calling this column of Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, “Voices.”

A number of people continue to write in with stories. If you have a story, continue writing in and as long as there are good stories that teach the rest of us how mindfulness can work in our lives, I will choose from them from time to time to post on Mindfulness and Psychotherapy.

Of course those that get chosen can also send me a link that I’ll include in the post where people can learn more about them.

Here’s a wonderful story that teaches us the wisdom of being present in the transitory moments of life by Stuart Frazer:

A short while ago I opened an opportunity for people to send me stories of mindfulness that can show the rest of us how it has had a practical impact on a particular event or their lives. I’m calling this column of Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, “Voices.”

A number of people continue to write in with stories. If you have a story, continue writing in and as long as there are good stories that teach the rest of us how mindfulness can work in our lives, I will choose from them from time to time to post on Mindfulness and Psychotherapy.

Of course those that get chosen can also send me a link that I’ll include in the post where people can learn more about them.

Here’s a wonderful story that teaches us the wisdom behind slowing down in life by Angeliki: