Blooming Your Life: How To Experience Consistent Happiness - Paperback

Preface:

To be a Flower, is profound Responsibility. — Emily Dickinson

This book began as a blog post in 2008. Then it became a 7-Day Shift email course. And then, like a tree, it grew into a talk that I gave at various functions. After that, it branched out into an online video course, then a class, and now a book.

As with the blog, course, and classes, I have an intention. I want to help you design your days and life to match who you are, discover what you need to thrive, explore the possibilities of happiness, and apply what you learn.

In our classes, we agree to fully take part in a community garden of like-minded souls so that every member feels the support and encouragement of walking with a group of people on the same path with everyone’s best interests in mind.

I know that reading a book may not feel the same to you. But if you wish to, you can imagine that you are in this community and feel its support as you read through this book. Think of all the people doing the same thing as you. Each of you is making life better for the next person, even if you never meet them.

However, perhaps you can find a friend or two to study this book with together, and you will make the same agreement to support each other.

Or maybe I’ll see you in class one day, or on one of my online courses, or perhaps you’ll join our Perception Circle at perceptionu.com

However, even if you feel you are doing this by yourself, let me assure you that you aren’t. I know that all the support you need will be present for you in a multitude of ways if you expect to see it.

In addition, there are communities of life-gardeners that you may not know now, but as you do this work for yourself, you will become one of them.

My desire for you is that your life blooms with happiness now and into your future.

But to bloom happiness, we must have the desire to be happy. We have to decide to cultivate the intent and passion for our life to bloom.

Even if you don’t feel that way now, stick with me for a bit, and let’s see if we can’t unearth that desire. It’s there, I promise.

And if you already feel it, let’s expand that intent and desire together. Let’s be willing to bloom profusely as ourselves—each of us as an individual bloom, but always connected and needing each other in this garden of life.

Darwin called it “an abominable mystery” — he wrote: Look into a flower, and what do you see? Into the very heart of nature’s double nature — that is, the contending energies of creation and dissolution, the spiraling toward complex form and the tidal pull away from it. Apollo and Dionysus were names the Greeks gave to these two faces of nature, and nowhere in nature is their contest as plain or as poignant as it is in the beauty of a flower and its rapid passing. There, the achievement of order against all odds and its blithe abandonment. There, the perfection of art and the blind flux of nature. There, somehow, both transcendence and necessity. Could that be it — right there, in a flower — the meaning of life?

Welcome to the garden! — Beca

PS:
Please be sure to do the Practical Blooming section at the end of each chapter. Otherwise, this book is only partially valuable to you. It would be like looking at a catalog of seeds and plants but never planting the garden.

If, as you read this, you discover you would like to pursue more of the ideas in this book, try another book in The Shift Series. Each one has a different focus, but the same premise. The mother tree book is Living In Grace. The rest of the series are the branches.