How I Set Myself Up for Success: “Flowing” My Bliss
Learning the Meaning of My Name
The first time I asked anybody what my last name “Bliss” meant was when my mom lost her job in the 1990s recession. She had been working as an administrative assistant at a gold and silver trading company, and when they laid everyone off they gave all their workers (yes, even the secretaries) a generous severance package. My mom started envisioning opening a cookie shop called “Simply Bliss.” For a few months, before she had to come back down to reality and go back to work doing admin, I became her second-in-command pastry chef, testing all kinds of recipes that could help her business live up to our last name: Bliss. But what was “bliss” anyway?
I asked my mom and she told me that it was something in between happiness and contentment, like an unwavering sense of pure wellness. She also told me that bliss was different from pleasure or the fleeting emotion that we call “glee.” It relied on a simplicity and peacefulness that made it last. So in the context of baking, bliss was the process of coming up with recipe ideas, taste-testing them, and enjoying sharing the results with our family and friends. And in the context of eating a cookie, it was the quiet moment when your eyes closed to more fully open your taste buds, and you sensed the warming comfort that someone just baked for you.
In the context of life, generating “bliss” is also about simplicity and peacefulness. It means bringing simplicity and peacefulness to our everyday actions, infusing calm and wellness into our moves and our momentary environments. This is why I think of setting myself up for success as a process of flowing blissfulness.
Flowing Your Bliss
Usually when I hear or see my name in a sentence it is in the slogan “Follow Your Bliss.” I’m sentimental and so that statement works for me. It reminds me to check in with myself and make sure I’m marching to my own drumbeat. It makes me think of my personal priorities so I can be accountable to my own dreams.
But beyond following my bliss, I like to think of “flowing” it: making sure it is flowing from what I do and guiding my every move. And the best way to do that is to calm and center in order to begin.
In my writing on intelligence, I talk about centering as a way of stimulating brainpower. Centering is where you stop what you are doing and focus your attention on the now. Doing a brief counting meditation or box breathing are two ways that I center. Even just closing my eyes and focusing on planting my feet flatly on the ground while I am sitting in my chair or standing up can help me center my mind. The point is to leave behind the worries and stresses of the past moment and clear the mind for a new thread of thoughts.
The other thing I do (something that probably every person on Earth could benefit from doing) is to take a quiet moment with my eyes closed to quash the hater voice. Again, this isn’t a typo. I’m not saying to deal with actual “haters,” a.k.a. critics of your work or deeds. THAT you will need to save for another time. In the centering moment, when we are setting ourselves up to begin some kind of task in a state of simplicity and peacefulness, one’s internal hater voice is far more detrimental and counterproductive. It’s that self-critical voice that sneaks up on you to say you’re doing wrong as opposed to right. No matter how confident or capable we feel, we often have self-critical, hater voices in our heads at the moment when we anticipate that we are about to start something new. It’s like the little devil on your shoulder that stands in the way of you doing your best. Closing my eyes, calmly asking that force to be silent with me, to center now, helps me to remember that it’s time to flow.
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