We have a slightly longer gap between meetings in my Happiness Club this month and so I thought I'd blog a quick, mid-meet up update on why I think Direction is important to be happier in life.

This is my video which tells you more about the basics of mindfulness and includes a 14 minute meditation of the body and breath.

I set up a Happiness Club almost a year ago, we have all committed to each of the GREAT DREAM messages over the months. Together we've shared a journey discovering what really makes us happy.

We’re over halfway now in our Happiness Club journey, entering into the DREAM of GREAT DREAM! What has been lovely is that we’ve all noticed how the things we started our experiment committing too (e.g. giving, relating etc) have dripped through to the subsequent months. So now we’re still giving more, exercising more and so on because they’ve really become part of our daily lives, of who we are. But now we’re starting to try new things and look forward with direction. In this blog I’m going to review our month of Appreciation and Trying Out as well as have a quick chat around the forthcoming month of Direction.

For the past month, we’ve been practicing accepting ourselves – unconditionally. Personally, I found this hard to do. Too often I was drawn into the high pressure, high stress reality of trying to do everything perfectly, so that I could feel good about myself. Frequently, maybe not frequently enough, I recognised this and offered myself kindness and compassion and fought against the urge of perfectionism. I accepted myself with lower standards and it felt liberating. I will be focusing on this unconditional acceptance going forward, I have only just scratched the surface, and need to commit to this each day in the future. I can almost touch the freedom that unconditional acceptance brings! I’m thankful that my happiness club friend has really inspired me. I have some great ideas of how I can take this forward into my life from her. We also talked about the month of meaning and how to be part of something bigger in the next month

This month’s blog is going to be focused on one Happiness Club member’s past month. It feels only right, as this month she opened her home, and heart, to a Kenyan runner. The experiences they shared show what true resilience is.

When I read Psychologies magazines recent happiness club article on acceptance it was a big lightbulb moment. I hadn’t considered ‘conditional’ or ‘unconditional’ acceptance of myself until this point but knew instantly I only accepted myself conditionally depending upon my own internal standards and successes. I talked about this with friends outside of the happiness club and, lo and behold, they did the same thing. It wasn’t that surprising on Monday evening to discover friends in the happiness club did too. We would accept our own children unconditionally, so why is it so hard to accept ourselves unconditionally?