Help Me Be Me

This one’s for planet earth. We all have an internal self portrait –and that is created by the way we feel about who we are. There are SOOOOO many factors that control how we feel about ourselves – and what we perceive as our flaws. And that’s why BD is such a big problem: it looks and acts like “normal” self-image concerns. It walks and talks like vanity. And, yet, it destroys the average person’s happiness in so many ways across a lifetime, unchecked. Your self-image is a distorted hallucination – one heavily affected by your fears, vulnerabilities, your brain chemicals, and the way you integrate information from the world around you. AND when it comes to how we view our flaws, it has no connection to how the world views you or your actual physical appearance. That’s one reason this is such a powerful and rising problem is because it’s a kind of suffering that’s veiled as “normal.” An every-growing percentage of the population is dissatisfied with some or many traits of their physical appearance. When everyone you know obeys the same standard and marketing and media reinforce the irrational bar – how would you ever know there was another option? For the resources mentioned check out teaspoonofhappy.com later this week. Smile y'all! Xo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast explores how old conflicts can hinder our present lives, and offers strategies for letting go. It discusses the impact of replaying old emotional memories and how to break free from negative patterns. The importance of moving on from conflicts, navigating emotional harm in relationships, and choosing happiness are also highlighted.

Jealousy, or a perception of your insecurities come to life. How does it sneak into your mind? Your darkest thoughts in your most fearful voice begin scratching at your feelings, dragging you down and causing you to act as your lowest self. You assume you are less than and life is against you somehow. You're either not enough, or something else outside of you is not enough. What is this emotional state? Your lowest form of self, the self that is motivated by fear and hate, put in a threatened defensive position. Think of it as You minus your awareness of what is good and loving in this world. This low emotional self is also called your irrational self. Most of jealousy acts as a hallucination. It does not show you reality it shows you insecure self-loathing reality: in that world, no one likes you and all the fears you have about yourself are true. For many of us it is clear that we are in an emotionally charged, irrational state – however, we cannot stop ourselves from wanting to “solve” for the perceived insult. “Is it true?! If so, how true? I need to know!” Nothing will quench the irrational need to compute “why” we have been betrayed: we go into loops of solving, calculating, tallying, replaying. And jealousy has a very potent ability to madden us for that reason: it’s all consuming, it belittles us, and we are aware it’s inside of us and us alone. A self-inflicted pain with the power to torture and haunt our every moment. You will never arrive at your truth through jealousy - you can only do that from a calm, objective vantage point - so this is all about stepping back from the emotion so you can regain your sound thinking. The power behind jealousy is also the key to undoing it: it does not live in reality – it lives in our reaction to reality. So we can indeed help ourselves when we struggle in the triggered moments. Hopefully, I will offer you a few tools to help you navigate out of it and back to your true and highest self: grounded, making decisions from a balanced and sane mindset. There are three parts: The what. They why. The how: the tools. This one is for Fran - thanks for writing me and I hope you likee! xox Sarah May B. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For when you can’t stop feeling worried or obsessed with what is threatening your stability in life – a stress response based on past traumas or recent ones, for that matter. In this episode, ‘survival mode’ is the term we are giving a pervasive sense of fear and stress and anxiety over issues that are not a real threat, though they are experienced in hypotheticals. Survival mode drives people to obsessively think about painful things: things past, things to come, analyzing and solving endlessly. In other words – like the worst version of brain overdrive you can imagine and all the time. It’s so powerful that it takes over your life. This can come in varying degrees – from intolerable writhing panic to manageable but potent worry. Regardless, it’s always something that keeps you outside of your life – unable to truly engage and enjoy it as you see others do. Living in survival mode, you want to run and you don’t know where. This one is for Heather! I heart you girl – hope this helps the teensiest bit. For more of my writing head to TeaspoonofHappy.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is for anyone who has conflicts with someone they care about who wants to figure out ways to get out of those conflicts fast and productively. It’s about our emotional baggage – specifically the unmet needs from our childhood, and how those block us from being able to see and receive the love from people in our life currently. I will focus on how to get out of conflicts and pain and move into happiness and get more of what you want. How to better love others and better encourage love back. It’s a set of tools to stay out of blaming and resenting and let go of what you think they should do. So that you can empower yourself to get to more of what you DO want – which is shared affection and happiness. Hi friends! I’ve been away for a bit because I got hitched! It was awesome and wonderful. And now I’m back! I will do the usual 3 parts: The What, The Why, The How – the tools. And to be clear – this is about all relationships that involve conflicts between the needs of others and your own. About relationships that involve needs of others and your own – and when those don’t match up. For more check out TeaspoonOfHappy.com Smile peeps! xo This one’s for Lara from Spain – thanks for writing me girl! :) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is about noticing negative thought patterns when they’re happening. What are negative thoughts? Bad habits. They’re not You – they’re the voice of a bad computer framework operating through you being fed by a chemical addition. You are now used to the chemical results of this thinking, so your brain wants to repeat it. They are the trained in ways of being – basically muscle memory but in your brain. So based on old experiences, just like a river wants to flow down the lowest path, so do your thoughts follow existing trained in currents. The more often you have these thoughts – the stronger the habit becomes. In other words, you have trained in the path of the river with repetition. As a result of that – you now perceive and look for this thought habit in your everyday life – like if you’re thinking of mean people who hate you, you will see mean people who hate you. Because it’s your mindset now. Plus, now that you are looking for this thing, you find it – so negative thinking becomes self-fulfilling. What is most important about all of this: it’s all totally unconscious. The fact that they’re unconscious is also the key to stopping these thoughts! This episode is broken up into three parts. What. Why. How aka Tools. For the blog version, check out TeaspoonofHappy.com later this week. It also has my book references for anyone who wants to read further. Smile friends! xox For more of the Buddhist psychological types – check out “The Chemistry of Joy” – linked here: https://goo.gl/diu91t Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is for a person who filled out my survey – I don’t know your name, but this is for you! I hope it helps. You asked how to break out of the vicious cycle of a narcissistic relationship. Because it can be extremely terrifying and painful and feel much like a hostage situation. The reason is that if you are in a relationship with a narcissist – you know how ruthless and dark their punishing can be. It also goes deep into your heart strings, puppeting you around like a raw nerve. In other words – they are master controllers and know exactly what to do to make you do what they want. And also they are WILLING to do it, at all costs. This episode is 3 parts – the what, they why, the tools. I will also provide a download for you on my site in case you are in a bad place and need to get a map out of this. For more check out Teaspoonofhappy.com and enter the headspace contest to win a year of free meditation!! Smile lovely friends - and look for the blog version of this post in the next week on Teaspoon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is a slashie? A creative person who knows that their day job isn't their real job: a busboy/actor; waitress/screenwriter/photographer; singer/production designer/legal secretary. Your slash is your professional makeup. In other words, most of us - if we are honest with ourselves. Because a creative thinker is many things, today if you are a slashie you are forging a new path in a wide open sea of opportunity, but you likely haven’t solved for that single, money-making passion just yet. But that’s a good thing – unlike how it might feel to a slashie – this stage is part of the process. Slashies are a growing percentage of the workforce because careers nowadays don’t have “work experience.” A creator can build a new app/community/business overnight and because of that, new job definitions are being invented every day. Thanks to equal opportunity of the internet, it’s like a claim-jumper era for creatives with a desire to build something new. It can be hard to choose a new career or even entertain the idea because if you are an adult, you want to be stable and have security. Because, hey - when you're a grownup, that’s what you are supposed to do. Thankfully nowadays there are all sorts of new avenues for creative thinkers to pursue professional careers based on their particular aesthetic and passions. So that’s what this is about. Five ways to better pursue your creative passions and figure out what can take your slashes to a more convenient or purpose-driven definition – for you as a creative voice with one lifetime on this earth. References: For the instagram marketing webinar head to: Ilovecreatives.com For B-school head to marieforleo.com For General Assembly, head to generalassemb.ly To find my reading list, head to: teaspoonofhappy.com/reading-list Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emotional Eating in this episode translates as negative soothing habits around food that relate to specific emotional states. So, depending on your dynamic, that could mean binging, constant eating in an unconscious state, or feelings of powerlessness with a complete lack of control that feels similar to being possessed or out of body. If you’re not an emotional eater, if you have pretty much any negative emotional-soothing habits, you will likely get something out of this podcast. It’s about how we have grown patterns of soothing – and also a few tools for objectively tackling them at the root. Food is often a metaphor for how we deal with fear. And pain. We either soothe we run we lash out we deny. In Buddhism, they call these psychological types out as the grasping/fear type, the rejecting/anger type, or the denial/adrift type. So depending on your type, you will react to stress in a predictable set of ways if you have grown used to coping with specific bad habits. For example – with food. There are 3 parts to this episode: What, Why, plus 3 Tools that work for me – that can give you a starting point. I will post the blog version on TeaspoonOfHappy.com later this week with my reading references. And if you haven’t already –check out the contest to win a year of meditation! Headspace y’all. It’s the ish. Head here to enter that little gem: http://www.teaspoonofhappy.com/headspace-contest And smile! Xox Sarah-May Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is a little power-up episode about creating more joy-filled and memorable moments in your life. Happiness is a thought-habit that for many of us, requires constant maintenance and deliberate focus. Though there are many reasons to feel grateful for our life – they’re all around us all the time - in order to be capable of feeling that value, we need contrast. Contrast meaning the complimentary opposite of gratitude and appreciation: pain or difficult striving. In other words, a constant state of awareness of value (happiness) often arrives from a true understanding of its absence (pain). Without that contrast, it’s easy for life to get stuck in a middle array of emotions – a permanent state of “so-so” or “okay.” When you live in this state for long enough, powerful emotions like gratitude and happiness are assigned to a set of general milestones (birthdays, weddings, getting a promotion etc) but outside of that it can be frustrating to find a true sense of joy. The real kind – that moves you to tears, or sticks in your memory for the rest of your life. So that kind of joy is what I want to talk about. You have the power to create that range in your life, minus the negative contrast. It’s a super power you are likely unaware of until you actually put it to use: but when you approach life in this way, you are also expanding your capacity to feel love, gratitude and happiness. So if you’re interested in having more of those real joyful moments, this is a podcast for you. And if you want to read the blog version of this I will post it shortly on TeaspoonOfHappy.com Smile lovely friends! xox Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices