The Dalai Lama's Rules for Living

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1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
2. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
3. Follow the three Rs:
   1. Respect for self
   2. Respect for others
   3. Responsibility for all your actions.
4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
6. Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.
7. When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
8. Spend some time alone every day.
9. Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.
10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
11. Live a good, honourable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.
12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.
13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.
14. Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.
15. Be gentle with the earth.
16. Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.
17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.
18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

Cat-Nappin'

Catatonic Recuperation, Sunnyside May 21,201

This is how I spent the entirety of my Saturday. Safe to say, I think this sums up the past few days.



Do you work a M-F, 9-5? How do you spend your weekends? Are you more of a "I-need-to-recuperate-and-relax" like myself or do you prefer to spend off days being actively out & about?

Celebrate (?)

Do you celebrate things? Occasions? Yourself?

I tend to not.

Today is my 24th birthday. Tomorrow is my graduate school graduation ceremony.

What have I been doing? Working & weeping.

I am not a birthday person. At all. They depress me though not because of the aging factor. And the fact that every single one of these 24 years, it has literally rained on my date (and whenever I choose to throw a party) doesn't help the cause.

I should be upbeat. I'm young, educated, and slightly successful.

But all day I have fought off a torrential downpour of tears. On the train, with clients, surrounded by coworkers. They just creep up on me again and again. And not just any tears. The tears you need to hold back because they hold so much ridiculous emotion with each tiny droplet. The ones that'l give you a migraine at the end of the bout from their intensity.

And here I am, rounding out the last few hours of my date, still glum as hell. Sometimes I tell myself I'll try to be better about it next year. Not let myself get so depressed. But it happens, year after year.

Here's to the day after my birthday.

Playful P

I thought I had managed to post yesterday from my phone. But apparently I'm not that crafty yet. Here are a few quick flicks taken from my fancy phone. 

We got home late last night and I'm still in a vacation coma. Hopefully I'll be able to write and visit everyone within the next day. Who knew a mini 3-day play-cation could leave you totally pooped?

Quick point being, play is a necessity in life! Despite being totally exhausted, we had a blast and definitely needed the chance to play around :)

Butterbeer is better, Harry Potter World, IOA, April 2011

Story of my life, Downtown Disney, April 2011

Ohana means family <3, Epcot, April 2011

Day 2 beginnings, IOA, April 2011

H's Happiness Health

There are flowers everywhere for those who look- Matisse

Over the past decade or so, the field of positive psychology has flourished thanks to researchers such as Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihaly among several others. And it's just about everywhere we look in pop culture. It's all about making yourself happy, what's wrong with you that you're not like people in commercials with giant smiles running through a grassy field with dogs.

But happiness is particularly important to me. Not necessarily because I strive to avoid unhappiness- that's not healthy. My family has a long, long history of "mental health issues". Enough so that my main priority as of recent years is to keep track of my happiness meter to evade the scary shadow of emotional catastrophe.

So what do I do? I'm far from figuring out what makes me tick and a part of me doesn't even want to know that much. But I try to eat well, observe my emotional characteristics, and semi- recently took up actively exercising.

After all, it's not about just knowing. It's about learning and living.

Luke: What's in there?

Yoda: Only what you take

What makes you happy?

"New York I love you, but you're bringing me down"

View From the Top- Sunnyside 7, March 2011

My mom says I was a pretty healthy kid, getting sick maybe once or twice a year with nothing more serious than strep throat. And pretty typical mental health for any hormonal, female adolescent.

But ever since moving to New York in summer 2009 I have come down with just about everything. Bronchitis, a 3 month flu, food poisoning, stomach problems, a torn ligament. And I've developed fears I once thought were irrational: clausterphobia, heights, heavy things falling on my head, being mugged, morbid thoughts about whether dying on an underground or above-ground subway would be the worst way to go (still haven't decided on that one)...

And anxiety. Anxiety that is so disabling, it causes me to have "pseudo-seizures" AKA attacks that manifest as seizure symptoms. And as of Monday, anxiety that also leaves me completely unable to breathe forcing me to rush to the doctor.

I was never really a particular anxious person. Sure, I'd get pre-test jitters. But these "anxiety attacks" come usually when I'm completely calm and relaxed. A few of my more holistic professors that I've mentioned it to said its probably because "when relaxed, your body/mind finally has time to release all the built up anxiety that is usually too distracted, so it manifests itself more intensely by bubbling up".

I've tried breathing exercises, meditation, my recent foray into active physical exercise. But they all only help so much, apparently. I don't know what to do anymore. Is this all what growing up entails- developing awareness leading to health issues? It's gotten to a point where on some level, I'm starting to believe that maybe some higher power is trying to kick me out of the city; New York doesn't want me around.

I wanted to stick around the city at least another year to experience it as a non-student. But I don't know. Maybe my body is trying to tell me something that I can't quite grasp- or not ready to at least.

"Above ground train- 5 stories up"

How do you deal with anxiety?