Obsession and Choosing Joy

Obsession

This week I need to apologize because my disease has won over the last couple months due to injury. I will include some pictures of the new monster I have become from falling into things and requiring stitches. It's a good thing my wife is already sealed to me for all time and eternity. Ha ha,

I want to talk this week about how I let this obsession with my injuries destroy my joy, my work, and my commitment to you. It has also strained my relationships with others as it was all I could think about or talk about.

Obsession is a dangerous thing. It is something that occupies your mind constantly and causes you to make questionable decisions, ignore the basic needs of yourself and others and ignore other important aspects of your life. Your disease, pain, depression, illness or struggle is never worthy of obsession.

Let's define obsession first according to the dictionary it means. "to haunt or excessively preoccupy the mind of" Other verbs that are suggested are plague, consume, posses and torment.  

I want to be clear here. I am not talking about an obsessive compulsive disorder that needs psychiatric treatment or any other disorder that requires medical care. That is for professional doctors to help people with and are beyond the scope of this Blog.

I recently had a friend say they would always obsess over something, it was their whole life. This made me really sad. The people that love this person would not want that. It is too large a burden and it is REALLY unhealthy. To occupy your mind totally with problems of others or yourself is a recipe for unhappiness for you and those around you. To torment yourself is horrible. Yet obsession is a form of torment. My friend’s simple statement caused me to reflect upon my own life and I changed my topic to Obsession this week.

Obsession takes over your mind and torments your life in all aspects of your life. Your mind or brain does not like this.

Your mind needs time to rest from worry. It needs time to play. It needs time to pray. It needs time to rejoice. So let's talk about each of those before we get to homework and the pictures of my completed cleaning assignment. It took 2 weeks.

Rest. Your mind needs rest from worry. Every day you need to take 5 minutes to think about something else completely. I am not talking about when you are working etc. But when you are obsessing. Stop yourself for 5 minutes and find a way to rest your thoughts. They will be racing. This will not be easy. You will need to work hard at this but you need to find a way to be at peace to rest your mind. I pray, or ask my wife to talk to me about something silly that makes me laugh. Then I rest my mind for five minutes thinking of the love I have for her. I try very hard to find a place that I can think about something not related to my obsession at all. Something positive in my life. You would think this is easy, if you are obsessed it is not. Because this is during periods that you are obsessing. You need to stop and rest. Break the cycle and rest.

Play. Everyone needs time to have a playful spirit. In the middle of obsessing about something take a few moments and text a silly joke to a friend. Call a friend and do something that makes you laugh. Find a way that you can play for a few moments during your day. I am not talking long periods of time. I am talking moments to break the long cycle of torment.

Pray. Now I know that not all of you pray so I have an alternative. In the second half of this part. I am leading with what I use most of the time. Take time to break the cycle and pray. The rule here is it cannot have ANY connection to what your obsession/torment is. You must spend time thanking your Heavenly Father for a blessing in your life or pray for blessings for someone else is even better. If you do not pray take time to think of someone in your life you are thankful for and why. Make note of that and the next day take time to write them a note of thanks. Break the cycle and pray or give thanks.

Rejoice. You need time to be happy. If you have done all of these steps each day. Stop your cycle again and rejoice that you are not tormented remember all those things you did. Reflect on them and how your heart was less heavy during those moments. Choose to be joyful for 10 minutes. Most of all take time to Choose Joy. Obsession is always a negative thing. It robs you of joy and torments you. You defeat it by being Joyful.

Now your homework is to do this every day. Try to extend the times of each item as you can. It will be hard to make the 5 minute mark trust me. Don't berate yourself. This is not an easy pattern to break. It took me a month to reach 5 minutes on each and I am still working on expanding the times.

Below are some Quotes about Obsession and some words of encouragement. After these is my closing paragraph.

The Prophet Joseph Smith said about this. "The torment of disappointment in the mind of man [or woman] is as exquisite as a lake burning with fire and brimstone.” Not so nice but remember you do not have to settle for this.

  

Psalm 118:24 King James Version (KJV)

24 This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.

2 Nephi 9:3 Book of Mormon

3 Behold, my beloved brethren, I speak unto you these things that ye may rejoice, and lift up your heads forever, because of the blessings which the Lord God shall bestow upon your children.

Rejoice my friends this road is not easy but you are not walking alone. I am walking with you. If you are a believer you believe God is walking with you. If you are not a believer take courage that friends and family want to walk with you and I will pray even if you think it is pointless it helps me to forget my obsession so forgive me and let me walk with you as well. We will share the burdens.

We will take this journey together and CHOOSE JOY!

Depression and Choosing Joy

 Many people myself included suffer from Severe Clinical Depression. This is a disease. It is not related to sadness. One cannot snap out of it. It saps your energy and drowns out the better angels of your nature. It is a chemical imbalance that cannot be cured alone without medical help. However, medicines alone are not the silver bullet. My psychiatrist has told me I too must fight this illness. Many of us who are struggling may be suffering from some form of this but do not know it. We are not without hope. So what advice do I have to offer?


Never believe that your life is without hope. This week I want you to focus on hope and action. Many people out there have overcome astonishing odds to achieve amazing things. Many of them suffer from depression or illness and disease. Do not let the disease define you.

So this week I want you to set some goals. Things that you want to accomplish. Little things. For me it will be to clean my living room so it is I am able to have people into it without being ashamed. This to most would not seem like a big goal. For me it seems daunting. With my seizures I have to crawl a lot to do chores. I need to vacuum and move things and I don’t have much energy.


Pick a small goal. Split the goal into 5 tasks. Make sure you can accomplish these tasks within reason but they will stretch you some. Do one task each day. Getting help is allowed and encouraged if you have a loved one or partner. Share this burden and goal with them. When you begin the goal may seem daunting but do not let this stop you.

Concentrate on the daily goal. When you finish your daily goal, rejoice in the fact that you finished it. If you do not finish your daily goal, Rejoice in what you did accomplish. Do not let negative self-talk ruin your hard work. You overcame a lot to work toward your overall goal.

At the end of the week look at what you have accomplished and rejoice and CHOOSE JOY! You have overcome. You have done something to improve your life. Even if you have not finished your overall goal you can continue working next week as we will have no working homework next week. You still need to CHOOSE JOY. You have overcome something. You have decided to do something that makes you feel better about your situation. Big or small this is an accomplishment.

Love yourself for you are worthy. 

My Scripture verse this week comes from 1 Corinthians 13: 4-5 “4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”

Do not keep record of what you see as your failings or wrongs. Rejoice in what you did right, Heavenly Father will be proud of you as I am Proud of you for trying.

Choosing Joy each day is not easy. This path is hard. But it is a path you can and will be able to follow as I am following it. You are not alone. I at least am travelling with you and

 I CHOOSE JOY

Relaunch Day

Good afternoon followers of I Choose Joy,
 I apologize for the long delay in posting. I will explain. When I posted my first blog I was so proud and showed it to my wife. She praised and encouraged me on the post itself. But then said. It looks a bit dark. You need to break up that wall of text with some pictures or something. Black and white are not really Joyous colors.

Being a well condition Husband Unit 101 with the take constructive criticism module installed I looked at the page and agreed with her. I also have installed the HTML, PHP, Joomla, SQL, Dreamweaver, Java, and several other programming packages that she had to send me into the shop for an entire year to have installed.

Some of these packages had not been used for a little while since I have had the Seizure Virus and the Customer Service Doctors cannot seem to fix it. Nonetheless I went about trying to fix my page. There was rust on those gears. I encountered a new entity called Google that apparently has the Blogger race enslaved. Everything must be done to the Google Entity standards. They speak a strange language called Googlian. It does not seem to interface well with established language protocols that this Husband Unit 101 knows.

They will let you bow under to their enslavement by using their own "Templates" but I was not about to become another slave to Google. So I soldiered on. I found a manual on speaking to the Google machine. It took me almost a month to break free from the shackles of this totalitarian regime but I have finally done it. Husband Unit 101 with the help of Rust EZE(Dr. Pepper) and Oil(Love from Wife) and Hard work has a new joyful looking page.

I promise Joy Chooser that in the future you shall no longer have to look at walls of text. There will be pictures, Flowers, Bunnies, and Zombies, Gotta have an occasional Zombie. Just so we are prepared for the Zombiepacalypse.

Love and Blessings,
Dravensworth

Post Incoming.

Reap What You Sew

Reap What You Sew!

Welcome to week one of our journey together. Let me explain how this will work. Each Monday I will post a new blog for you to reflect upon and hopefully learn something. Sometimes there will be homework. Now I am not a school teacher so you will not have to send me your assignments or feel like you are bad if you don’t do them. They usually are just tools to help you employ that posts ideas. So don’t panic or stop reading. I promise they are not write a 5 page paper on the importance of American manufacturing during the pre-war period or something equally as snooze worthy.

Now onto the actual meat of this week’s post. One of the things that brings people the most joy is to make someone else happy. Seeing a smile on another person’s face that you put there warms the heart. It also lets us forget for just a little while our own problems and focus on someone else. This has been called many things by many people I simple call it service to others.

We must now find a way to apply this to our lives for the next week. This is what I did. I picked 4 people that made a difference in my life and thanked them in a meaningful fashion. Then I picked one person who I had a difficult experience with and tried to find something I could say to them that would be truthful and yet compassionate and heartfelt. (Oh, no homework on weekends. Sorry this is a five day a week program if you want extra credit you can work on the weekend.) I wrote each of them a note every day for a week and saved the hardest for last. Some of them I wrote the note first but thanked them by talking to them. The first person I thanked was my wife. I made her cry but in a good way.  I still thank her at least once a week and I write myself a note about what she has done for me in the last week that is above and beyond. Those notes tend to turn into novels if I am not careful.

This simple act benefits 5 people and you an untold number of times as the memory of that happiness begins to grow. I am sure many of you have heard the saying you reap what you sew. This comes from scripture actually and is very practical advice. But I think without one of the follow on verses much of the benefit of this idea is lost. The following quote is from Galatians Chapter 6 Verses 7 and 9 from the NIV version of the bible.

A man reaps what he sows. Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.

I truly believe this. I believe that if you treat others around you with love and compassion you will be treated the same way. If you sew joy into their lives they will return the favor. By starting this cycle with a few simple words of thanks you can begin a new phase in your journey. This is certainly not going to end all of your troubles, worries, fears, etc. It is just a beginning. But it is an excellent place to start.

Your homework this week is the same as mine was. Pick 4 people in your life that make a difference in your daily struggle. Pick one person who you have had a difficult experience with. Do not pick someone you cannot say anything nice to in good conscience. Just someone you had a disagreement with and want to maybe mend a fence or something similar. I will share a note I wrote to a friend my first week below. (To all of the Ken’s in my life. This is not you I did not send you this letter week 1 so do not write me indignant emails. HAHAHAHA)

Ken,

I just wanted to take some time out to thank you for coming by this week to help me get my books moved up into the attic. Not being able to do it myself is frustrating and your cheerful willingness to help was appreciated. I also appreciated that you sensed my frustration and allowed me to help in a small way and joked with me and made me smile. I also want to thank you for stopping by and visiting me. I know that for you just stopping by and visiting a friend seems like no big deal. For me it is a huge deal because I get to talk to someone else who shares my love of history and it takes my mind off of other things. You are such a great friend and your visits bring sunshine into a dark a gloomy place in my life. I want to thank you for being such a great support to me. Someone who doesn’t judge me by my disability but sees me as just a regular guy. This is a huge loving example of true friendship. I love you brother.

That is just an example. I am not Shakespeare. So it is your turn to try.

Now go out and Choose Joy and do your Home Work.

Launch Day

Hello Everyone,
I am excited to announce the start of my latest project the I Choose Joy Blog. We will be publishing a new post every week to share the I choose joy lifestyle. We are just getting ready for launch day and are very excited about what the future holds for this venture and for those who follow along with us on this journey. Please share this with as many friends as you can. I promise you it will enrich their lives. I am not selling anything or trying to convert anyone or con anyone here. This is about helping people please read the What is this about page to find out more.
We Launch on July 7th 2014 we are counting the days. Please join us.