Suzanne Ragan Lentz

luminary for emergence

What makes you happy?

A man very clear about his happy place… Bob Ross and his "beautiful, beautiful mountains"

A man very clear about his happy place… Bob Ross and his “beautiful, beautiful mountains”

Over the past three months, I have been coming out of a shell created by three years of consecutive burn-out. The most surprising thing I’ve discovered that I hadn’t been doing things that made me happy without purpose. I term it that way as there was an intuitive pull and a lightness of being to many things I was committed to during that time but they were all about an end goal rather than the sheer bliss of happiness just for the sake of being happy.

While I was working a 40-hour a week day job, seeing clients on Sundays, and taking business + energy medicine courses from Marie Forleo, Erika Lyremark, and Marie Manuchehri, I constricted my circle to focus my energy on the end goal of helping folks live the life they were meant to live rather than the life they thought they ought to be living. There wasn’t much blissed-out happiness for me.

I had stopped reading entirely months prior to the end of my day job and focused my attention exclusively on streaming episodes of Gossip Girl on Netflix to get me through to the finish. There hadn’t been a movie that I had wanted to see in, like, forever as I had no band-width to pay any attention to coming attractions. And art museums had begun to feel like a thing of the past… a piece of a former life when I was in an art museum daily.

So the past three months have been full of cocooning, following that thread of inspiration (the intuitive pull) wherever it leads, and preparing for the coming year that feels larger than large. inspiration has led me to reading books for fun and discovering that I love historical fiction as I am more of a non-fiction girl, watching documentaries on fascinating people and places, seeing art and becoming a member of the Seattle Art Museum, connecting with folks dear to my heart, and eating at my favorite places.

What I missed most in those three years of being in the pit of burn-out was the way my eyes would do a dance of delight when a surface struck their fancy. Like, really, wow. The feeling blows me away.

Doing what makes me happy is the root of my focus in 2014. It’s the things that make life worth living. Without the happy places there is no me to help folks realize their goals and dreams. And this, it turns out, is my ultimate happy place.

xoxo, s

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