“What if you just refuse to suffer? What if you dare to do the funky chicken dance after Chad dumped you or your boss fired you? What if you chose to laugh when the world expected you to cry?  What if you decided to run when they wanted you to fall? What if you felt the misery of not getting what you wanted but chose not to live in that misery because if there’s anything I learned in my 34 years on this Earth, it’s that our suffering does not have to become our identity, and that sometimes horrible things can (and will) [sometimes] happen to us, but those horrible things don’t have to define us.  There is a time to cry, a time to rage, a time to retreat, but also a time to do the funky chicken dance.  Because sometimes the best therapy we can do is to not only surprise those around us but to surprise ourselves.  Never forget that there is endless magic locked inside of you, and the only thing you need to do to unlock it is to have the courage to use a different key.  So if nothing else today I hope you not only refuse not to suffer, I hope you refuse to stay still because life is a movement.  And on the days when you feel like your life has left you I promise you’ll find it again if you dare to be ridiculous and do the funky chicken dance,” Anna Kai. 

There is power in choosing how we feel.  For years this seemed an impossible feat.  I don’t claim to be good at it now, but I know I have a better understanding of what this actually means and the possibility in it.  We truly do have the power to decide how we feel about nearly every situation.  I believed for years that a certain action required a specific reaction, that we were supposed to just feel a certain way when specific things happened, that relationships were supposed to be a certain way, that love looked a certain way.  I was never taught to feel my way into what I believed things should be, what I valued, what I wanted.  I put myself through endless suffering because I didn’t know better.  That was my understanding and training.  I wallowed in that suffering.  The truth is we all have the ability to decide to not feel or be any particular way about things.  We can make it easier or harder depending on how we choose to interpret things.  More importantly we can manage our expectations.  Ask ourselves what our motivation really is—control of the self or over others.  And if you make your life contingent on the reactions of others and the outcome of their actions, you will always be miserable. 

Instead of making life contingent on any feeling or any image we have in our minds, we need to make it based on how we feel and what brings us closer or further to our goals.  We choose to do things that make us happy and make us feel good and that will continue to guide us toward the big picture, the answer, the key to what we are meant to do.  Life isn’t all doom and gloom by any means, but we have the power to take those down moments and make them less sucky by deciding to move.  Move through the feelings, move through what it actually feels like.  Decide how we want to feel and do what it takes to get there.  There is magic we need to remember in our very being and it guides us.  When things feel low we have the answers inside, all we need to do is listen.  What people think is irrelevant and at the end of the day, these are our lives and we get one shot.  Don’t waste time suffering or creating suffering for ourselves or others.  Don’t make our happiness based on what other people think/feel/do or how they react to us.  Don’t make our happiness contingent on a job/house/relationship etc.  Decide to make the best of life in all situations.  Even the painful ones.  The only one who can decide what our day is like is us.  The only one who can decide what it feels like is us.