A Recipe For Happiness

A recipe to create your happiness:

Ingredients: one mind-full of happy dreams, a healthy dose of love and trust, a magic pinch of creativity Utensils required: sharp scissors, drawing pins, some groovy tunes, a board or canvas, an optional candle for extra ambiance

Suggested instructions:

• Take the goals and happy ideals you have acquired through living life and proceed to scour the web for images which represent them. Be specific and don’t be afraid to choose goals that you really love even if you don’t know how to achieve them yet. This recipe is going to help you to unlock the power of your imagination which is the ultimate creative tool and knows no limits. Alongside more goal oriented images, it’s a good idea to collect some pictures of things that you love which are already in your life or some quotes which inspire you. This can help to internalise positive beliefs and enhance your mood. And after all, good feeling emotions are the primary goal of this recipe! Add as much of your love as possible at this stage while compiling your chosen image babies onto a word document and sizing them appropriately to fit onto whatever board or canvas is available to you.

*Pro tip: Old shoe box lids make excellent bases for mini happiness boards!

• Next, print out your documents and get ready for the real fun. If you’ve not already utilised your groovy tunes and lit your optional candle, now is the perfect time to do so. With the mood set and your images fresh and warm from the ova-I mean printer, it’s time to settle down for an intensive cutting out session. I sometimes imagine that my scissors are like a chef’s knife and I am chopping up all the ingredients required for an amazing and unique meal, only in this case, the meal represents my life.

*Pro tip No.2: Use this step to really focus on each image as you cut it out and appreciate how in doing so you are bringing the dream it represents further into the physical world. Notice with satisfaction how you are already transforming each dream from an internal idea into something which is tangible and which you can interpret visually.

• Next it’s time to enlist the help of that magic pinch of creativity and arrange your images into an appealing design on your board/canvas. Note that your unique board is meant to please you specifically so feel free to express yourself in any way you like. If you are an orderly person you might enjoy heightening your focus by arranging the images into neat categories such as home, hobbies, relationships or cute hamsters (whatever floats your boat). Alternatively, you could go wild and be as random as your heart desires.

• Now that you have an idea of how you’d like to arrange your creation, you can move on to the highly satisfying task of pinning each dream onto your canvas. I like to imagine that this action of attaching your images to the board is akin to securing your new life onto the blank screen of the universe.

• Finally, as an optional step, you may wish to add some decoration to your new happiness board to make it look even more delicious than it already does. You can use whatever you like as the icing on your cake. Flowers, an artistic border, and fairy lights are just a few of the infinite options. Otherwise, you could leave your board as it is for a more refined and focused look.

• At last, it is time to sit back and bask in the love and glory of your own creation. This is also a good moment to marinate the dreams on your board with a generous helping of trust in yourself and in their reality. After all, as the teacher Bob Proctor points out, “if you can see it in your mind, you can hold it in your hand” [1]. This means that every goal you have set is certainly available for you. Know and feel that just as your vision board has been successfully cooked, you have perfectly prepared all of the ingredients for your new life. All of the components you have chosen are now being baked in the oven of creation.

I find that the tangible process of making and updating vision boards is a consistently great way to really get involved with my own happiness and the creation of my life. It is ultimately satisfying to use this fun and creative craft to help visually and emotionally attune myself to the ideas I love. The satisfaction does not end there though! Perhaps best of all, it is so empowering to watch as my life transforms as if by magic into all of the dreams I have put on my boards. As Albert Einstein famously remarked, “Imagination is everything, it is the preview of life’s coming attractions” [2]. This explains how the imagination invoked and enhanced by a vision board actually attracts real results and positive changes in life.

That is the true beauty of this craft; it is joyful in the sense that it is an artistic and physical activity, but it also unleashes the creative power of the mind and the emotions. This in turn, can create anything wished for. There is truly nothing like looking at the vision board you have created and feeling the visceral belief that each thing you have put there is coming to you. It is also lovely to reflect on past boards and realise that the things which are now normal in your life were once merge ideas which you were cutting out and tacking down. I had this profound experience recently while contemplating the images on my current vision boards, some of which are related to pole dancing. I can remember choosing those images and the feelings of wishing I had a way to start the beautiful new dance form. Now pole dance is something I get to participate in on a daily basis and I can hardly imagine it not being a part of my life.

This reflective element is why I think it can be really worthwhile to put some images of very specific objects which you know you can easily and quickly acquire on your board. I recommend adding things like particular items of clothing you intend to buy in the near future. It’s fun because it’s always such a great feeling to see the exact items on your board become present in your life. Looking back on a vision board is simply a fantastic reminder of how wonderfully things can change for you and can certainly help ignite the belief that dreams really do come true. Making image boards is the craft that I adore. It is truly a magnificent tool in the creation of my happiness and if you try it out, I hope that it may help you to create yours!

1. Bob Proctor, Quoted in 25 of the best law of attraction quotes [article], iamfearlesssoul.com

2. Albert Einstein, quoted in 25 of the best law of attraction quotes [article], iamfearlesssoul.com