......:)

gowendygo:

MY MONASTERY

I haven’t been blogging lately nor have I been baking, but I have been b*t*hing. At least I can admit it. I take full responsibility for my misery. So, bottom line is that I’ve just been going through a rough time lately. No, not lately, for like a few years. As you may know from reading my “Meet Wendy” page and some of my more emotional, non-baking posts, I am really trying to turn things around in my life. I want to discover what makes Wendy happy and how to maintain that happiness in my life. That’s the key…MAINTAIN. I’m good at having moments of happiness, but I tend to fall into a dark cave when things get really bad and can’t seem to crawl out.

Speaking of caves, I was thinking about some of these Buddhist monks and the like, that meditate in caves for years, or live in monasteries. They live a very simplistic, peaceful life, walking around in loose clothing (nothing tight for when they’ve eaten too many pastries), no hair on their head to get frizzy, no bills to pay, no phone, email or texts to answer and no job to drive to in crazy traffic everyday. Geeez…COUNT ME IN!

But I mean REALLY, that’s EASY to become at peace with the world when you remove all the worldly distractions. Don’t you think? I’m not even that impressed with people like that. I am more impressed with people that are out in the world dealing with all the stresses of money, jobs, bills, relationships, etc. and can still enjoy and love life.

When I encountered a few problems in this past week and I was about to lose it, all I kept hearing in the back of my mind was, “You can be happy despite your circumstances.” I think I’ve heard this from numerous authors and motivational speakers from the past and it seems to have stuck in my head. Although that’s a good thing to have engrained in my brain, my ego quickly jumped in and argued saying, “Puh-leeeease! How can you be happy with all this crap going on in your life? Those self-help gurus don’t know anything.”

But then I realized that some of this garbage that I have been dealing with will still be there tomorrow and probably for many, many tomorrows. And even when some of it goes away, there will be new garbage piling on top. Bottom line is there will ALWAYS be garbage and you have to keep taking out the garbage or your life will STINK. The problem for me is not so much taking out the garbage, because I’m actually quite good at that, but it’s just facing the fact that there is garbage to take out and learning to be happy no matter what. So okay, Self-Help Gurus, I believe that you CAN be happy despite your circumstances, but how?

Here’s what I think…You have to continue to DO things on a daily basis that you know that make YOU happy. No matter how small it is, just do it. I have a whole list of things that I knooow I enjoy doing, but I get caught up in the B.S. of life and don’t do them. You need a balance of happy crap and sad crap. Ahhh…the Yin and the Yang. I know I can’t run away to some cave or monastery, although there are times that I’d like to, I can run away to my kitchen. That’s MY cave. That’s where I can go and be in MY element and express who I am. I don’t think about anything, but what I’m doing in that moment. That’s my meditation. That’s my way to temporarily escape the world…and I love it. It’s not that I’m avoiding my problems in my life; I’m just temporarily setting them aside. So I suppose I should crawl in my kitchen monastery to achieve peace and happiness. Whatever works, right? And you need to do whatever works for you to bring joy in your life. Discover your cave of tranquility.

So to give clarification to the pictures attached to this post, I decided I needed to do some Happy Baking and make something that just simply makes me feel good. I made some Happy, Yummy Double-Chocolate Cupcakes with Vanilla Buttercream and Peanut Butter Cookies. I mean, you can’t get much happier than that! My youngest son was quite eager to help and that made me happy, too. We had a good time.  : ) We even packaged our goodies in white boxes with pretty pink bows and delivered some to our friends. Seeing their smiles made me smile.

I know that all my problems were waiting for me when I was done with my baking, but I was able to conquer them with much more strength and ease. Luckily, another means of achieving peace in my life is running. At least running offsets all the sampling that I do in the kitchen. More Yin and Yang. I’m getting the hang of this.