This is a guest post by Daniel Offer. Daniel manages an interesting Facebook application called Emoinstaller. Emoinstaller allows you to add extra Facebook emoticons as well as Facebook smileys to your Facebook chat experience in just a couple of clicks.

Do you tend to beat yourself up by bringing past personal mistakes or shortfalls into the present? Do you tend to live with a lot of regrets or wish you could have a do-over in life?

If so, you aren’t alone. Most people have experienced embarrassing moments and have made a few mistakes along the way—it’s part of life. Unfortunately, it’s easy for thoughts of past negative experiences to pop into a person’s mind when they least expect it which can cause havoc for living successfully in the present.

While reliving past mistakes can seem like a form of penance, rehearsing regrets will never repair things or help you feel better. Constantly re-living bad experiences can chip away at self-confidence and undermine new risk taking opportunities.

When less than perfect things happen in your life, you can choose to either dwell on them or let them go. There’s a lesson to be learned in every experience, good or bad.

Since going back in time or having a do-over isn’t an option, you’d might as well learn the lessons and move on. You’ll be mentally healthier and emotionally happier if you do.

How to Let Go of Regrets

Since you can’t change the past, try to let go of it and the corresponding regrets with these tools:

• As soon as feelings of regret and self-doubt appear dismiss them, unless there is something within your power to repair a situation.

• Don’t base what you do today on mistakes of yesterday.

• Don’t treasure hunt through your past, or anyone else’s, looking for problems.

• Don’t use your past as an excuse.

• Forgive people. Every person is a product of his own past that has little to do with you. Don’t get wounded by another person’s stuff.

• Give up habits that aren’t serving you well.

• Stay away from toxic people such as those who are still reliving the past and attempting to bring you into it.

How to move forward

Everyone has the opportunity to start fresh every single day. If you are committed to stop living in regret and to begin living a fresh life, consider your answers to these questions:

• How will you say no to things you should say no to, and yes to new adventures?

• What habits need to be broken?

• What negatives might crop up in the future and how are you prepared to deal with them?

• What or who might you need to let go of?

• Who do you need to forgive?

Choosing to change your thought processes and habits makes a positive difference.

New Steps to Take

Picture the life you want to have. How will it be different starting today? How can you make today more meaningful so that you don’t regret missed opportunities tomorrow?

Here are a few ideas to consider:

• Appreciate your job and the people therein more, or make a leap for the job you’d rather have.

• Clean up your language and temper.

• Close the office door and take a vacation without a cell phone or laptop.

• Entertain more.

• Exercise more often.

• Hug family members frequently.

• Invest in a personal hobby.

• Participate in charities, church events or say yes to other invitations instead of isolating.

• Say kind words to your family members and others.

• Spend more time with your spouse and family.

• Stop complaining or criticizing. Adopt a happy spirit.

• Visit extended family more.

You can’t have a do-over in life, but you can try to live your best life now. Let go of regrets. Be a guardian of your own life by saying no to events or people that might cause you to have future regrets.

Be intentional about carving out important habits now so that at the end of your life you won’t look back in regret. Be confident of your choices and decide that if you do make a mistake, embarrass yourself or have something else go wrong that you will learn from the experience and pick yourself back up.

That is how to live a life with no regrets.

Any thoughts on this post? Please share.

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How to live with no regrets is a post from: The Happy Seeker - Living with grace at any age

One of the blessings life has brought to me in recent years is something called abdominal breathing.

I’m not an expert in this by any means, and it’s quite possible that you know more about it than I do. But the physical and mental calm and relaxation that abdominal breathing can bring is remarkable.

Children breathe naturally through their belly

The basic idea back of abdominal breathing, or belly breathing, is this. When we are children, we do it naturally. But as we grow up, and succumb to the pressures and tensions of modern life, we forget all about it. What a surprise.

We begin to breathe mainly through our chest, and it doesn’t work nearly as well. It is not nearly as relaxed or peaceful a process. In fact, in some ways it is a struggle — a struggle that mirrors a larger struggle as we do our best to stay sane and fulfill our purpose and find happiness in a violent, unpredictable, changing world.

83% of Swedish adults breathe with their chest

A recent study in Sweden discovered that 83% of the adult population uses chest breathing, that is to say, uses only the top part of the chest when it breathes. Of course, this has various side effects. For instance, we have to take more breaths per minute, while at the same time we receive less oxygen and get rid of less waste products.

I can say with absolute conviction that even a small amount of effort and time devoted to “re-learning” how we used to breathe as a child is well worth it.

It has helped improve my blood pressure, for example. And if I’m facing a situation that I know will make me anxious, breathing with my belly helps me stay calm.

Mind you, there is a price to pay – you may have to set aside the idea that a hard, flat belly is somehow desirable

Instructions for abdominal breathing

Perhaps you’d like to look into belly breathing, if you haven’t done so already? There is quite a good overview and set of instructions available online at eHow.com. Here are the basic instructions posted there by an eHow contributor:

1. Lie on your back in a comfortable setting. It’s easier to practice abdominal breathing in a quiet environment.

2. Place one hand on your abdomen, below the rib cage, and one on your chest. Placing your hands on the abdomen and chest helps you focus on using your diaphragm while breathing. The diaphragm is dome-shaped and assists with breathing. It moves downward and upward during inhalation and exhalation. Our lungs expand and deliver more oxygen when the diaphragm moves.

3. Breathe slowly through your nose. Hold the air for 7 seconds. Your stomach will rise, raising your hand. The hand on your chest should remain still.

4. Exhale all of the air slowly through your mouth while counting to 8. Let yourself go while exhaling, and imagine your entire body relaxing.

5. Repeat this cycle four more times. This allows your body to relax.

6. Practice abdominal breathing twice a day. If you practice abdominal breathing often, it becomes a normal process, and you’ll notice health benefits. Abdominal breathing increases energy and reduces stress and anxiety.

Yet another benefit of aging?

For me personally, becoming acquainted with belly breathing to the extent I have is yet another benefit and blessing of aging. Because I can assert with confidence that it helps me keep a buoyant spirit: “It’s never too late to learn to breathe like you did when you were a child.”

Wishing you happiness and good health. Please dive in here if you have any thoughts you’d like to share.

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It’s never too late to breathe like a child is a post from: The Happy Seeker - Living with grace at any age

What is your deepest longing?

One of the reasons I’m so grateful for the privilege of aging is that it has given — and continues to give — more space and time to let my own deepest longing be fulfilled, and enjoyed. And made new.

I’m a slow learner, I guess.

“Better late than never,” they say, and that’s sure been true in my own life. In some ways it feels as if it’s only in the last two or three years that my own longing has really come true — the longing I blurted out to my parents at lunch one day when I was 15 years old.

“I want to find the truth of my existence,” I cried during an argument with my dad. Oh my, what a scene there was that day. How angry and upset my father became, angry enough to slap me hard across the face with his hand.

He was a fine, fine man, but we never became close, and perhaps the encounter we had at lunch that day was an example of our separation.

What I really longed for was peace

In recent years, I have come to see that what I was seeking all my life – something that is difficult to describe, but which can be experienced — is a deeper connection with my own unconquerable spirit.

A deeper awareness of the stillness and peace of my own being as the winds of change roar.

It was more important to me than money, fame, a successful career — even my love for my parents and family.

The pain, trauma and tribulations I have known in life — and there have been plenty — are insignificant compared to this stillness that I love. It is my own stillness. Feelings of anxiety and distress still arise – but always this stillness is present.

I have come to see, and chuckle at one of life’s supreme paradoxes — the peace I was seeking so long and earnestly across all the continents of this world was actually seeking me.

It’s who I truly am. It’s who you truly are.

Seek and you shall find

The peace of our own timeless Self is with you and me constantly.

All that is necessary, I discovered at long last, is to be still for a few moments, and surrender, as it were to the timeless presence that is with us every moment of our existence, and which is who we truly are.

“Seek, and you shall find,” the Bible says, and I experience that those five simple little words are true.

All you have to do is persevere in the direction your own inner wisdom dictates and your deepest longing will indeed come true.

What is your deepest longing? Whatever it is, know that if you seek and persevere you will find it.

Love and blessings to you, and I’d love to hear any thoughts you may have on this post.

I want to give a special thankyou to my friend Mary Jaksch, co-founder of the A-List Blogger Club It’s a great community and a great resource for bloggers, and Mary has been and is a tremendous help in preparing my forthcoming course on “The true promise and potential of aging.” There is so much involved in a venture like this. I had no idea. Incidentally Mary has even written two great articles especially for this course. I look forward to offering it very soon.

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What is your deepest longing? is a post from: The Happy Seeker - Living with grace at any age

I was alone, eating supper on a cold winter’s evening 300 miles north of Vancouver, British Columbia. It was cold and cheerless outside, and it was cold and cheerless inside — in my heart, and in my home.

My wife, Joy, to whom I had been married 25 years, had died suddenly a month or two earlier. And the spiritual community that had been my home for 36 years was collapsing before my eyes.

One moment I was conscious. Food was being conveyed in a rhythmic manner into my mouth and everything was more or less normal. The next moment — without even realizing it, of course — I simply lost consciousness.

Of course, losing consciousness itself wasn’t frightening in the least. It just happened. What was frightening though, or disturbing, at least, was regaining consciousness 45 minutes later and wondering what on earth had happened to me.

Taken to the hospital

To be on the safe side, I got myself to hospital to be examined — first our local hospital in the tiny B.C. village of 100 Mile House, and then a larger hospital in a town called Kamloops.

I was in the hospital for three days while tests of every conceivable variety were carried out. It was an anxious time, without question. Was something terrible going on I didn’t know about? A stroke? A brain tumor, perhaps? A cancer?

My imagination was trying to be helpful. But the trouble with being a writer and having a good imagination is that sometimes it can get a bit carried away and work against you.

In any case, I had no visitors — and no idea at all what I was facing. Drawing on the English capacity to endure, I simply endured. I simply waited to receive further news concerning what happened to me.

On the third day, an inner voice

On the third day in the Kamloops hospital, around 10 in the morning, still waiting for news from the doctors, I suddenly had a sense that everything was going to be all right.

It was like I heard an inner voice. It was a subtle thing, to be sure. Easily dismissed. Like a beautiful bird passing by. But I’m quite good at subtle — sometimes anyway — and I heard this subtle message in my heart.

I was still thinking about it when a few hours later, in the afternoon, a doctor finally came to see me.

“We’ve checked out everything and it all seems to be normal,” he said, with a reassuring smile. Then he added:

“Every dog is allowed one bite — we’re going to let you go.”

Are we really alone?

I’ve thought sometimes about that lonely moment in the hospital in Kamloops — and other times too — when the voice of the Angel, if I could put it that way, spoke to me in my heart and blessed me.

One thing I’m sure about is this. We are not alone in this world, or in this universe. We are part of a living, loving whole that is more beautiful than anything we will ever understand mentally — and there is a hand of grace upon each one of us.

I send you love and blessings. And if you have any thoughts or experiences in this area we sometimes call intuition, I’d love to hear from you.

PS If you enjoyed this article please subscribe to my blog and enjoy my free e-book, The Wisdom of Serenity, written especially for these troubled times to help you reconnect with the happiness and peace of your own being.

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Are we really alone? is a post from: The Happy Seeker - Living with grace at any age

The power of patience is all too easily overlooked in our fast paced culture. But it’s absolutely critical to lasting happiness and inner peace.

True, with more and more people demanding immediate gratification it might seem patience has become obsolete.

But whatever your age, and whatever your life situation, nurturing this calm and noble quality will yield the same rich rewards today that it always has throughout the entire run of human history.

Of course, it goes without saying that patience can never really be isolated from any of the other qualities of our own true character. “Patience is the companion of wisdom,” said St. Augustine, and he was absolutely right. Patience needs the balance of wisdom – and it needs the balance of courage too.

Here are 5 reasons why the power of patience is so important in your life.

 1. You need the power of patience to fulfill your dreams.

If you are short of patience, even though your dream may be an admirable one, you will simply not have the strength and persistence necessary to sustain you through the inevitable disappointments and setbacks that life brings.

2. You need patience to become whole.

 What was true in ages past is still true today. “Let patience have her perfect works, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.”

 3. Patience is required to fully forgive.

Often, we may think we have forgiven someone – perhaps God himself – for some past injustice, but then the pain and resentment rise up in us again. Do we give up, and allow negative emotions to fester freely in us until we die?

Or do we summon the Angel of patience to our aid and forgive at a deeper level?

4. Patience makes it possible to see another person in a truer light.

It takes time and perseverance to see through our first impressions — which may or may not be all that accurate – and come to know the real person behind the outer mask.

 5. The power of patience nourishes all other human virtues.

As St. Augustine suggested, if we want to develop wisdom, we will need the help of its companion, patience. Or how about compassion? Perhaps some people are born with naturally compassionate natures — but it’s my guess that even compassion needs the nourishment of patience at times.

Perhaps patience is in my mind at the moment because JoAnn and I are still hard at work making improvements to our new home. Fortunately the well of patience hasn’t run dry yet…

If you have a story to share concerning the power of patience in your life I’d love to hear it. If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing to my blog.

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Power of patience critical to lasting happiness is a post from: The Happy Seeker - Living with grace at any age