A Winter's Path to Inner Peace

What if the simple act of noticing could fill your days with joy, regardless of the chill outside? Join us as we explore the art of finding joy even in the midst of winter's darkness. We share personal stories, cherished traditions, and heartfelt reflections, offering you a roadmap to realigning daily habits with what truly matters—peace and joy. Through gentle self-examination and small adjustments, discover how to embrace the goodness surrounding you, inspired by the simplicity and omnipresence of joy. 

To learn more, go to mycreateharmony.com

Chapters

• 0:04 Cultivating Joy in Everyday Life
• 8:16 Creating a Joyful Backyard Pool

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

Welcome back to the Create Harmony podcast, and this is a place where we really try to celebrate everyday joys and we pay special attention to good things happening all around us. You don't want to miss them in the busyness of life. We get our inspiration from nature and its glory and we really relish all the changes that it brings. So this is a place of creativity and introspection. But don't worry, everyone is welcome to join in. You can find a place here, and also you can take a few minutes to lift your spirits and find some fun in your everyday routine. So this is episode 105, and I'm your host, sally Burlington. And so today we are kicking off our new series of the thing that we do in the winter.

Speaker 1: 0:56

Every winter is called winter well-being. So it's the beginning of a new year, it's the winter season here in North Carolina, where I live, and we're going to do winter well-being. So if you're new here, let me explain just a little bit. Winter for us is a cold, dark season. A little less cold here than some regions of the country, but still we do have a season change and it is short days, darker times, and life can get a little sad and dreary during this time. It's also the season that we tend to catch colds, flu, we tend to get sick. So here at Create Harmony we try to shift our gaze during these weeks and months that we call winter to things that are healing, things that are restorative, things that make us feel good. This is going to have a combination of self-care. There'll be some decluttering of both our homes and our minds. You'll find some immunity boosting tips and also some gentle urging towards Sabbath, just generally taking these winter days and finding ways to cherish what is. We focus on being cozy. We're really into hygge around here and we try to incorporate that into our routines. So this is our first week of winter well-being in this this year. So here we go Now.

Speaker 1: 2:14

Our conversation today for our first week is going to be about joy, and if you've been around a while, you know that this topic comes up quite a bit here at Create Harmony. Joy comes up a lot really across all of our whole culture, not just here at Create Harmony. There are things from books to coffee mugs to cute little stickers to put on your computer that encourage us to lean into joy. But I think that sometimes we tend to overcomplicate it. And here's the thing Joy is not complicated, it is simple and it is around you all the time. You don't need any extra money, you don't need education, you don't need special skills to experience joy.

Speaker 1: 3:01

Now, your circumstances are your circumstances, but there is always an opportunity for joy. Even in the most dire circumstances, you can always find a way to notice the sunset or a beautiful tree. Even on your worst day, you can find some sort of glimmer of joy. But here's the problem that we have. Sometimes your ability to spot joy is a little bit like your vision as you age.

Speaker 1: 3:30

When we age, the lenses of our eyes get cloudy and we're set in a different way. We lose the ability to focus clearly, and the same is true about discovering joy. Sometimes other things get in our way and cloud our view. The same is true of discovering joy. Sometimes other things get in our way and cloud our view. Now, these are things like busyness or the need for popularity and doing what the cool kids are doing, or being a people pleaser, or toxic relationships or our relationship with alcohol. These things take up space in our lives, but they really don't refocus us back on joy. Now, I doubt anyone ever said on their deathbed that they wished that more people liked them. That really doesn't matter at the end of the day, but sometimes we get in such habits that we think those things do matter. We put those things in our rhythm and we don't cultivate habits that will bring us joy. We work too hard without resting, we spend too much time trying to impress others, we soothe our worries with sugar or alcohol or some other substance, but at the end of the day, joy was there all along. We just needed better eyes to see it. We needed our vision to be cleared and our lenses adjusted. So the world is full of goodness and joy around you all the time, and you just have to take time to look.

Speaker 1: 5:05

When I was preparing the content for today's talk about winter well-being, I was thinking back to the Christmas holidays, and one of the traditions that our family has is that we love watching the movie Love Actually, and that might not be your jam. It's a funny little movie and mostly about nothing, but in the opening scene the narrator talks all about love being all around you at the Heathrow Airport, and he goes on and on and he makes a pretty compelling case. If you aren't familiar with that scene, you should go on YouTube and watch it. It's really very soothing and makes you feel good and makes you just remember that when we have a view of the world that looks like things are going in a terrible direction, we forget that love and joy are all around us all the time. It's the same idea here Good things are all around us all the time and we don't always know how to recognize them.

Speaker 1: 5:59

Sometimes it helps if we take a long-range view of our life. Does your calendar, does your to-do list, does the things you have that you do each day, your habits each day? Does that reflect the things that are most important to you? If you were describing your life as a stranger, would they be able to discern that peace and joy are things that you are prioritizing? But listen, be gentle with yourself. If you discover you're prioritizing something that doesn't align here, don't scold yourself. Just ask does this need an overhaul or just some baby steps in a new direction? If it does need an overhaul, but that's not possible, could you challenge yourself to think about how to turn your battleship in a slow way, in a small and incremental way? So here's an example of what I mean. Instead of saying to yourself I never get that right, say something like this I want more joy in my life, so I'm gonna add the habit of stopping for three minutes a day to focus on what I'm thankful for, little things like that. That really fits into the most busy of schedules and it can make a world of difference and your joy will begin to flow out of you and to other people.

Speaker 1: 7:16

So right now, at our house, I'm gonna give you a little bit of an update on what's going on at our house. At our house, we happen to be in a pretty joyful season. We've been married for over 25 years and we still like each other on most days, pretty much happily married most of the time, and our children are thriving. We're healthy. It's easier for us to see happy things right now because our lives are really going well and not everyone is in the season of dreams coming true and days going well. I acknowledge that some days are extra hard. It's okay to have a hard day. It's okay to feel down. This is not a smile, no matter what type of message, but when you are in a season of good things, celebrate it and find ways to share it with others, just like the message of love. Actually, every love story is not perfect, but there is always love all around and joy is the same. So I'm going to share a special joy with you.

Speaker 1: 8:16

My greatest joy at the current moment is our backyard pool project. So if you've been listening for a while, you know that we are adding a pool into our backyard and this is a lifelong dream for me. But I don't think that I've shared fully on the podcast the why of our backyard pool. I mean, a lot of times people don't need an explanation of why they're putting in a pool. Having a pool is nice and it's great for our own enjoyment and we're excited about that. But the bigger picture is that I want to use this space to host many retreats, workshops, other in-person experiences to promote peace and joy. I want our space to help people feel centered and calm and to give them a place to connect with God and step away from the worries of their lives. Now the nuts and bolts of how all of that's going to work are still just a little bit blurry, but I know they're going to come clearer as the project comes together. So here's where things stand right now.

Speaker 1: 9:17

When we started on the project, there was a good bit of. We had a lot of structure in our backyard. We had a patio, we had a crepe myrtle which for those of you that don't know that's sort of a mid-sized tree, and it was in a big built-in planter in the middle of our big patio area. There was a brick wall around the exterior of the patio. So all that to say, a whole lot of structure. It was very beautiful but it didn't. There was no room in all that structure to put a pool, so it all had to be taken out to put a pool. So it all had to be taken out. So we had a crew come in, break up all the pieces of the patio and it will get crunched up and recycled and used on another construction project. And then there were some plants and trees that had to be removed and we now then we had a blank slate and the next step was that the pool company came in and they dug us a big hole and they reinforced that hole with rebar and wood forms and got it all ready and then they poured the concrete. So at that point it's really begun to look like a pool, so we could kind of see what was going to be formed out there.

Speaker 1: 10:23

So they're currently working on adding the plumbing and the pool equipment and everything that runs the whole situation working on adding the plumbing and the pool equipment and everything that runs the whole situation. And then they will add the finishing layer to the pool. You know, the liner of the not the liner, but, like the, the finish that goes over the concrete and the tile that goes around the side, and then a whole different crew will come in for hardscape and they'll add coping and patio and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There'll be more on that as it unfolds and we hope that we will be done with the bulk of the project by springtime. So right now, during the cold, dark days of winter, our backyard is a mud pit slash construction zone. But we are going to be so glad this spring when we can get out there and enjoy its beauty, when it comes all together, and then we can work on how these retreats and little mini workshops will take shape. So stay tuned for that. So now we're going to circle way back around to the beginning, to winter, well-being and hopefully, thinking about joy. And hearing a little bit about our joyful project has lifted your spirits today and we hope you'll seek ways that you can move yourself towards more joyful living.

Speaker 1: 11:31

So in closing today I'm going to read a quote from a delightful little book that I've just gotten, called how to Be a Moonflower by Katie Daisy. But before I read the quote, let me just tell you about this book. I have actually two books. One is about being a moonflower and one is about being a wildflower, and it's filled with all this beautiful, colorful art and it talks all about how to relish the night, how to enjoy the night. It talks about night animals and the phases of the moon and things you can do outside at night and just enjoy a darker season. It's just fun. So I thought that this quote would help us. I'm going to be using this a lot through winter well-being. So the quote goes like this Night, the beloved night, when words fade and things come alive, when the destructive analysis of day is done and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again, when man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree. And that quote was by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and I might not be pronouncing that correctly, but I just thought that was such a beautiful, calming quote about how to embrace the night during these longer nights and shorter days, so hopefully you enjoyed that.

Speaker 1: 13:15

Thanks for joining us today. We hope you'll journey along throughout our winter well-being series that will happen over the coming weeks. Hope you'll be here for all of it and can take the ideas into your own life. All of it, and can take the ideas into your own life. And if you're in the Raleigh, north Carolina area, I just want to tell you about one of the things we have coming up. We have a vision board workshop coming up at a local mental wellness boutique. So this workshop will happen on January 9th, so it's right around the corner and you don't want to miss it. If you are local and you want to register, you can go to mycreateharmonycom for more information. So thanks again for joining us and until next time. Peace, thank you.