 Last Friday at Toast2U, Brandi asked all of us to write our fears, stresses and worries onto little yellow strips of paper and tape them, one-by-one, to Pete the Empowerment Piñata - a rainbow colored donkey full of Kit Kats and positive affirmations. Once Pete was covered in all of our grievances, we beat the hell out of him with a yellow dollar-store wiffle ball bat. For the first time that I could remember in my adult life, I had to actually search for worries. That’s not to say that life is perfect - because perfect doesn’t exist - but life is so damn good. It had been a week of so many gifts from so many amazing people that I was too filled with gratitude to think about much else. So I chose "fruit flies" to tape to Pete. Chez Adams has recently had an outbreak of fruit flies - little f’ers that are completely impervious to every known pest control measure known to man. Flash forward to Saturday and Kira’s writing seminar where I was doing a timed writing about my first journal: "I don’t remember anything I wrote in the red journal except one particular line recapping the day’s events at school. 'What do you think Paul wanted to ask Stormy in the cafe?' it read. The contrast between the two events stuck me. How did this seven year old girl who wouldn’t spell a word wrong in her own journal for fear of admitting she was imperfect become a woman who couldn’t think of any big worries in life so she taped “Fruit Flies” to Pete the Empowerment Piñata? Have I really learned so many lessons in the forty years in between that this calm is a new, more natural state for me? Or am I batshit crazy in denial? Like, am I Oprah or am I Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch? Truth is, it doesn’t matter. Tom Cruise was as happy as he had ever been when he was jumping on that couch. Bliss was his perception, so bliss was his reality. And if fruit flies were the only thing stressful enough in my world to tape to Pete the Empowerment Piñata last Friday night, that was most certainly my reality. In fact, it was and it is. For far too long I believed that if I “fixed” everything about myself, dug in real hard and eliminated the imperfections, that life would get easier and I’d be happy. I know now I had it backwards. I made a conscious decision recently to be happy and life just got easier. It’s given me the energy needed to tackle some pretty big stuff, some hard stuff and some important stuff. Part of that important "stuff” was taking an idea I had in my head for a while - Bliss Camp - and putting it on paper so I could bring it to the SheHive. Based on the research of positive psychology guru, Shawn Actor, Bliss Camp is a 21 day gratitude challenge that tests the theory that there are a defined set of tools we can practice for 21 days that will flip the script in our head to find happiness first. Want to test the theory with me? Bliss Club kicks off Friday, June 9th, and ends Friday, June 30th, with an evening of random acts of kindness at the SheHive and downtown Ferndale. We’ll meet once in-between, online. Click here to learn more and/or to register. With much love and gratitude,  Ursula Adams, MSPOD
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