Visualize your happy place.

I spent a great deal of time in my head as a child, which accounts for a lot of my strange ideas. As an optimist with great faith, I tend to romanticize when I'm down and out. It helps to think not about what's missing, but rather focus on "someday". Someday could happen. I like to do this thing which I call "connect the dots". Next time you're in a fix and it seems overwhelming, try to visualize a point in the future (you don't even have to be that specific about time, just focus on the YOU at that point) where you are past the obstacle. Understand that inevitably you will arrive at that point. Before you know it, you'll be there and you will have the strange and wonderful sensation of having made a dot in two separate points of time and traveled a direct line between them. It feels a little like time travel.

Meanwhile, you don't have to play connect the dots only when you're frustrated. Visualizing yourself in a someday is incredibly helpful in helping yourself understand what is at the center of your happiness. Knowing what that is could help you chart a course toward it, making it more likely you will end up with what you want.

A good example of this is something I've been doing a lot lately; imagining "home".

As someone who grew up "on the lam" so to speak, juggled between parents and moving every couple of years or so , Home is really important to me. That eventual place where I end up will become my sanctuary. I have cobbled together an idea in my head, one room at a time, of what that place will be like. Generally it's part something I have literally dreamt about, and part inspiration taken from blogs on Interior Design.

You should try it out! Try picturing yourself at your most comfortable, doing whatever it is that you might find yourself doing if you were in YOUR perfect environment and able to just relax. Look around you, what is the room like? Are you even in a room or are you outdoors? What do you see around you? What are you wearing? Are you eating or drinking anything? How about reading a book? Really see yourself in the room. After awhile you may start experiencing feelings of relaxation and contentment just "being there" mentally. Understand that these feelings are yours and are waiting for you in a future that you can now create. Sounds New Wavey I know, but it works!