As a mentor, I often find myself working on the same bottom line with clients — are you letting your heart sing? This is a powerfully loaded question that deserves some unpacking here.

First, let’s look at what it means to let your heart sing. Think of a time or times when you have been in your glory. It could have been a particular meeting, job, relationship, a song you sang, a book you wrote, or just a humble yet essential moment in your daily life. These moments typically engage a person in the flow of creatively expressing something they are deeply passionate about. It’s as though your body, heart, mind, and soul are in a personal harmonic convergence and you can feel your heart smiling. There is a fulfillment — a sating of a piercing hunger that has been building in your soul.

I’ve come to recognize that my heart sings best when I am experiencing a loving oneness with another — whether someone close to me, a client, or a total stranger. For example, I can be walking down the street and have my eyes meet deeply with the eyes of a stranger for the briefest of moments and zoom past all the things that normally prevent such an essential connection from occurring. My heart also sings when I am effectively being of service and when I am able to communicate well. What about you? What makes your heart sing?

Once you have identified one or several strong examples of you at your best, ask yourself some of the following questions:

• What did it feel like in your heart? Soul? Mind? Body?

• How did you know you were in your zone?

• What were the characteristics of the experience? For example, did certain people, circumstances, forms of expression, or heightened experiences facilitate your reaching the point where your heart was singing?

• What specifically do you need to be, do, or have to make your heart sing?

Notice the question isn’t is your heart singing? It’s are you letting your heart sing? In this crazy world we live in, very few hearts simply sing anymore. It’s not that it is not important, but rather that we are too busy giving our attention to other matters. We need to make our lives conducive to allowing our song to emerge — even within the simple moments of our everyday lives. So, if your heart rarely or never sings, here are some things you might want to do:

• • Listen deeply to yourself: When our lives are filled with stress and more activities than time, our focus tends to be outward rather than inward. We need to deeply immerse ourselves in quiet contemplation and focus on the urges of our heart and soul. In the absence of such inner grounding, we are likely to live our lives hoping that this person or that job will somehow bring us greater happiness. In other words, we give over the power to yield our happiness to others and we become the recipients of whatever they happen to give to us. This kind of passive living rarely makes our heart sing. It is far more likely to get us to focus on manipulating this other person or situation to yield that nebulous and ill-defined happiness we seek. Our heart’s song comes from a deeper place within us that we must visit and become familiar with to create the pathway for its expression.

• • Be mindful of living from the inside out: In the business of our lives, it is very easy to lose track of our essential self — the part that imagines and dreams about creating, promoting, and allowing our inner yearnings to manifest in our lives. Too often, we find ourselves at the end of our lives with a voluminous bucket list of unfulfilled dreams and desires. If something deep within us keeps seeking our attention and we keep ignoring it, it eventually gets drowned out by the drumbeat of daily life. Then in the quieter days of our life’s end, we have too many regrets. So, take time to listen deeply and to create an energy flow that moves from deep within you outward into expression in your life. This could be as simple as wanting a particular color in your environment or taking the time to call an old friend. We must not only listen to our inner yearnings, we must honor them through action so we can bring them to fulfillment.

• • Dare to sing: Letting your heart sing means making that a priority. It means going for “it” — daring to give expression to your heart’s desire and best vision of what your life could be. Get in the practice of doing at least one thing each day that evokes your soul’s expression. Make that important enough to make it a habit.

• • Set clear intentions: Seeking a vague sense of being happier yields only disappointment with the present. If you want to create more health, wealth, happiness, and inner fulfillment, then you have to be specific with yourself about what exactly you need to do differently to move in the right direction to fulfill your dreams. This year, for example, I have set four very specific intentions for what I want to bring forward in my life. Every day, I affirm those intentions morning and night and challenge myself to spend as much of my time as possible bringing those intentions into reality. If you want your heart to sing, be very clear with yourself about what that involves and don’t try to do it all at once. Set manageable, doable intentions that affirm your willingness to do what it takes to bring them forward in your life.

• • Focus your attention on your intentions: You must breathe life into your intentions through action every day. Don’t wait for someone else to magically appear who will recognize what brings out the best in you and allows your heart to sing. Take ownership of your own life — get in the driver’s seat and go for it!

There is only one you. So, please give voice to your most beautiful inner song and share it with the rest of us.

Some of the greatest life wisdom is articulated by the dying.  In her book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware shares what she has learned about the dying by serving as a caregiver to many.  She notes, “of all of the regrets and lessons shared with me as I sat beside their beds, the regret of not having lived a life true to themselves was the most common one of all.  It was also the one that caused the most frustration, as the client’s realization came too late.”

So, what does it mean to be true to yourself?  A lot of people throw around the term ‘authenticity’ to describe it.  On some level this term suggests that there is a truth that resides within each of us that is unique to our specific being.  It also implies that there is an opportunity to somehow maximize the experience of living our life and meeting our death that involves being attuned to that truth and living a life that is a reflection of that truth.  But, how do we do this?  How is that different from simply living and doing the best we can?  What does it look like?  What does it feel like?

In the process of living, we come to know things about ourselves – experiences we love and those that leave us unengaged.  We discover certain talents, abilities, and inclinations within us.  My favorite food group will always be chocolate, for example, that’s simply not negotiable.  Each of us will have different preferences from the same menu in a restaurant – or the de jour offerings of a given day.  As time goes by, if we pay attention – if we listen to that pure, inner voice that simply says an enthusiastic ‘yes!’ or an emphatic ‘no!’ – we come to learn that that voice seems to have our best interest in mind.  It is not the voice of our ego preferences or greed.  It comes from a far deeper place than that – I sense mine in the area of my solar plexis.

The real challenge is that there are other voices that we hear too and our inner voice of truth often gets lost in the shuffle.  Our insecurities and fears speak to us.  Our wants and desires demand our attention.  Outer influences, norms, and authorities seek our allegiance as well.  What do you do when your parents or teachers – the gods of your youth – are steering you in a direction that doesn’t match your fragile and emerging sense of self?  When outer authorities or social norms insist you do or be something that is in conflict with your sense of who you are, what do you do?  Do you trust the outer authorities, perhaps out of fear of the consequences of not doing so, or do you somehow hold to your inner truth, in spite of the judgment, rejection, and ridicule that might bring upon you?  I know a man who paid a heavy price for following his passion to become a concert pianist when his father insisted he stay in Idaho to tend the family potato farm.  What must it be like for a child who knows he or she is gay to survive and find a path through a family or world that will judge and reject them?  What do you do when you know that how and what you are is likely to never be favored or acceptable to your family or the society you live in – even though you are a good person?

It’s ironic that it’s just not that easy to simply be yourself.  But, maybe therein lies the secret to living and dying well.  The real prize in life is to come to know your very own truth and to learn to be obedient to that truth in a way that does not harm others.  They may not like it, but if we are lucky, we teach them how to love us in spite of our differences.  We teach them to respect our ways of being and to let us be.  You have to be willing to claim the privilege of being yourself in a social context.  It’s not an easy path and typically takes dedication, devotion, endurance, and sometimes the willingness to proceed without the support and understanding of those we love.  It requires listening to inner truth and figuring out how to honor it.  It takes time to develop this inner attunement.  But the prize is a peacefulness, an experience of being who you are rather than resenting yourself and others for what you didn’t get to do or be or have that was essential to you.  To know that you are living your life with obedience to what you know to be your truth may be as good as life gets – especially when you find a community of support of others who are walking to the beat of their own drums as well.

Take a look at your life and ask yourself these questions:

• If I were to die tomorrow, would I have any regrets?  If so, explore what you could do right now in your life to prevent yourself from reaching the end of your life with those regrets.
• Is there anyone in your life with whom you are not at peace?  If so, what are you willing to do about that either within yourself or in relationship to that person?
• Are you at peace with yourself?  If not, what changes could you make to bring yourself to a state of inner peace?

As long as we live, it is never too late to be ourselves and to make peace with our choices and the people in our life (past or present).  So, if you want to live and die really well, befriend, honor, and love yourself madly and deeply.

One of the fundamental themes I weave into my work with coaching clients has to do with fully embracing and focusing upon what hurts in them and how they have learned to deal with or avoid their suffering. This is usually the antithesis of where they want to look. Usually people perceive the source of their suffering to be ‘out there’ in the circumstances and relationships of their lives. Most get lost in their stories about what is happening to them out in the world and they want to find a strategic solution to achieve their desired success. Many operate under the assumption that if they change the outside, the pain they feel inside will go away. This is true when you have a nail in your shoe, but when your pain is emotionally driven, external changes never yield permanent results.

Those seeking external solutions are typically residing in what I call “the land of if only’s.” It sounds like this: “if only so and so would change in the way I think they should, then my suffering would be relieved.” Or, “if only I could lose twenty pounds, then . . .” Or, “when such and such happens, then I will be really happy.” These are all forms of emotional hunger and wishful thinking.

There are several key problems with this approach:

1. The imagined happiness, if achieved at all, will be temporary at best and the hunger will return.

2. Attempting to sate emotional hunger displaces our focus away from the present into an imagined future that we then attempt to create.

3. We fail to examine the real source of our hunger, thereby forfeiting the possibility and opportunity of knowing what is really going on within us.

Emotional hunger runs far deeper than we imagine. For many, it expresses in addictive behaviors. As in the examples above, our hunger takes the form of present yearnings and cravings for something that we imagine will make us feel fundamentally better than we do. The fact of the matter is, the satisfaction of our hunger does not lie outside ourselves, but inside in the form of unresolved wounds from the past coupled with our early reflexive responses to pain and suffering that have now become autopilot reactions.

Consider the fact that when we are infants, in the absence of language, we are socialized to communicate our perceived needs by crying out to let our caregivers know what’s going on with us – “I’m hungry.” “I need to be touched and comforted.” “My diaper is dirty.” It’s a very effective way to get our needs met. However, if in adulthood we continue to empower others to determine our sense of well-being, we will live as victims rather than as authentic, self-empowered creators and participants in our own lives.

Most of us have been emotionally wounded as a child – often without anyone realizing it. If we have not healed that wound, we develop emotional baggage and adaptive behaviors that unconsciously seek to get the outside world to give us what we didn’t get emotionally as children. The impulse is to heal, but we go about it the wrong way. If we continue to cry out and make our problems other people’s problems and/or to see ourselves as powerless victims of circumstances or the behavior of others, we never learn how to handle our emotional challenges in a healthy way.

If you are in a persistent state of emotional hunger or dissatisfaction, you may need professional help in getting to the bottom of your own particular pattern, but personal observation can also yield amazing results. If you really want to sate your emotional hunger, you need to understand what beliefs are driving your experiences. Here is a process that should help you get to the bottom of it:

1. Pay attention to your own self-talk. If you repeatedly hear yourself saying things like the ‘if only’s’ listed above or some other statement like ‘I never . . . ‘ or ‘I always . . . ‘ recognize that every time you reach that conclusion you are claiming to believe that to be the truth. For example, if you have a belief that you never get what you want – guess what! You will make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.

2. Take ownership of the fact that you hold such a belief. Write it down and make a conscious choice to change your belief.

3. Pay attention to the ways that you repeatedly affirm your belief by creating, promoting, and allowing experiences that are consistent with that belief. Write down every example you see with enthusiasm and neutrality and never with self-judgment. Remember you are in the process of healing this pattern instead of remaining an unconscious victim of it.

4. Play detective gathering evidence of how and why you make the choices you make that keep bringing you what you do not want.

5. Pay attention to and document how it feels inside of you (physically, emotionally, mentally, etc.) when you do not get what you want.

6. Challenge your belief. Pose ‘what if’ questions to yourself of what might be so if you let go of your limiting belief. For example, if you hold the belief that no one will ever love you, be creative in breaking down that belief. Use affirmations that claim your worthiness – do them in front of the mirror with great enthusiasm – “I am lovable!” Play the ‘act as if’ game of behaving as if you are lovable, smile at total strangers and start letting other people in – open up to the possibility of being loved. Love yourself!

Remember that your beliefs are powerful self-fulfilling prophecies. The bottom line of this is that if you change your beliefs, you will change your experiences. You are not a victim unless you choose to be. Health and well-being in adulthood is not achieved through the accumulation of external successes, but rather through cleaning out your internal emotional closets.

Trust is an interesting concept — and far more exciting as an action. Trusting yourself involves the willingness and confidence to rely on your own integrity, abilities, and character to meet the challenges of a particular experience, or all of life for that matter. For me, trust is not only a psychological factor, but has a spiritual component as well because God is very much a part of my worldview.

I believe that the ultimate gamble with the greatest potential gain in life is to trust yourself and that in so doing, you gain a level of freedom, authenticity, and peace that is unreachable any other way. Trust requires living in your own skin, recognizing your own authority as the very best arbiter of what is for you and what is not. We may have learned as children to trust and rely upon the authority of others to tell us what to do and when to do it. But there is a profound and authentic inner voice that lies dormant within us all until we start to listen to it and recognize its ability to express our deepest truth and to guide us with the most precise discernment of what will serve our highest good — whether we like it or not. Some call this their “inner” or “true” self, and some suggest this is the spark of the divine that resides in each of us. Either way, just as with physical exercise we are trained to strengthen our core muscles, we must strengthen this core self as well by exercising its voice. That’s how we learn to trust ourselves. Otherwise, we remain at the effect of external sources of authority and simply react to them, usually with the intention of getting their approval or affecting their perception of us in some way.

In my second doctoral dissertation, I focused on the topic of trust because I had become profoundly aware of the fact that whenever I felt out of balance, the bottom line was that I wasn’t trusting myself. As I explored the internal wiring of my consciousness, I discovered something remarkable — my lack of self-trust was so fundamental to my way of being that I was living my life built upon the intention of avoiding pain and suffering. I knew that it was fairly normal to minimize our distress, but my behavior was an all-encompassing way of being whereby I sought to anticipate and avoid perceived sources of suffering.

There was an ironic and fundamental flaw in my approach. In my effort to achieve greater happiness by avoiding pain and suffering, I was actually attracting them to me by focusing upon them rather than on the happiness I sought. I was equating happiness with an absence of pain. In fact, our minds act like great magnets attracting to us what we focus upon, which in turn makes our intentions and focal points self-fulfilling prophecies.

Inherent in my approach was the fact that I neither trusted myself nor God, and so I played God by attempting to write the script of my life. I recognized this as the most pivotal shift I needed to make in my consciousness to improve my physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being, and I wanted the joy, ease, grace, and abundance that it would bring forth in my life.

So, what about you?

Do you trust yourself?

Do you tend to live at the effect of people and events outside yourself?

Or, alternatively, do you experience yourself as capable of living your life with all its unanticipated twists and turns?

Here are three keys that really helped me make this wonderful transformation of my inner experience. First, I practiced keeping my consciousness focused in the present moment until that became a good habit. This replaced my previous habit of worrying so much about the future. It empowered me to take appropriate action in the only time frame that affords us that opportunity — the present.

Secondly, I observed myself and developed a list of my physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual experiences and expressions during the presence or absence of trust in my consciousness. Creating this list helped me to recognize what it looks like and feels like to be trusting — to put flesh on the bones of the concept of trust. For example, I noticed that when I was experiencing trust, I was physically relaxed, comfortable, open, with fluid and graceful movements. In contrast, when lacking trust, I became rigid, tense, stressed, and pushed others away. Mentally, I was not feeling attached to my point of view, worrying, judging others, or avoiding anything. Instead, I was paying attention to what was present and cooperating with it. Emotionally, trust allowed me to go with the flow, confident that I could meet whatever came my way. This was an enormous contrast to my previous experience of anger, fear, agitation, resistance to whatever I did not like, and doubting my ability to be happy in life. Spiritually, trust brought an attunement to the highest good of all concerned and the desire to surrender to “God’s way” rather than demanding “my way.” Rather than playing God, I learned to recognize God’s wisdom and presence in my life.

Finally, I practiced, practiced, and practiced doing more of the things that brought greater trust, and breaking the habit of doing those that did not. I came to believe that there is nothing “wrong” that I have to try to fix. I discovered that trusting is about letting go of “should”s, “have to”s, demands, expectations, fears, illusions, and delusions. The more I surrendered into trust, the more it became my automatic response. Rather than closing down and retreating in response to pain and suffering, I built skills in experiencing them and learning from them. This built my openness and trust that God’s infinite wisdom is present at all times — not just in the experiences that I like.

What lessons have you learned about trusting yourself that you could share here with others?

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Part 1 of this article http://www.huffingtonpost.com/judith-johnson/addiction-recovery_b_1929196.html addressed the dynamics of excess body weight being a side effect of addiction whereby food is used to repress and numb unbearable (often unconscious) emotional content.  In other words, in order to really understand the dynamics of weight gain and loss, we need to shift our focus away from obesity as the result of the simple physiological equation of calories in and calories out.  Instead, we need to consider that the real problem is the emotional weight that put the physical pounds on in the first place.  In order to maintain a physical weight loss, we have to lose the corresponding emotional weight as well.

Part 2 now speaks to emotional weight loss.  There are all kinds of physiological theories about why the vast majority of people who lose weight regain the lost pounds and then some.  My own experience on this journey has given me a different answer.  As mentioned in Part 1, I engaged in deep inner work using NET (Neuro-Emotional technique) http://www.netmindbody.com/for-patients/an-explanation-of-net for two and a half years before being ready to begin my physical weight loss. Since writing Part 1 of this article, I went on to cooperate with ease and grace through the process of losing a total of 126 of the 144 pounds I wanted to lose.  Then I hit a wall and suddenly began to revisit my addictive behavior of acting out with chocolate and becoming less rigorous with my weight loss program for a period of five months. I regained about 20 pounds. The good news is I am not horrified!  I know this is not simply a matter of me lacking discipline and being helpless and hopeless.  I don’t believe that it is just a matter of time before I regain all 126 pounds and then some.  Instead I have a new perspective that has to do with the correlation between my physical and emotional weight loss.

Throughout my weight loss, I continued to work with an NET practitioner.  Then, some events in my current life triggered yet another pile of deeply repressed emotional issues coming up for release.  I think my addictive acting out was an act of self-protection whereby I was trying to keep these emotions at bay as I had in the past – that was my go-to method of self-protection.  Much like pulling up a blanket when cold, I had lost 126 pounds of physical weight, but only 106 pounds of emotional weight and felt the need to pull back on those 20 pounds to protect myself while catching up with my emotional weight loss.  I simply wasn’t ready to maintain the smaller physical body yet let alone to lose the additional 18 pounds that would have brought me to my target weight.  It freaked me out at first until I recognized that my “acting out with chocolate” was happening for a very good reason.  This was simply a red flag letting me know that my physical weight loss was getting ahead of my emotional weight loss and I had more inner work to do before I could continue to lose more pounds.

I no longer see this as gaining or losing weight or the battle that typically represents.  Rather, I am inhabiting my life’s journey with greater conscious understanding and compassion.  I see now that when I entered into addictive eating again (which had been gone for a year and a half), that was an act of self-protection in relationship to emotional content I had not yet released that was being triggered by events in my current life.  Seen in that context, it’s far less scary and far more manageable.  The answer was NOT to stop eating the chocolate, but to figure out what emotional experience I was attempting to protect myself from.  The good news is I am finding my answers and beginning to drop weight again.  I have come to realize more deeply than ever before that this entire process is FOR me – even the regaining of lost weight.

I strongly suspect that I am not the only one challenged with body weight issues for whom this is true and perhaps this is a key to all addictive behaviors.  We seem to focus too much on stopping the out of control behavior and not enough on what throws us into these coping mechanisms and why.

I think it is interesting to note that we live in a society that doesn’t even have lingo for emotional health.  We speak of physical and mental health, but not of emotional health.  We are highly complex creatures with conscious and unconscious physical, mental, and emotional dynamics all intertwined.  Unraveling the knots takes courage, willingness, time, patience, wisdom, and in many cases – competent help.

Here are some of the specific things I have learned on this journey of releasing my excess physical and emotional weight:

• Sometimes the experiences and emotions that were repressed from childhood look very minor through our adult eyes, but at the time may have been overwhelming to us, and so we buried them and have avoided them ever since.
• Rather than freaking out at a backslide, it helps to explore its origins with self compassion and the assumption that it is simply feedback that you have some more inner work to do to prepare yourself to be able to sustain further physical weight loss.
• Long-term weight loss is a balancing act of physical, mental, and emotional dynamics.
• Don’t give up because of a backslide or if the rate of your weight loss isn’t keeping up with your desired timetable.   Stay present in the reality you are experiencing and work with that reality rather than trying to change reality.