Archive for category: Consciousness/Thriving

Are You Letting Your Heart Sing?

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.

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The #1 Key to Living and Dying Well

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.

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Picking Up Your Life

I recently came upon the expression “pick up your life” in a talk given by John Morton, the spiritual director of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness. This simple phrase captures the idea that we always have the choice to move our life to a higher level of expression. Whether you dream of being an Olympic star or simply see areas of your life that you would like to improve, it is your choice whether or not you take it upon yourself to lift yourself higher. Is it time for you to pick up your life? What might be possible for you?

It is so easy to pass endless days and years of our lives in a kind of stupor on autopilot spending and losing ourselves in the routines of daily life and to-do lists that get us nowhere. Sometimes life simply exhausts us and we lose sight of our dreams, our potential, and passions. But there is a heavy price we pay for stagnation and complacency. We become stalled out and stale and sometimes bitter. We lose sight of the power we have to choose to live our lives differently.

We are meant to evolve through learning and growing. These processes take place within us physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. We all have areas of our lives where we feel stuck or unfulfilled at times. That’s not a problem — it’s perfectly normal, and often the irritation required for us to choose to pick up our life.

So, how do you break out of a repetitively unfulfilling life or an irritation? The answer starts with believing that it is possible. Until you believe in the possibility of change, it simply cannot occur. Belief opens the door to taking action. It is the accelerator out of stagnation — beyond all the excuses and rationalizations that have kept you doing what you have always done, getting what you have always gotten. This is as true about small personal changes as it is about global issues. Momentum comes when you choose to do what it takes to manifest what you have come to believe is possible. You take ownership of your life and do something radically different. Radical need not be earth shattering. It is sometimes best to start with a baby step like making your bed each morning because you have come to believe as my friend, Lisa says, “making your bed each morning is the cornerstone of civilization.” Now, I appreciate that you may not hold bed making in such high regard, but sometimes the smallest change can make a world of difference.

While belief is the door opener and initial accelerant of change, momentum and eventual success come by taking consistent, appropriate actions in a clearly defined direction. Action is taken in the context of a vision of success and a plan of action. For example, over the past year I have been overcoming a lifelong challenge with excess body weight. Every single thing I have put in my mouth or chosen not to eat has been a conscious choice. In time, temptations receded, new habits formed and I began to have a love affair with vegetables. Who knew that was possible? Every step of the way I kept my eye on my goal and reinforced my belief that long-term success was possible and in the process of happening. I also chose to celebrate my mini-successes along the way to the momentum of gratitude. Someone once told me about an interview with Jack LaLanne, dubbed “the godfather of fitness.” The interviewer said “Jack, you must really love exercise” to which Jack abruptly and passionately responded “I hate it! I hate it! I hate it! I do it for the results.” When we believe in something, whether it is sustaining a healthy body or laying down our lives for a cause we passionately embrace, success comes in the followthrough.

So, here are some questions for you. Do you have any secret dreams for yourself that you have let slip by the wayside? Are you settling for less than you know you have in you? Have you given up on yourself or told yourself it is too hard or too late to change? I encourage you to come out from behind your excuses and disillusionment and pick up your life. Imagine what is possible if each of us believed in ourselves enough to manifest our greatest self-expression. Imagine if we believed that we all have that responsibility and accelerated our best selves into manifestation.

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Are You Suffering Unnecessarily?

Do you often find yourself saying “It isn’t fair” or thinking you have more than your share of suffering? Do you play the story of “what happened to you” over and over in your mind like a hamster running in his wheel? Consider the possibility that there IS something you can do about that. The place to start is by distinguishing between unavoidable suffering that is a necessary part of life and the kind of suffering that we create for ourselves.

“Necessary suffering” seems like a strange concept to most people. But, consider the fact that no one gets to escape some form of pain in response to the trials and tribulations of life. You fall and skin your knee – ouch! A friend lets you down or disappoints you in some significant way – sadness. Someone you love and treasure dies – deep grief. In other words, there are the kinds of suffering that come with the territory of being alive. Perhaps you have also noticed that these kinds of unavoidable suffering can become steppingstones to greater wisdom and understanding if you look at them in the right way. Otherwise, you may obsess about them or they become a constant irritant like a stone in your shoe that you don’t realize you can remove. The necessary suffering of life also has a way of getting us to draw closer to one another and to comfort one another in ways that are deeper and less common than we find in everyday life when everything seems to be moving along beautifully.

According to psycho-spiritual teacher, Robert Augustus Masters, the unnecessary kind of suffering is the kind that is a direct result of the stories we tell ourselves about our painful experiences. Unnecessary suffering happens when we get so caught up in either focusing on our necessary suffering in our minds or telling our tales of woe to others. When this happens, we cause ourselves to suffer more than we need to because of the fact that we are intensifying our suffering by focusing our attention on feeling the pain.

Masters advises that we can minimize our suffering by entering into the pain that comes our way and moving through it rather than replaying it over and over like a broken record. To illustrate this distinction, imagine the difference in experience of a birthing woman who is actively working with her breath to move through the pain of her labor versus the one who is busy resisting her pain and screaming about how much it hurts. The path through our pain is to accept its presence rather than to resist it by trying to get away from it. Ironically, we create unnecessary pain by the very act of resisting pain. In other words, through resistance, we focus upon our pain, draw it to ourselves, and attach ourselves to it.

Our point of view – our attitude toward suffering makes all the difference in terms of how much we suffer. In a TED Talk, BJ Miller referred to perspective as “that kind of alchemy we humans get to play with, turning anguish into a flower.”

So, next time you start throwing a pity party for yourself, change your point of view so you can change your experience. Try one of these methods:

1. Expand your perspective to entertain the good news that is coming with the bad. In other words, appreciate the half full part of the glass you are only seeing as half empty. My friend, Barbara Sarah, the founder of the Oncology Support Program at HealthAlliance of the Hudson Valley in Kingston, NY shared a list that one of her students in a Constructive Living program made of all the people who she was grateful to for helping her care for her hospitalized husband. 105 people! As the list grew, so did her gratitude to people like the person who supplies the “lollipop” mouth moisturizers, the pre-admission secretary who greets you and sets up your test schedule, the gardener who cares for all the plants in the public areas, and the staff who buzz you in the surgical ICU. So make a list of all the things in your life that are also true blessings while you are suffering and see if you don’t find yourself becoming so grateful that you forget a bit about your pain. This is about finding and restoring balance inside yourself.

2. Give yourself a deadline to finish your pity party. Give yourself 5-10 minutes to really get into all your complaints and suffering. Exaggerate the immensity of your pain and feel really sorry for yourself until the timer goes off. Then, choose to shift your focus onto doing something really thoughtful or supportive for yourself or someone else. Don’t allow yourself to start grabbing onto your pain again. If it hurts, breathe into it and keep going. Ask yourself, “Is there anything constructive I need to do about my pain?” If the answer is “yes” then do that, if it is “no” then make the choice to place your focus elsewhere.

3. Pray for your highest good. Prayer, in its highest form, is about trust and laying down your burdens – surrendering to that which is beyond our comprehension. This kind of prayer is beyond personal preferences or judgments of what “should” or “shouldn’t” be happening. It acknowledges that there are forces present in our lives that are beyond our understanding. By praying for the highest good in whatever the situation is, we appeal to the benevolence of whatever forces are at work in our lives and surrender our burdens to these forces. In other words, we acknowledge that what will happen is beyond our control and we accept that and go on about our business of living the best we can.

4. Decide to make fabulous lemonade out of your lemons. My spiritual teacher, John-Roger always advised using everything for our upliftment, learning, and growth and that advise has served me very well in the hardest of times. This is a matter of choice. We have the option of shifting the message we send ourselves about our suffering from “poor me, this is terrible” to “I wonder how I can work with this to lift myself up, to learn, and to grow.”

The bottom line is we have far more power over the degree of our suffering than most of us imagine. When we stop accentuating the negative, we make more room for better options to be the focus of our attention.

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How Did You Get to Be the Way You Are?

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.

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Can You Trust Yourself?

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?

Please feel free to leave a comment below or to email me at judithjohnson@hvc.rr.com.

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Are You Strategically Living Your Life?

Strategic planning is typically thought of in terms of how large businesses and nations design a plan of action to accomplish their specific goals — but it is a fabulous tool for individuals as well. If you find yourself disappointed by your life, consider taking a look at how strategically you are living it.

Some people worry that being strategic is about being manipulative. Certainly there is a fine balance between passivity and trying to live life according to the “my way or the highway” approach to influencing the course of events. I think of being strategic as actively engaging in shaping and directing your life. It is about being thoughtful, careful, and purposeful — the antithesis of simply drifting along being caught up in whatever situations and circumstances you happen to bump into in the course of your life. Strategic living means being smart enough to embrace the opportunity of playing an active role in determining what you are creating, promoting and allowing in your life.

If you were investing in a business, wouldn’t you want to know that it was being run by individuals who were well versed regarding the opportunities and challenges they faced? Wouldn’t you want them to use their resources (people, money and time) in such a way that they maximized the company’s short- and long-term return on investment? Most likely, it would be important to you that these returns be measured not just in terms of money, but relative to such other factors as alignment with the company’s mission, and their commitment to such values as integrity, social consciousness and the quality of their relationships with employees and other stakeholders.

Now, let’s apply this thinking to how you assess your own life choices. Being strategic is about getting off autopilot behavior and being thoughtful about the choices you make in your life. It means living within the context of having a good understanding of who you are, what matters to you, and what resources and options you have available.

As a life coach, I work with this perspective as a means of increasing my clients’ self-awareness, wellbeing, enjoyment and creative self-empowerment. Making thoughtful and strategic choices about how you live your life can have an enormous impact on your level of satisfaction and enjoyment.

There are three fundamental, ongoing, and interrelated activities involved in strategically living your life. They are: creating a plan, keeping track of results and altering your course based on those results and the unanticipated surprises life brings your way. A good strategist needs a great sense of humor and an appreciation for the power of the unknown because no matter how thoughtful and thorough your planning techniques, life will throw you curve balls. It’s humbling, but the alternative of having no plan means being at the effect of your life rather than being an active participant and driving force.

Our lives tend to be very complex and to include conflicting priorities and demands on our time. A seasoned life strategist is like a juggler trying to simultaneously stay on course with specific plans for each major aspect of his or her life. For example, you might have plans for your spiritual life, family, career, finances, etc. For a novice planner, I suggest picking the one area of your life where you are experiencing the greatest challenges and starting there. As you stabilize one area of your life, develop a plan for another aspect and learn to develop skill in making the tradeoffs that are necessary between the various aspects of your life.

Whether strategically planning for your entire life or just one area, here are some suggestions:

When developing your plan:

    • Begin by identifying what you value most that is essential to your success and happiness.
    • Take stock of your resources.
    • Set one to three measurable goals that are in alignment with your values and realistic in terms of your resources. For example, “I want to lose five pounds by November 1, 2013” rather than “I want to lose weight.”
    • For each goal, develop a plan of action — what specifically needs to be done, when, where, and by whom to achieve success?
    • Consider who else will be affected by you pursuing your plan and enlist their support.
    • Always remember that reality will never match your plans — be a good sport and expect unanticipated occurrences.

When keeping track of results:

    • Set up some consistent method of keeping track of how well you are doing as you move forward in time. How will you know if you are on course or not to achieve your desired result?
    • Create a visual measurement tool. For example, if you are working to lose weight, you might record your weight every morning.
    • Be honest with yourself, pay attention to results, and respond and adapt accordingly.

When altering your course:

    • Use your feedback as feed forward. You will never know ahead of time what is going to happen. Don’t give up because life is different or harder than you expected. Just alter your expectations and plans as needed and expect that to be part of the process. After all, it’s not so much about reaching the finish line as it is a matter of developing your skills and abilities and doing your best.

Ultimately, strategic living is an organic process of fully engaging in your own life. So dream, imagine and plan for your heart’s desire to manifest in your life. Our dreams are much more fun when we actually bring them to life.

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Obesity, Addiction, and Repression – Part 2

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.

 

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Obesity, Repression, and Addiction – Part One

For many of us who struggle with excess body weight, “success” in losing weight is soon followed by regaining those pounds and then some.  Just now, at the age of 64, I am recognizing why this has been happening to me and perhaps to many others.  I have long suspected that the answer that would break me free of this yo-yo pattern is psychological rather than a matter of finding the right diet.  We are told that fat serves as a protection.  I found that it was not the fat that I was using to protect myself, but rather my food addictions were my method of protection.  Obesity was a byproduct.

Since self-judgment only adds fuel to the fire, I choose to view this issue with curiosity and without judgment.  To support myself in figuring out what I was doing to sabotage my ability to maintain a healthy weight, I have worked for 2 ½ years with a practitioner of NET (Neuro-Emotional Technique).  According to www.net.com, “NET is a mind-body technique that uses a methodology of finding and removing neurological imbalances related to the physiology of unresolved stress.”  For me, NET offers an amazing way to bypass conscious and unconscious defense mechanisms to get at the originating cause of an issue that is currently manifesting in my body and my life.

I began working with NET for the sole purpose of finding out why I had been unable to remove and keep off my excess body weight.  Essentially what I found was that the repression of emotions is a survival mechanism held in place through addiction.  In my case, since my addiction of unconscious choice was food, the byproduct of this pattern was obesity.

Here’s how it worked for me – from my infancy until my father’s death, the psychological message I consistently received from him and internalized was that I was somehow fundamentally unacceptable.  This same message came from one of my siblings as well and continues to this day.  As an adult, I have done everything possible to heal these relationships but whenever coming face to face with this rejection, and the absence of love from them it hurt at the core of my being.  While I am able to cope with the occasional, yet always unpleasant, encounter as an adult, as a child they were a devastating and constant barrage.  As a matter of survival, I repressed my feelings and fears about being deemed essentially unworthy, unlovable, and unacceptable.  Over time, I accumulated an enormous reserve of repressed, unmanageable emotions.  No matter how I worked on myself as an adult and how well I learned to cope with current encounters, I never recognized or acknowledged the emotional pain and stress I had been unable to endure as a child nor the fact that I was carrying this trauma around with me like a beach ball held under water.  Apparently, not being aware of this nor feeling safe to feel what had been emotionally life-threatening to me as a child, I unconsciously held it below the surface.  What I have come to realize is that I accomplished this in two important ways through my addictions.  First, they were my way of numbing the pain and keeping it on an unconscious level until I was ready to deal with opening Pandora’s box.  No wonder I would regain the weight whenever I lost it – I had been depriving myself of my addictions which were my protection – my repression mechanism!  Secondly, I had been embodying the message of my unworthiness through obesity – perhaps the most shameful and socially visible of all unacceptable, albeit taboo, ways of being.  Other addictions you can hide, while obesity is in your face.

So, here’s an irony to this – if my sibling had not continued to treat me with such distain, I might never have put this pattern together and found my path to freedom.  So, thank you to all those who have pushed this button to get me to this point of liberation!

You might wonder, how do I know I have broken free of this pattern?  The answer is simple.  First, for three months now, I have not experienced any food compulsions.  I have been to a wedding reception attended by my sibling and on vacation for a week recently and neither one triggered the usual desires or excuses for “treating myself.”  Secondly, I am steadily and easily losing weight without the fear of regaining it.  For the first time, I am confident that I will be able to sustain a healthy weight.  Third, I am going through an emotional release very similar to grieving where weeping simply rises to the surface and spills out of me seemingly unprovoked.  The tension and stress of holding down this childhood trauma is finding expression and finally being replaced by a profound sense of inner peace.

If you can relate to my story and suspect that something similar might be going on inside of you with whatever your addiction(s) of choice might be, here are some suggestions:

-Set the intention of compassionately understanding and freeing yourself.

-Make time for introspection to explore your own situation and to get below your storyline.  Be a non-judgmental, curious detective and ask yourself questions like: “What awful truth do I suspect is true about me?” and “How did I get the idea that that was true about me?”  “How did I cope with this as a child?”

-Believe and affirm to yourself that it is possible for you to be free from your addictions.  Don’t tell yourself that you are an addictive personality, or that you are too far gone but rather be open to the idea that your addictions have been serving and protecting you in some way until you can get to the place where you don’t need them anymore.  See them as a survival mechanism rather than as your downfall.

-Find someone wonderful to facilitate and bear witness to your journey.  This might be a personal coach, therapist, NET practitioner, etc.  Just be sure it is someone you feel emotionally safe with and whose skill impresses you.

-Be patient.  This may take longer than you would like, but know that it is possible.  On the way, avoid judging yourself and the ongoing expression of your addictions.  The healing process can often be invisible at times, but trust that it is happening.

When we are children, we don’t have the psychological resources to protect ourselves from the atrocities that others may inflict upon us.  This trauma is often stored somehow in our bodies.  Repression and other defense mechanisms help us to survive until we can hold our own in the world.  However, the damage done to us while children must itself be healed and released in addition to understanding and freeing ourselves from the related difficulties experienced in adulthood.

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Do challenges devastate you or define you?

As a life coach, I spend a lot of time helping clients to pay close attention to their autopilot reaction to challenges in their lives. What you consider to be challenges and how you respond to them are defining factors in the quality of your life.

Next time your sense of well-being is disturbed, try the following 5-step process and see if it leads you in a better direction. Don’t be surprised if you get stuck on the first step. This is profound work and doesn’t happen overnight. The key is to keep practicing with deep personal honesty until this response comes naturally to you.

1. Attitude: Your attitude will pre-determine your ability to work with and learn from life’s challenges each and every time they show up. If you tend to think of them as ‘wrong’ and as ‘things that shouldn’t happen’ then you will automatically be thrown into a defensive and confrontational posture. On the other hand, if you receive them as simply calling you or the situation into question, a more relaxed, self-trusting, and open response is possible. If the same pattern happens again and again, rather than going into high drama defensive victim mode with such thoughts as ‘here we go again,’ ‘this always happens to me,’ ‘everyone else . . . ’ or ‘what’s wrong with me?’ try another point of view. Rather than suffering through the challenges that come your way, consider embracing your life as a perfectly customized journey of learning, growing and healing. Give yourself permission to be vulnerable and to explore your own behavior without trying to justify it as ‘right.’

2. Feel It, Name It, and Rename It: Once you have opened up your attitude and are ready to learn from your experience, take a few deep breaths and focus inward to what it feels like inside of you meeting this unexpected and perhaps undesired experience. Are you scared? Mad? In shock? Be really honest with yourself and name your feelings and name the challenge. For example, I am working through a challenge with my downstairs neighbor. She complains about things like the fact that she can hear my cats running down the hall. This triggers anger in me and I tend to fly into judgment of her as a small-minded person with a princess complex. My mind reels with anger at her choice to make an issue of everything and anything I do that she doesn’t like, rather than choosing to acknowledge all the things that are good about having me for a neighbor and/or choosing to contribute to creating a harmonious shared living environment.

When I look below the surface I see that this trigger relates to a much deeper issue I am working on that has to do with feeling profound sadness when I encounter all the big and little ways that we choose less than the goodness, kindness, and caring that is available to us in our relationships with one another. When I see any presenting irritation in that context, I am better able to respond in a way that encourages my own learning and growth rather than falling into the same old pattern of judgment and self-preservation. When I redefine the true issue at hand in this way, I take ownership of it by recognizing the difference between the deeper issue and the outer trigger of the situation at hand. By renaming the true issue, I can respond more appropriately.

3. Neutral Observation: Neutrality means not belonging to or favoring either side in a challenge. It is the opposite of analyzing and judging the behavior of others as a way to feel righteous or good about yourself. Neutral observation occurs when we choose to activate that part of ourselves that is not IN the situation involved, but rather is able to move around it and look at it and ourselves from many points of view, free of our triggered feelings and thoughts. This is how we gain insight instead of just running the same old reactions from our past. When we are open to a new point of view rather than automatically making the situation, other person, or ourselves ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ our imagination and deeper insights can lead to entirely new and more rewarding ways of seeing what is really going on.

4. Inner Work: Always do your inner work as described in steps 1-3 above before deciding how to respond to the outer situation. Think of the outer situation as merely the hook or trigger that is calling you to finding greater inner freedom. When you have done your inner work, rename the challenge as your own personal learning opportunity as in the example in #2 above. Trust that what comes your way in life is FOR YOU not against you.

5. Outer Work: Having stepped free of your autopilot, knee-jerk reaction to a given challenge by doing your inner work, it becomes fairly easy to choose how you want to respond to or engage in the situation at hand. As tempting as it is, for example, for me to say something judgmental and unkind to my neighbor like ‘get a life,’ or ‘you better be careful or your mind is going to get so small that you’ll lose it altogether,” I have learned that it serves me far better to say something like, ‘yes, isn’t it a happy sound when my cats run down the hall,’ or to quietly say a prayer for the highest good in the situation and to go do my own inner work.

I know these steps seem simple when you read them. I’ve heard many a client dismiss or become irritated by my guidance towards one of these steps, defensively thinking they already know this. But, the name of the game here is not intellectual knowledge, but application. It is in the doing that we learn. Practice, practice, practice and then challenge yourself to take this process deeper and deeper until you really get free.

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