Archive for category: Consciousness/Thriving

If you are one of those people who dreads the holidays or simply does not want to experience a repeat performance of holidays past, this article is for you.  Preparing for the holidays is not just about eating food, buying presents, and making travel arrangements.  The kind of holiday season you will have is not primarily determined by who you are with, how they behave, and what presents you receive.  

The #1 key to enjoying the holidays is choosing to be an active, conscious participant and not a passive, unconscious victim.

What you do in your inner mental and emotional kingdom will determine whether you suffer through yet another holiday or do your best to ensure that you optimize your chances to have a delightful time.  Blaming and judging others for your dissatisfaction keeps you stuck in your unhappiness.  If you want to create, promote, and allow yourself to sing a different tune this year, you have to get in the driver’s seat to make that happen.

Empower yourself, not others, to determine the quality of your experience.

I remember shopping in Filene’s Basement in Boston once and the memory still makes me giggle while also reminding me of one of life’s most powerful lessons.  A woman asked her friend what she would tell her husband about all the things she was buying.  The friend replied, “I’m just going to tell him the devil made me do it.”  Well, just where was that devil and how is it that he or she had the power to take over that woman’s personal authority and responsibility for her own actions?  Too many of us play victim over the holidays disclaiming responsibility for our actions and experiences.  We tell ourselves we have no will power to resist all the treats and temptations.  We feel sorry for ourselves when we don’t feel loved and cared for by those with whom we share the festivities, or we feel left out because we have no invitations to be anywhere we really want to be.  Often, we think we are the only one in that situation.  When we are with our family, we often revert to the dysfunctional roles we played with each other during our childhood.  Many of us get depressed because this holiday season shows no promise of being wonderful.

What to do?  Here’s a plan to renovate your holiday experience:

Step One: Set a Clear Intention to Give Yourself a Good Holiday Experience:  Don’t commit to trying to do it differently.  Commit to doing it differently.  Make your own needs and happiness important to yourself and commit to doing your very best to take care of yourself.

Step Two: Assess Your Options and Set Realistic Expectations:  If you have been stuck in a rut of feeling obligated to spend your holidays with people you don’t enjoy being with, then your options will be far different from those of someone whose loved one has just died.  Survey your situation.  First ask yourself, “what do I really expect is going to happen this holiday season?”  Be ruthlessly honest with yourself because your expectations are the foundation upon which your experience will be built.  They are self-fulfilling prophecies of what is to come.  It’s kind of insidious, but what we believe to be true has power.  Beliefs function like a screening mechanism whereby we prove ourselves to be right.  If you tell yourself that unpleasant circumstances, situations, and events will repeat themselves, they will – because that’s the only option you believe is available to you.   Alternatively, you can anticipate the challenges and temptations you will encounter, and choose to create a happier holiday as a gift to yourself.

From where you stand right now, what are you anticipating your holiday season to bring your way?  What about it looks good to you and what looks dreadful?  Have you experienced those dreadful things in the past?  How well did you handle them? With 20/20 hindsight and ruthless honesty, do you see anything you might do differently that could yield a better experience for you?  Were you on autopilot reacting to your experiences or were you really staying present in the moment trying different strategies to improve your experience?  If you can’t think of any alternative ways of experiencing the same old challenges, imagine someone you consider to be savvy and outstanding at handling these kinds of situations.  What would he or she do?  Are you willing to step outside your comfort zone and try something new or would you rather just suffer through it all again?

If you are particularly tender-hearted due to the death of a loved one or some other sensitive new experience in your life, be honest with yourself about what you really need.   Maybe everyone else’s well-intended concern for your well-being is more than you can bear right now.  Maybe you’d just like to be alone and let the holidays pass uneventfully.  It’s OK.

Let the filter through which you assess your options be about your true needs rather than any concern for what others might think.  Have the courage to trust your own instincts rather than trying to please others by following tradition or doing what you think they expect.

Step Thee:  Get Creative and Bold: Be proactive.  Here are some of the things you might do differently:

Find a new place to belong.  Think of someone with whom you’d really like to spend the holiday.  Let them know why it would be meaningful to you and ask if it’s possible.  If not, think of someone else.  If you end up with yourself that need not be a lonely option.

Spend the holidays in service to others.  Whose holiday might you make brighter?  Is there an organization in your area that you would like to help?  Is there someone you know who could use your loving kindness?

Consider a feast for one.  Some of my favorite Thanksgiving Day memories are from creating and eating an entire feast for one and having fabulous leftovers for days.

Let the holiday pass uneventfully.  If there is no one available you would really love to be with and don’t want to be bothered with holiday activities, honor that as the right choice and not a “poor me” scenario.

Host your own holiday.  Rather than being someone else’s guest, take the initiative to be the architect of a holiday with you as the host(ess).

Give yourself a lavish holiday for one.  Maybe that means travelling to somewhere exotic or decorating your home over the top and buying yourself lots of presents that you wrap rivaling Martha Stewart’s finest work.

Be with the same people, but do it very differently.  Sometimes, drastic measures are called for.  If you have a family member or fellow participant who treats you as though you are emitting a really bad odor, practice not letting his or her negativity in.  This may take a lot of effort and time to perfect.  Consider new strategies like praying for you both, distracting yourself into being helpful to your host(ess), having meaningful exchanges with others, and minimizing the opportunities for this person’s behavior to infect your experience.  It all helps.  And, you may find it all too tiresome to continue being in this person’s company and decide to go in another direction entirely.

Trust your intuition about what is right for you no matter how different from what other people think you should do.  If you find yourself not experiencing a strong sense of belonging anywhere but with yourself or feel more like an observer of other people’s festivities rather than a real participant, break free of obligations.  Be grateful for being invited, but maybe it’s time to strike out on your own.

The bottom line is to give yourself the holiday experience that is just right for you.  Do what is meaningful to you and be with people who appreciate you.  Some might view this as self-indulgent, but I see it as taking responsibility for warming the cockles of your own sweet heart.  Happy holidays everyone!

Please share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

If you would like to suggest a topic for a future blog or ask me to address a particular situation or issue, please email me at judithjohnson@hvc.rr.com

To view a more extensive archive of my articles, visit me on the Huffington Post at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/judith-johnson

(Image courtesy of Lindsay Mumma on http://www.trianglecrc.com/blog/holiday-stress/)

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.

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.