Monthly Archives: July 2017

Jul 30
2
Problems

Problems

By | Encouragement, positive thoughts | No Comments

We all run into problems from time to time. From small daily things to big unexpected events. The choice we have is in how we deal with our problems. Usually our first instinct to problems is resistance. It is something happening that we didn’t want or plan for. Often we fall into poor habits of thinking when we encounter problems.

Rather than focusing on solutions and opportunities, we may have created a habit of worrying and overanalyzing. We spend too much time focusing on the problems, and that habit creates more problems. We aren’t always taught to step back and look for the opportunities in the change or situation. We may have created our first instinct to think of worst-case scenarios and agonize over what could happen or go wrong.

When we tune into these thoughts and vibrations, we are actually attracting more negative outcomes with our stress and worry. Think of it like a domino effect. Once you knock the first one down, the rest follow after. Or there is an old saying that “birds of a feather flock together.” Your thoughts react very similarly. It’s like a chain effect. Once you are thinking positively or negatively, the next thought generally follows suit.

Now, you can turn negative worrisome thoughts around, but it may take a little practice and trickery to turn that momentum around. You may have to start slow to look for the positives in the situation. If you slow the focus down on the problem or the negativity, you can allow some space for other thoughts and feelings to come in. You may have to look for the silver lining. If you can find any good points to start with, you can turn the worry and troubling thoughts around by focusing on one good thought at a time. If you can get a few going, you can start the domino effect going in your favor.

It’s done by training your mind and subconscious to start looking at things more positively. When you can look for the positive points more often, you will create those habits of thinking. You don’t have to jump to stress and worry when a problem arises. The more you can practice, the stronger your abilities get. No one can promise you that situations and problems won’t pop up, but you can learn new and better ways to cope and deal with them.

Isn’t it nice to know that you can experience problems without things getting worse? It’s more about the forces you choose to add to your momentum of thinking. Learning to see the positive aspects instead of seeing everything that can go wrong can be a more empowering way to use your imagination. Utilize your gifts of thought in your favor. When you understand how powerful your thoughts really are, you can move them around in support of you.

Your mind generally leads you in one direction or another. The opposite of problems is assistance, help, benefit, peace, opening, or a good situation. The opposite of worry is calmness, cheer, certainty, pleasure, trust and reassurance. So you always have an option in which direction you are leading your thoughts. You can guide them towards more worrisome and problematic thoughts, or you can practice more regularly the more calm and reassuring thoughts.

I have found that I deal with my problems so much better and more clearly when I can take a little time to feel reassured. I have to build that trust and guidance from within. Often the answers we need are within ourselves. When we burden ourselves with the problems and worry, we can’t see a better solution awaiting.

The next time you start to notice and experience a problem, acknowledge your feelings and emotions surrounding it. See if you can find some positive things to focus on until you feel more centered and comforted. Once you can gain this perspective, you can allow more solutions in these opportunities. You may even surprise yourself and find a better direction. Many times problems that pop up are a blessing towards a better journey than we had originally planned.

Jul 24
2
Guiding our thoughts

Guiding Our Thoughts

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I’ve learned over the years that guiding your thoughts yields better results than trying to control them. Often when we have decided to aim to feel more positive by working on our thoughts, we tend to make it harder on ourselves by trying to force it. Many people teach in meditation that, rather than trying to stop all thoughts, we should learn to observe them and allow them to pass by. The same concept can be helpful in our everyday lives.

Many of us are living in a fast-paced, busy culture. Finding ways to destress and not feel overwhelmed can take some practice in how we experience our present. When you want to feel joyful and relaxed in your daily life, it is helpful to know that it’s not about trying to control every thought—it’s about learning to guide your thoughts. You do that by noticing how you are thinking more often.

The awareness of how you are feeling when things are busy is key. We often push through and do not pay attention when life is busy and stressful. We get through it by triggering our adrenaline. Our adrenaline is designed to kick in for emergency situations. When we get our adrenaline going daily by being stressed, our health and kidneys can be poorly affected.

We often get caught up in our busy world and forget to notice how little we are breathing deeply, feeling relaxed and balancing this pace. Even noticing many times in your day how you are feeling and breathing can be a small step into remembering to take deep breaths and feel calm.

Paying attention to the little moments in your day can provide a powerful yet small opportunity that is doable. For many, big changes are hard to do all at once. Instead of struggling to rise to overwhelming expectations, scale it back to some smaller steps. Think of it like eating your meal with smaller bites and slowing down. The idea is to pay attention throughout your day to notice when you are feeling those stressful and unpleasant feelings, and then to gently guide them towards more pleasing thoughts.

If our situations in life don’t provide much opportunity to feel calm, we have to find ways that are applicable in our lives to feel calm. Noticing when we are feeling stress and when our breathing gets shallow, we can take a second to take a deep breath and decide to think about something pleasing. Just for a moment. It doesn’t take much time or money to stop and think about either a pleasant memory, something you’re looking forward to, or something you’d enjoy. This immediately slows down your heart rate, allows more space to breathe deeply, and evokes some calmer emotions.

Once you feel a bit more calm, you can move through your day and handle more details with a bit more ease. It amazes me at how much better my decision making process is when I’m not feeling stressed. When I make decisions from a calmer place, I also feel more at peace after making them. You can feel more sure-footed. As you feel more ease through your day, you will in turn feel less stressed, less overwhelmed, and certainly less negative. This leads to better health and more positive feelings.

Guiding moves with more ease. Controlling is more forceful. Can you feel the difference between the two? It’s just a small adjustment towards feeling more joyful daily. The more joy you can harness more often, the happier your daily life will be. It amazes me how powerful small shifts can be. Perhaps it’s because they are easier and more applicable. Change can be more permanent when it’s comfortable and simple.

Remember that change doesn’t have to be hard and gigantic. It can be easily done and small-scale. It’s taking smaller steps and smaller bites. As the old saying goes: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!”

Jul 16
2
Our minds

Our minds

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We often give technology more credit than we do the capabilities of our magical minds. Just like a computer downloads and stores information, so does our mind—but we have much more than a hard drive. Our mind may take us a few years to store science and advanced studies, but it may only take a second to download the information that you can burn yourself touching a hot surface. We are multifaceted in many ways.

It can take a computer programmer a period of time to download information, but we can’t teach a computer the powers we have like creativity, innovation, imagination, ideas, and visualizing. We forget how magnificently and capably we are made. The abilities and possibilities of what we can do are endless.

We continue to evolve, expand, and grow. Not only each of us, but collectively as a whole. We often get lost in our everyday tasks, focusing on our activities,, our responsibilities, and too often our problems. We forget the power we have in what we do with our minds. Where we focus our thoughts, emotions, ideas, and capabilities.

You were born with ingenuity. Creativity. Conjuring ideas and possibilities. Have you ever paid attention, when things are down to the wire, to the miracles you have performed in your life? I think when we can stop and take notice of things we didn’t think were possible turned into reality, we can let go of some of those strongholds of disbelief. You don’t have to have everything figured out to believe in what is possible. If that were the case, we certainly wouldn’t be on the internet or using smartphones.

It seems with our technological advancements we are just now understanding more of what the brain is capable of and how the mind functions.. We are learning that consciousness can’t quite be measured and that awareness exists outside of the brain. We are truly opening up to more ways we can work with our beautiful and creative minds. It seems amazing to me that, in addition to our talents and gifts, we may be competent at even more!

When we take the time to nourish and care for our thoughts and mind, we also enhance our abilities. We often forget how inventive and resourceful we are made to be. Our genius is within us all. Don’t discredit yourself for not knowing it all. No computer does, and man has to download it to begin with. The more you can appreciate and recognize your greatness, the more you empower what is possible!

Our minds are one of the greatest values and assets we have to help with our health, body, and soul. The more we can treasure and respect it, the more knowledge we can gain and the higher we can soar together. Be open to learning new things. Understand there is always more to know. The less we close our minds, the more possibilities we open ourselves up to. The more we open ourselves up to the possible, the less we limit our potential.

I encourage you to be open and keep unlocking your potential. The sky is not the limit. Only your mind is. You don’t have to keep it locked up or grounded. You just have to first believe. I used to have a bad habit of saying we all have our limits. Now I understand that I am the only one who sets those limits. To set any boundaries restricts what we can do. Take off your constraints and allow your mind to keep expanding. You may be pleasantly surprised at how far you can go!

Jul 10
3
Stress

Managing Stress

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In life we can be frequently faced with stress. Whether big or small, often it is a big nuisance in our lives. In my career, stress appears to be one of the biggest complaints and struggles people deal with. I’ve not met anyone who has been able to completely avoid experiencing stress.

With practice we can certainly learn how to manage stress and improve our reactions to it. When we stress over our stress, we create an even bigger mess than the one we are already faced with. Not only does stress create much strife, but it also affects our health more than we may realize.

When we don’t find ways to balance the stress in our lives, it often manifests in health problems and unhappiness.

When we take the approach to fight stress head on, we end up creating more stress for ourselves. It isn’t always possible to eliminate stress from our lives, as circumstances can be out of our control. We can, however, accept that when it arises we can practice better management.

We can think of stress as an alarm system. Rather than struggling so much with it, we can look at it as an advantage of communication from our inner self. When stress arises we can understand that our body, mind, and spirit are letting us know something is out of our alignment.

It could be simply that we need to step back and reevaluate our situation. Slowing down to look at things a little more closely can be therapeutic when dealing with stress. When we can give ourselves the space to calm down and center ourselves, we can find clarity in handling our stress. It can also allow us the time to shift our perspective away from feeling stressed. We can have stress without panicking or making our stress bigger by the way we perceive it.

Many times we stress because we don’t know the outcome. We create bigger unease and stress by imagining worst-case scenarios. Overthinking can escalate quickly, causing us to stress further. Making some peace with stress enables us to work through it better. Accepting how things are can enable more choices in how we deal with our stresses.

Stress can be a healthy communitunicator in our lives rather than an exhausting battle. When you feel stressed try to step back a little and ask yourself what the stress is trying to communicate with you.

You can acknowledge stress as an alarm system, warning you to listen to your body and what it’s trying to tell you. Maybe you’ve said yes to what you really are miserable doing. Or you need to rest and take better care of yourself. Just because your mind wants to continue pushing you forward without taking a break doesn’t mean it’s good for your body or health. We may not be taught to listen to what our bodies are communicating, but we can learn from it if we do. I’ve seen people get severely ill too many times because they didn’t listen to their alarms. I’ve also learned a few of those lessons the hard way. They aren’t easy lessons when we ignore those nudges.

Reevaluating how we spend our time and energy can help reveal where our stresses can be coming from. Take some time to see what is really necessary. Sometimes it simply comes from our hold on how we think things need to be. When we can let go of our expectations, we can release a lot of our stress.

When we can honor what we need for our health by setting boundaries for self-care, we can heal many of the effects of stress. It’s helpful to take some time or give ourselves a little space to understand what we need more or less of in our life.

Habits can be tricky to break, but if we can notice when we make the statement we feel or are experiencing stress, we can start by pondering what is off-balance. Rather than use the word “stress,” change the language to “off-balance.” When something is off-balance, we can look at ways to try to balance it out. The word “stress” in and of itself seems to amplify powerlessness. It’s like an escape to avoid looking deeper into what is really going on inside ourselves.

You’re probably not going to eliminate all your stress in one day. What you can do is practice more things that calm and center you to manage the stresses in your life. Managing isn’t always about eliminating. It’s mostly about guiding, controlling, and directing.

Stress can overwhelm us and bring us all to our knees at times. We can empower ourselves away from the stress mentality and towards more balance in our lives. Stress is screaming for the need to neutralize. We all de-stress differently. The key point is honoring the importance of some equalization. This is how we can live and manage with stress present in our lives.