Resourceful Life

Thinking about a life without problems is an illusion. My personal and clients’ experiences have helped me get this insight.

In life, we may come across some problems that repetitively appear in our lives. We try to fix them, they disappear for a brief period and show their faces again later in life.

I tried to fight with these repetitive problems in my  life. I tried to fix them but some of them kept on coming. I also experienced that whenever I found myself on the way, speeding up, towards my goals; something would happen to derail me.

Is it a pattern within me that brings those difficult moments back into my life?

I have now grasped the meaning behind these repetitive painful experiences in my life.

Why is it so?

What are they?

How to deal with them?

How did I deal with them initially

Earlier I worked with my negative feelings and thoughts with cognitive and behavioral therapy approach. The feelings and thoughts which were disempowering, were my Automatic Negative Thoughts and resultant emotional experiences, I believed. I explained to myself that these ANTs and associated feelings are the results of my dysfunctional beliefs and paying them importance is strengthening my negative beliefs. So, I learned to ignore them. I just let them pass through my mind without attaching any judgment to them but acknowledging them as ANTs.

(This is an unedited post. I have not done its spell and grammar check. It was high time that I did not continue with posting. Of course, I grew in other areas of my life during these days. I realized today that I have a commitment towards this blog and its few readers. So I decided to shoot the one directly from my heart.)

People have tendency to motivate themselves by feeling pain in their current life situations. This creates the impetus for them to move away from where they are right now. This is one way of going for your desires. We have been conditioned to think and act this way.

The focus in this way of living is to move towards what you should be, and constantly feeling unhappy about your current situations in life. This is generally a process occurring in your psyche outside your conscious awareness. There may not be an intention to deal with the life this way. But, this is the way it is for the most.

The critical aspect that is missing here is the acknowledgment what you are. You devalue your current self. You obsessively tend to focus towards something different and more attractive aspects of yourself that has not yet manifested in your present self.

The excessive and obsessive focus on What you should be than What you are!

photo credit: KayVee.INC

Life can be lived in two ways:

1. In the way our conditioned-self directs us to take on

2. We find our purpose and our true-self and design our lives based on the direction that we get after aligning with our true-selves.

The first way is the most natural (?) way of living for most of us. We live our lives based on the beliefs and assumptions that are programmed inside us by our family members, teachers and other environmental influences. We accept this learning without our conscious awareness. We learn this because we were taught to think and behave in specific ways and also by observing people around us living and thinking about life in their own ways.

The mind in our early lives was like a sponge. It absorbed what ever it was offered to. The more consistently and intensively something was offered, the more impact that left on our psyche. People who played critical role in our lives did not have any wrong intention, in most of the cases, to affect us negatively. Yet, they pass their negative (better word is: dis-empowering or maladaptive) life patterns to us without knowing the process happening.

photo credit: lydurs

It takes courage. It takes faith. It takes commitment to apply.

Time that tests your patience

It is the time when things are not in your control. You have worked hard and still Life is not turning the way you want it to. You may start doubting whether you really have control over things in your life or the events  happen randomly and you are there just to respond to  them!

This time fills your heart with feelings of disappointment, frustration and also hopelessness at times. You start wondering how much more life asks from me. Am I going to live my whole life this way? Struggling and working to find ways how to make it happen and never making it happen?!

You may even start doubting your worthiness to receive what you want in your life.

You are committed and ready to learn and apply whatever it takes but sometimes do not find any clue for it.

I am a believer of the philosophy that says that, the outside events in our lives are the results of what is going on inside us. This belief further reinforces the above mentioned feelings of despair for some; as you tend to blame yourself for things not going well in your life.

What’s your way of living?Fixing or Expressing?

If you can not make sense of what I am trying to say,  just go ahead and read the post.

I lived that way

It was my way of living. Fixing Myself! I lived that way for years. I worked very hard on myself. Yes, Hard On Myself!! I was never happy with whatever I created. I would search for the reasons to prove to me that the work could still be better!

It was comfortable

The process was somehow helping me survive with my Low Self-esteem. I believed deeply inside me that it was the Correct way of Living. I was always protected. No major difficulties. Yet, no excitement and no feeling of growth.

Every day was predictable. Even problems in life could be managed by Blaming Me! I could always find something inside me to Fix and then would spend days in correcting.

I believed that if I could learn how the mind worked I would overcome my Low Self-esteem. I did not realize for a long period that I was trapped by Myself! My mind was making me fool and I continued to remain in the state that was comfortable and known to me. Ofcourse, I did not have to face Change. I did not have to explore the Unknown.