How to persist when Life takes its own time

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.

If all these resonate with your life situation any time, read on. I hope you shall find useful insights into this.

The actual problem can get masked
Continue reading How to persist when Life takes its own time

Your body language matters!

Can we change our state of mind, just by changing how we behave?

Have you ever noticed that your physical expressions convey the message to others more powerfully than your words?

Have you experienced that your eyes convey love more effectively than your mouth?

What we express physically in our comunication and relationships reflect what state of mind we are in. It is natural for us to do so. However, it is also true that if we change how we express ourselves physically, we can change our state of mind: Thoughts and Feelings!

It is easy to understand that our Thoughts determine our Feelings and Behviours; and also that our Feelings can decide what thoughts we are going to have and what actions we may take in response to our emotional state.

For example, if the content of my thought is empowering, I will have associated empowered feelings and will acto accordingly. Also, if I am already feeling upset because of some reason, I am going to have disempowering thoughs and will not act in an adaptive way.

Your Actions affect your Mindset Continue reading Your body language matters!

The Power Is With You!

Life gets unfair.

Things are not in my favour.

Peole are not helpful. People are after me.

The circumstances are not allowing myself to fulfill my desires.

These are the thoughts that go through our minds sometimes. For some, this may be a regular way of thinking.

How do we handle this?

The experience is not what happens to us but rather it is what we perceive as what is happening to us.

This is said by many in different ways. The conclusion is:

It is the perception not the events that creates our experiences.

We can learn to choose what we perceive. We need to train ourselves how we process what happens to us. And this applies to all areas of life.

Events don’t create feelings

It is not true that events by themselves create feelings and our behaviours. Yes, it is true that our state of mind determines our actions. But, the state of mind is the result of our perception of what is happening to us at a given moment.

How we process information is a habit Continue reading The Power Is With You!

How Does Being Grateful Help?

Most of us have a tendency (Ego-driven) to look for the things that are not working in our lives. I think it is because we are conditioned to work towards improving our lives. We are taught to look for the faults with us, find the cause behind them and Fix them.

I agree that it is ok to have an approach to know what can be improved in our lives and grow by learning in the process. However, in the process, if we forget to look at the things that are already working well, we are missing something important in our personal growth.

For some, life’s focus is on Lack

I know some people in my life, who are focused on what they lack in their lives, more than what they already have. The focus for them is to zoom in the areas that are not going well. They complain about how unlucky they are, how bad others around them are and how things do not go well even if they work hard.

I see this pattern in many of my clients in my counselling practice too. If I look at their lives from the perspective of an outsider, I can find events, people and reasons for them to Be Grateful.

Focus on what is already working in your life

I am of an opinion to give more importance to what is already working in our lives than finding out what is not working and fixing them. I have logical reasons and experiences to back it up and explain.

Being Grateful helps you become Resourceful Continue reading How Does Being Grateful Help?

Fixing Vs. Expressing Yourself

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.

Never complete Continue reading Fixing Vs. Expressing Yourself

Affirmations- easy to use and effective in outcome!

(If you want to see the video first, scroll down the page and you shall find it. I suggest to read the post first.)

I think most of you know what affirmations are. I looked inside Wikipedia and found this:

“Affirmation is a declaration that something is true.”

(as on the date of this post’s publication. Link)

I have found using affirmations very effective for me. I find that repeating certain words or phrases inside our mind helps us shifting our mental state.

If we are feeling low or hopeless or frustrated, repeating these chants of affirmations can lift us out of this prison of unhealthy emotional state.

As the definition above states, when we declare something with a sense that it is true, it starts shaping our reality as per its content.

For some people I know, this sounds very simple and so not much effective. But, let me tell you that this is one of the most profound way of accessing our resourceful state.

Many times we use some phrase inside our head that are not empowering and also repeat them without our conscious awareness for major part of our day. This can shape our day as per its content! We then wonder why things are not working and why I am stuck with my negative emotional state!

Affirmations with empowering content can dramatically lift a person out of the trap of unhealthy thinking and feeling patterns.

I remember my early days when I first started using affirmations consciously. Those were the phrases or sentences that I used as a part of Cognitive Behavior Therapy for my anxiety problems. Those phrases helped me calm down and feel safe. I could notice that using affirmations was one of the most effective ways of handling panic and anxiety. Although it was difficult to get handle on using them, continuing with the strategy helped me a lot. Continue reading Affirmations- easy to use and effective in outcome!

Learn to vibrate with our desires

In life, we often get into the trap where our desires are not congruent with our daily thoughts and behaviors. This is the time when we desire to have good things and people in our life, yet we vibrate at a frequency that attract opposite to what we want. This results in events in our life that we least want.

For example, we desire to have abundance and prosperity, but we get involved in mental processes and actions that attract scarcity. We talk about the problems we are facing and find reasons and people to blame for. We ruminate about things not working in our lives.

I believe in the Law of Attraction and so agree with the notion that we attract what we focus on. This reminds me of a saying that says,

“Be careful of what you think about… because you will get it.”

But how can we dissolve this discrepancy and learn to vibrate with what we want.

Let me tell you that the major part of our brain processing is Unconscious. Those are the mental processes and their consequent behaviors that occur outside of our awarewness. Continue reading Learn to vibrate with our desires

A time of uncertainty and Faith

Today I want to write about acting in time of uncertainty.

I am now getting the perspective that the time of uncertainty is the time of transition in life. I can tell this because I can recall many such incidences in past when things were uncertain and so tough to handle with; It usually, at the end turned out to help me learn and grow. When I hold on to this perspective I feel better about the times in life when I do not know what is going to unfold in coming days or weeks.

A scary time

This is the time in life when we feel scared about what can happen. We do not feel motivated to take action in any direction. We get trapped . We feel lack of resources inside us.

Transition phase

We have the option here to change our perspective and start looking at this time as a transition phase. We need to feel open to new and never-seen-before options. We also need to develop faith in the energy source of all existence and trust that it shall help us. We need to set intentions. We need to have and affirm the belief(or assumption) that every thing that happens has a positive intention behind it. This may seem difficult, yet this is the starting point in our passage from what we are to what we can become when this period of uncertainty ends.

Begining

Continue reading A time of uncertainty and Faith

Bring love in place of fear – part 2

(the begining is in part 1)

Initially I did not know how to do it and my ego did not allow me to bring love into the situation that was very fearful and anger-provoking. How can I bring love here when I am so much frightened? Is it not unjustifiable to dissolve this anger and fear by bringing love here? Logically, I could not make sense of doing so. Still I went ahead to give it a try.

I read about this concepts & also listened to it in some audios. This has always made be deny and argue about its validity at first. However when I experienced that myself, I could really grasp the subject! Now it is my way of living to bring love in place of fear every time!

I experimented by giving love to those all who are involved in making this type of mass homicidal incidences come true. It was really tough but when I persisted, I could think of reasons to love these souls too! Of course there is no legal way to justify their behaviors and I do not advocate or endorse here, that this kind of act should be any way allowed by the legal system. However, feeling love towards them has worked in bringing me back to my original happy and productive work and family life. I know that some of you may not like the way I resolved this conflict of mine but this has made me feel better and productive. I have become more creative and now believe that I can face and stand anything that is fearful. I am ready to help others and contribute.

My initial way of coping (rationalizaton and justifying) made me more self-centered and protective. It restricted myself from going out freely and living this world. I remained neutral in my feelings. When I brought love and persisted, it made me feel abundant and courageous!

I thought this way: Continue reading Bring love in place of fear – part 2

Bring love in place of fear – part 1

I could not stop myself but jump to write about this topic immediately after I returned from one of the hospitals I visit. When I left that clinic, in my car, this topic and its content kept on running inside my head. Actually, I jotted down some vague notes about it around a couple of months back, when first I got to think about it seriously. But today, I am actually drafting it for publishing here.

How it all started

Around two months back, when I came back from my hospital visit to a periphery town and switched on our television set, I was shocked on watching the news about a terrorist attack in Ahmedabad (for those who arw reading this and not from india; Ahmedabad is a big city in Gujarat state, India). The most shocking and terrifying was the fact that one of the blast places was the Civil Hospital of the city. I was not at all in a state to digest such kind of information at that time, as I was really tired from my day’s work. I changed the channel but could not stop myself from coming back to different news channels, that were broadcasting the news of the attack. I was curious to know more about it although the curiosity was fear dirven! Although I was scared, I continued watching the same clip on the channel repeatedly. My son was sitting besides me and playing with his toys. He looked at the TV and also the fear on my face. I realized and tried to divert him play with his friends.

The other family members also came to know about the news. We sat together and talked about it. We shared our opinions and discussed how to be safe in this period of terror. The fear inside me was then diluted!

Next day Continue reading Bring love in place of fear – part 1