 Be honest, how much does the way other people behave affect your mood? Your nearest and dearest, your boss, your work colleagues, the guy who served you at the coffee bar?
As humans we have become accustomed to putting others in the driving seat when it comes to how good we feel. In our relationships at home especially, but also at work, how others are being can affect you greatly if you believe you’re not always in control of your own experience. I heard a great story this week about a couple who had been married a long time, and their grown up son was distressed because his father had Alzheimer’s and he couldn’t bear to see what it was doing to his mother. He was asking a great spiritual master why this had happened and what he could do about it. Alzheimer’s, he was told, is just a form of withdrawing from this physical life. When someone has Alzheimer’s they initially have difficulty remembering recent events but, as the disease progresses, they sort of recede through time and stop recognizing those closest to them. I recall my great uncle being heartbroken as his wife no longer knew him, speaking only of those in her childhood. The spiritual master told this man that his father had really deployed a rather clever way of getting his wife, who he had sensed was rather dependent on him for her happiness, used to him not being there. Now none of this happened at a conscious level, it wasn’t as though this man had flicked through the pages of a medical journal, chosen a disease and whamo, there it was. It never is that way, we desire something (or fear something in which case the desire for the opposite is born), the universe responds. Hence the saying ‘be careful what you wish for’ because we don't get to dictate how it will come about or who is involved. This man or his wife had certainly had strong feelings for each other and a concern that his passing would cause her great unhappiness. His mother, who was used to being in the driving seat, was struggling because the person she had known was no longer there. The son was lovingly reminded he could not change any of the circumstances, he couldn’t charge in on a white horse and fix this, he could acknowledge that his father was withdrawing from this life and honor his path, he could encourage his mother to look beyond the life that had been hers, and start to see the things in it now that were worth appreciating. Her strength was not in his father, her strength was in herself, as was her happiness. Whether it's a loved one with an actual form of dementia, or simply an outstanding task that they promised to do (6 months ago), understand that, good or bad, we bring these situations into our life; not by prescription but by our strong desire (or worry). When you also realise that feeling good is both entirely within your gift and absolutely necessary in order to go with the flow of our life, you can start to practice getting into the drivers seat of your own life experience. It’s the minority who both understand and live like this because we’ve become a society dependent on others for our happiness. Despite being born with a joy and happiness that is indiscriminate, we soon receive messages that we can't rely upon our own knowing and intuition, we must rely on others, and so it is that we start to outsource our wellbeing. Rather than letting the joy flow we unknowingly train our children into thoughts that really just create resistance to the good things coming into their lives. Most of us act mainly from a point of fear, letting our minds run away with the "what if..." scenarios. Many believe they are their mind, rather than it being a tool for creating. Each day as you go about your routine, watch out for the thoughts you have that attribute how you're feeling to others. I know I do it all the time, with my partner, my children, the lady at the cash desk, the man in the car behind, the list is endless. Now though, I catch myself and think, "that’s interesting, what does that interaction reflect back about me and what I’m feeling?”. Remember it’s all interconnected. Most of your thoughts every day are repeated, rote repetitions based on past experiences, and because you keep replaying them you keep attracting the same experiences which further entrenches your beliefs. A belief after all is just a thought repeated again and again. It’s based on those thoughts that you take action and it's that action that determines your feelings, and thus your experiences. If you’re just letting it all happen unconsciously and not taking responsibility for your own feelings, you are missing out on your best life. You can be in the driving seat. It’s not that you will never experience challenges, because challenges remind us of what we don’t want, and in that the desire for something new is born. In time, as you become more conscious of your own thoughts, and your own feelings, your experience of challenges changes because your perspective changes. You will take a helicopter ride and look at your life from a broader perspective and wonder what dots this experience will connect to later on, trusting it will bring about exactly what you intended – whether deliberate or not. Your feelings are what attracts your experiences, if you refuse to feel bad, you will start to attract more and more of the things you do want into your life. We know “it’s not what happens it’s how we respond”, yet in our darker moments we reject it, wallowing instead in a pool of powerlessness brought about by our own narrow perspective. What happens if you have someone depending on you for their happiness? People who attribute how they are feeling to you? While you can take on an attitude of “I’m not responsible for how you feel, you are”, you really just have to be the example. The truth is, if you have someone like that in your life, it’s probably a reflection of your own beliefs. Stand up and take charge of your own life. The sooner you do, the more you will notice others around you stop depending on you for their happiness because you can’t attract what you're not projecting. There is much out there to help you with the 'how' of all of this, aside of my own articles there are libraries full of wisdom on this topic, go with something that resonates for you. Make it your mission to take charge of feeling good for yourself. Whatever you desire in life it starts with feeling good about who you are and what you have in your life now. You are not responsible for the details of how it happens or who is involved. Take the example of the man whose father had Alzheimer's. His mother wished for the father to be well again so that she could be happy, but really, her wish was to be happy. Yes, once upon a time that happiness had come about because of the times she shared with her husband, but if her desire for happiness is the predominant feeling, she would start to attract many other situations into her life that would also give her happiness. ‘Who’ is not important, other than you. You can start to feel good about who you are right now. Over time, if you practice that, you will find more peace, more joy, more harmony and, as you look back, be amazed at how your life has changed. This article was initially published on LinkedIn. photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27526538@N07/9240212796">Ojas' First Shoot</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">(license)</a>
0 Comments
 Photo by Webvilla Being who you are is about being the best, most vibrant version of yourself. With our wellbeing so multifaceted, it’s important that we listen and maintain a healthy balance between our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual states.
Time and again I learn that in order to make a change in your life, the easiest and fastest way is to start by finding your happy place and then surrendering the how and the who to happy coincidence in circumstances. When it comes to dieting, it’s worth remembering that it’s your emotional state that drives your behaviours and actions. This week I had a physical assessment in which I was told the energy systems in my body are working at far from optimal, around 30-40 %; the likely root cause being sugar and gluten. Growing up in the west of Scotland, where you can buy deep fried chocolate bars in the fish and chip shop, it’s probably fair to say that my diet is sub-optimal. However, it’s what’s driving me to eat the sugar and gluten that is more relevant. There are a couple of times in my life where what I was eating became really important. Firstly, in my early twenties, when I was suffering from undiagnosed panic attacks, the doctor was bombarding me with antibiotics for chest infections (because one of the symptoms I had was chest pain… yes, I know it was pretty unbelievable) which then created a yeast issue. This led me to study Candida, its effects and links with diet, in quite a lot of depth. These days those links are all well understood, but back then the science was only emerging. What released me from the symptoms wasn’t the diet. Understanding what was happening to my body, and why, helped me to let go of the feelings of fear that were driving them. All my other health issues then just dissipated. Later, in my thirties, with four failed pregnancies behind me, along with a huge amount of angst around the trying and failing, I decided to set aside trying for a time and focus instead on my general health and wellbeing. Just prior I had read a book by scientist Dee McCaffrey, on flourless and sugarless living. She was one of the original scientists who ‘recommended’ the food pyramid (the final published version was practically inverted due to the pressure from food manufacturers apparently). Then, out of the blue, someone recommended a naturopath to me that had a lot of success in helping others have healthy babies. Knowing that he’d recommend a healthy diet and some herbs I felt a sense of dread at the time and effort it would require but, given all that I understood about the evils of sugar and flour, I decided to give it a try. It was at this point I realised just how limited my knowledge of food was. Reading through the list of recommended grains (I hadn’t even thought of a world beyond wheat, oats and barley), it struck me how pervasive gluten and sugar is in our world. Knowing how extraordinarily difficult it was to cater for the anti-Candida diet I had tried briefly back in the early 1990’s, there was certainly a feeling of apprehension in thinking about embarking on a sugarless, flourless diet. Within the first month (on both occasions) of altering my diet I fell pregnant and gave birth to two beautiful healthy babies, thus proving it can make a difference. However, more important than the diet, I had first let go of the sense of a lack of a pregnancy and switched focus to my general wellbeing. Six years on, having breastfed two babies, worked full time for most of it and now the demands of parenting two young children while switching careers, I confess my dietary habits have slipped back into their old ways. I could go on a healthy diet and I’m sure it would give me more energy, but I’ve learned it’s really the hard way to go about things. There’s no disputing that certain foods provide us with better energy than others, there’s a really simple universal principle that the closer a food is to its natural state, the better it is for your body. However, if you are relying on the diet to make you feel better, you really are making things hard for yourself. Whatever change you want to see in your life, the easiest way, the fastest way to achieve it, is to get into alignment with the inner you. What that means is it is your job to feel good, because that is your indication you’re in tune with yourself. Think about a time when you were really happy, can you remember how easily things just seemed to flow? That is your natural state. Your willpower is like a battery that gets depleted quicker than a Samsung Galaxy downloading a video. If you are embarking on a diet and you are not in the zone, in your natural state, your will battery will be pretty empty already. It’s a hard way to achieve what you want. Feeling good is the key to your success. It might seem strange after all that we have been taught in our society, but if you want to make some real changes read the article Hating Your Way to Happiness to help you get in the zone and feel good. Forget trying to force a diet, your first priority is to feel good about yourself, and then you will be naturally attracted to the foods that make you feel good. If you feel bad the golden arches might prove irresistible, or that bar of chocolate at the checkout, or the bottle of wine in the fridge... If you feel great you are more likely to notice the smell of the fresh fruit on the counter, or the sight of vegetables in a picture is more likely to start a creative process in your mind of putting together dinner. Feel good and you’ll start to make healthy choices that are right for you, the real you. This article was originally published on LinkedIn.  Photo by Sergei Zolkin Female hormones - and all their glorious effects in adulthood - rarely get discussed in workplaces. Men dare not, preferring instead to keep comments limited to jokes in down time. Women dare not, lest a crack should show in our armory and we should be thought of as 'less' somehow.
When we are at work, most of us want to remain professional and are likely to keep our masks in tact. In the throws of some hormonal fluctuation, if we do manage to keep the mask in place, often the inner dialogue is slightly less than professional. Our patience and tolerance are diminished - outwardly we might smile and nod, if you are lucky, but inwardly we are rolling our eyes, seething and thinking "how dare they..." or " I just don't have time for this crap". At home though we tend to let the mask slip. Those around us know first hand the effects these potent chemicals have with such regularity. Last week I found myself verbally unleashing momentary rage upon my kids for, well, being kids – making a mess, bickering, screeching at the first sign of anything blocking their flow; how dare they? Like Bruce Banner becoming the Hulk, I just flipped. Joking aside, one day I am at peace with everything around me, not easily flustered by much at all, the next I have all the tolerance of a pea. Out of the blue there are scripts playing in my head that have been silent for a few weeks, basically blaming everyone around me for their selfishness and insensitivity. I hear myself chuntering all the same things I used to hear my mother say, getting sucked into a vortex of thoughts, stories that reaffirm my righteousness. Then I observe with wonder and incredulity. Why did I speak to my children in such a way? “They’ll not trust me if I’m not consistent” I thought, then, “don’t blow it, you are meant to be their safe haven". The grip subsided, started to dissipate. “Goodness girls” I said, “I’m so sorry, that wasn’t nice at all huh? “ They reaffirmed and I apologised, again. In the next moment, one of them spilt something on the floor and the mad lady was back. “How dare you?” I cried. To myself I thought “stop, just stop, that is enough”. Exhausted I decided we had to switch it up, get some fresh air and burn off some energy. Good move. The energy I’d tuned into was so dense, it was pulling me down. Out in the sun enjoying the kids playing at the park, a modicum of tranquility returned as my energy found a different wavelength to tune to, my inner stillness. Thank goodness I practice regularly tuning into that inner stillness when I’m not so emotional; it helps me to find it when I am. I have heard it said that – at various points in the hormonal cycles – females are susceptible to the energy of female persecution through the ages, something I thought sounded totally farfetched when I first heard it. However, given we are always creating energy, and that all energy created hangs around, in a hormonal state I obviously give off some bad vibes and attract more. Rage certainly seems to spring from nowhere. I’m not sure that we can even blame biology for the hormonal state, because anthropological studies show that cultures vary in the way a woman’s hormones affect them. In societies where the females have been cherished, the emotional and physical state we recognize as ‘premenstrual’ or ‘menopausal’ does not exist. This leads me to the cultural expectations that we get locked into from a young age. Women going periodically schizo (I don’t mean this distastefully, there is no better phrase to describe the constant and extreme switches in emotional state), arguments ensuing and men rolling their eyes and sanctimoniously saying “ah, it’s that time again is it?” all reinforce the energy hanging around. Even in the workplace you can be sure everyone is thinking that when a female seems to ‘lose the plot’. With two girls growing into this world I am sensitive to the things that they can take on that remove them yet another step from their innocence – or ‘inner sense’. For really, that natural state that children come into this world with is the natural state within all of us. It’s the one I tune into when I practice mindfulness or meditation. If we can simply be the space in which these strong emotions arise, allowing them to be without attaching thought to them, they start to dissipate. While I’d rather not be schizo mum, at least I am at a point where I recognize it and try to catch it now. I apologise for it if I don’t catch it in time, and I hope that I’ll get better and better at simply being the space for that energy to pass through me like a wave and dissipate, it’s as important for my own wellbeing as it is for that of my kids. Still today I know female persecution exists, but for most of us, if we can start to let go of the hurts of the past, the bad vibes will have no place to exist anymore, they will dissipate and we can free ourselves of this taboo and move forward. This article was originally published on LinkedIn. |
This is a two-step sign-up process, you will have to verify your subscription by clicking the link in the email you should receive after clicking this 'Subscribe' button. If you do not receive the email please check your Junk mail.
By signing up you will only receive emails from shonakeachie.com related to Shona's Blog and you can unsubscribe at any time, thank you. Please note if you are using the Google Chrome browser and want to subscribe to the RSS Feed you will first need to get an RSS plugin from the Chrome Store.
|
RSS Feed
Site powered by Weebly. Managed by iPage