This whole Covid-19 lockdown thing and so many people being in fear got me thinking…
So we’ve all been locked up inside our homes for quite some time now, partially because we were told to, but some choose to stay there by choice and out of fear.
We’ve been told that there is a life threatening danger outside the walls of our homes and we’ve had our eyes fixed on the media who continuously provides us with more and more evidence that supports our belief that locking ourselves within the confines of our homes is the way for us to take control over and avoid the perceived threat and danger that is outside of it.
Although the fact that we are locked down in our homes is very real to us at present, we’ve actually really locked ourselves up in our own hearts too.
We’ve all experienced being hurt, disappointed, rejected and mistreated by others or experiences. We’ve all seen some things in the world out there that were not so good to see or experience. We’ve all read and heard the stories of how “evil & dangerous” the world outside is. And that has caused many of us to lock our hearts away behind big walls to keep anything out that would cause us any discomfort or pain.
We’re told by society that the way to keep ourselves emotionally and mentally safe is to put walls around our hearts and lock ourselves in there to take control of never being hurt, rejected or disappointed. And life has given us more than enough evidence to support that. So we keep our hearts locked up in order to protect ourselves and feel like we are in control of keeping any danger out and at bay.
But just like remaining locked up in our homes out of fear cannot indefinitely be sustained and will eventually lead to us running out of much needed resources for survival, our hearts being locked up behind walls will eventually also be depleted of much needed resources for its survival, causing our hearts to grow hard, selfish and cold.
And once we’ve locked our hearts behind those walls, we never go beyond the walls because that feels “unsafe” so we keeps our dreams, hopes, desires and love locked up inside, slowly depriving it of what it desperately needs to thrive.
If you want to know how restrictive your walls around your heart really are, imagine yourself for a second walking straight in the direction of what you fear to allow in (or project out from it).
Does that feel uncomfortable? Notice for a moment what your chest area is doing. You can literally feel your heart closing up, shrinking and it doesn’t feel good at all right? That’s because you’ve taught your heart to close which goes against its natural state of being.
If life has taught you that when you love someone you’ll get hurt, chances are that if you try to move beyond the wall you built around your heart because of it, you’ll intuitively want to pull back to avoid smashing into it. And that’s what keeps you bound up and locked inside your heart’s perimeters. You become a prisoner to your fears.
And if you’re really honest with yourself, what you really desire is to break free and to let it out right? What you really want is to love and be loved without any fear or restriction. But you deprive yourself of it and lock all of that love and all of that desire up in there out of fear of what your mind fabricates and tells you will happen if you do.
Read More
mindfulness
Why We Need Contrast To Be, Do & Have Better In Life
If you’re ready to be, do & have better in life but it feels like you’re experiencing the opposite of what you want right now or don’t understand the contrast we sometimes face, then keep reading.
Its 06:00 on a beautiful Autumn morning. I look outside the window in awe of the majestic sunrise over a clear sky, birds merrily chirping to greet another day. My eyes catch a glimpse of my pooches still fast asleep next to me and my heart and face light up with love and gratitude for these two little fur balls. “How blissful they look” I think. “Just the perfect picture and epitome of unconditional Love and just being.” “Yeah its probably because every day is a good day for them. They don’t experience ups, downs and stresses of life like we do as humans” my ego mind chimes in with the conversation. But very quickly my consciousness interrupts the egoic thoughts asking: “Why can’t every day just be great? Why do we have amazing days and then not so amazing days? I mean life would just be great if we never had to do anything we don’t enjoy or have those harder conversations in life, wouldn’t it? Would it, really?” My mind began to wonder, searching for the answers to these loaded questions I just posed to it. It began to take me back to memories of days that were just all rainbows, glitter, unicorns and feel good warm and fuzzy stuff and experiences. Then it took me back to a few memories of days that I’d rather forget where it felt like my heart was bleeding to death and I thought I’d never survive. “No wonder most people prefer to avoid, run from and bury the more difficult experiences and emotions rather than to face them” my ego tries to interrupt the conversation again. And then it suddenly hit me! We live in a universe full of contrast!- Day and night.
- Summer and Winter.
- Male and female.
- Light and dark.
We actually need it.
Without the contrast we could never grow, expand and evolve into the highest version of ourselves and what our soul’s pursuit and purpose on this earth really is. Do I prefer the great days? HECK YES! I’m sure most of us do. But if we didn’t have the “not so great ones” then how would we even know what the good ones feel like? If darkness didn’t exist, there would have been no such thing as or even a need for light. The fact that Thomas Edison even thought of inventing the light bulb was because darkness existed which created a need for it, right? Without contrast we would really all just be robots existing with no purpose, no desires, no experiences, no evolution and frankly no emotions or a need for them. There would be no innovation or technology either. Think about it for a second. The reason you know what happiness feels like is because you’ve experienced sadness. The reason you know how you like your coffee is because you’ve experienced more than one brand, more than one way of drinking it, right? Our need for things to be done simpler, better, faster and different has also driven innovation and technology as we know it today and it is all birthed through a desire and a need for things to be different which we wouldn’t have had if we didn’t experience the opposite of it first. Without the one, the other simply cannot and would not exist. Sure, we would all rather have perfect relationships and never have to have the hard conversations. We would all rather experience happiness than sadness, ease rather than difficulty. But it is really our labeling and judgement of things (our perception of them) that makes them appear good or bad to us. We label and judge things as good or bad, easy or difficult, how it should or shouldn’t be based on societal norms and beliefs that have been handed to us, when in fact it all is exactly as it should be. This is exactly why it also doesn’t serve us when all of us are trying to change who we are or be or look the way society has labelled as acceptable, perfect, successful, happy, good, bad, pretty or whatever else. We need our unique differences to serve the evolution and highest good for us all and of this planet that we call home for now too.What if I told you that it is your desire to evolve that drew the opposite into your experience in the first place?
Think about it for a second. By experiencing the opposite of what you want you identify and learn what it is you do want. That’s GROWTH. That’s EXPANSION. That’s EVOLUTION! And its never ending too. The type of partner you’re attracted to has vastly changed over the years as you experienced and refined what you do want in a partner by dating people who showed you what you didn’t want, right? Life is always going to present us with contrast. How it serves us lies in how we choose to see it. When we see it as “This shouldn’t be happening. This isn’t how things should be” we have a not so good experience. But when we see it as “Everything is as it should be and it is always happening for me to serve my highest good” we cruise blissfully through what others may perceive as “bad days” or “bad times” with our inner peace and happiness in tact. For me that is really what free will is. If our story was already written before we were born, it really just comes down to how we choose to experience it. We can either experience it from a place of “God promised that all things He makes work together for my good. So this too is for my good” while waiting for the unfolding and the next chapter. Or we can experience it from a place of “God has lost control and this shouldn’t be happening and is never going to get better.” Either way how you end up experiencing that thing will reflect how you choose to see it. We only really have 2 choices in any experience life throws at us. To perceive and experience things through the eyes of Love, or through the eyes of fear. And although contrast is what helps us to learn, grow, heal, evolve and expand, we can always choose to learn through love and not through difficulty or fear.DO THIS NEXT TIME YOU THINK YOU’RE HAVING A “NOT SO GOOD” EXPERIENCE:
When a “problem” situation pops up. Don’t panic and don’t go into those old familiar thought patterns of “Why is this happening? How am I gong to solve this? What am I going to do?”. Instead take a moment to stop, breath deeply a couple of times, silence those thoughts and say this out loud to yourself: All is well. Everything is working out for my highest good. Out of this experience only good will come. I am safe. Take note of firstly how much better and calmer you feel and then be expectant and on the look out for the universe to present the solution or to you or dissolve the “problem” for you, as it was always designed and intended to do. We don’t ever really need to fix “problems”. We only need to fix our thinking and perspective about it. That in itself is already growth, evolution & expansion that serves your highest good and the highest good of all others involved.YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:
A Powerful Prayer When You Struggle To Let Go & Let God The Roadmap To Finding Inner Peace & Wholeness 5 Crucial Self Care Practices For Inner Peace & Wellness During Turbulent Times Like The Covid 19 LockdownEMOTIONAL DETOX: 7 Pivotal Steps To Emotional Freedom
So its one of “those” days where everything that could possibly go wrong; does, and your emotions are off the charts, in fact your emotional well being seems severely under attack and at risk.
You wake up only to see that its 06:30 AM and that’s the time you’re already supposed to be leaving for work. Your alarm clock didn’t go off for some inexplicable reason and no matter what you do, you’re going to be late!
You hustle to shove yourself into the outfit you luckily laid out for work already last night, but as you grab your coffee to get one sip in on the way out, you spill it all over your brand new, crisp white Chanel shirt.
So you rush to change only to find that your back-up preference is in the washing basket and your washing day is only tomorrow..
You eventually make it to the car with no further delays only to realize that you forgot to fill up your tank last night and the petrol light seems like its deliberately trying to be snarky flashing the words “EMPTY” in big red letters at you!
You finally make it to the office and it appears that all hell had broken loose in the mere 10 minutes that you were late.
To top it all off, the boss is in a bad mood and glaring at you (you think its probably because you’re late) and he piles yet another crisis that is on deadline onto you.
At this point the “drama queen” inside your head revs it up a gear, kick into overdrive and she’s like:
“He’s probably testing me to see if I will manage. He’s just setting me up to fail. He never liked me anyway. I bet he is just looking for a reason to fire me and my being late just added another bullet to his arsenal. Oh my gosh how will I find work again. The job market is so over-saturated as it is. I’m going to starve and end up living as a bum on the street. Why didn’t I just take my phone in last time it did that? Oh yes it was because I had to work late to finish that project. That my boss doesn’t remember. He doesn’t even see the value I bring to the team and all of the extra things I do. Why the heck do I do them anyway? They don’t appreciate me. No one does. Its because I’m not good enough. Just like my ex. Nothing is ever good enough. Maybe I should just resign before he fires me” – EASY THERE GIRL! STOP & BREATHE!
We’ve all had a day, at times a week and some are even convinced a life like this, right? Okay that may have been a little bit over dramatized but you get the gist. And it serves the point I’m getting to.
When you read that, how did it make you feel? A little anxious perhaps? Did your heart start racing or your stomach turn into a knot? Changes are that it absolutely did.
That wasn’t even happening for real and it wasn’t even happening to YOU, yet your body reacted to it physically anyway and here’s why.
Read More
- The mind doesn’t know the difference between fantasy and reality. So whatever you’re thinking it thinks is really happening. I wrote that in the first person and you read it that way too, so your mind did 2 things there. It perceived is as something you are really thinking and thus experiencing and it reacted accordingly by letting you feel it as emotions and physical manifestations in your body.
- Despite most people believing that their emotions cause their thoughts, its actually the other way around. Our thoughts cause our emotions. You read it (thus thought it) and pesto, you felt it right? Not convinced? Think of a person or situation that makes you anxious. Focus on your body for a second and feel how and where you can feel that anxiety in your body. Whatever you thought about isn’t even happening at the moment yet you were able to conjure up those emotions physically in the present and physically react to it anyway just because you thought about it.
MY 2 FAVORITE PRACTICAL TIPS TO LIVE AWARE OF YOUR EMOTIONS:
- Set hourly reminders on your phone that just says “How do I feel?” – Stuff happens throughout our day and this way we are prompted to become aware of how we feel every hour, and then either process it or at the very least pivot by choosing a better thinking thought and better feeling emotion in that moment, stopping the low vibrational thoughts and energies from gaining more momentum.
- At the end of the day before you go to sleep or when you’re soaking in a bath, reflect on your day’s experiences. Become aware of how they made you feel, what you thought about it and how you acted and reacted to it. This way you choose to pivot and stop those low vibrational thoughts, feelings, experiences and frankly the story you told yourself about it in its tracks at least once a day and you don’t carry it into the next day with you which stops its from gaining momentum.