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.
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self awareness
EMOTIONAL 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.
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- 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.
HERE’S MY 7 PIVOTAL STEPS TO EMOTIONAL FREEDOM:
You can do this exercise as an emotional detox now to process specific events and experiences, but its also a great daily practice to incorporate when you become aware of how you’re feelings through your hourly phone reminders, or once a day when you’re reflecting on the day that has passed. These 7 steps will help you to process and release emotions straight away with a lot more ease as you bring them to conscious awareness.NEED A LITTLE EXTRA SUPPORT?
Check out the blog on The Roadmap To Finding Wholeness & Inner Peace Check out the blog on 5 Steps To Lasting Happiness That No One’s Told You About Dive a little deeper into a meaningful life with my Ultimate Life Transformation Program Listen to this Podcast Episode of Breakthrough on 5 Steps To Getting Your Breakthrough Connect with me on Facebook Connect with me on Instagram Connect with me on LinkedinDID YOU FIND THIS HELPFUL?
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5 Steps To Lasting Happiness (that nobody’s telling you about)
Happiness seems so hard to come by and even harder to hold onto, right?
The other day I was talking to one of my clients about why we struggle to hold onto the “new & improved me” and to remain positive and hold onto our happiness once we’ve chosen a better life. It got me thinking about my own journey of see-sawing up and down from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows in literally seconds at times. Now before I had gone on my self awareness and spiritual awakening journey to understand why we are who we are and do what we do, this was a common occurrence, but it didn’t make sense why it was STILL happening now that I knew better and had made the conscious choice to be happier and implemented the daily practices to back it (like meditation, daily reflection, questioning my thoughts, etc.) Even the apostle Paul wondered why he still did the things he didn’t want to do even after he chose to turn his life around.”I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. 16 And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. 17 As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. 18 For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature.[a] For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it”. – Romans 7:5-20Have you ever notices that you can be on such a huge high, so positive and ready to be a nice human after watching an inspirational Youtube video or reading a powerful motivational quote, until …. something shitty happens in your day or your life that in one foul swoop just seems to knock you back down to a low vibe, negativity or lashing out at someone. See here’s the thing … We are “pre-programmed” as humans to resist happiness & feeling good. Yes, you heard me right. Our unconscious default setting is that we have to struggle, difficulty, and to feel guilty about being TOO successful, TOO happy, TOO wealthy. And when we finally have those things, we begin to feel guilty for having them. We go into fear about losing them and begin to wait for the other shoe to drop and for it to be ripped away from us at any second. But why? Because we’ve been sub-consciously programmed from a young age that good things don’t come easy and that they don’t last.
Before we dive into how to KEEP our happiness, lets look out how to find it first.
The route to finding real happiness can be described in one word: SELF-AWARENESS. See until we become aware of our own emotions, habits, beliefs, thoughts, actions, reactions and so on, we cannot really be happy. These are the very things that caused us not to be happy in the first place and until we become aware of them, we cannot begin to change them to change the outcome. Looking outside of ourselves for happiness just makes us fearful on an unconscious level anyway because we sub-consciously know that other people and external factors are the things we don’t have any control over. And as humans we fear what we can’t control (like other people for example). The reality is that the only thing we do have control over is OURSELVES. This is why finding happiness can only start by taking your focus off of what’s going on outside of you and becoming self-aware of whats going on within YOU!So, once you’ve found real happiness, how do you hold onto it?
It took me several years of doing everything I knew to do to hold onto the new, positive and conscious living me to figure out what REALLY brings about lasting, tangible results when transforming our lives. Through my own personal life transformation journey from being broke, victimized, undervalued, sad, angry, stressed, anxious, lost, alone and directionless to consistently being happy, free, certain, clear, supported, successful, healthy, joyful and valued and over 10 000 hours of 1:1 coaching with my clients to identify exactly WHAT brings lasting change and transformation. What I identified was that we need to address the areas of our life that we want to transform on each of these 5 key levels: 1) Emotional 2) Behavioral 3) Mindset 4) Spiritual 5) Practical/Physical Let me unpack this for you a little further to help you to identify why your initial results and the “new & improved you” didn’t last. Often times traditional therapists work mostly only on the emotional level, right? Truth is that working on an emotional level and resolving underlying conscious or unconscious emotional traumas will help you to feel better, but if the particular situation isn’t addressed at the other 4 levels as well, the feeling better won’t last. For example, the experience may have caused you to form limiting beliefs about yourself, others, life, love, money, success or whatever, and those beliefs are still present (mindset). Which means you’ll continue creating, attracting & experiencing similar experiences because of them. There may be certain behaviors and patterns you formed because of the experience that need to be addressed too. For example you perhaps became a people-pleaser or an introvert because of the experience which means you are still behaving that way which isn’t the real you. This in turn causes unconscious thoughts and emotions of resentment, dissatisfaction and unhappiness because these are “learned” behaviors you developed and not the true you, which is inherently what we are wired to desire to achieve as human beings. Perhaps the situation or emotional traumas caused certain beliefs that you don’t have what it takes, you’re not as good as others or that you don’ t deserve to or have the things you deem necessary to have a great life like everyone else. This is why we need to work on the spiritual level as well to re-frame those thoughts and beliefs and for you to re-connect with a Higher Power of your own understanding to remember who you really are and where your support and supply of everything you need comes from. And just in case you’ve forgotten or you’re wondering who you are …You are not a limited human being trying to have some kind of spiritual experience here on earth and find your way or try to make it happen all on your own. You are a powerful spiritual being having a human experience here on earth and you are connected to, guided and supported by the entire universe and the One who made it, while on your mission here on earth.Lastly, we have to look at the practical and physical level as well. If you don’t have actionable daily practices in place to continue growing and working on each of the other 4 levels daily, or you’re living in an environment that is toxic and not good for you, your transformation and the “new improved you” can’t last either. This is why its imperative to also look at your physical and practical circumstances, routines and daily practices.