Inspiring New Year Resolutions

With 2012 fast approaching, do you find you are a person who makes a promise to lose weight, join the gym, eat healthier, quit smoking, get out of debt, travel, or be less stressed? But as February approaches you are totally stressed out and find yourself turning your back to your New Year's resolution.

Are you willing to be inspired to try a different approach this year?

We had previously discussed how thoughts effect our actions. Therefore, it is beneficial to focus on our thoughts, so that you can change your actions.

This may not sound easy, but the effort is worth it when you reap the wonderful results. Let’s discuss how you can change your thoughts in order to fulfill this New Year’s resolution.

1. First, you need to become a witness to your own thoughts.

2. Next, ask yourself: "Is this thought a positive, negative or wasteful thought?”

3. Then change the negative, wasteful thoughts into positive and harmonious ones.

Finally, focus on your self: how does my body feel, how is my outlook on life, how are my interactions with others?

The world is a reflection of who you are within.

How people react to you is a reflection of how you approach them; what you think and feel about them. But what if you really dislike some one? My answer would be: try to find one positive quality about them. So that when you meet or think about them, try to focus on that one quality. In this way the relationship can start taking a turn in the opposite direction.

New Year’s resolutions are a great time to start change because as another year passes, we begin to realize that time lost is never gained back. How did you spend your precious time this past year? Did you dwindle it away with gossip, meaningless chatter, endless t.v, and internet? If so, is this the year you want to spend quality time with people around you, educating yourself, and becoming introspective? All of these qualities can help you to live a more balanced and peaceful life.

Are you tempted to try it? Let me know, and I can help you fulfill your New Year’s resolutions.

Unconditional Happiness

Feelings are so important to us because we base our sense of happiness on our feelings.

We think we have to achieve something, acquire something or be in a certain relationship in order to be happy. Actually, we don’t need any of these things to be happy. We just need to approach our feelings in a certain way to experience a sense of happiness unrelated to achievement, possession or relationships. That’s called: Unconditional Happiness.

In today’s society there seems to be a huge gap: we are intellectually advanced, but emotionally unaware. The goal of unconditional happiness is to create a balance between intellect and emotion, thinking and feeling, reason and intuition.

Have you noticed that you may have strong negative feelings that you can’t seem to resolve, like: depression, loneliness, anxiety, etc…. You may also be experiencing active emotions such as: anger, jealousy, fear, which erupt from time to time, especially in intimate relationships, where our buttons get pushed the most.

Most of us are locked into fixed, limiting patterns that we find difficult to get out of. Until we release the feelings associated with these patterns, we will be unable to change. For example: Negative feelings cause stress and stress is merely a negative emotion we are unable to release. This does not mean that we can be stress-free all the time. Even in our most positive relationships, we will from time to time experience periods of loneliness.

When we resist an experience, that negative energy gets trapped and held in our emotional and physical body. This in turn leads to suppression. A suppressed emotion goes into the subconscious, and creates a body of unresolved feelings and emotions, waiting to be released. The problem with suppressed emotions is: if we don’t consciously release the feelings, they will start coloring our experience, making us react in unreasonable and destructive ways. Often we blame the other person for our feelings because we are not aware that our own unresolved issues are being triggered.

What is the solution? Not to resist those negative feelings, but to allow yourself to experience them. Know that when you allow yourself to feel the feelings, they will come to a completion and you can then be free of them.

Are You Body Conscious or Soul Conscious?

Body consciousness concentrates on materialism, arrogance, greed and violence. It compels you to lay blame and criticize others in order to create the illusion of being okay. Your life is random and undisciplined. You take uncalculated risks, lose your sense of self, live in a state of denial, and reject the voice of your conscience. You get bored with yourself and others. You cry out for love, but can’t recognize it. You get drawn into temptations and emptiness. When body consciousness takes over, you forget who you are and become as the other wants you to be. Your conscience has stopped functioning and you allow unhealthy relationships to occur. Your energy gets drained and your happiness has been robbed. This type of consciousness undermines you and sees no way out of dilemmas. It raises excuses: “I had to because….I could not because ….”, until you are paralyzed and unable to cope.

Soul consciousness means to come to terms with all aspects of your self. To become neutral in the face of good and bad, and focus on your original qualities of purity, peace, power and love. Soul consciousness means to become still and melt away the negativity that presses upon the mind. It makes your intuition sharp and accurate, has meaning and signals you forward. You don’t accept sorrow. Some one may say something hurtful and you immediately rise into your power of tolerance. The electric bolt passes right through you; it does not lodge into your heart.

If you desire to move from body to soul consciousness, you need a set of tools like inner power and attitudes. Ask yourself: what did I do to myself? What was done to me? Put it into perspective; see the origin, emergence and dissolution of all that is happening. Discern the pattern and adjust. Give yourself enough distance to judge accurately through self-examining what reveals the true nature of your motivations.

By changing from body to soul consciousness, you become calm, balanced, centered and beyond storms. Nothing can break your harmony; you are fully integrated in your perfect state of physical and emotional balance.

The Psychology Behind Meditation

One of the simplest definitions of meditation is 'the correct use of the mind'. The aim isn't to deny our thoughts, but to become aware of our mind, gain mastery over our mental activity and generate the highest quality thoughts. With practice, we will be able to slow down our minds and enter the inner space within our consciousness.

People learn to meditate for a variety of reasons. Some desire inner peace, others use it as a part of their quest for truth and understanding, and for some it is the hope of discovering the holy grail of happiness. Meditation is a spiritual, mental, and emotional healing process, with proven benefits to our physical well-being.

The main benefits of meditation are: improved levels of contentment, concentration, creativity and communication.

Surrounded by a highly charged, constantly changing world, we may find it difficult to maintain our attention span for any length of time. When we take the time to explore the real cause of stress, we would find distorted thinking leads to various emotions that we find stressful. Stress and tiredness is a modern disease. If we acknowledge that negative thoughts and stresses are not normal parts of a fulfilling life, than we can reap many rewards from the regular practice of meditation. It helps to balance our physical energies, which allows the body to function more effectively, while improving its ability its heal itself.

The physical benefits of meditation are: reduced blood pressure, increased vitality, better sleep patterns and greater pain control.

Meditation helps us gradually increase self-awareness and awaken who we really are. It is a journey through which we rediscover our natural resources of peace, power and love.

Telephone Counselling

After a full day of work it can be hard to come in for therapy or accomodate it in your schedule. To make it easier, I do offer a telephone therapy service.

You can make arrangements and pay by interac email transfer or by check in advance, This is not just for people here in Toronto, you can do this from anywhere in the world!

For more information, head over to the Telephone Therapy section of my website.

How Clean Are Your Windows?

A young woman saw her neighbor hanging the wash outside.

"That laundry isn't very clean," the young woman said to her husband, "She doesn’t know how to wash clothes, maybe she needs better laundry soap." Her husband looked on, but remained silent. Every time her neighbor would hang her wash to dry, the young woman would make the same comments.

A month later, the woman was surprised to see nice clean laundry on the line and said to her husband, "Look, she finally learned how to wash! I wonder who taught her".

The husband said, "I got up early this morning and cleaned our windows."

And so it is with life.

What we see when we look at others depends on the window through which we look.

This is an e-mail I got from a friend and it struck me how true that is for all of us. How clean are your windows? Most of carry carry some dirt from the past, which causes biases and judgement. How do we clean our windows? By getting rid of the past issues blurring your lenses.

Forgive all the people that you hold a grudge against, whether they were wrong or not.

Just repeat the following 4 sentences:

I am sorry

Please gorgive me

Thank you

I love you.

These 4 sentences are quoted by Ihaleakala Hew Len, Phd. You may find amazing results when you repeat these 4 sentences all day long. Try it out, I am interested in your results.

Observe Karma to Change Your Life

The moment we are born, we are constantly doing one of three things: acting, reacting or interacting. Sometimes we do all three at once. Laws govern all action and interaction, constantly operating in every relationship. They are called the laws of karma, defined in Western culture as: "As you sow, so shall you reap". Isaac Newton observed these laws in physics as the third law of Motion: ''for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction". The Laws of Karma remind us that whatever quality of energy we give out, we get back. Through careful observation of ourselves, we can learn how our actions effect our lives and how to break patterns of negativity.

When we are reminded of karma, it awakens an awareness of responsibility. Normally we believe we are responsible for some of our actions, but not all of them, creating moral blind spots. For example: We consider ourselves responsible for driving our family safely to their destination, but if we have an accident because we were driving too quickly, we consider the other driver responsible.

We have learned to avoid taking responibility for our actions. We fail to see the impact of our actions upon others and we fail to see that the real meaning of responsibility is our ability to respond. The way we respond to situations will always effect the outcome.

The Laws of Karma also serve to remind us that our circumstances and our personality today are the result of what we thought and did yesterday, last month, last year, etc. The past is continually creating the present. And by recognizing how our previous actions have caused our problems in the present, we can recognize the solutions.

People don't like this insight or find it difficult to accept because most of us have been taught that our destiny lies in someone else's hands or in fate or luck, about which we can do nothing. But this is actually a freeing realization. Control over your actions is the only chance for change.

If you spend a few moments reflecting on events in your life, without judgement or emotion, you will begin to see connections between actions and outcomes, causes and effects. When you see how all effects have their causes, you then have the evidence that this universal law is at work in your life at all times.

The lesson here is not to write off the events of your life as out of control; you have free will and you can start to make better choices. Relating to the world in a positive way, while it might not change everything, will make an enormous impact on your life.