Have you ever woken up and felt as if you were going through the motions of life—just existing and not living it to the fullest? I have, and I realized I was being dragged and not directing my life the want I wanted it to go.
What did I do?
First, I knew I needed help with several things, like being held accountable, what steps to take first, and goal-setting. It was as if I were starting AA all over again. And in theory, I was. The 12-Steps of AA held me accountable, had the correct order steps, and reached the goals I set when met.
Simple, but not easy. Just like life.
Here are a few actions you can take to begin the journey of life, moving from the caboose of your train—where life drags you—to the engine—where you have the power to redirect your life.
The first and most vital action to take is to quiet your mind. Whether you do that through meditation, a walk-in nature, or quietly just sitting, it is essential because you are opening your consciousness by being present. When you live in the now, you create an opening for a stream of consciousness to flow in, leading to aligning with your higher purpose.
Reflect upon one question each morning, such as, “What is important for me to notice today?”
Next, set a daily intention for yourself, focusing on exactly where you want to be in life. You will soon see your life bending and stretching around it.
Examine your limiting beliefs and then clear them. They are various methods for ridding yourself of them, but one excellent way is through The BeliefCloset Process. (The BeliefCloset Process will be the topic of a later post.
After eliminating any beliefs that no longer serve you, you want to discover your life purpose. There are various means to accomplish this, and the following are just several examples:
Ask yourself, “What do I love to do?” Whatever it is, it should feel comfortable or natural for you. It should feel as if you are swimming downstream, not like a salmon’s upstream journey.
Look back in your past and see what has resonated with your inner world, that part of you that connects with your higher self. Identify those instances where you truly felt alive and living “on purpose.”
See if you can recognize a pattern of qualities from the incidents you chose, which you love to articulate.
Identify your particular life purpose category. Does it have to do with teaching, supporting others, defending, building, leading, nature, or some other type?
Write down what your ideal life would look like using a vision board or some other mechanism to relay your vision.
Once you’ve done these steps, you must then communicate your vision. That will begin Part 2 of this series.
“LIFE PURPOSE: Your purpose is not what you do to bring home a paycheck. Your purpose is what you were put on this earth to do with such intensity and passion that it becomes a SPIRITUAL CALLING.”
SIMPLES STEPS TO REDUCE STRESS AND ANXIETY IN YOUR LIFE
What is mindfulness? And what does it mean to you?
Mindfulness is the act of being here now. It is focusing your attention on what you are doing and your surroundings. Your mind is not dredging up memories of the past or in the future, “creating fantasies that haven’t happened yet.” It is living in thepresent moment.
John Cabot-Zinn defines mindfulness as:
Paying attention ‘on purpose’
Rooted in the present moment
Non-judgmentally
Let’s break this down:
On Purpose: Mindfulness involves the conscious and deliberate direction of your attention. So, another way of saying “on purpose” is “consciously.” We are living more consciously, more awake when we pay attention in this way.
In The Present Moment: Mindful attention is wholly engaged in the present moment experience. We let go of tension caused by wanting things to be different from what they are, and we accept the present moment as it is.
Non-Judgmentally: When practicing mindfulness, we aren’t trying to stop or control our thoughts. We pay attention to our experiences as they are without labeling or judging them in any way.
WHAT DOES LIVING IN THE PRESENT EVEN MEAN?
Let’s take an example. Have you ever gotten in your car to go somewhere, and when you arrived, realized you don’t remember how you got there? Or, you walk into another room or upstairs to get something, but once you got there, you forgot what it is you wanted?
MOST OF US HAVE!
These are typical examples of mindlessness—another term for being on auto-pilot or programming, where we’re not fully conscious of our actions.
We lose ourselves in auto-pilot most of the day. Every day, we’re programmed to live in our heads rather than through our experiences.
One point I stress in my yoga classes is to let go of thinking about how a pose should look and begin to experience how it feels. Noting what a yoga pose feels like allows you to go within for the experience instead of looking outward and enables you to be in the present moment.
When you live in the past, you don’t have enough presence; you are loaded down with too much of your history: guilt, regret, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and non-forgiveness.
At the same time, living too much in the future weighs you down with unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry, and all forms of fear.
Whether you spend your time living in the past or the future, you’re a spectator in the stands watching those who live in the present moment on the field, playing the game we call life full-on!
Ideally, you want to be in the now when you focus on the present moment, so you participate instead of watching and cheering.
That’s great, but where do you even start?
If you don’t know where to begin, here are six mindfulness exercises that are 1-minute or less you can do:
Before you sit down to eat a meal
In the shower
When you wake up in the morning
Sitting in your car just before you walk into work
Sitting at a traffic light
Standing in line anywhere
Anytime you feel you need it, at home or work
1. Count your breaths. As you inhale, silently think 1, exhale 2, Inhale 3, exhale 4, all the way to 10. Repeat three times.
2. Yawn and stretch for 10 seconds every hour. Fake a yawn to trigger a real one, and say “ahh” as you exhale. Notice that your thoughts are interrupted, and you are brought into the present moment. Stretch your arms slowly for 10 seconds, noticing if there’s any tension or tightness in your body. Bring “ease” to the spot without judgment. Take another 20 seconds to see what you feel and then return to what you were doing.
3. Stroke your hands. Lower or close your eyes. Take the index finger of your right hand and slowly move it up and down the outside of your left fingers. Once you have mindfully stroked your left hand, change your index fingers and left your left one stroke the edges of the fingers on your right hand.
4. Do a short body scan. Rest your attention on different body parts. Start at the top of your head and move toward your toes. Noticing each one, focus your attention there and consciously relax that part of you. You should be able to scan your scalp, eyes, cheeks, mouth, jaw, neck, shoulders, chest, arms, belly, legs, and feet in a minute.
5. Mindfully eat a raisin (or piece of chocolate). Take a raisin or a chocolate piece and mindfully eat it. Slow down, sense it, savor it, and smile between bites. Purposely slow down. Use all your senses to see it, touch it, smell it, and sense it. Then gently pop it into your mouth and really savor it. Savor its texture, its taste, how it feels in your mouth. Let it linger and then swallow it. After you have swallowed it, let your lips turn up slightly and smile. Do the same thing for each raisin you eat or bite you take.
6.Mindful breathing for one minute. Lower your eyes and notice your breath. Is it going in and out of your nostrils, or do you feel the rise and fall of your chest and stomach? Place your hand on your stomach to feel the rise and fall of it with each breath you take. Focus on your breath and feel the movement of your belly. If your mind wanders, bring your attention back to your breath.
Just like weightlifting builds muscle if you’re disciplined and have a consistent practice, mindfulness meditation, when practiced, increases the amount of time you spend living in the present moment.
SO ….wouldn’t NOW be a good time to start your mindfulness practice?
The Wounded Child archetype is one of several aspects of the Child archetype. The others include the Magical Child, The Nature Child, the Abandoned child, the Divine Child, the Invisible Child, and the Eternal Child. Everyone shares the Child archetype as well as its variations to some extent or another.
The Wounded Child is an archetype that contains negative emotional patterns children experienced. The wounds could have been abuse, neglect, or trauma, but they usually occur before seven. There is permanent damage that is haunting them.
The pain from their childhood wound will repeatedly replay in their adult life until the trauma or wound is healed.
Anger is a pattern of behavior that manifests. The pattern remains
with them and erupts as they grow older. There’s a continual eruption that plays out throughout their adult life. It’s destructive because the wounded child acts out the wounds of his childhood and feels justified doing that. That’s the child part—the temper tantrum.
One thing to remember when you are dealing with a Wounded Child, whether it’s someone else or yourself—it’s a pattern of behavior, and it’s not personal. When the Child archetype comes out, it is in the Shadow aspect. It is a time when the Wounded Child can feel misunderstood, such as reliving an event where they were accused or punished for something they didn’t do. Or perhaps they are reminded of a time when they were abandoned.
Whatever it is, the wound can only be healed by first recognizing the behavior pattern and that it’s not personal.
All Wounded Children erupt in anger; that’s just the pattern; it’s not personal. The Shadow aspect may manifest in self-pity, with a tendency to blame their parents for the reason why they are in their current position. It also blocks the path to forgiveness.
However, the painful experiences of the Wounded Child archetype can often awaken a deep sense of compassion, where there is a call to being of service to help other Wounded Children. From this spiritual enlightenment, a path of forgiveness is opened.
Do you have the Wounded Child archetype?
If you have the Wounded Child archetype, you may relate to one of the following behavior patterns.
The Wounded Child shows itself when:
you don’t get what you want
you need your wound to be validated
your wound is more significant than anyone else’s
you always look for someone to take responsibility for what happened to you
you frequently need to be loved and valued
How does one move from the shadow to the light?
All the Child archetype variations have a presence in the subconscious that is universal, as do the other three Survival Archetypes, and it is crippling in their adverse effects. Through becoming self-aware, it is through recognizing and identifying repeated patterns of behavior throughout our lives that have had authority over our choices. You embark on the Journey of Life where you move from the caboose of your train—where life drags you—to the engine—where you have the power to direct it.
The Journey of Life is a process and not something that is done quickly. Learning why you do the things you do will enable you to make better decisions and identify the actions you need to take to start down the path of personal evolution and transformation.
Schedule your free 15-minute Assessment today to begin your Journey of Empowerment.
We all have archetypes—universal patterns of mythical power— within our psyche, and the Saboteur archetype may be the most difficult to understand because its name is associated with betrayal. Caroline Myss calls it the Guardian of Choice because its purpose is to help you identify when you are about to make a decision that weakens you.
When an opportunity arises that helps you grow by stretching your comfort zone, have you ever heard a whispering voice beneath you that says, “You’re not good enough. You’ll never make that achievement?” If you have, what you’re hearing is the internal Saboteur raising the possibility of failure, which is a decidedly fearsome prospect.
Another example is when you fear success. You call upon the Saboteur to destroy the foundation of that success because the responsibility seems overwhelming: What if I let people down? What if I’m not able to sustain the position?
The Saboteur operates in the shadows of our subconscious.
HOW TO BECOME AWARE OF THE SABOTEUR
The Saboteur’s fears and issues are all related to low self-esteem that causes you to make choices that block your empowerment and success.
The Saboteur’s core issue is fear of initiating change into your life, change that rearranges your entire reality and requires you to respond in a positive way to opportunities that shape and deepen your self-esteem and empowerment. Ignore it, and the shadow Saboteur will manifest in the form of destructive behavior or the desire to undermine others.
It typically makes its presence known through a feeling or a thought that is rooted in fear. It may be a feeling of anxiety, doubt, of looking stupid, lack of confidence, or being afraid of failing. The Saboteur can guard your heart and push away any people or opportunities that bring you joy or success.
Only when we become aware of the Saboteur and recognize it can we make it our ally. The first way you can explore the shadow aspect of the Saboteur is to observe your behavior. You can effectively do this by creating a journal where you recorded the times or events when you realized you’d sabotaged yourself.
The keyword here is OBSERVE. The Saboteur needs to be recognized for it to be integrated.
You don’t want to analyze. You want to observe, and through the power of observation, you will garner the capacity to see things from a higher perspective, which will lead to positive behavioral change.
QUESTIONS TO ASK OF YOURSELF
Acknowledging the Saboteur requires us to take responsibility as we must look at our failures and missed opportunities and find how we contributed to the situation. A few questions to ask yourself to learn how to become aware of the action of the Saboteur within are:
In what areas of my life do I fear change?
What fears have the most authority over me? List three.
How have I thwarted my success in the past?
What am I protecting myself or someone else from by sabotaging my success?
What happens when fear overtakes me? Does it make me silent?
Have I let creative opportunities pass me by?
How conscious am I in the moment that I am sabotaging myself?
When we make the Saboteur our friend and ally, we can then make decisions based on our highest purpose in life, as we stand firm in our center with unwavering self-esteem rather than giving in to our fears egos.
In Part 1, you realized the beliefs you learned and agreed to early on in life are limiting you, and that those beliefs became your truth. In order to awaken from a programmed life, you must first become aware of the authority they hold over you and what you want to change in your reality.
Changing your beliefs change your reality.
WHAT IS YOUR CURRENT REALITY?
Reality is subjective to an individual; it is what you believe it to be. There are social realities with certain customs, moral values, and societal rules with which we agree with. In spiritual circles, it is said that we ‘create our own reality.’
Looking further into this concept, one thing necessary to deepen our understanding of reality is learning to observe yourself within your reality. You are in effect, viewing yourself as the main character in a play and those that surround you are supporting actors.
When you begin to see how you operate in life, you activate your greatest tool—your soul! Your soul has the ability to observe yourself through a wide lens,
offering you a perspective of a camera that can pull back or zoom in to see your actions in daily life. The resulting benefit is you’re able to see yourself more clearly and discover how you create the reality you live in.
As you begin to observe yourself, you’ll see what your beliefs have created; your emotional pain, your joy, your hardened heart, your open manner, your lack of connection with yourself and others—the list of how your beliefs create the reality you operate within is endless.
When you are able to honestly see what motivates you to do what you do, the next step of creating your reality is possible—you can begin to change the things you want to. Only you can change what you believe your reality is. And you can change it.
You may feel you’re doing everything to change your reality, but nothing is changing. When this happens, there is something stuck within you. You have what is called an inner blockage. For example, you may struggle with a pattern of self-sabotage, even finding it difficult to help yourself when you know you need to.
You subconsciousness mind might be
blocking you to be and do your best through your limiting beliefs. One reason this happens is that, at some level, you have an inner conflict about succeeding. This type of inner conflict occurs when one part of us wants to change, but the other part (often the subconscious) does not because of the fear of success. Simply put, it the Saboteur archetype at work.
HOW WE LEARN BELIEFS
Early childhood experiences are the first way we get ideas or beliefs about life and gave you a sense of who you are as a person. The messages you received from your parents, siblings, teachers, and peers taught you something about yourself. As we grow up, we move through life creating experiences to match our beliefs.
We also learn beliefs through school, movies, books, advertisements, and life experiences, to name a few. Beliefs are important because they shape your world—first internally, then externally. If you have not invested in yourself to change a belief and see how it’s affected your life, you will not fully understand this concept.
Beliefs can prevent us from seeing accurately and they can cause pain. Or they can strengthen us.
Write down in your journal the beliefs you have today that you feel are holding you back or limiting you in some way. Keep them at your disposal as you’ll want to revisit them when you are given the steps to change them in the next post.
Here are a few examples that may resonate with you:
“I’m not good enough.”
“I’m afraid to________.”
“I don’t deserve (money, recognition, success).”
“People will judge me.”
“If I succeed, I won’t be able to sustain it.” (This was me.)
“I’m happy with how things are now.”
“I don’t/wouldn’t know where to start.”
Take some time and reflect on what are the major beliefs you have that have an impact on your life. Sit and let yourself be open and honest about where you are in life today and what your current state of reality is. Be ready to take the steps to change. Dig deep inside—go within and muster the courage. It’s there, I know it is.
Until next time,
Debbie
Contact me today for your complimentary 30-minute Discovery Session to begin your new life!
Are you living a life that has meaning and purpose or are you just surviving?Do you go through all the motions yet find something is missing? Maybe you’re gradually becoming aware that the things you are doing aren’t working for you and your present reality reflects that.
In other words, you realize the beliefs you learned and agreed to early on in life are limiting you.
What can you do to change old patterns?
Although unlearning old patterns is a simple process, it’s not easy. As a child, your beliefs are shaped by your family, schooling, religion, and culture, and because you have nothing to compare them with you accept them as true. The more examples you were shown of something, the more it became reinforced in your mind and the stronger it became.
Your belief becomes your truth.
Each belief of how you should think, behave, and see things, had been downloaded into your psyche, leaving you with an energetic imprint on the world behind your eye where there is a parallel reality—the unseen world. These are the dynamic structures that create truth in your outer world.
Where to start?
Since the two worlds coexist, meaning one cannot exist without the other, the beliefs that no longer serve you create a life that is disharmonious and out of balance. You need to be clear about your limiting beliefs as you can only change what you acknowledge.
Change and growth are inevitable, and the more we align ourselves with this truth, the easier our lives will be.
Becoming aware
The first step to awakening from your programmed life is to become aware of the authority your ingrained beliefs have on you and what you want to change in your current reality. Ask yourself where you
may be stuck, what is holding you back, or what habits need to be modified. The best way to do this is to start a journal and write your reflections down.
Words make it real
Play detective and follow your thoughts and emotions to discover the beliefs that are limiting you. The simple act of writing it down keeps it still long enough for you to get a good look at it. Once it’s in front of you, you can determine if it something you want to change.
For example, you want to take an art or photography course, but you believe, “I don’t have enough time.”
Or you know you need to exercise, but you believe, “I have no energy.”
Acknowledge that these are beliefs, not truths!
Truths are universal and have been proven to be true.
Gravity works on earth. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. The earth is round. We don’t need to validate them beyond that.
Beliefs, on the other hand, are personal, selective, and changeable. The stories we tell about ourselves, others, and the world come from beliefs.
The source of our values, beliefs, and behaviors
Keep in mind that usually, the concern you are dealing with is not new, but an unresolved one leftover from childhood where you accepted the points of view from those around you. These points of view created your beliefs of what appears to be true to you—positive or negative. Being told you are lovable and worthy has a positive result while being told your opinion doesn’t matter has an adverse one.
These beliefs become your truth because you look for and find evidence to support it.
The beliefs we hold and live by, define our values, and it’s our values that govern the way we behave, communicate and interact with others.
Awakening from a programmed life is about examining and transforming the energy of our beliefs so that they create positive and life-affirming values that result in behavioral changes impacting life physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.
AWAKENING FROM A PROGRAMMED LIFE – PART II will provide the steps you can take to begin changing your beliefs from limiting ones to those that empower you.
