Peace
Work Life Balance: Gratitude Today Keeps the Doctor Away
Work and life balance is central to health, real wealth and enjoyable relationships. Gratitude and appreciation are apparently little known secret ingredients to what everyone is really seeking – inner peace, meaning and joy. Then we can “in joy” our efforts and monetary results and use money constructively and with greater purpose. “Stuff” starts to lose its meaning in general.
“Happiness” is very situational, yet joy is the “peace that passes understanding”. It is not a transient mental state; it is the essence of our “being”. We’ve just lost sight of this truth. So, why is there so much increase in disease, debt and divorce or unsatisfying relationships – at home and at work? For one thing, we have forgotten, “who we are”. We have attached our worth and identity to “stuff” that many of us don’t really want.
In fact, I’d venture to say that most people don’t really know what they want or “why” they are so busy “doing” things. It has become a national epidemic – “Doingitis” – a “dis-ease” state. Then, we don’t even feel grateful or appreciate what we accomplish or have. There are steps and processes one can take to disentangle one’s self-worth and meaning from this chronic distracted way of living. However, here I will offer one simple remedy; cultivate gratitude and appreciation. This one thing, felt with the heart and not just an intellectual exercise can:
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When More is Never Enough
Peace. I see holiday cards right now that say, “Peace” and “Joy” on them, yet I see people rushing about complaining that they are “overwhelmed”. I used to be one of them. These days, I’m giving my attention more and more to “why” I do what I do.
Have you ever stopped rushing around long enough to reflect on “why”? Do you slow down to contemplate, “Who do you think you are”?
Or are you still living by the definition that others assigned to you? Are you looking for more “to do” even though you have not mastered what is right in front of you? What are your heart-felt, five top values? Do you know? If you don’t, you are very likely not very passionate about what you do or about your life.
Like most people, you are probably just going through the motions, trying to keep from falling off the hamster wheel of life. Your mind is full of chatter and your heart is disconnected – and a “heartless mind” is no way to live. When we attach our sense of identity to things outside of our self, peace is always elusive. If we think we are our family heritage, money, fame, occupation or social status, we are always in a very precarious situation, as these things can shift overnight.
I was listening to a thought leader’s interview last night and she said she was disowned by her family for asking that her family’s assigned husband for her allow her to go to college. I’ve read articles of billionaires losing it all and then killing their whole family along with themselves – I’ve known personally millionaires who too have committed suicide after losing their money. I changed careers myself – I no longer perform eye surgery and I sold my business. Yet, what I did is not who I am. Life is full of change and unexpected events.
0Personal Power: How Troublemakers Can Accelerate Your Inner Peace
Personal power can accelerate when we have big “aha” moments. We don’t really know if we “know” something until we actually look at the irritant or trouble in its face and it is how we respond that reveals what we “know”.
I had ample opportunity over the last 48 hours to come face to face with old inner turbulence “under the radar” that surfaced through my close relationships. It gave me an opportunity to practice self-awareness. This is one reason why I call relationships a major type of “mirror of life”.
Our relationships can quickly expose what is going on internally at a subconscious level. Those around us who irritate us most are showing us the shortcut to reclaiming our personal power – pay attention! Now I must say that this works best after we have started to “train our brain” to separate from over-identifying our self-image with our thoughts. You are not your thoughts.
We HAVE thoughts, yet strictly speaking our “being” is life force/spirit, consciousness and is not the same as the patterns or concepts that run through our brain on a daily basis. Herein lies a way to accelerate your personal power and growth. As you learn what thoughts, feelings and emotions are and how your brain processes information based on how you’ve conditioned it, you can begin to change the perception of feelings and this will actually change the quality of their intensity and whether or not you can respond powerfully with self-awareness or if you react and run away or become uncontrollably upset.
In my situation, I had a button pushed that related to a set of expectations and pedestals I had created about the persons involved.
7Want More Confidence and Inner Peace? Make Friends with Your Inner Critic
Until confidence and inner peace is cultivated inside out, you will be subject to having your feelings hijacked without notice. I read an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal online the other day on Fear and Self-Doubt.
The article is entitled, “Conquering Fear” by Melinda Beck. I created an acronym when I wrote my book, Empower Up and Play Big: Winning at Life from the Inside Out! called FEAR – Fictitious Evidence Affecting Reality.
From a brain standpoint, most fear is literally “all in your head”, meaning it is psychological. The estimate is that 90% of our stress is due to our focusing on things that scare us, like the evening news, or having an inner critic that berates us, or worrying about something that hasn’t even happened.
So, where is this inner critic coming from, those annoying voices in our heads? I don’t know about you, but generally speaking, mine has quieted down and has become a type of ally. This inner critic is a type of “cellular” memory that is within your brain’s, “autobiographical” storage area.
Is there hard research for this? Probably not, but I’m not one to let other mere mortal scientists tell me what to think. We do have areas of the brain that stores this information “autobiographical” information, and is so called, and it makes intuitive sense that since this is the mental construct of your sense of “self” and your life experiences, that it is where the “inner critic” resides as well.
We have “parts” of ourselves that form our personality and do so often at times in early childhood when we were full of fear, even of things like the “boogeyman”. Though they do not have a lot of logic, children do the best that they can to make sense of the world and to stay safe. The problem is, most children think that it is their fault for virtually every unpleasant situation.
They blame themselves for everything from mom and dad’s divorce to their impatient teacher yelling at them inappropriately. Interestingly enough it seems that after age 7 or so, most people begin the totally opposite behavior of blaming everybody else for everything and avoiding responsibility. By then, most people are so full of self-doubt and shame that they spend the rest of their life projecting their feelings onto other people. Life does not need to be lived judging, comparing yourself to everyone else and beating yourself up for subjective performance.
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