Confidence and empowerment is something near and dear to my heart, as I know the pain of self-rejection and the hazard of constantly striving to over achieve. It’s not productivity that is the problem; the issue is the mindset in which the goals are set and undertaken.
If we as women buy into the faulty thinking that our worth is based on what we do, what we look like and whom we are trying to please today, we will never have peace of mind, empowerment and personal power or authentic confidence.
The driven behavior that is going on in our society today is not even healthy masculine behavior. Truly healthy masculine energy (not male, -masculine- there is a difference) allows us to move forward into life and get things done. It creates a sense of independence, provision and protection.
Even as women we need to have a balance of these qualities in order to speak up, have courage to go through fear and to keep people out of our space when we need to. These qualities are not limited to males/men. The driven quality that most people attribute to men that we see is really the wounded ego. In fact, men need to live in more balance and tap into the feminine qualities of the Queen also, truth be told. The need to relax, feel and enjoy life is a human need for health and well-being.
The ego, our sense of human identity has its place and I believe that if you did not have one, you would not be able to self-identify yourself. Yes, you can be aware that you have an ego, yet are NOT the ego. You can be aware of yourself as a spiritual being, yet living the human experience via your “role” or as you call yourself, yet not get lost in the ego. This only comes via awareness and spiritual maturity which is a process unique to everyone.
It is not a one size fit all cookie-cutter process. Anyway, the ego wounded pushes and drives us as it gets lost in “survival of the fittest”, judgment, competition, all based in fear. Ego gone wild is fear at its worse. So, in earlier decades of my life, my ego, (I too was lost in it at one time), in its need to survive and get, (notice I said “get” not “receive”) affirmation and what I perceived then as love was always striving to prove that I was “good enough”.
Yet, funny thing was I never truly felt good enough or that I had enough of anything, be it time, energy or money. This is no way to live and accounts for all of the stress, fear and chaos that is going on in the world today, not to mention war, disease and greed. As women, it’s time to see through this nonsense and stop the madness in ourselves first, and then perhaps we can do what the Dalai Lama said in regard to “the western woman saving the world”.
If we don’t save ourselves first, the attempt to play rescuer again is a waste of time and as dysfunctional as ever. If we don’t develop confidence from our CORE, it’s just fake, cosmetic. Living into the Queen is about self-love, self-acceptance, and recognizing the POWER of love and feelings. Our feelings are just a guidance system to reveal to us what we truly perceive; not what we give lip service to.
As human, women and men, we have allowed ourselves to be conditioned like Pavlov’s dog to repress our feelings and run away. When we learn to make friends with them, we then are able to be truly empowered and physically healthier as well. As we face our fears and release this repressed pain-body of emotion that dwells within us at a cellular and energetic level, we can heal. Once we heal our wounded ego, these “cataracts of the soul” can fall away and we can let our Light shine and see others and ourselves more clearly.
Empowerment involves awareness. Becoming aware of how to consciously operate the greatest “supercomputer” on the planet is very important, more now than ever. Guard your focus, because what you focus on expands and if you want an abundant, whole life, focus on what you want and learn how to get excited and expect this. I use to think that the way I saw life was “just the way it is”. Actually, perception, HOW we see the facts that show up in our lives, or what we think we can have or not is relative. It’s relative to what we believe about ourselves and the way “life is”. I have lived in the “hostile” universe model and I am now living in the “friendly” universe model. As Einstein said:
“The most important decision you will ever make is whether you live in a friendly or hostile universe”
Yes, you get to decide. It depends on how you see it. Let me tell you, friendly is much better and peaceful. No, I can’t control everything, and I no longer try, when I stay aware and present (happening more and more these days, yeah!). I do what I can do, feel good, get clear as I can, and release it to the Universe to take care of the details. This is making for an adventurous life instead of a life full of fear, resistance and struggle. You interested? Come join me.
Happiness and peace of mind seems to be on many people’s minds. After all, happiness and peace of mind are two elements that make for a life well lived. The challenge though is being clear enough to stay focused on principles that allow us to avoid getting pulled into the trap of “common knowledge”.
Common knowledge is often simply hand-me-down opinions that have been accepted as “just the way life is”. There is not a way life is that is universally true. What determines how you see life is the filter that you see the facts around you through, known as perception.
Perception is the lens we interpret through and if your brain has been unwittingly wired, particularly at a young age, to see life as threatening, this viewpoint will color the way that you see the world.
I’ve come to call these filters that keep us from connecting with our Authentic Self, sense of power, wisdom and peace of mind as “cataracts of the soul”. We all have many gifts and talents that are unique and would make a positive difference in the world.
Yet, once we develop perceptions about the world around us, our brain and nervous system keep us focused on the people, places and circumstances to keep our established perceptual systems in place. This is often the reason why change is challenging and why we stay stuck. It is difficult to have happiness, health, wealth and great relationships when your filter says, age brings disease, money is hard to get and people cannot be trusted.
The answer is to re-educate yourself while at the same time learning systems and processes that allow you to release the old perceptual memory from your nervous system/body. You can then learn how to more easily rewire and retrain your brain.
A practical example of how this plays out in your life can be seen from an article I read today about an “Aha” moment that Jada Pinkett Smith had. In the article you will note that she says that she micromanaged everything because:
Confidence from my point of view is about letting go of the stories that block the light and power that you already are. It is about, as Robert Browning said:
“There is an inmost center in us all, where truth abides in fullness;….and, to know, rather consists in opening out a way where the imprisoned splendor may escape, then in effecting entry for a light supposed to be without.”
We’ve had it backwards for so long. From the time we were children, we have been conditioned, via ignorance, to look for our security, love and self-esteem outside of ourselves. We look around the landscape and compare our worth relative to others, based on external values of gender, race, culture, class and even clothing.
These are all just judgments made from a wounded ego, the storytelling part of the brain. These are the way of victim consciousness and it is totally disempowering. The confidence that I speak of comes from “core confidence” which is an inside job.
I can sense though intuitively and from listening to others that these changing times of ours are shifting this tide. I have a sense that there is a sense of restlessness. A growing number of people are looking for some new answers to some old questions such as:
Video Blog Post: There is a science to learning how to deal with change so that you are able to go from where you are to where you want to be without all the fear and struggle that affects most people. It is all begins with mindset.
Stress is so common now that there is an American Institute of Stress. Unfortunate. I read a statistic recently that 75-90% of all visits to a primary care doctor is due to stress. What is stress?
Essentially it is an emotional dis-ease. It is a chronic feeling of overwhelm, insecurity and feeling out of control in some way. It is a perception based in danger or threat. And the good news is, it is by far psychological. I say “good” in that if you learn how to change your mindset, you can change your level of stress.
I know from first hand experience. It’s not even how much you do, as it is how you are thinking ABOUT what you are doing. It is generally not due to a real physical threat, only one in your imagination.
If you set your intention to change, and find someone, like me, who understands how to consciously calm down your brain, and reframe the way you perceive life, you can shift your reality from one based in fear, dread and unhappiness to one that is expansive, abundant and out right peaceful. Does it take effort?
Yes, and probably not as much as you think. However I will say, if you think you can change your life without any determination or commitment, you are just going to continue to stress yourself out.
Eliminating stress is really an inside job. Once you change your inner reality, the outer will just line up – it’s magical how that happens.
Empowerment is more often a topic for discussion lately, I believe because we are undergoing a shift in paradigms. Most people are looking at the changes going on in the world as a “bad” thing. I see the metaphor of the butterfly when I look around.
What it feels like to me is that society is like the caterpillar that is undergoing change and in that transition of going from the less than gracefully caterpillar to the butterfly there is a struggle. With change comes turmoil often because most people resist it and react instead of responding from a place of power.
We all want a better health care system, yet just look at all of the resistance going on in Washington. We want prosperity, yet our system breed debt and Wall Street and the markets are a mess. Then there’s the issue of relationships. Depression and dysfunction is at an all time high, yet, most people resist personal change until they hit the proverbial brick wall.
Why wait?
Change is going to come either way. We can resist kicking and screaming or adapt and learn how to get into the flow. We can proactively release our old baggage and wounded emotional patterns by learning new ways of shifting using our awareness and working with the energy of life, or we can stuff our feelings and continue to experience more chronic disease and lack of peace within ourselves and with others.
Empowerment is what most people would say that they want. In fact, I’ve noticed an increase in the use of the word in the general public. I think we are in a time of evolution. Evolution did not stop with the dinosaurs.
However, when we try to hold onto ideas that do not progress us, don’t we surprise if we join those dinosaurs either individual or collectively. Mother Nature does not play when the interest of Life is on the table. What I mean by this is, all of life is connected whether you are walking around in a physical body or not.
Your physical body is a an expression of the role you are playing now, however, when you live against life giving principles, don’t be surprised if the consequences start to catch up with you. I am referring to our emotions and feelings.
Empowerment is about seeing clearly, embracing the totality of who you are with love and acceptance, then being able to have the personal power to update those things within you that need to evolve. It may have worked for you at one point in your journey, but the environment has changed, so you will evolve or make life really tough for yourself.
The earth and civilization changed and the dinosaurs, with their destructive dispositions and oversized bodies, could not adapt, so they are no longer in the game. We are at a time of change on our planet, this is obvious. Yet, many people want to ignore this change and pretend like its business as usual.
You can feel it in the air. The energy has shifted. This is one reason why things seem to move so fast and furious – unless you have learned to live in the present moment and make friends with change and your emotions. For me, it is getting easier, not more difficult. And I am happier now than I have ever been in my life. Why?
Because I finally stopped pretending that I did not see the “elephant in the room”, I stopped repressing old emotional baggage and saw them for what they were. Emotion is the perception, either based in fear or love. It is energy at its most basic definition. I, like most people were conditioned to live in fear – focusing on what we don’t want, like or prefer to avoid.
And this is dangerous to your mental, emotional, physical and spiritual health.
Emotional healing is an idea whose time has come. It is often ignored and swept under a rug, the old “elephant in the room” that people pretend that they don’t see. This is truly unfortunate as emotions are the fuel that runs the engine of our life.
Our intellect, logic and actions cannot rise above the quality of our perceptions, and emotions have more impact on our perception than what we think. This is also one reason why change can be so difficult for people.
We often think we want to change but because of our fear of feeling “bad” emotions, when uncomfortable feelings show up, we distract ourselves with all manner of drama, from workaholism to, well, all manner of additions and procrastination. And it’s not just our self-esteem and confidence on the table.
85% of all disease is stress-related, and stress is an emotional disease. Note the word “dis-ease”, or not at ease. The electrical energy of emotion is 60 times greater than thought and the magnetic energy is 5,000 times greater that thought.
In other words, when you feel good, you are a powerful attractor of that which resonates with the vibration of that feeling and when you feel “bad” you are going be on the “vibe” of these kinds of experiences. Science shows we live in a vibratory universe and like attracts like.
I use to be terrified of feeling pain, and there is a reason for this that often links back to early childhood, though not always. The long/short of it is, I discovered that once I stopped seeing feelings as something to be avoided, I was able to stop judging them and not dealing with my life.
Ego is a concept that I believe is very important to consider. What is ego? Ego is your personal sense of “I”, who you think you are and it is formed in an area of the brain that forms “autobiographical memory” – the story of who you think you are.
I’ve heard of many opinions regarding the ego, most of which are dismal. The ego is considered “bad” and something to get rid of by many. I used to wonder about this myself until I realized the role of ego in the “Game of Life”.
Neuroscience really helped to clarify it even further for me. Ego is that part of your perceptual system (Nervous System), that allows you to pretend and via the five senses unconsciously believe that you are separate from everyone else and the surrounding environment.
I say, “pretend” because even quantum physics is now teaching that at a sub-atomic level, everything is connected. There is no such thing as “empty space”. We are swimming in a sea of energy and yet we are like the fish in the ocean that asks “where is the water?” or “what water?”
We cannot sense it with our five senses but we do have more than the physical five senses. Ever heard of something called “intuition”?
Confidence and empowerment is something near and dear to my heart, as I know the pain of self-rejection and the hazard of constantly striving to over achieve. It’s not productivity that is the problem; the issue is the mindset in which the goals are set and undertaken.
Ego is a concept that I believe is very important to consider. What is ego? Ego is your personal sense of “I”, who you think you are and it is formed in an area of the brain that forms “autobiographical memory” – the story of who you think you are.
