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.

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:

“I grew up in a neighborhood in Baltimore that was like a war zone, so I never learned to trust that there were people who could help me. I was also stuck in the idea that taking care of others was the way to create good relationships. As a result, I tried to micromanage my world”.

Notice her response is based in fear. The nervous system does not judge, so whatever you feel from an emotional and intellectual level will dictate the quality of experience you have. If your perception about a given set of circumstances feels threatening to you, you will automatically, like a robot, revert to your old habitual perceptual pattern.

I totally relate to what she says here as I too once had this challenge. I’ve come a very long way, yet it is an evolving process. What has helped me the most is to realize that my brain is creating these “cataracts of the soul” and with awareness, they can be eliminated. Yes, your True Self is powerful and amazing, yet the fact is, you will not express if your nervous system is wired to cover over and hold back the expression of this Essence, the Real You.

It takes awareness because 90% of what runs our life is unconscious. This is why I re-educate my clients on the new science of the brain and nervous system, as it helps the fear center in the brain to quiet down enough to open the door to new understanding. It is also very important to understand how to release these “blind spots” at a cellular level where they are held.  They keep us from shining our light, and dull our life.  They also keep us focused on fear and what is wrong with the world and cause us to miss opportunities to grow our businesses, relationships and maintain our good health.

Since I’ve learned how to do this, it has become much easier to flow with life and to expand the vision for my life. I am no longer looking through the cloudy lens of fear and childhood experiences that color my world darkly. This is why I called my coaching system, “Breakthrough to the Real You” as it shows people how to eliminate these self-limiting perceptions simply and also retrain our brains to support us to actually live our purpose and desired outcomes.

We can release the stories that keep us playing on a constricted stage of life and learn to choose our destiny instead of staying stuck and missing out on what could have been if we only could see life clear enough to avoid falling into the ditches of “common knowledge”. What are your thoughts?

“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:

1. Who am I?
2. Why am I here?
3. Why do I believe what I believe; what is life about?

For the most part, the stories of who we think we are were written from a foundation rooted in FEAR – the fiction accepted as Truth when in reality it was only a way of interpretation, a story that covered over the Light of our being, our Authentic Self. The challenge is that if it is “true” for you, it will create your experience via your nervous system.

In our brains, we have an area called “autobiographical memory” which via our conclusions and thus formed perceptions, we create a “Mental Me” – the story of who we think we are. Be aware through, that as a whole, these deeply rooted conclusions were formed by you unconsciously often before the age of seven when you were most illogical and a bundle of shifting emotions.

In other words, who you think you are was formed in the mind/brain of a child who still believed in the boogeyman under the bed. The way to empower up, truly empower yourself, is to realize that you are more than your stories and you are more than “only human”. This is the starting point. You must open your mind to new ideas from science and learn to trust your own intuitive guidance.

Then as you learn how to retrain your brain, via updating your information, and opening your mind to use energy awareness and tools that can go to the root of these stories. You can eliminate the “blind spots” that are covering your inner splendor, that “Magnificent Me” instead of continuing to look for your power and love in all the wrong places.

This works and the change can be made as fast as you are willing to commit and evolve. This is not about “fixing” yourself for you are not “broken”. It is about awakening and remembering, getting in touch with your spirit, your Authentic Self, your purpose and having the courage, the “Core Confidence” to release the cellular memory, the energetic stories that are hanging out in your nervous system.

Yes, you have/are an inner spirit, yet you live in a physical body. Learning how to operate your own brain and mind consciously is the door to empowering yourself for lasting change, spiritually, emotionally, mentally and physically. These stories limit everything from business success to the level of good health you experience. You can only accomplish this sort of lasting change with awareness from the inside out. What do you think?

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.

We have been taught almost everything that leads to empowerment in a backwards order. We are taught to look outside of ourselves for our security, love and self-esteem and then we wonder why enough is never enough and why our happiness feels so unstable.

If you have to find your happiness in the weather, your job (see what’s going on now?), or the opinions of flaky acting people, is it any wonder that life feels like a rollercoaster ride? Since you need to start somewhere, for now, you can help yourself if you would just start taking your attention away from the following five things that you cannot control – except by choosing to think and feel differently and learning how to do it.

Just by becoming aware to take your focus off of what you don’t want, and instead looking for something – anything – to be grateful for, you can lower your sense of stress and overwhelm. Here are five common things people do that can raise their stress levels:

1. Listen to and focus on negative news online or off

2. Ruminating about the past

3. Worrying about your job or future

4. Multitasking an overloaded “To-Do” lists

5. Worrying about what others say about you

As a bonus, a variant of number 5, negative self-talk, will also send your stress levels through the roof and help to worsen your self-esteem on top of it. There are studies that show how this works. Look at the list.

All items can be changed when you learn to change your mindset. The past is just the way you choose to remember the event; you ascribe the meaning and significance to it. You can learn how to re-write these unproductive stories and release the emotional charge from the cellular memory in your body.

Empowering yourself will help you to stress less and be your best – from the inside out! Have you ever thought about how you can stress less?

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.

Fear, suffering and misery can be dealt with if we would simply make a conscious decision to make friends with the inevitable. As long as you are in this human body, you WILL have to contend with change and emotion. Mark it down. So, what I’ve found is, going the route of cooperation is the way to go.

Since I have learned, using a combination of science, intuition/spirituality and psychology, how to proactively manage my thoughts, feelings and emotion, I see and experience life in a whole new way. I see a whole new world. We don’t see life the way it is; we see it as we are wired on the inside.

The world is but a reflection of our inner beliefs. Since I have learned how to make friends with change, I am far less reactive to the monkey wrenches that get thrown into my day. I really like and love who I am, which for me would have seemed impossible a decade ago. I have better relationships, I’m in excellent health, and I expect the best so I no longer fear disappointment.

If I don’t get what I want, then I choose again. We are taught to live in fear of disappointment and to run from “negative” (I say inharmonious instead) feelings. There are reasons for this, and it is not rocket science to understand. It just takes a willingness to open our minds and to learn some new ideas and paradigms.

It is simple, maybe not always easy, but if you want to have an abundant whole life, you must learn to make peace, make friends which change and emotions, the two power brokers that determine if you live empowered or victimized. What do you think?

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.

Emotions are just our guidance system as to whether or not we perceive with eyes of love or fear. They show us if we are aware in the present moment that we are love, loved and centered in love, or whether we are giving our power away to some illusion outside of ourselves. Now, there is one good reason for paying attention to fear and that is when our life or physical threat is facing us.

This is so that we can run or fight to survive; other than this, it is psychological. And psychological stress is chronic and deadly. It has now been associated with 75-90% of chronic disease, including, cancer, autoimmune issues and heart disease. Yikes!

And stress – is an EMOTIONAL DIS-Ease! Stress is about HOW, we are perceiving. When we are focusing on what we don’t want or feel overwhelmed, or beat ourselves up, we stimulate the stress response, as we are viewing life as threatening. The way I began to get out of the horrendous pattern first began as follows:

1. I stopped rejecting myself and went a mission to start liking, and then loving myself. Contrary to popular belief, this is NOT the same as narcissism

2. I started meditating to slow down my thoughts which were in over-drive as I had turned into a workaholic doing machine

3. Once I started slowing my mind/brain waves down, I could actually tell when I was beating myself up and I began to realize that I could “see” or hear these thoughts as separate from my awareness (my Being, who I really am).

4. Combining these three things, then adding conscious positive things about myself to focus on, or things to be grateful for, began to break the habit of negative self-talk.

Now there are other tools and processes you can use to speed this up. I’m talking about quantum evolution. Who wants to take the next decade to change?

Once you began to truly understand how to deconstruct the key nonsense beliefs that are wired into our bodies at an early age, you can began to more easily expand your vision for your life and make it happen. There is a process to making friends with emotions that makes all this even easier, but the very first step is to begin to acknowledge the big elephant in the room and stop pretending that you don’t feel.

Also, make friends with change; it’s the one thing in life you can truly count on! Empowerment is an inside job, dependent upon how you think, feel and ultimately act!

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.

One of the first steps to freedom, emotional freedom, is to stop judging yourself and to learn tools and techniques to separate your sense of self from your thoughts and feelings. As Shakespeare said:

“Nothing is good or bad except thinking makes it so”

There is so much relativity to life and when I let go of my judgments and fears, and used simple tools that are now available to release destructive energy patterns from my body (by the way, emotions/memory is held in the body at a cellular level so it is in your best interest to release old drama), I began to have compassion for myself and feel good again about myself and life itself.  I also became happier!

Needless to say, my relationships also improved and continue to do so. As long as you have breath in your body, you will experience emotion. They are the “spice of life” and they are just nature’s way of letting you know when you are aligned with the energy of love or fear.

Making peace with feelings and learning how to consciously deal with them is a sure way of releasing the shackles of shame that binds you and keep you in destructive patterns that hold you back from living a life you love. When you are free to love, you are free to heal.

Here is an article I found today on The Huffington Post regarding the PBS series entitled “The Emotional Life” Click Here

Emotions are not so much as “mental” as they are a part of the overall bodily physiologic process. Changing the way we see emotional repression is the next step in the journey to living healthier lifestyles and reclaiming our personal power.

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”?

There are lots of studies which are also demonstrating that the energy field of our minds can become “entangled”. An example of this is when you think about someone and immediately they call you on the phone. This is no longer sci-fi.

When I was in medical school years ago, I realized that the more I learned, the less I knew. There is an infinite amount of knowledge floating around. Unfortunately, wisdom seems to be a much more scarce resource. Wisdom would say, “you know not because you ask not and when you do ask, you ask amiss”.

We often close our minds to whatever conflicts with what we already believe. And then we wonder why we use only 10% of our brains! Some people’s minds are so close you could not pry it open with a sledgehammer. I would not even try.

I’ve come to appreciate that everyone is where he or she need to be at the moment. If people are open and ask, sincerely, I’ll share my point of view. If you are reading this, it is still your choice. Whether or not you agree is not the point. We all have our point of view.

The question I started asking is, “does this belief serve me and expands my life or does it constrict me and keep me in fear and playing small?” If it does the latter – “off with its head” – so to speak. I believe that as long as you live in a human body you by definition have an ego; it allows you to function in the world.

The key is, is this ego wounded or is healthy? Another way to put it is, are you asleep or aware? If you are aware, you will realize that the real YOU is not the ego of the mental mind.  If you are aware, are you consciously healing the wounded ego, which is the source of the “cataracts of the soul”? When these wounds, these emotional blockages are healed, you can then see clearly a more expanded vision for your life.

You can see your own inner Light better and the Light in others. When the ego is healthy, it can serve your soul instead of always frantically attempting to cover up (persona in personality means “mask”) illusionary stories about the self. Shame can be healed and you can start to feel again without running away from emotions.

When you make friends with emotion and feelings, you can start to consciously manage your thoughts and feelings in a manner that is proactive instead of staying in the reactive “asleep” zone. It’s a thought. Heal the ego, and play the Game of Life to win. I’m going for it, what about you?

I believe arrogance is a telltale sign of insecurity. It is the ego’s way to covering up and hiding inner fear of inadequacy. One may as well have a neon sign on their forehead that says “I am hiding my pain and shame” when they mistreat others in a rude and condescending fashion.

What I have found to be true within my own life is that the more I come to love and accept myself, the less judgmental and more compassionate that I become with others. What we do is not the same as who we are.

When we behave in a way that is harmful to others, of course there should be a penalty (even if the law doesn’t apply the penalty, karma takes its toll). It’s a matter of reaping and sowing. I am not of the school that karma is “punishment”.

It is really about getting back what you put out. So, when we plant seeds of love, we will reap a harvest of love – eventually. Now realize that some of what we reap is not obvious in its origin.

Some people can fake looking good, but their motive for seed planting is what the field of energy is processing. What I mean is, if we pretend we have good self-esteem, or if we think that acting macho is good self-esteem, we may not receive the harvest of inner peace and happiness that we hope for.

Our energy is always perfectly matched and balanced by an Intelligent Universe that runs on order. It does not play dice and is not random. This does NOT mean it is always predictable by the mental human intellect, but from a higher, transcendent view, everything is working in order.

There is an article written on Tiger Woods in the Examiner, San Francisco on December 11, 2009 (click here) regarding his present self-inflicted drama (drama is generally self-inflicted). I agree in essence with the writer who says that she does not see Tiger’s self-esteem as healthy just because he is a wealthy, great golfer. As I said earlier, what you do, is not who you ARE.  What he did is an experience.  Our behavior often reflects the state of our ego.  I still look beyond his behavior and see that at his core, he still has a light that shines brightly.  He just needs to heal the emotional blockages.

Apparently, he has enough inner ego insecurity that he went about exhibiting behavior and having relationships that were a far cry from honorable. In fact, they look to me like a reflection of someone who devalues himself and his body. What he did was outright self-destructive to his life. Herein lies the danger of not healing emotional pain or inner insecurity and shame.

We are taught to deny and hide and ultimately, it all comes out explosively and we wonder what hit us. When you proactively take the time to heal the inner emotional wounds, by working at the level of ENERGY, then you can remove those “cataracts of the soul” that block your inner light and cover your souls’ loving power.

True self-esteem is about living from the True Self, instead of the ego sense of false self. It does not come from outer accomplishments and title. No, self-esteem is an inside job. What are your thoughts?