Mental Moments

Some say that the purpose of life is to seek happiness.

Is happiness the purpose, or is happiness the result of another purpose? Is happiness the meaning of life, or is happiness the result of discovering what has heart and meaning for you?

There is not one right answer to this question. The answer lies within each of us regarding what gives meaning to our life.

WHAT GIVES MEANING TO YOUR LIFE?

Perhaps, in seeking happiness, we discover what has heart and meaning for us. Is this how it is for you? Or is it the other way around for you? Is happiness for you the result of loving yourself and others? Do you find that when you are open and loving, that you feel filled with happiness?

Maybe love and happiness are inseparable. Maybe when we are happy, we are naturally loving, and maybe when we are loving, we experience happiness. If this is the case, then is the purpose of life is to seek happiness, or is the purpose of life to evolve in our ability to be loving and compassionate with ourselves and others? Read the rest of this entry »

Daily affirmations can totally reprogram your thinking and behavior in a way that produces amazing new results. This article gives you the proven formula for creating your own killer set of affirmations.

Do positive daily affirmations work? Absolutely!

The people who make fun of this practice and claim it’s not worthwhile are just unhappy, bitter individuals who resent the idea of people they know getting happy and successful. Look more closely at the skeptics you know and see if I’m telling the truth.

The technology behind affirmations is very simple and rock-solid:

Through repetition you can reprogram your subconscious mind to believe pretty much anything you want to be believe. And once your deep, automatic beliefs have been altered in the desirable direction your habitual thinking and automatic actions will be working for you instead of against you.

The forces of belief and habit wield awesome power over a human being’s life. Most of the ruin and despair in the world are caused by negative beliefs and bad habits; and every amazing success story is built on positive beliefs and good habits.

The first and foremost rule in doing affirmations is to be consistent. Do your affirmations at least once a day and preferably twice daily. Get totally religious about this and let nothing (nothing!) stand in your way of stating your affirmations; this is the only way to produce the desired results.

Remember your goal here is to literally reprogram your mind. This takes a lot of repetition.

Here are my other rules in creating affirmations that will make you absolutely unstoppable:

Get Organized

Write your daily affirmations down on standard sized index cards. The simple act of writing them will help cement them into your mind.

But the main reason to do this is to help you remember the exact phrase. It’s important to use the winning format when stating your affirmations and if you write them down you’re guaranteed to say them right every time.

Affirm With Absolute Clarity

Write your affirmations with absolute clarity. Leave no room for doubt as to what you are trying to achieve with each statement, and capture any necessary details for proper reprogramming of the mind. Read the rest of this entry »

Vera sought out counseling with me because her doctor advised her to discover the emotional causes of her chronic fatigue. Vera, a successful stockbroker, was in a loving 18-year marriage. On the surface, everything in her life was fine. She had enough money, friends, and a good relationship. Yet Vera awoke each morning battling fatigue and depression.

David sought my help because of chronic feelings of inner emptiness. David is very successful in his manufacturing business, has a good marriage and two adult children. Like Vera, everything seemed fine. Yet the feelings of inner emptiness drove David to overeat, overspend, and indulge in porno on the Internet.

While both Vera and David were successful in their careers, neither loved their work. They worked to make money, but their work had little meaning for them. Yet when they looked inside, neither could discover what did have meaning for them. Both reported that they had never experienced a sense of meaning in their adult lives, and that the emptiness and depression had been with them since adolescence.

As I worked with Vera and David, it became evident that each had made a decision early in their lives to shut down their feelings to avoid the deep pain of unbearable loneliness. Vera shut down because she was unable to tolerate the loneliness of her mother’s behavior toward her. Her mother would say she loved Vera, but Vera never felt her love. Instead, she felt her mother energetically pulling at her, trying to suck the life out of her. As a very sensitive child, Vera could not tolerate this confusing experience, so she put her feelings in a box and decided to live out of her head instead of her gut.

David, also a very sensitive child, shut down because he was unable to tolerate the loneliness of being with two emotionally unavailable empty parents, and the loneliness of rejection from peers.

As adults, both Vera and David were still shut down from their feelings. They were still afraid of feeling the pain of loneliness – a feeling that is actually an everyday fact of life. Loneliness is present when your heart is closed or another’s heart is closed, or when there is no one with whom to share love. Loneliness is the primary feeling when we want to connect with another and the other is unavailable. If you were completely open to your feelings, you would feel moments of loneliness throughout the day. However, most people never feel this feeling and are completely unaware of it, because the moment there is a twinge of emotional pain, they move instantly to various addictions and addictive behaviors, such as substances, activities, thoughts, shame and blame. Yet when we shut out pain, we also shut out joy and a passionate sense of purpose.

Pain and joy are in the same box. Vera and David could not discover what has meaning for them and what brings them joy while keeping a lid on their feelings. And the very act of keeping a lid on their feelings was creating their depression and inner emptiness.

Imagine that your feelings are a child within. If you ignore this child – by ignoring your feelings – this child feels abandoned. Our refusal to feel and take responsibility for our own pain is an inner abandonment and results in anxiety, depression, and/or inner emptiness.

It is our child within – our feeling self – that has the blueprint for what has meaning for us, for our passion and purpose. Each of us comes to this planet with a deep purpose to express, and when we don’t express this purpose, we end up feeling empty and depressed. Yet we cannot discover this purpose when we keep a lid on our feelings.

Learning to manage the pain of loneliness is essential to discovering your passion and purpose. There is no way of managing loneliness without a deep and personal connection to a spiritual source of love and wisdom. We cannot manage loneliness from our mind alone.

You will find deep meaning in your life when you decide to open to and learn from your feelings of loneliness rather than continue to shut them down. And you will open to these feelings only when you do not feel alone inside due to experiencing the love and wisdom of your spiritual Guidance. Opening to Divine Love and opening to your feelings will bring you the fullness, joy, passion and purpose that are the yearnings of your soul.

About the Author:
Margaret Paul, Ph.D. is a best-selling author of 8 books and co-creator of the powerful Inner Bonding® healing process. Click here for Your FREE Inner Bonding Course: http://www.innerbonding.com/welcome/step1core.html and visit our website at http://www.innerbonding.com

Keyword tags: self help, self improvement, personal growth, spiritual growth, passion and purpose, meaning of life

Positive affirmations are powerful tools to help you manifest what you desire into your life. Everything that exists is made up of energy in the form of radiating wavelengths. The denser the form, a rock for example, the lower the energy levels, at the other end of the spectrum there exists things that have high levels of energy. These high energy level forms are things like light, colors, and thoughts.

Yes, thoughts!

Have you ever had a day off work and did a lot of thinking, and then found at the end of the day you was exhausted? On a day you hoped was for rest, it tired you out just by thinking.

So if you ever needed confirmation that thoughts were powerful, then they can tire you out. If we flipped that scenario slightly, if thoughts can reduce your energy, we must therefore have thoughts that can fill you with energy.

Expanding on that theory that thoughts give us energy, we must consider what out thoughts can project onto others. If we are sad for example and enter a room with happy people, we can sometimes see their happiness subside as my sadness energy over powers their happiness energy. That can also work the other way. Should I walk into a room bounding with happiness the other people’s energy may try to over power mine but invariably if the energy is positive, my happiness will flow through the room.

So if we can see first that thoughts alone are powerful, we can begin to understand where affirmations sit into this system of using energy to empower our life.

Thoughts, when focused on and combined with passion, in time, are manifested into reality. That is the power of positive affirmation, it is the repeated reading of a statement or thought that gets into the sub-conscious mind and radiates from us to attract the necessary means to bring forth that thought into reality.

Affirmations are simply statements that we make to ourselves; it’s our self-talk. You use affirmations all the time, whether you’re doing so intentionally or unintentionally.

Successful people think successful thoughts. They know that entertaining thoughts of failure and defeat is a waste of time. Successful people think of future possibilities, not of past set backs. Read the rest of this entry »

The happiest people are those who love themselves. You do not need to be perfect to be happy. What you can do is to love yourself more to have a better and more positive outlook in life. Self-improvement tips on loving yourself more are accessible anywhere and if you want to learn to love yourself, here are some insights to reflect on.

Complement on yourself. Give yourself good points whether physically emotionally. For instance, tell yourself that you look good on your new dress or you worked on the situation well. Complements tend to make your mood better. Try to focus on every positive side in any situation.

Do yourself a favor and have a makeover. Looking good can make you feel good. Make an effort to wear something attractive, put on a little makeup and go to a salon for a new hairstyle. This can give you confidence and realize that you can indeed look your best. It is a good idea to pay attention about your health and fitness. You do not need to have a supermodel image but keeping yourself fit by daily exercise can improve your health as well as your mood. Exercise can give you positive energy, which is very important with how you deal with people around you.

Treat yourself occasionally. Take time for yourself and go shopping, watch movies or eat in a nice restaurant. Pamper yourself with relaxing massage and go to health spa. Everybody needs a break after a long week of hard work and you deserve to have one. Traveling with family and friends can make a big difference in your perspective in life. Going to places that you have always wanted to go is a good way to reward yourself.

Make a list of your strengths and weaknesses. Focus on your strengths and on how you can develop them. On the other hand, reflect on your weak points so that you will be able to know how to change them. This way, you can know more about yourself and love yourself even more.

Do an act of kindness everyday. Do something good to other people. Even how simple and small it is, the act can give you a good feeling and a sense of fulfillment for the whole day.

Be aware of what you can and cannot do. Try to evaluate yourself and be honest on your assessment. Read the rest of this entry »