Celebrating Each Day
 It takes consistent effort to bring about positive changes in your life. One practice that I always recommend for all my clients is that of keeping a success journal.The idea is to record every success that you can, everyday.
Nothing is too small; whether it’s making it on time to an appointment, getting a haircut, or getting the car washed. The big ones count too of course—new client or job, new home, an award of recognition, etc. However, we want to start to see successes everywhere—because they are there, we simply need to train ourselves to see them. This act of celebration is a tremendously subtle yet profound way to practice the laws of contribution and receiving. How it works is that when you allow yourself to celebrate even the tiniest successes, you contribute to your own wellbeing and happiness. The exercise keeps you in a positive and upbeat frame of mind by reinforcing the fact that you are moving forward. When my clients report back to me that they haven’t kept up with their success journals, they also report lagging behind in other areas of self-care. Self-Care is very different from the all too common over-developed sense of self-sufficiency. There is a huge energetic difference between getting it all done, in order to assuage some sense of doom or “shoulds” and doing something lovely for oneself and creating a space of peace and joy. The latter is self-care. There is breathing room there! However, when we stop finding joy and happiness in our achievements, big or small, we put ourselves in a sort of limbo. We stop doing things for ourselves, because we don’t give ourselves the time and space to realize how much joy these changes are bringing into our lives. A success journal is a spiritual tool that can help us stay motivated towards self-care. The more we celebrate life, the more fulfilling it becomes.
Your Assignment: Set aside some time everyday; one minute counts! Reflect on the day’s events and make a note of all your achievements. Take this time to celebrate your achievements and give yourself the credit due. After two weeks of practicing this regularly, reflect on your state of mind. How do you feel about yourself? How do you feel about your life? Bonus: Refer to the last day’s journal, before you make a new entry and feel how amped you get.
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Liberate Yourself…
Forgiveness, I have come to realize, is one of the hardest decisions to make. We know that letting go of our anger and bitterness is essential for our own well-being, yet more often than not we end up resisting forgiveness. For some reason we associate forgiving with condoning the act and that’s where the problem lies.
Yes, all of us have the right to feel hurt. Forgiveness, however, is not giving up that right. It simply is refusal to dwell on the hurt.
When I choose to forgive someone, I do not tell myself that it’s okay for people to hurt me. Instead, by forgiving someone I make sure that they no longer hold any power over me.
When we hold a grudge, we let emotions like anger and hurt simmer till they become toxic. We continue to allow ourselves to be affected by the memory of someone’s hurtful behavior. However, when we decide to forgive, we free ourselves from the hurt.
Forgiveness is not absolving the other person of guilt. It’s a decision that we must take to make our own lives more fulfilling.
This saying “Acceptance is not approval” helped me to have me to experience this tennet.
It’s important to remember this when it comes to forgiving ourselves as well. We are usually harsher onourselves than we are with others. At the ego level it’s hard to accept that we are not always right, fair or good. Yet, in reality it isn’t possible for us to be perfect always.
These unrealistic expectations not only hold us back from forgiving ourselves, but also seeking forgiveness from others.
Often we make half-hearted attempts at seeking forgiveness by using our favorite ‘get out of jail card’—sorry.
Unfortunately, more often than not, ‘sorry’ reflects a superficial apology—one that makes us feel better while still protecting our fragile egos. It is more of an action rather than a change of being.
Seeking forgiveness is as liberating as forgiving. What we need to accept is that we can’t be good or positive all the time. The moment we start embracing ourselves fully with our flaws, we will no longer view seeking forgiveness as an affront to our egos.
Your Assignment:
Take out at least an hour at a time when you know you won’t be disturbed, for this exercise. Sit down with a pen and paper and list the names of each and every person who has hurt or offended you. If thinking of them, brings up the buried feelings of hurt again, put their name down on paper.
Once you are done, focus on each person, close your eyes and imagine that they are standing in front of you.
If you need to, yell at them. Tell them all the things that hurt you. Punch a pillow if you need to and let it OUT!
Once you are ready, you may tell them “I forgive you. I now release all the anger, hurt and resentment, I held against you.” Dwell on the truth of these words and then move on to the next person in the list. You may see each of you bathed in white light.
Once you are done, look within and reflect on how you feel? Do you feel lighter, relieved, or more at peace with yourself?
Even, if you are not able to feel a huge difference the first time you do this, please don’t take this an an opportunity to judge yourself! Repeat as necessary.You will still get great benefit from simply taking the first step towards forgiveness.
Taming The Monkey Mind
When we are actively growing ourselves or expanding our horizons, resistance can (and usually does) come up.
To be more precise, our monkey mind comes up with the most creative excuses to avoid change—“This is silly, I should be doing something else”, “I already know this…”
This monkey mind works in tandem with the ego. Our ego likes maintaining the status quo and any sort of change threatens it. Therefore, the monkey mind and ego pull out the BIG GUNS, coming up with every distraction they can, to pull you off course.
This is where you can use distraction as the mindfulness bell. Shine the light of awareness on multitasking or commotions, or drama and say to yourself, “that’s interesting…” take a breath and refocus from a perspective of choice.
For example, let’s say you are working on forgiveness, however, every time you decide to work on releasing old hurts and negativity, distracting thoughts jump up one after the other.
That’s the time to Breathe!
Take a moment and ask yourself, “Have I been able to do what enriching acts I set out to do?”
If not, don’t panic! This is about becoming more and more aware, not about creating opportunities to be mean to yourself.
Whatever your answer was, say to yourself, “OK! That’s interesting!” and simply reflect. Did you go into:
- Oh Shoot!
- I never get it all done…
- What is she talking about?
- I don’t have time!
- I always mess up…
These are DISTRACTIONS! And act as barriers to goodness and love that are waiting to be bestowed upon you.
A huge distraction for many of us is called perfection paralysis, which sounds like, “I’ll do it later when I have time.” It will keep you in procrastination and the ego happy since it is thwarting change.
The idea is not to worry when this happens. Distraction is a natural instinctive reaction of the mind. However, to develop ourselves and to make our lives more fulfilling, we need to break the pattern and focus on the moment.
As you start practicing this technique of taking a step back to breathe and reflect, you will realize how much peace and joy being in the moment can bring!
Assignment:
Choose any enriching task that you would like to work on. It could be forgiveness, opening yourself to more love, or any past Love Letter assignment. Mark a convenient time and day for you to give it attention. At the designated time, if your mind starts throwing up one distraction after another, I suggest you set a timer for 5 minutes. Allow the distracting thoughts one-by-one to float away, like down a river, and then go back to your exercise. The idea is not to over think any of this, but to allow yourself to notice your go-to distractions and work with them, not against.
The Courage to speak the Truth in Love
The Gift of Anger
Most of us don’t see anger for what it really is. We usually associate the emotion with negativity, aggressive behavior, and hurt. However, it really is a matter of perception. In the East, anger is considered the most useful emotion.
Every time we are angry we get a chance to gain valuable information about ourselves. We get to know what makes us feel threatened. What limiting belief gets triggered when we feel inadequate or hurt.
Some Buddhists call anger the mindfulness bell. When they experience anger, they stop, breathe, and look within. They identify the internal discord, wrap it up like a baby and give it love, knowing that some old hurt is resurfacing.
In fact, if you look back at all the times when you have felt angry, you may realize that most of the times your anger had more to do with yourself than others. For example, often when we get angry with someone for being rude with us, we are actually more focused on the hurtful feeling of being disrespected, but instead of focusing inwards, we channel our hurt outwards as anger.
By the same logic, when someone else acts nasty with us or hurts us, it is because they are feeling terrible inside. As they say, hurt people, hurt people.
The solution lies in naming it and claiming it. When we are willing to admit the shadow nature within, it has a much harder time ruling us and coming out in an uncontrollable manner. In other words, we need to embrace all our flaws, limitations, and emotions, including our anger.
There’s a wonderful quote by Deepak Chopra that describes this perfectly—
“At the ego level, we constantly fool ourselves into thinking that being absolutely good is possible. Never again will we cheat, feel jealous, lose our temper, or give in to anxiety. This intention never works out, because being good all the time is as rigid as being anything else all the time. There are moments when it is absolutely right and healthy to be angry or afraid”. It is these moments that we can use to look within, identify the emotion, uncover the old hurt that has resurfaced, wrap it up in love and heal ourselves.
Assignment:
Reflect on any instance that made you angry lately. It could be someone on the road being rude with you, or a loved one acting in a hurtful manner. Bring up the emotions you felt at that time. Were you angry only with them, or because of what their behavior made you feel about yourself? Did their behavior trigger an old buried hurt?
It’s only a leg (Um, no it isn’t)
The calculated poses of Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Lopez, and Angelina Jolie at last night’s Oscar Awards Ceremony are abuzz all over the internet.
With good reason, too. One wonders, “What is the motivation behind objectifying oneself?”
The cynic might say that they know where their paycheck come from and want to ensure that they keep coming. After all, as one viewer in response to the backsides of Jennifer and Cameron, “That’s why they were asked to present!”
A pop culture enthusiast might say, “Awesome! How wonderful!” with admiration and perhaps some envy. As one friend said, “I thought that it was cute, but maybe that is simply because I am programmed to the sexualization of women.”
I choose to believe that these three smart women are subverting the norm. In my heart, I hope that their over-the-top pranks are meant to provoke us into questioning the system of objectifying women’s bodies for profit and the long-term harm it does to the adoring and emulating fans. By bringing it up to an absurd level, we are shocked into examining a system making women’s’ bodies more important than their talents, their humanitarian efforts, and their hearts.
And maybe I am simply a dreamer.
Interested or Committed?
Lately, I have been thinking about how we perceive being let down and I have come to realize that there are many facets of hurt and anger that we choose to ignore.
I can now see that a lot of times I have blamed others for letting me down, when it has, in fact, been my own fault.
Every time we act outside of our integrity, we hurt others and ourselves.
For example, when we do things like commit to something but then cancel or reschedule, it erodes trust. This is quite common and is not looked at as a big deal. After all, we’ve all made ourselves so time-sick that being busy has become a sort of a cultural agreement. We let it slide when others flake, because we need to do it too.
A lot of times being busy is in fact nothing but an excuse for our inability to keep a commitment. The real reason often is that we commit to things without being aware of all the facts.
How many times have you been angry with someone you made a plan with someone and later felt like you had been tricked?
In truth we are not mad at someone else, but at ourselves for committing too soon, or saying “yes” without seeking full information.
I have done it too. I committed to an event that sounded fun. I showed interest and ended up giving a wishy-washy sort of commitment (which is a non-commitment). It was only later that I found out that the event wasn’t what I thought it was and my contribution was more than I was expecting. What made it worse; I had also committed to something that would overlap.
Eventually, it got very complicated, and involved unsolicited tickets and a third party put in the middle. I felt like I had been duped. However, what had actually happened was that I was angry with myself for committing without full information, and then in back peddling, made it worse!
This is all very normal. Once I looked at the whole situation objectively, I realized that I wasn’t nearly as aligned with my integrity as I thought! It was a very helpful lesson and helped me get more clear about what words to use and when!
How I handled it in the end was, I showed appreciation. While I do not know the big picture, I know that my acquaintance deserved the benefit of the doubt (hint: we all do). I thanked her and simply explained that I would not be attending. I do admit, the lure of over explaining in order to make myself look better in her eyes was strong.
However, once I was clear, I was more interested in the highest good of all involved.
Assignment:
Reflect on the last time you committed to something, reneged on it and then felt that the other person tricked you. A date that you ended up saying yes to, an event invite that you accepted, a favor you agreed to grant, etc. What awareness can you bring to it? Were you duped, or did you fail to gather more information?
Shining the Light on Hurt
Often when we feel hurt in life, we tend to seek comfort by blaming someone for our pain.
However, if we were to look back at the times when we have been ‘let down’ in life, we would also realize that whenever we were upset with someone else, we were also upset with the self.
There are many manifestations of this. One that I have to watch, and lots of my clients experience, is the spiritual ego, or superiority.
When we are hurt, we try to feel better by telling ourselves, “I used to do that but now I know better” or “Really? Really they are doing that?”
Sometimes we become judgmental of others, merely because they are doing what we secretly want to, but don’t because “we know better.” This is another form of superiority.
Ultimately, we hate in others what we hate in ourselves.
This is far more prevalent than we know. Let’s face it; we don’t want to admit that we are guilty of the same drives, quirks, or, bad behaviors that we are judging.
Seeing and admitting our own flaws makes us uncomfortable, so, we tend to shift the blame to someone else and prefer to feel the hurt, instead of digging deeper into our emotions.
Often hurtful incidents stay with us for a long time and keep rearing their bothersome heads, reminding us of the pain we felt. Just recently, I came to a startling realization about this.
I had been looking inside and wondering why an old hurt still bothered me. Instead of letting it sit on the surface, I went into the discomfort and boy, was it uncomfortable! I was mentally squirming all over the place.
What my gripe was that I had been let down by someone. I knew that there had to be an old hurt at play somewhere, or the incident wouldn’t bother me so much.
There was!
I hated being let down and by digging deeper into the hurt; I saw where I HAD BEEN LETTING OTHERS DOWN! Here I thought that I was such a good friend. All of a sudden I saw where I had been flaky and out of integrity. I was floored. I did not make my hurt better or worse than it was, simply shone the light and took a look.
By allowing myself to reside there for a moment—that seemed like an eternity—I got to see why I let others down. If I let them down first, then I would be protected from them letting me down.
Ultimately, what we need to understand is that when we attribute anything that makes us uncomfortable to external circumstances or ‘someone else’, we attempt to circumvent the discomfort of our feelings.
Absolving ourselves of all responsibility and feeling sorry for ourselves allows us to continue living in the comfortable space where we are in the right and therefore better than others. Shining light on our own actions, even when we believe we have been wronged, on the other hand, helps us understand ourselves better.
Your Assignment:
Reflect on the times when you felt really hurt. This time instead of focusing on what someone else did, focus on your own behavior and actions.
Take time out to introspect about the habits and traits you do not like in yourself. Pick out any recent incident when you felt really irritated or hurt, by someone’s attitude. Do you see any similarities between your own biggest flaws and this person’s attitude?
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