I’ve been noticing quite a few people talking about how disappointed they are in their lives, relationships or work. Disappointed that they haven’t achieved what they thought they would have achieved, or experienced what they thought they would have experienced “by now”. I can see how dragged down they are by these thoughts, losing momentum in their projects and relationships, and losing connection to what inspires them to be sharing their gifts and talents. So in my Mindset Mentor-way, I look to what this contrast is pointing to, and that is…

Contentment

So let’s talk about contentment.

A very simple and easy way to understand contentment is the following:

At the present moment, wherever you are is wherever you are meant to be, whatever you are doing is whatever you are meant to be doing and whatever everyone else is doing is what they are meant to be doing.

I suggest that in order to experience contentment for longer than a nanosecond, you need to become aware of all the things that make you dissatisfied. Go ahead make a list, or take one example for now.

The next step is to free yourself from the ideas, opinions, objects, or people that cause your discontent. You don’t have to reject them or distance yourself from them, but just create a detachment from them. My favorite way is to say, “I don’t like it, but I could be ok with it.” In this way, you emotionally and energetically bring yourself back to your inner freedom. You may feel a kind of stillness because you stop being dependent on anything or anyone outside of yourself.

Then notice what this discontent is telling you about what you really want. Use your example and get clear on what you desire.

It is only by understanding and accepting completely that everything is the way it is meant to be at every moment, both outside your mind and inside your mind that you move closer to being content. In this way you will touch contentment and experience it, which will in turn create more opportunity for you to move toward contentment more often.

This is one of the foundational pieces of cultivating fulfillment in your life.

Discontent is the first necessity of progress ~ Thomas A. Edison

Mindfully,

The good thing is that I practice what I preach. The not-so-good-thing is that I hit some pain. Well, we’ll see if I’ll still call it a not-so-good-thing by the end of this article.

Right now I have a condition. Not diagnosed completely yet, the doctors are guessing. It’s been with me for a number of years. I experience flare-ups, pain and nausea at random moments. It’s evolved over time.

Like the good Mindset Mentor that I am, I continued to accept this condition not realizing I was repressing my true feelings about it. As soon as I felt bad about it, I’d move along to feeling better. Sounds good, sounds like what I teach?

NO!

What I came to realize is that I was jumping “up the ladder” of good feeling thoughts without really getting to the bottom of my fears. In so doing, I’ve kept a level of resistance vibrating in me.

So I got some coaching.

The first question he asked me was, “What could go wrong?” Bang! The well of despair and all the repressed feelings started percolating up.

He told me the better thing to do was to face that I am truly afraid of some things and ask myself, “What is this all about?” For me, it’s having my kids witness me weak or in pain, operating every day wondering in what way the condition is going to wreak havoc on my body, not being able to see my clients, dying.

So I cried. And I cried. Maybe even a bit more.

Then I suddenly spewed, “Phucket”! (sorry mum!) In my head I was saying to myself, “Fine, whatever, I don’t care if I die, or if my body gives out! I don’t like it, but I’m ok with it because, right now, there is nothing more for me to do.”

I felt resigned. And behind that resignation was a teeny tiny bit of relief. All I can say is that a small amount of “ahhh” trickled in. I wasn’t kicking up and happy, but I felt calm.

Now I’m telling you, there was no stronger desire for good health than in that moment. I was CLEAR about what I wanted. So I sat in the feeling of good health. To me, it feels like being in a river and the water is flowing along my body, clean, clear, fresh, cool, holding me and I’m going with the flow…

Up to that point, I wasn’t willing to do or experience what I did NOT like about my condition. Too scary, and I have the tendency to “pull up my socks and move on” – that coupled with a high pain tolerance. I was just creating more resistance.

I needed to get out of my own way.

As my coach reminded me, “You have to hit the bottom so you can bounce back up.” Otherwise you keep “treading water” around the issue.

Once I faced what I was afraid of and did not want to do, I was no longer fighting against it. The resistance was gone.

Now, some of you might be thinking, “You didn’t change anything.” Well, externally, no I did not (for now). But internally, I found relief. Then I seemed to walk gently into something that felt better and soon enough I found myself feeling better about life. Really appreciating life – I get to decide how I feel about all of this. I know what I choose!

Now that’s freedom and clarity!

Forgive me for the self focus. What I hope in sharing is that if YOU face something dire, unknown, unwanted in your life, you will consider facing your fears and being vulnerable to the feelings that accompany them. And when you sit with them for a few moments, WITHOUT THINKING, or hooking onto thoughts, the feelings WILL EVOLVE.

You no longer have resistance running the show of your life. You’ve opened the door to allowing what you want.

Let me know how this lands for you. Please share your thoughts below to keep the conversation going I’d really love to hear what this brings up for you.

To allowing…

Mindfully,

Feeling sluggish in the mind, wishing you were “there already” and not “here”, antsy and you don’t know why?

Often we get into action mode and we don’t stop to “smell the roses” or ground ourselves in the WHY we are doing what we are doing. We can be run by our subconscious thoughts and beliefs and cut ourselves off from our creative force.

When the foggy mind, lack of creativity and sluggish energy start to show up, I reach to my toolkit for cleaning out the mind.

The visualization I am going to share with you will work on a subconscious and super-conscious level – meaning, you’ll be virtually cleaning out some old beliefs that no longer serve you and tapping into your creative force to bring in the revitalized energy. You’ll be amazed at how simple this is!

Click below to relax, release and create a fresh new start.

Mindfully,

In many ways, you may underestimate the power of appreciation. I’ve heard you say, “Well of course I love my children. That goes without saying.” Or “I’m happy with my home, my work, BUT…”

When you are not feeling well in your life, whether it’s with family members, your new idea, your body or your work then you are not appreciating yourself around that subject matter. The negative feeling is just a symptom of not really allowing yourself to appreciate.

For example, let’s take one of my clients, Joe (not his real name), who is suffering from anxiety that permeates all aspects of his life. When I asked him what he appreciates in life, he began with a list of things he likes; his car, his gym membership, skiing, etc. When I asked him if he appreciated his kids he looked at me slightly annoyed, and said, “Well of course I do, that goes without saying!” I suggested that maybe he didn’t understand the word “appreciation”. Wikipedia says appreciation is “the recognition and enjoyment of the good qualities of someone or something. Gratitude for something.” Appreciation is not liking something. It’s recognizing AND enjoying it. It’s got more of a “feeling/being” aspect to it than a “doing” aspect.

So I asked Joe to tell me what he appreciates about his kids. He leaned back and smiled, started to say a few things, then began to cry. In a few moments he explained that he had NOT been appreciating his kids because if he had been, he would feel the warmth in his heart (very relaxing) and the calm knowing of enjoyment he has for them. For that moment, Joe felt no anxiety. He was elated!

I know when you’ve taken the time to really appreciate something because when you tell me about it, I can feel it as if it’s happening. I can also see the smile on your face and the sparkle in your eyes!

Appreciating is an experience. It’s NOT a thing to do.

What I want for you is to slow down long enough to really get into the experience of appreciating. It’s delicious. It’s gorgeous. It involves so much of the enjoyment of being human – taste, touch, sight, smell, sound, love, pleasure, I could go on! Your body begins to respond as if you are experiencing the enjoyment all over again. Your central nervous system gets calmed, your creativity opens, and you get connected to possibility.

And then what happens is a door opens, an internal door to who you really are. It’s authentic to you. It’s highly creative. You appreciate things or people the way YOU appreciate them. This spurs you to engage in life, to direct your thoughts, to go forward with enthusiasm. The side effects of appreciation are endless!

It taps you in and turns you on!

I invite you to take your time with appreciating. Wake up appreciating, bathe in it, lounge in it, stretch in it, run with it, do yoga with it! Then end your day in appreciation.

Oh, the good sleep you’ll have

I hope you liked that re-frame. BE in appreciation and let me know how it goes. Feel free to share your thoughts below. I love to read how this lands for you and share more insights.

I appreciate you!

Mindfully,

I find in the day-to-day routine you can have different desires and want different things: what you want for today; what you want to do at the weekend; what you want to achieve with your professional career; the results that you want to get this year; what relationships you want to focus on.

But, when you don’t know the purpose behind those desires and wants, you can feel aimless and unfulfilled. So what is your purpose? What are you doing here? What do you desire?

When you open yourself within to answer these questions, you will see that the inner voice that answers you is the voice of your own consciousness and is connected to some sense of value: it becomes clear that what you want is to discover how to live in the truth and not appearances, to live from an inner space of love, to be free, you want peace.

If you listen to and follow this voice, you will come close to your wholeness and your contentment, because you will then align your energies: your vision, your intention, your inspiration, your consciousness, with your action and your life.

Try this: each morning, look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself: “If today was the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do?” And if you find most often your answer is “no”, then it is a sign that you have to change something, given that your action is not aligned with your purpose.

What you want or seek is connected to living some values in an authentic way in all areas of life. But what I find happens is that you may disconnect from your true, original and authentic self. You end up living the day-to-day routine from your defenses and your fears. So you do things from a sense of duty and compulsive perfectionism, which weakens the imagination, sensitivity, spontaneity, and the pleasure of enjoying the path of being in action as a human.

I suggest you decide that you want to have time, or space, to do things you enjoy. The decision to have time for human tasks like playing, reading, thinking, reflecting, learning, meditating, innovating, having friends, loving, spending time with the family or simply being is essential in order to give meaning to life and to provide pure happiness.

Even the mundane is an opportunity for bliss! Don’t wait for someone to magically appear to make you happy. You have to know that nobody will come as if by magic to rescue you from your essential emptiness. It has to be you yourself who decides to live with a purpose and fill yourself in order to overcome your deficiencies and enjoy your life.

Now some of you get tripped up when it comes to having a vision when you can’t touch it yet or it hasn’t manifested. So let me reframe this for you. The most powerful dimension of vision is not the long-term manifestation but actually the way you choose to see yourself in your work, circumstances, relationships, right now. Important changes start occurring by simply choosing to see things and people as if you had already accomplished what you desire. That will have a huge influence on the decisions you make and the results. This is the power of vision.

I’ll just touch lightly on goals. Goals are aimed at achieving the vision. Most of us have been taught that goals “should be” Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant and Time bound (SMART). That never really worked for me until I realized Feeling goals were better. Really, in the end, I desired something because it made me feel good.

An example, your original goal, using SMART, may be to lose 20lbs. You would then ask yourself “why would that be important?” and you might reply “so I would feel lighter in my body and feel good in my clothes.” Start practicing thoughts every day like “I love feeling light in my body. I really love to wear sleeveless dresses. I love the feeling after exercise.” You’ll be using your vision to bring about the feeling of success in the present. When you believe it, you’ll see it!

Mindfully,

Appreciation is a very powerful state of being. Try it right now, go on, in your mind hook up with something that you appreciate. Now feel it. Doesn’t that feel amazing?! Feel it in your body. Relaxed. Happy. Ahhh.

I see such a positive difference in my clients when they practice appreciation. I would like to outline an exercise that I often teach.

When you wake up in the morning, just as you are coming into being aware of being awake, begin to appreciate things around you (your pillow, the duvet, the person beside you, or the dog or cat in your bed, the color of your walls, the lamp, the coffee machine in your kitchen, etc.) Now really feel the appreciation.

Smile

Now get up and get ready for your day. The next step is up to you when you do it, but I suggest it occur right after your appreciation exercise or after you’ve prepared yourself physically for the day.

Write down a few things, no more than 3-5 things, that you would appreciate doing or being today. The list could look like this:

• Have a coffee with Jane
• Finish my accounting
• Do 30min of exercise tape

Or it could look like this:

• Go for a walk
• Listen to my son instead of telling him what to do
• Listen to the entire Michael Franti album I bought at Christmas

Whatever your list, the criteria is that you will appreciate it.

In the middle of the day, take a few deep, cleansing breaths and check in. Tune into your thoughts of appreciation. Look at where you are at with your ideas of appreciation for the day. If you are aligned with all of them, great. If you haven’t done any of them, great! Just tap into the feeling of appreciation that they brought you in the morning. If you need to adjust, do so, you are free. Just remember that you move into the next action of your day with appreciation.

Finally, at the end of the day, write down 5 to 10 things you appreciate. Feel it. Then close your journal and allow yourself to let go of the day.

The main benefit of this practice is not the structure but in how much you allow yourself to feel the appreciation. With practice, you will begin to feel the desire to naturally set your intention for the day to be one of appreciation.

It is a very powerful exercise to begin every day and end every day with the feeling of having created or experienced what you desire. Appreciation is an empowered state. Good things must follow

Now don’t be shy. Go ahead and try it out. Then write a comment below so others can benefit from your experience.

Enjoy!

Mindfully,

To set the stage, Calvin and Hobbes are sliding down a snowy slope on a toboggan.

Calvin: Let’s try this path over here!
Hobbes: I don’t see a path.
Calvin: We’ll make a path!
Hobbes: Huh boy!
Calvin: Change is invigorating! If you don’t accept new challenges, you become complacent and lazy! Your life atrophies!

Falling off a cliff…

Calvin: Whoops… well, here’s a fresh challenge.
Hobbes: I’ll admit it’s opened up new horizons.

Both buried in the snow…

Hobbes: The problem with new experiences is that they’re so rarely the ones you choose.
Calvin: I feel smarter already.

These 2 characters always crack me up! Right from the beginning, Hobbes doesn’t see a path and Calvin says, “let’s make a path!”

Can you relate? I know you’ve experienced times when you don’t “see the path” out of your concerns or even into your success and happiness. The truth is whatever you are experiencing IS the path you are on! Whatever challenges you are having IS part of your path and the more you resist them, the more suffering and less growth you will experience. Just think if you were never challenged, how else would you have learned to say “No!” or state your worth, or think outside-of-the-box, or take better care of yourself, or let go of negative beliefs, to name a few?

The next time you “fall off the cliff”, say to yourself “well, here’s a fresh challenge” and look at what has “opened up” for you to discover. Remember challenges only teach you more about your potential. Breakdowns show you how to become your highest self.

And finally, because I know you are not hearing the cheerleaders in the background (frankly, neither do I!) most often these “new experiences” occur when we least expect it. That’s just the reality of being in life like author and mindfulness expert Jon Kabat-Zinn says, it’s “full catastrophe living”.

Remember, we are human beings, not human doings. There is a portion of faith that we must connect to and nurture. There is more than just our intelligence that is at play in life. Thinking that we can control everything is hogwash. But understanding how we create and respond to life is more real and empowering.

There, do you feel smarter already?!

In this first message to you for 2013, I really want to let you know that you don’t have to have big plans, new plans, or big goals, new goals. What’s most important is that you feel connected to what you are being in life. Then you can create most anything you desire.

So don’t let another day go by without owning who you are, or even being just a little bit curious. My passion is to teach you how to navigate yourself through challenges and get you acquainted with your power and happiness. I have some great programs for you to get you saying “Bring it on!”

Come with me. It’s an awesome ride!

Mindfully,

I am so happy to hear that many of you are meditating or performing some form of mindfulness practice. And the feedback you give me is that the more you practice, the easier it becomes, and the more relaxed and calm you feel. As your Mindset Mentor, I would then ask, “Why not bring it with you into your day?”

This is what I suggest. Keep close contact with your internal self (check what your feelings are like) and maintain the ‘meditative’ awareness at many moments during the day, even if it is for very short periods of time. You will find that the good feelings you have experienced through conscious choice, in meditation, you carry them with you into your interactions with others. Then, in any exchange, although the other person’s thoughts, words or actions may not be as you would like them to be, you’ll be better equipped to maintain a good feeling towards that individual, and towards yourself.

For example, let’s say you meditate in the morning and then leave home and find yourself in a situation in the office where two of your colleagues are arguing over an issue. When you try and intervene, one of them gets aggressive with you, but the feelings of peace you experienced in your meditation a couple of hours ago are still with you. You do not react angrily or fearfully. In fact, if your peace is powerful enough, it will make the other one also peaceful. You see how this could be the same within your family and relationships?!

To go one step further (I love expansion!), you could collect positive feelings through meditation at regular intervals during the day. Then become a donor of positive feelings to negative situations. This is an invaluable achievement. It is good for your own wellbeing, and for contributing to the creation of a peaceful atmosphere wherever you are, whenever required.

My best advice is… “Don’t leave home without it!”

Mindfully,

I know that sometimes you feel strong negative emotions. What I would like you to understand is that when that is happening, it is pointless to try to cover it up with a bright, happy thought.

Let’s use the analogy of tuning into a radio station to illustrate the point. When your radio signal is set on 107.9 FM you cannot hear what’s being broadcast on 93.5 FM. The frequencies are too far apart.

When you are focused on strong negative emotions, you are more likely to be focused on something going wrong, so you can’t immediately focus on, “My life is perfect in every way”. This is partly because you have been trained to “face reality” and “tell it like it is”, but also because those frequencies are pretty far apart. Do you see that?

I’ll go on to further illustrate.

Say something happens and you feel despair and one of your well intentioned friends tries to help you by being cheerful. What happens? All you do is justify more vehemently why you feel like you do! Their happiness just makes you feel even more like a failure. And their guidance just makes you feel like you would like to smack them along side of their head. There is nothing worse than feeling the opposite of who you are and how you want to feel while some positive thinker is flapping in your face about how you create your own reality.

Here’s what I want you to understand: it is not your job or even possible to find a really good feeling thought from that bad feeling thought. You have to work out of it slowly. If you are in despair about something, instead of trying to change it completely, perhaps you could find a little appreciation in something else to soften your energy. If you are having trouble forgiving someone, maybe you could feel a little better if you forgave yourself for something that you might have done in the past. Sometimes we
cannot come out of despair, lack of forgiveness or other negative emotions completely because the frequencies from despair to happiness or total forgiveness to loving the other person are too far apart, but if you will take a small step in that direction, it can make a huge difference.

Even frustration or being annoyed is better than despair or lack of forgiveness. From frustration you can find hope and from hope you can find just about anything that you want. You see, the reason you have given up on any awareness of what your emotions are telling you and doing something about it is the leap seems too far from where you are. All it takes is some small steps and you will get there!

I encourage you to leave a comment below to let me know how this lands for you. Sharing your perspective and experience just adds to the learning. Do it if it feels good. I love to hear from you

Mindfully,