Life is stressful.  Most people try to relieve their stress by taking some form of chemical crutch like a sleeping pill, or cigarette.  None of these help to relieve stress.  They simply suppress the symptoms of stress.

Stress is not caused by life events such as moving house or getting divorced or changing jobs.  All these and many other events are symptoms of an inner division.

A life event can be stressful for one person, but a relief for another person.  One person dreads moving house, while another person looks forward to it.

The way people deal with stressful events also differ drastically from one person to the next.  For example, one person gets raped and carries that burden for the rest of her life.   She knows of no other way to define herself.  Another person gets raped and experience a turning point in her life where she becomes a motivational speaker or changes to a career that she would otherwise never have considered.

Stress is nothing other than an inner division or inner tension.  This tension is determined by how the person perceives the situation.

What is healthy stress for one person, is unhealthy stress for another person.  Healthy stress results in inner growth towards maturity.  Unhealthy stress results in stagnation, and emotional and physical pain.

What happens when you ignore or suppress the symptoms of stress?   Your body finds more and more different ways to express the tension.   If you believe that chemicals and drugs resolve stress, you add more chemicals to your cocktail and your body protests more and more.  It becomes a vicious circle.

How can you avoid the consequences of ignored stress?

It is possible to acknowledge the symptoms of stress and then look for the cause.  Sometimes this is easy, and at other times it is a challenge to first overcome the fear of what you may find when you do some introspection.

When you take that step and explore the reason for your inner tension, you are always pleasantly surprised.

Please leave a comment if you feel inspired.

Love and Light
Elsabe

PS: I am a professional transition coach.  I help individuals and businesses to achieve their personal and commercial objectives.

What is the one thing which is consuming all your energy at the moment?

Visit http://www.elsabesmit.com/the-smit-method-stress-relief/ for a new stress relief program that will put you back in charge of your life.

I have spent a considerable amount of time recently on getting up to date with social media.  If you want proof, search for my name on the internet and link up on Twitter to ElsabeSmit.

Working on this task has made me realise how technology catches up on what is there.  Why do we like to believe that what technology creates what is there, when it is in fact the other way round?

We have been one big nation called humanity for thousands of years.  We have known about phenomena such as telepathy and ESP for the same number of years.  We feel closer to some people than to others.  We immediately connect to some people but avoid others, often for reasons that we cannot put into words.

All this happens because we are connected on a level that we cannot see, but we can feel it.

I have had highly successful personal and business relationships with people that I have never met in person.  I have had really bad encounters with people that I met in person.

I have been astonished at the number of people who have connected up with me on social media – amazing people.  There are probably quite a few soul mates among my new friends.

We are all connected, whether we like it or not.  We all impact on each other by means of what we think, say and do.

If I think aggressive thoughts, I send a negative and damaging message right through my body.

But it does not stop there.  The energy of my thought pattern leaves my house and affects people living around me.  They then feel the negativity in their bodies and the pattern is repeated.  This is the true world wide web.

I often deal with clients in unhappy relationships because their partners do not live up to their expectations.  They do not realise how their thought patterns cause and contribute to the situation.  These thought patterns can actually cause a war on the other side of the world if they are strong enough, and if they are repeated often enough.

Charity begins at home, the saying goes.  In fact, charity begins right between our ears, in our thought processes.  Be careful of what you think – it may just happen.

Please leave a comment if you feel inspired.

Love and Light
Elsabe

PS: I am a professional transition coach.  I help individuals and businesses to achieve their personal and commercial objectives.

What is the one thing which is consuming all your energy at the moment?

Visit http://www.elsabesmit.com for a FREE new start audit and a FREE Food for Thought subscription.

I come from a family of special souls.  We are as different as chalk and cheese.  The chalks have beautiful colours.  The cheeses have a wide range of textures tastes.  Together, we make an interesting, tasty and useful combination.

There is nothing that brings out the best in people like a family crisis.  This is when we stand together and support each other.  We form a wall between us and the rest of the world, and we protect one another’s interests.  We provide emotional support and at times financial support.  We have meals together when we can.  We stay in contact, unlike other families where siblings disappear for years without a trace.

There is also nothing that brings out the worst in people like a family crisis.  This is where we each show our true colours and tastes.

Yes, we all have true colours, because we all have some chalk in us.  We all have the gritty bits that taste like sand.  We all become the piece of dust in another’s eye.

We also have our own tastes, preferences and ways of doing things.  We know who will choose heads and who will choose tails in bets.  We know who will complain about the outcome and who will shrug it off and get on with life.

Have you noticed how you will tolerate much more from relatives than from strangers?  This is because we all intuitively know that at some level our relatives have a special bond with us.

As the saying goes, blood is thicker than water.  We have very special relationships with our relatives, whether we choose to label these relationships good or bad.

The purpose of these relationships is always to teach us something about ourselves that can only be learned and resolved with Love.  Our families are masters in the art of teaching us about Love.  They either show us love when we need it most, or they highlight the part of ourselves that we know and appreciate least when we do not love ourselves.

Some people place a high value on family.  They may be seen as busy-bodies by those who place a lower value on family.  Where family does not take such an important place on a person’s list of values, they may be seen as cold and uncaring.

The only way to have a perfect family is to have both the chalk and the cheese, because they both have a purpose.  Without that, there will be no balance.

No matter what happens, my family are perfect for me.

Please leave a comment if you feel inspired.

Love and Light
Elsabe

PS: I am a professional transition coach.  I help individuals and businesses to achieve their personal and commercial objectives.

What is the one thing which is consuming all your energy at the moment?

Visit http://www.elsabesmit.com for a FREE new start audit and a FREE Food for Thought subscription.

Of course the same government is hell-bent on ensuring that nobody under the age of 18 gets access to alcohol.  Hence the law which ensures that a shop assistant who sells alcohol to anyone under 18 will be severely punished.

But it does not stop there.  A shop assistant is by law also obliged to refuse selling alcohol to anyone who may provide that alcohol to a person under 18.

What is the result of this?  A woman and her 20-year-old son cannot buy a bottle of wine for Sunday lunch, because the son, who is with the mother in the shop, cannot at that moment prove that he is over the age of 18.  His mother’s word is not acceptable to the shop assistant.  And what will happen if the son is by any chance 17 years and 364 days old?  The shop assistant will get a hefty fine and lose their job.

Can the same shop assistant sell the same bottle of wine to the next customer who has her 11-year-old son with her?  Of course.  In the judgement of the shop assistant, the 11-year-old is too young to drink, and the mother would not give the alcohol to the boy.  And we all know that no child would ever steal alcohol and experiment with it at any age.  And the moon is definitely made of cheese.

Next in the row is the lady with arthritis in both hands.  She brought her 15-year-old daughter and 14-year-old niece with her to carry the groceries.  Can she buy wine?  Of course not.  In the opinion of the shop assistant, there is the risk that the lady will force-feed the wine to the two girls, or even offer them each half a glass of wine with their meal, under her supervision.  Sorry, madam, no sale.

What kind of society allows – no, forces – teenagers to police parents?  What kind of government resolves alcoholism problems with longer pub hours?  What kind of nation allows a government to put barely-out-of-school shop assistants in a position to be the moral judges of the nation?

We created this government.  We can create a different government.  Do we know what we want from the government we create?  Or do we just want to sit back and see what farcical legislation they come up with?

Please leave a comment if you feel inspired.

Love and Light
Elsabe

PS: I am a professional transition coach.  I help individuals and businesses to achieve their personal and commercial objectives.

What is the one thing which is consuming all your energy at the moment?

Visit http://www.elsabesmit.com for a FREE new start audit and a FREE Food for Thought subscription.

Are you tired from work today?  Are you putting your feet up and having a drink?

Before you take another sip, let me ask you: who gave you permission to have that drink?

If you are saying it is none of my business, you are right.  However, if I was a shop assistant in the UK, it could easily have been my business.

Of course you are an adult and you can decide when, where and how much you want to drink.  And chances are that you are a generation older than the average shop assistant.

How would you feel if you go to your local friendly supermarket to buy your favourite tipple, and the shop assistant refuses to serve you?  Would you go back to that shop?

Before you answer: what if the shop assistant is acting on instructions?  Would you really want to shoot the messenger?

The UK is well known in Europe for having the highest level of alcoholism.  For every one person who is addicted to a class A drug, there are six people who are addicted to alcohol.

A BBC web page states “There is an urgent need for the government to give as high a priority to tackling alcohol dependency as it does to addressing drug misuse.”

How does the government do this?  Since 2002 drinkers no longer need to finish their drinks so that the pubs can close at 11pm.  The pubs can now stay open later because when the law was changed, “Ministers also hope[d] the changes would help “encourage a more civilised culture in pubs, bars and restaurants”.

No that makes complete sense to me.  Take one drunk, aggressive person who knows of no other way to entertain themselves than to get blind drunk night after night.  Add lots more alcohol and a very tired publican.  Stir in some equally drunk buddies, and voila – problem solved.  The result?  A “more civilised culture”.

But at the same time the law was changed to ensure that this drunken behaviour is limited to people over 18.  Apparently it is OK to turn 18 and have no experience with alcohol.  Not that I am encouraging excessive drinking at any age, but there is nothing wrong with anything in moderation.  I just wonder how many 18-year-olds learn moderation from an older generation who is encouraged to spend longer hours in the pub so that they can achieve a “more civilised culture”.

To be continued.

Please leave a comment if you feel inspired.

Love and Light
Elsabe

PS: I am a professional transition coach.
I help individuals and businesses to achieve their personal and commercial objectives.

What is the one thing which is consuming all your energy at the moment?

Visit http://www.elsabesmit.com for a FREE new start audit and a FREE Food for Thought subscription.

The second conclusion is that it is easier to find the reason for an experience once you have been through it.

For most of our conscious experiences, we have a plan and we focus on the outcome.  Once we have achieved the desired outcome, we are happy because we have achieved our objectives.  But all of these plans that we consciously achieve are one-dimensional.  Whatever we achieve, it is always less than we are capable of, for various reasons.

Then we have other experiences that we regard as “bad luck” or co-incidence or other people’s mistakes that we have to suffer for.  We often feel that these experiences are out of our control.  We like to blame other people for them.

I have discovered that these “unplanned” experiences are the really meaningful ones.  They are multi-dimensional.  They are not measured by formulas or outcomes of achieved goals.  They are the really meaningful experiences which teach us far more than anything we can consciously plan.

For us to have successful lives, we have to go through these more complex experiences.

Does this mean that we have to first experience everything and then only later understand the meaning?  Initially, yes.  It is only much later, when we have learned to decipher and respect the code of life, that we become aware of the meaning of an experience while we are having it.

We first have to be in the picture and experience the picture.  Only once we know every corner of the picture, do we learn the skill of detachment.  Then we can still be in the picture, but a part of us candstep out of the frame and look at the picture from the outside in.

This new view helps us to learn our life lessons much quicker.

Don’t confuse detachment with denial.

Denial is a pressure cooker which can boil over at any minute.  Denial is a bomb waiting to explode.  Denial is something that you need to deal with, and the only way to deal with it is to stay in the picture until you can happily smile and enjoy being in the picture.

Detachment, on the other hand, will only occur when you have learned that being in your picture is natural and normal.  Once you take ownership of your life, you stop reacting and start responding.

That is when you can step out of the frame and see the whole picture.  That is when you understand the meaning of your experiences and understand that every single experience was a blessing.

Please leave a comment if you feel inspired.

Love and Light
Elsabe

PS: I am a professional transition coach.
I help individuals and businesses to achieve
their personal and commercial objectives.

What is the one thing which is consuming all
your energy at the moment?

Visit http://www.elsabesmit.com for a FREE
problem identification audit and a FREE Food
for Thought subscription.

Have you ever had one of those experiences where you ask yourself ”Why have things gone so wrong for me?  What have I done to deserve this?”

I have had many of them over the years.  When I was still a church goer, the standard sanctimonious answer was “Just suffer through it.  One day you will see the reason why God has punished you like this, and then you will understand.”

It made no sense to me whatsoever that this old man with a beard sitting up there in the clouds would “punish” me with things like a broken leg, a divorce, redundancy, friends who disappointed me and so on.

Surely He had other, more useful things to do with His time than to think out these various “punishments” for me?  And if He really was gunning for me, then he had his knife in for everyone around me as well, because they each had their own version of “punishment”.

The funny thing was that over the years I did discover why things had happened to me – and no, it had absolutely nothing to do with punishment for my sins.

I discovered that sin had nothing to do with my “evil” nature.  For me, sin happens when I move away from my true, loving nature.  And guess what?  I am not the only person who has a loving nature.  The more I looked around, the more I discovered that the world is filled with good, kind, loving people.

All of these people experienced their own version of “sin”.   All of them wanted to know why unpleasant things happened to them.

The question I asked my self was:  why was it that while I had these bad experiences, I could not understand why or what was happening to me, but later on, looking back, they all made complete sense to me?

This triggered my search for the meaning of human experiences.  My reasoning was that if we all have to go through these experiences, surely we could expedite them if we knew their purpose?

My quest has led me to two conclusions.   The first is that there really is a purpose behind every experience – but it has nothing to do with punishment or suffering.  Life is one massive experience, filled with a series of smaller experiences.  Every single life experience we have are part of a bigger Plan.

For most of our lives we are not aware of this Plan.  We just get through every day, and we have no idea of what happens to us and how we learn and grow.
To be continued

Please leave a comment if you feel inspired.

Love and Light
Elsabe

PS: I am a professional transition coach.  I help individuals and businesses to achieve their personal and commercial objectives.

What is the one thing which is consuming all your energy at the moment?

Visit http://www.elsabesmit.com for a FREE problem identification audit and a FREE Food for Thought subscription.

I have been very busy recently with some really exciting new developments.

If you visit my main website you will see various items there.

The first is a tab called Food for Thought.  This is a short daily email which raises a question or makes a statement or provides something for  you to think about.  Some regular readers may find these emails quite basic.  However, you would agree with me that there are many people who reject anything spiritual simply because it means venturing into the unknown.

These emails are meant to provoke thought and to ease people into the realisation that “the unknown” is interesting and not necessarily scary or sinful or negative.

There is also a tab called Please Help Me.  I will be hosting teleseminars soon – yes, and I am really excited about that!

Here I ask you to propose topics for teleseminars.  If you are concerned about missing out, don’t worry.  The proceeds will be recorded and made available as MP3 recordings.   Please let me know what burning issues you have or what you are curious about.

I am providing a free mystery gift to the value of £9.95 for each successful suggestion.  And please don’t think your issue is trivial – there may be a number of other people who may have the same issue.

You may not be aware that I have also published a number of guided meditations on-line.  Please have a look at this website for a free guided meditation as well as an explanation of what meditation is about.

And watch this space for more exciting things to come in the next month.  I am now in a space where my hobby has become my work – how lucky can a girl be!

I also want to thank you for your support and interest over the past two years – you have helped me immensely on my own journey.

Love and Light

Elsabe

PS: I am a professional transition coach.  I help individuals and companies to achieve their personal and commercial objectives.  What is the one thing which you are spending all your energy on at the moment?  Visit www.ElsabeSmit.com for a FREE new start audit and FREE daily food for thought.

Of course some people are far more willing to break down boundaries in their thinking.  There are people who will happily explore phenomena such as crop circles and UFOs.  Other people will say that is a bit much, but they are willing to learn about discoveries in science which can be explained logically.

And then there are the people who simply close their minds, because they are too afraid to discover anything that may question their beliefs.  This is quite OK if it only affects the individuals.

But when it affects other people, I often wonder about intelligent people and their motives.

I recently came across such an example where someone told me that a woman was “bad news”.  I knew the woman in question and have only ever seen kindness and goodness in her.  Of course I am aware that people have different views and experiences, and I asked what the judgement of “bad news” was based on.

The answer was “because my dad does not like her.  She does not work.”

I happened to know that the woman was self-employed and not dependent on anyone.

Did this judgement come from someone with a petty grudge and a lack of judgement?  No.  It came from a man with a senior position in a large company, someone with advanced academic qualifications.

Did he ever speak to the woman to get to know her and form his own judgement?  No.  Why not?  Because his dad taught him that “you stay away from people like that”.

This man is so stuck in his own moral judgement of anyone who is different from him, that he will do anything to defend his position, even if his actions are irrational.  He is a perfect employee – despite his intelligence and achievements, he is a competent follower and will probably remain one for the other half of his life.

I wonder what he would say when he discovers that I am self-employed.

Please leave a comment if you feel inspired.

Love and Light
Elsabe

PS: I am a professional transition coach.
I help individuals and businesses to achieve
their personal and commercial objectives.

What is the one thing which is consuming all
your energy at the moment?

Visit http://www.elsabesmit.com for a FREE
problem identification audit and a FREE Food
for Thought subscription.