Creating Balance In Your Life

We all need balance in our lives. If we put all our attention on only one or two things it leaves us lacking in many other areas. If we vary our activities and interest it helps to fulfill our many needs for achievement, recognition, creative expression, spiritual growth and emotional support. Then when one area is not go so well we can lean on the other parts.
Some of the areas we can develop in life are as follows:

Family and Friends.
We are naturally social animals. We need to feel connected and involved with other people. Having strong relationships helps to create an emotional buffer against hard times and stress.

Personal Time.
Everyone needs quite time alone. Time for yourself allows you to reflect on your relationships, your career path, your financial status, your health, and the overall direction of you life.It also allows you to just slow down and take a breath. But remember to have fun in personal time too.

Work
Work outside and inside the home provides a sense of productivity and achievement most people need to feel good about themselves. Participating in professional associations is one way to enhance the quality of you work.

Community Involvement
Pursuing a political cause or helping people with special needs allow you to give something back to the community. There are many ways to get involved in your community and helping others may have a unique payoff. It may help you put your own life in perspective.

Spiritual Involvement
Whether you define it as belief in a higher power, connection to the earth, or simply a moral consistency in what you think, feel and do, spirituality can provide a sense of meaning and purpose in your life beyond your own self. It also provides you with a sence of support outside of the physical world.

Fitness
Many forms of exercise can provide stress management benefits. It releases pleasure-producing hormones, strengthens and relaxes muscles and give you more energy. It can also improve the way you look and feel about yourself.

Food
Balanced meals provide the energy you need to meet the day's physical challenges. Eating a variety of healthy food such as protein, vegetables, fruits and grains helps both our body and mind function much better. Limit caffeine, a stimulant that increases the stress response, and sugar, whose quick energy fix backfires making you more tired and irritable. Eat small meals several times a day.

Pets Keep You In The Pink
They purr, sing, hop, dance, or wag their tails with uncontional joy. Pets can often be the saving grace in face of stress. In fact, they may even lower you blood pressure or decrease your number of doctor visits. They provide us with both emotional connection and a sense of purpose. The unconditional love they give cannot not be mimmicked by any other relationship.

Fun
Don't feel guilty about having fun. Just enjoy yourself. You can justify having fun for fun's sake. It doesn't matter what you choose for fun as long as you enjoy it. It might be puzzels, sports, crafts, cooking, writing or any other acitivity you like to spend time doing. Give yourself permission to just let go and have fun. Bringing humor into stressfull times can also help to balance out your life. Lighten things up and you will feel lighter.

I hope that some of these suggestions will help you to find better balance in your life. Play with some new ideas and activities and see where it might take you.

Men and Women are that they might have joy and happiness.


Adapted from Rapid Eye Technology Life Skills Manual.

Criticsm

"Perception and Criticism

We are on our life's journey. It is unnecessary to reuse and regenerate old lessons or thoughts and perceptions. We can create new tools that serve us better.
If we call ourselves negative things, our mind and body will honor that. It will send the signal out through our bodies to create what we have thought and said. If we want positive to expand in our lives, we must speak it, think it and act it.
We can choose to stay focused on what we are for, or what we are against. It is impossible to teach by criticism because criticism focuses on what is not or areas that are lacking. Only by love, firmness, acceptance, and seeing the good in others can we see the good in ourselves.
Consider for a moment that we are already perfect, just as we were created. We must do nothing more to become so . What we require, however, is to become aware of our perfection. This is a matter of a perception change, or, in other words, a paradigm shift to viewing things in a different way than perhaps we have ever done before.
It's fun to practice and see our perfection. Each time we overcome, release and forgive, we become stronger and improve our ability to imagine ourselves as perfect and joyful. It is our birthright as humans to be joyful.
If we wish to grow and heal, it means self transformation will happened on all four levels: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. Choosing to rid ourselves of our obsolete conditioning is the first step.
Desire is the first and most important ingredient to healing. People who really want growth and freedom from pain come into a RET session eager to let the past go. They make their growth and healing a priority. What is put into this effort come back compounded.
Once we have experienced growth we will discover that we are unwilling and unable to go back. We will continue the process of broadening perceptions, and eventually perceive beyond our normal sensory parameters. "

"We can greatly facilitate our own growth by avoiding attachments to our flawed perceptions and letting go of addictive behaviours based upon those perceptions.
By quieting the mind we can emancipate ourselves from our habits. People often perceive this to difficult to remain in our painful habits once we rid ourselves of our conditioning because positive , whole, unconditional love is our natural, spiritual state. "
Taken from the RET Life Skills Manual.

" Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him" Aldous Huxley

Cause And Effect

"Newton discovered the law of cause and effect: in other words that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. We only get back if we put out. If we plant tomatoes, we don't reap thistles. It is important to remind ourselves that this principle affects everything we do, every experience we have.
We can't beat the law. Our physical health, our mental health, our business success and our personal relationships are each governed by the same equation which requires us to "pay up front". The fascinating thing about the law is that we never know quite when we will be rewarded; when we will receive the dividends on our time and effort. But the rewards always come and the uncertainty of their time of arrival only serves to make life more exciting.
In addiction, what we have in our life at the moment is a result of sowing we have been doing until now. If we currently enjoy warm friendships and loving relationships, it is because we have prepared the ground and planted the seed. If our business is currently flowering, it is because we've expended the effort to get the results.
If we talk about others, we'll be talked about. If we speak well of others, they will speak well of us. If we rip people off then we will be ripped off. If we rejoice in the success of others, we will be more likely to enjoy success ourselves. If we tell lies, we will be told lies. If we criticize, we will be criticized. If we love, we will in turn receive love."
Life Skills Manual from Rapid Eye Technology

The Philosopher's Answer

Here is a great parable to demonstrate the principle of perception.

The Philosophers Answer

The story is told of a philosopher who stood at the gate of an ancient city greeting travelers as they entered. One of them questioned him: "What kind of people live in your city?"
The philosopher met the question with a counter question: "What kind of people lived in the city from whence you came?"
"Oh they were very bad people." Answered the traveler. "Cruel, deceitful, devil worshipping."
"That is the kind of people who live in this city,," declared the philosopher.
Another traveler came by and asked the same question, to which the philosopher replied:"What kind of people lived in the city from whence you came?"
"OH they were very good people, answered the second traveler, kind and truthful, and God loving."
The philosopher replied, "That's the kind of people who live in this city."



Perception is, in a nutshell, our beliefs based on our experience. The way we perceive the present day world is based on how our world has been in the past, and the meanings we put on those experiences are based on that perception.

There is no right or wrong in perception. Perception simply is! It is made up of either illusion or reality. Illusion is defined as anything that is temporary in nature, that was thought up by man, and had a perception placed on it. When two people agree on this illusion, it then becomes their reality.

Perception can make whatever picture the mind desires. This is especially important to remember in the way we perceive others.
When ever we judge anyone negatively, we are really judging those aspects in ourselves. It is impossible to see something in someone else unless we perceive it in ourselves on some level of experience. "What we resists persist"

Perception is a mirror not a fact. What we look at is our state of mind, reflected outward.

Taken from the Rapid Eye Life Skills Manual.

Who Is The Master?

I heard a great quote yesterday. I cannot remember who said it or the exact wording but it went something like this: Have mastery over yourself and you master the situation. The idea was that if you have mastery over your feelings and reactions in the situation you have a lot more influence over the out come. In reality we all have very little control over others or situations however we have a lot influence. One of the ways to have the most influence is to master our own feelings and reactions to people and situations. In fact we want to no longer react but respond. Responding is different in that we consider the consequences of our action or attitude and then choose it instead of just going with what the same old thing that comes up for us. When we are mastering ourselves then we can change the old pattern and it then invites the other person to choose a different response. Someone once said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different outcome. Lets vow this week to choose a simple situation we want to change and choose a different response and see what happens. If you like the effect then stay with it if you don't then just choose a different response.

Here are some ideas:

Choose trust instead of suspicion
Choose patience instead of anger
Choose acceptance instead of judgement
Choose love instead of hate
Choose forgiveness instead of holding a grudge

Just observe what happens next and see if you like it!

The Secret To Successful Resolutions

As everyone is diving into their resolutions these last couple weeks I want to address tips on creating success this year.
The real secret to creating positive change is.......aligning the conscious and unconscious mind to the same goal. When you are no longer experiencing resistance from the unconscious mind then change is much much easier. So why does our unconscious mind resist positive change? Our unconscious mind is very set in what has worked in the past and sticking with it. So when we come up with all these wonderful ideas about how to improve our lives and start moving in that direction sometimes the unconscious mind becomes uncomfortable with where we are going and what is going to happen. It is much like trying a new wonderful food for a very, very, very picky eater. They are anxious and resistant to trying something new and would rather stay with something they are familiar with even if everyone around them is telling them that it is the best food ever. They just won't take the chance.
The techniques I use like hypnosis, Rapid Eye and EFT are perfect tools for helping align the conscious goals with the unconscious mind.
You can also use at home self hypnosis, visualisation, positive affirmations and EFT.
When you use these tools it is important that you build up the positive goal in your mind very vividly. Use all of your senses to experience the realization of the goal... such as hearing what you will hear, seeing what you will see, touching something if that applies and any other way you can bring it all to life in your mind.

Some EFT statements you can use would be like:

Even though I have failed every time in the past I now forgive myself for the past and change my direction to success now.
Even though I may be afraid to succeed on some level I choose to move forward and trust my self and embrace change.
Even though I am not quite ready to succeed yet I choose to get ready and let go of the fear and resistant now.

Happy New Year to all and blessings in success this year.

Liesl

Meet The Robinson's

This weeks post will be about a movie I watched this week with my kids. We rented a Disney movie called "Meet The Robinson's". The message in the movie was so profound that I just had to share it. If you don't want to have movie given away then you should probably stop reading now.
The story line was built on a boy who was left at an orphanage as a baby and his struggle to overcome such a devastating blow. His roommate also plays a important part in the plot. In fact it is really the roommates lesson that hit me so hard. This young boy faces a set back in a baseball game where he makes a big mistake of falling sleep in the outfield and they loose the game as result. He is told by a time traveling older self to " hold onto" these negative feelings and allow them to fester and let hate fuel his actions from now on. As a result he chooses to blame his roommate for his falling asleep in the outfield and sets out to ruin his life. There is alot of time travel in the movie and at the end the main character tells his roommate that he messed up his own life and that it wasn't his fault. The roommate then says another profound statement. It is something like this... Lets see... take responsibility for my own life or blame you.... I choose BLAME YOU! This statement spells our so plainly what so many of us do that have been victimized. We choose to "Hold onto" the pain and hurt as this boy did. I found it quite profound that when this roommate reveled himself to the main character he still had the baseball uniform on that he was wearing as a kid on that terrible day.. wow how powerful that he had refused to change these way to small and terribly dirty clothes as a way of holding onto the pain and suffering he had endured. In the end of the movie the main character returns to the past and wakes up his roommate in the outfield and as a result he catches the winning ball, changing his life. There was an alternate ending on the DVD that I preferred though. The main Character takes the roommate back in time and he wakes himself up and changes own destiny. He then says ... wow all this hate and suffering and all I had to do was wake myself up..

Are you ready to wake yourself up?