Some thoughts on Forgiveness from
"The Forgiveness Formula" by Kathleen Griffin

The Ten Golden Rules of Forgiveness:

1. Forgive and the whole landscape will change.
2. You are the only one who can change-those who have done you wrong have nothing to do with your forgiveness process.
3. You can only forgive when you are ready- it won't work until you are .
4. When you forgive and let go, you change and then the whole world is different.
5. There will always be someone else to forgive, so the better you get at it, the easier life will be.
6. When you forgive the big stuff, you will always have a scar on your heart: that way you won't forget.
7. Sitting on top of the mountain of being in the right is a very lonely place.
8. Think of people you know who can forgive. Now think of those who bear a grudge-which camp would you rather be in?
9. If you can learn to forgive yourself, you are more than halfway there.
10. It is never to late to forgive.


The forgiveness formula:

* It means completely letting go of the hurt this person has done you.
* It means letting go of the hold this narrative has had on your life.
* It means getting rid of a piece of garbage that you will no longer have to carry around with you.
* It does not mean forgetting what has been done to you.
* It does not mean that you do not learn lessons from what happened to you.


This is as inspiring book on how to let go of the pain that we tend to hold onto from trauma in our lives. Forgiveness of others and ourselves helps to lead us to a place of peace and happiness.

I highly recommend reading this book.

Happiness Is A Choice

"If we're unhappy, it's because life is not as we want it. Life is not matching our expectations or how it ought to be and so we're deluding ourselves.
Happiness is a choice. Many people live life as if someday they'll arrive at happiness like one arrives at a bus stop. They figure that someday everything will fall into place, they will finally be happy.
Being happy is not always easy. It can be one of the greatest challenges that we face and can sometimes take all the determination, persistence and self-discipline that we can muster. Maturity means taking responsibility for our own happiness and choosing to concentrate on what we have got rather than on what we haven't.
How often, though, do we do the opposite? How often do we ignore the compliments that are paid to us yet dwell on unkind words for weeks afterwards? If you allow a bad experience or nasty remark to occupy your mind, you will suffer the consequences. Remember, you are in control of your own mind.
Most people remember compliments for a few minutes and insults for years. They become garbage collectors, carrying around trash that was thrown at them twenty years ago. "
Life Skill Manual

I challenge you to shift your focus to the positive things and people that are in your life. Really begin to give energy with your thoughts, feelings and behaviours toward what is good in your life even if it is only one thing. As you give your power and energy to the positive you will notice a shift in your feelings and beliefs. You will begin to spontaneous experience more joy and happiness.

Praciting Mindfulness

Check out a great interview about practicing mindfulness in our day and age. See how mindfulness in related to long practiced meditation and weight loss.

https://www.abc.net.au/rn/healthreport/storied/2003/972729.htm

I really liked this article talking about weight loss and being mindful of your body signals and emotional triggers. In regards to weight loss I teach clients to be mindful of what their body and mind is telling them so they can learn the triggers that lead them to over eat. They can then release those triggers and beliefs so they can eat both healthier foods and portions without all the struggle.


Hope you enjoy!

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.