Tiny Buddha

Tag: awareness

  • How Two Simple Lists Completely Transformed My Life

    How Two Simple Lists Completely Transformed My Life

    “Happiness turned to me and said, ‘It is time. It is time to forgive yourself for all of the things you did not become… Above all else, it is time to believe, with reckless abandon, that you are worthy of me, for I have been waiting for years.” ~Bianca Sparacino

    I didn’t know who I was.

    That realization hit me like a punch to the chest after I ended a decade-long relationship and canceled my wedding six weeks before it was supposed to happen.

    I remember standing in my kitchen one morning, staring at the floor, and thinking, I have no idea what kind of music I actually like.

    That might sound small, but it was the beginning of everything unraveling.

    Because when you don’t know what kind of music you like… you probably don’t know what your values are. Or your opinions. Or your boundaries. Or your identity.

    And in my case, I didn’t.

    My identity had been shaped entirely by other people. I had become an expert in sensing what people wanted me to be—and then being it.

    I did it with romantic partners, with friends, with coworkers. It was like I had this superpower: I could walk into a room, assess the energy, and morph myself into whoever I thought would be the most likable version of me in that context.

    Great for my acting career. Not so great for real life.

    When the relationship ended and I finally found myself alone, I didn’t just feel lost. I felt hollow. I didn’t have a self to come home to. And the loneliness? It was unbearable.

    I entered what I now call my “summer of sadness.”

    At the time, I called it freedom. I drank more than usual. Partied more than usual. I told myself I was finally living. But behind all of it was a deep, silent ache. A confusion. An emotional fog that wouldn’t lift.

    Eventually, the fog turned into something darker: I spiraled into a rock-bottom moment I never saw coming. It was like my soul said, Enough.

    And somewhere in that mess, I grabbed a pen.

    I didn’t know what else to do. I had so much swirling inside me, and nothing made sense. So I sat down with my journal and wrote two lists.

    List One: Who I Am

    This list was hard to write. It wasn’t self-love-y or positive. It was honest.

    I wrote things like:

    • I’m anxious and overthinking constantly.
    • I say yes when I want to say no.
    • I try to be what I think others want me to be.
    • I interrupt people when they are speaking because I want to feel relatable.
    • I feel guilty all the time, and I don’t know why.
    • I don’t trust myself.

    There was no sugarcoating. No judgment either. Just observation.

    I looked at the page and thought, Okay. This is where I’m at.

    Then I flipped the page.

    List Two: Who I Want to Be

    This list felt different. Not dreamy or abstract, but clear.

    I wrote things like:

    • I want to be grounded and calm.
    • I want to be kind, patient, and generous.
    • I want to listen more than I speak.
    • I want to say no without guilt.
    • I want to show up more in love and less in fear.
    • I want to move through the world not feeling like I always need to prove myself.

    Reading them back, I could feel how wildly different those two versions of me were—not just in how I showed up for the world, but in how I treated myself.

    One list was full of fear, defensiveness, and guilt. The other was rooted in confidence, calm, and choice.

    It wasn’t about becoming a brand-new person. It was about becoming more me—the version of me that had been buried under layers of people-pleasing, perfectionism, and performance for years.

    You can’t become who you want to be if you’re not honest about who you are right now. That’s exactly what those two lists gave me—an unfiltered look at both sides of the mirror.

    As I looked at both lists side by side, I didn’t feel shame. I felt clarity.

    The gap between them wasn’t a flaw. It was a direction.

    And I had a choice to make. Keep going as I was—or finally do the work to change.

    Not just for a month. Not just until I felt better. But for real this time.

    The kind of change that’s uncomfortable. The kind that reworks your patterns, rewires your reflexes,
    and asks you to let go of everything that no longer fits.

    That moment became the foundation of my healing journey.

    Awareness First, Then Change

    Let me be clear: I didn’t wake up the next day and magically become that second list.

    What I did was start noticing. I’d walk away from conversations and think, Ah… I interrupted people a lot again. I tried to be funny instead of real. I said yes when I meant no.

    At first, that awareness was frustrating. I wanted to be further along. But eventually, I realized the win is in noticing.

    What helped me most in this part of the process was journaling.

    I began tracking my thoughts, my actions—even entire conversations. I’d ask myself: Was I present today? Or was I in my head? Did I try to prove something? Where did that pattern show up?

    Sometimes I’d set one small focus, like “interrupt less,” and observe that for weeks. I started noticing who I felt the need to impress, when I lost presence, and what kind of people triggered those old habits. I wasn’t trying to fix it all at once—I was learning myself in real time. That awareness, day by day, became the bridge.

    That’s the starting point for every real shift.

    Over time, those small moments of noticing turned into different choices. I started speaking up. Setting boundaries. Sitting with my emotions instead of numbing them. Choosing presence over performance.

    And little by little, I began becoming the person on the second list.

    Not perfectly. Not quickly. But honestly.

    What I Learned from Writing Two Lists

    1. Change starts with radical honesty. You can’t grow if you’re not willing to name where you are.

    2. Self-awareness is a skill, not a switch. It builds slowly. Be patient.

    3. You don’t need to know the whole path. Just the direction is enough.

    4. The goal isn’t perfection. It’s alignment. It’s feeling proud of who you are becoming.

    If you’re in a season of unraveling, I see you. It’s disorienting. It’s uncomfortable. But it might also be the doorway to everything real.

    So grab a pen. Write your lists.

    Not to shame yourself, but to meet yourself.

    That moment of truth might just be the moment that changes everything.

    You don’t have to write your lists perfectly. You don’t even have to know what to do with them right away. Just be honest. Start where you are. Let clarity come before change—and let that be enough for now.

  • Awareness and Self-Compassion: Two Powerful Tools for Chronic Pain

    Awareness and Self-Compassion: Two Powerful Tools for Chronic Pain

    “Pain is not wrong. Reacting to pain as wrong initiates the tangle of emotional resistance against what is already happening.” ~Tara Brach

    The wooden meditation hall creaked softly as sixty people shifted in their seats, trying to find comfort in the silence. Outside, winter rain tapped against the windows, a gentle metronome marking time. I sat cross-legged on my black cushion, watching sweat trickle down my temple despite the cool air. My legs burned as if I’d been running for hours, though I hadn’t moved in forty-five minutes.

    It was day three of my first six-day silent meditation retreat, and I was learning my first profound lesson about physical pain—not from my meditation teacher, but from my protesting body. Little did I know that this experience would become a crucial foundation for navigating a far greater challenge that lay ahead.

    The pain started as a whisper in my lower back, a gentle suggestion that perhaps I should adjust my posture. Within minutes it grew to a shout, then a scream. While other practitioners appeared serene, their faces soft and bodies still, I was waging an internal war. Every few minutes, I’d shift my weight slightly, trying to find that elusive comfortable position. The cushion that had felt so perfect during the orientation session now seemed as unyielding as concrete.

    The meditation instructions echoed in my mind: “Just sit and observe your breath.” But my body had other plans. Each inhale brought awareness of new discomfort—a sharp knife in my hip, a dull ache in my shoulders, pins and needles racing down my calves. The physical sensations became my entire world, drowning out any hope of focusing on my breath.

    I tried everything. Different cushions borrowed from the prop closet. Various positions—Burmese, half-lotus, kneeling. I even snuck to the back of the hall to lean against the wall, feeling like a meditation failure as I watched the straight backs of more experienced practitioners ahead of me.

    Then, on day four, something shifted. Perhaps it was exhaustion from fighting my experience, or maybe it was the wisdom of surrender, but I finally heard what my teacher had been saying all along: “Don’t try to change what’s arising; just be with it with kindness.”

    For the first time, I stopped trying to fix my discomfort. Instead, I got curious about it. What did the pain actually feel like? Was it constant, or did it pulse? Where exactly did it begin and end? As I explored these questions with genuine interest rather than resistance, something remarkable happened—while the physical sensations remained, my suffering began to decrease.

    “In the midst of pain is the whole teaching,” Pema Chödrön’s words would become my lifeline two years later, when a back injury transformed my relationship with pain from a periodic challenge into a constant companion. I would join the ranks of millions living with chronic pain—a silent epidemic that affects more than one in five adults globally.

    While medicine can sometimes dull the sharp edges of physical suffering, many of us learn that managing chronic pain requires more than just medication. It demands a complete reimagining of our relationship with our bodies and with pain itself.

    The lessons from that meditation hall now played out in vivid detail through every moment of my daily life. Simple tasks became exercises in mindful movement. Getting out of bed required a careful choreography of breath and motion. Picking up a dropped pen became a practice in patience and body awareness. Each movement called for the same careful attention I’d learned to bring to meditation.

    The physical pain was just the beginning. In the darkness of sleepless nights, lying on my floor because no other position brought relief, my mind raced with endless worries: Would I ever recover? Could I continue counseling my clients in person? How would I pay the mounting medical bills? These thoughts circled like hungry wolves, testing the limits of my newfound practice of acceptance.

    Working as a therapist brought its own unique challenges. I vividly remember sitting across from clients, maintaining my therapeutic presence while searing pain radiated from my tailbone through my entire spine. Each session became a practice in dual awareness—being present for my clients while acknowledging my own experience. Some days, the effort to maintain this balance left me depleted, with barely enough energy to drive home.

    There was also the exhausting social dance of chronic pain. The simple question “How are you?” became complicated. Telling people about the constant pain felt burdensome after a while. No one wants to always be the person who’s suffering. So instead, I’d smile and say, “I’m fine,” swallowing the truth along with the discomfort. These small acts of concealment created their own kind of fatigue, a lonely space between the public face and private reality.

    I invite you to pause and reflect on your own relationship with pain. When discomfort arises, what stories does your mind create about it?

    Notice how your body responds—the subtle tightening, the wish to push away what’s difficult. Consider what it might feel like to create just a little space around your pain, like opening a window in a stuffy room.

    Sometimes I think of pain as an unwanted house guest. We didn’t invite it, we don’t want it to stay, but fighting its presence only creates more tension in our home. Instead, we can acknowledge it’s here, set appropriate boundaries, and continue living our lives around it. Some days we might even discover unexpected gifts in its presence—a deeper appreciation for good moments, increased empathy for others’ struggles, or the discovery of our own resilience.

    Working with pain mindfully reveals that healing happens on multiple levels. When we respond to physical discomfort with gentle awareness, we start noticing how our thoughts create narratives about the pain, how emotions arise in waves, and how our nervous system responds to kind attention. Through this practice, we can learn to expand our attention beyond the pain, discovering that even in difficult moments, there is also the warmth of sunlight on our face, the sound of birds outside our window, the taste of morning coffee.

    Years later, my pain isn’t as severe, but it remains a daily companion. I carry a back pillow everywhere as if it’s an accessory, mindfully choosing which events to attend and for how long. Gardening, once a carefree joy, has become an exercise in presence—each movement an opportunity to listen to my body’s wisdom. Some days still find me lying on the floor, being with whatever my body is expressing in that moment.

    But there’s a profound difference now. Where I once pushed through pain with gritted teeth, I’ve learned to respond to my body’s signals with care and compassion.

    This shift feels especially valuable as I age, knowing that new physical challenges will likely arise. Each twinge and ache is no longer an enemy to vanquish but a reminder to pay attention, to move more slowly, to tend to myself with kindness.

    The clock in that meditation hall taught me about impermanence—how even the most challenging moments eventually pass. My back injury taught me about acceptance and resilience. Together, these experiences showed me that while we can’t always choose what happens to our bodies, we can choose how we meet these experiences with awareness and compassion. In doing so, we discover that peace isn’t found in the absence of pain but in our capacity to be with it skillfully.

  • Escaping Escapism: From Drinking to Scrolling to Being Present

    Escaping Escapism: From Drinking to Scrolling to Being Present

    “Sit with it. Instead of drinking it away, smoking it away, sleeping it away, eating it away, or running from it. Just sit with it. Healing happens by feeling.” ~Unknown

    I had no idea I had so many feelings until four years ago. I became sober and immediately started overflowing with emotions—emotions I never knew I had.

    I stopped drinking just over a month after my twenty-fifth birthday, in January of 2021. I drank a lot in college, often going out Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights every week. Once I graduated, though, my drinking mellowed. I was still going out, but paying for my own drinks (as opposed to the free flow of alcohol at a college party) forced me to drink less to save more.

    Early in 2020, my drinking increased again due to being stuck inside while in an unpleasant living situation. By the end of 2020, though, I again wasn’t drinking much—maybe a glass of wine or two during the weekend. I was, however, smoking weed daily.

    Cannabis, a substance used by many to calm their anxiety, did the opposite for me. Every day after work, I would sit on the front porch and smoke a joint—through rain, snow, anything. I loved the heady feeling of being high.

    When I was high, I felt motivated to become a better person (that motivation, however, lacked follow-up action). I felt like a child again, seeing everything with wonder in my (droopy red) eyes.

    While I enjoyed the effects of weed, I also felt my anxiety, an ever-present being in my psyche, slowly become more intense. One harrowing night, after being up for hours having panic attacks caused by both alcohol and weed, I made the decision to try sobriety.

    I went into sobriety with no expectations. It was an experiment for me, although I had a hunch I was on the right path. Would not smoking help my mental health? Would quitting drinking lower my anxiety? I was about to find out.

    I realized that something changes when you stop engaging with harmful substances, almost like a switch slowly flips the less mind-altering drugs are in your body. Things become clear, like taking off glasses you didn’t know you were wearing. You realize things and remember things, especially things you didn’t expect. Thoughts you had forgotten, memories you thought you blocked, trauma you thought you had released.

    There’s something about the absence of anything mind-altering in the body that makes things abundantly transparent. In early sobriety, I discovered that the anxiety I thought I was healed from was only lying dormant.

    I’ve had anxiety my entire life; some of my earliest memories are of being anxious. I remember starting kindergarten nervous that my peers would make fun of me for the way I chewed.

    By January 2021, I thought I had my anxiety under control. I was on the same medication I had started nine years prior. I was going to therapy regularly. I was familiar with the feeling of butterflies taking over my stomach, the wash of heat or cold that would overtake me during a really anxious moment.

    I did not, however, know how to manage my anxiety without any substances. The second I stopped smoking daily, it felt like all the suppressed anxiety came to haunt me. My legs were constantly bouncing. My stomach was constantly upset. My heart was constantly pounding. I couldn’t go a day without at least an hour of panic attacks.

    I was terrified and confused, thinking to myself, Shouldn’t I be feeling better? I thought I moved past these intense feelings ages ago.

    With time, my panic attacks became fewer and farther between. I learned to allow the feelings to flow through my body—my legs would eventually stop bouncing, my stomach would eventually feel normal, my heart would eventually return to its natural rhythm.

    But I still unconsciously tried to find distractions. I drank caffeine, and I scrolled on social media. I read a pile of self-help books without taking any action. Just reading the book is enough to feel successful in self-improvement, right? But really, I was in the same place as I was pre-sobriety. The only difference was I was suppressing my feelings with social media instead of the bottle or a joint.

    Then I woke up one day and recognized that social media was serving the same purpose as substances did. I would get up on the weekends feeling hungover, even though I hadn’t drank the night before. I had, however, scrolled TikTok for an hour.

    Getting out of bed after bingeing social media feels like getting out of bed after bingeing alcohol. I had stopped using substances, but I hadn’t stopped doing everything I could to get away from experiencing everything happening inside me.

    Once I had this realization, I tried, desperately, to process my emotions, to feel my feelings, but the lure of TikTok was so strong. I’d tell myself only five minutes but would be in the same position an hour later with a stiff neck, berating myself for bingeing TikTok yet again.

    Escapism was screaming in my ear, and it was so, so easy to give in. Reaching for a phone takes a second; processing an emotion takes minutes. Which one is easier? Which one is more beneficial? Which one will make me feel better?

    I was stuck in this cycle of wanting to be in touch with my feelings, of wanting to embrace life, but continually falling into the trap of one addiction or another because it’s Just. So. Easy.

    Our phones were designed to suck us in and rewire our brains to use them to escape our lives. And no matter how much I recognize that and how much I want to be fully present every day, I can’t seem to stop trying to ignore my feelings.

    Every day when I get home from work, I ‘decompress,’ using my thirty minutes of allotted TikTok time curled up on the couch. I do feel refreshed after, but I can’t help but think, how close are we to living in the spaceship from Wall-E? How soon will we all be so glued to technology we’ll be physically allergic to human emotion?

    When there were talks of TikTok getting banned in the US, people were freaking out. Influencers who make their income on the app were posting videos on where else they could be found. People were revealing secrets—some influencers even admitted to building their platforms on lies.

    When did we become so dependent on an app? How have we gone from dial-up internet to tiny computers in our pockets that we can use anytime, anywhere in the course of my lifetime? And why are social media apps designed like casinos—to give us little dopamine hits here and there to keep us engaged and addicted?

    When I phrase it like that, social media can be easily seen as evil. However, social media has also done a lot of good.

    I’ve used TikTok to find tips on managing anxiety, on curing migraines, and workouts.

    People have donated the money they’ve made to good causes—to rebuilding Asheville after Hurricane Helene, to Planned Parenthood, and to buy school lunches for children.

    Unknown authors, singers, and comedians have gained fans and recognition.

    How can something that’s done so much good be so bad at the same time? How do we, as humans with pleasure-seeking brains, reconcile this dichotomy? I regularly have this conversation with my therapist, as I recognize how far I’ve come.

    It took two years of sobriety for me to WANT to acknowledge my feelings. Although I had been in therapy on and off since I was a child, my therapy became much more effective post-sobriety.

    I felt like I was on the fast track to healing, like before I had been dragging my feet with my therapist, and now we were running together like athletes. It still took a while, however, to turn away from escapism and embrace my inner world.

    It’s taken another two years to start becoming aware of every time I turn to one of my vices. Life is so busy that it’s easy for me to go a week drinking caffeine every day, or extending my TikTok screen time for fifteen more minutes four times in a row.

    It’s taken years of building knowledge of what makes me feel good (for real) and what makes me feel like substances used to—good for a moment, bad for a while.

    I love reading, and I always feel refreshed after taking some time out of my day to read. Listening to music can always put me in a good mood. How long is it going to take for me to fully let go of technology, of dampening my emotions to avoid unpleasantness? Will I ever find peace?

    Had someone told me four years ago I would be writing about the similarities between substances and social media, I would’ve laughed and said, “They’re both so fun; they make my life better!” But that’s addiction, isn’t it? Even if you don’t have “a problem,” looking to external sources for your happiness will always end in suffering.

    Although sobriety hasn’t solved my desire to escape, I do feel a lot better than before, and I continue improving every day. Over time, I’ve learned to accept and sit with my emotions. I know that everything will pass, even the most unpleasant feelings.

    Four years in, I finally understand that vices are a way to run away from feelings. I may never totally escape escapism, but as long as I continue trying to choose presence and awareness, that will have to be enough.

  • How to Cultivate Awareness and Presence, Two Powerful Tools for Healing

    How to Cultivate Awareness and Presence, Two Powerful Tools for Healing

    “The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

    In our fast-paced world, juggling multiple responsibilities while managing chronic conditions can make healing seem elusive. However, by harnessing the power of awareness and presence, we can unlock a profound path to recovery that addresses not just the physical symptoms but also the mental and emotional aspects of well-being.

    My Experience with Chronic Pain

    For a long time, I never really thought about my scoliosis. Not that I didn’t feel pain; it was ever-present and intensified by the demands of my busy career, family responsibilities, and a couple of car accidents.

    As I climbed the corporate ladder and juggled family needs, I neglected self-care. Frequent pain flares forced me to take more time off from daily activities, leading me to realize that my struggles were not solely physical.

    What began as occasional aches turned into never-ending pain accompanied by a fear of movement, leaving me bedridden and wondering how I had reached that point.

    Desperate to change, I started researching the role of the brain and nervous system in processing pain. I learned that stress and anxiety can amplify pain signals, making discomfort feel more intense and persistent. Understanding this connection became crucial to my healing journey.

    I soon realized that healing required more than merely managing or controlling symptoms; it involved understanding and changing the patterns contributing to my pain.

    For years, I tried various treatments and therapies, but the relief was often temporary. Recognizing specific patterns—like dealing with stress, pushing through activities, and failing to fuel my body—became key to my recovery.

    Mindfulness and presence emerged as powerful tools in this journey. At first, mindfulness didn’t come easily; my busy mind was adept at conjuring up ideas and plans, leaving me unaware of my ability to quiet those thoughts. However, after years of internal chatter, I found freedom in stillness.

    Over time, I noticed how this practice allowed my body to rest. By embracing mindfulness, I transformed my relationship with pain.

    The Mind-Body Connection in Healing

    To truly understand the importance of awareness and presence in healing, it’s essential to recognize the intricate connection between our minds and bodies. Neuroscience has shown that our thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations are deeply intertwined, forming a complex feedback loop that can either perpetuate illness or promote healing.

    When we’re constantly caught up in the whirlwind of daily life, rushing from one task to another, it’s easy to disconnect from our bodies. This disconnection can lead to a lack of awareness of the subtle signals our bodies send us, potentially exacerbating existing health issues or creating new ones. By cultivating awareness and presence, we can tune into these signals and respond appropriately, setting the stage for healing.

    The Role of Awareness in Healing

    Awareness is the foundation of any healing journey. It involves consciously paying attention to thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations without judgment. This practice has been essential in my own healing process, allowing me to:

    • Identify patterns: By becoming aware of habitual thoughts and behaviors, I’ve been able to recognize patterns that contribute to pain or discomfort.
    • Detect early warning signs: Increased body awareness helps me notice subtle changes in my physical state, allowing for earlier intervention and prevention of flare-ups.
    • Understand triggers: Awareness helps me identify environmental, emotional, or situational triggers that may exacerbate symptoms.
    • Recognize the impact of stress: By tuning into my body’s stress responses, I’ve learned to manage stress more effectively, reducing its negative impact on health.
    • Make informed choices: Increased awareness enables better decisions about diet, activities, and self-care practices.

    Cultivating Presence for Healing

    While awareness is about noticing, presence is about fully engaging with the present moment. Being here now, without getting caught up in worries about the future or regrets about the past, has been crucial in my healing journey because:

    • It reduces stress: When I’m fully present, I’m not ruminating on past pain or anticipating future discomfort, which significantly reduces stress and anxiety.
    • It enhances body-mind communication: Being present allows me to listen more closely to my body’s signals and respond with greater compassion and understanding.
    • It improves pain management: I’ve found that mindfulness and presence can alter pain perception and increase pain tolerance.
    • It boosts the effectiveness of my movement practice: When I’m present during exercises, I’m more likely to stay and feel my body and derive maximum benefit.
    • It fosters a sense of agency over my life: Presence empowers me to take an active role in healing, rather than feeling helpless or overwhelmed by my condition.

    Practical Techniques for Cultivating Awareness and Presence

    Over time, I’ve developed several techniques that help me cultivate awareness and presence. These practices have become essential tools in my healing journey:

    1. Mindful Breathing

    Setting aside five to ten minutes each day to focus on my breath helps me stay connected to the present moment. I notice the sensation of air moving in and out of my nostrils, the rise and fall of my chest or belly, and gently bring my attention back to my breath when my mind wanders.

    2. Body Scan Meditation

    This practice involves systematically focusing attention on different parts of the body, from toes to the top of the head. It’s an excellent way to increase body awareness and identify areas of tension or discomfort.

    3. Pain Reprocessing Techniques

    Chronic pain is often maintained by the brain’s learned neural pathways rather than ongoing tissue damage. By bringing awareness to my pain and reframing my relationship with it, I’ve begun to rewire these pathways. Observing pain with curiosity rather than fear or frustration has helped reduce the emotional charge associated with it.

     4. Mindful Movement

    Incorporating mindfulness into physical activities enhances body awareness and promotes healing. Whether it’s gentle yoga, tai chi, or simply paying close attention to my body during daily activities and walking, mindful movement has become a key part of my routine.

     5. Emotional Awareness Exercises

    Developing emotional awareness has helped me manage stress and anxiety more effectively. Throughout the day, I check in with my emotions, asking myself how I’m feeling and where I feel this emotion in my body.

     6. Mindful Eating

    Applying awareness and presence to my eating habits has improved digestion, helped me make healthier food choices, and fostered a better relationship with food. During meals, I eat without distractions, paying attention to the colors, smells, textures, and tastes of my food.

    7. Daily Gratitude Practice

    Cultivating gratitude shifts my focus from what’s wrong to what’s right, promoting a positive mindset that supports healing. My morning journaling practice includes writing down three to ten things I’m grateful for. This practice helps bring my awareness to the present and the positive aspects of my life.

    Integrating Awareness and Presence into Daily Life

    While dedicated practice times are valuable, I’ve found that the real power of awareness and presence comes from integrating them into daily life.

    One way I’ve done this is by using daily activities as mindfulness anchors, choosing routine activities, like brushing my teeth or daily walking, to practice full presence and awareness.

    I’ve also created transition rituals, using the moments between activities (like getting in and out of the car) as cues to take a few conscious breaths and center myself.

    Lastly, I engage my senses whenever possible. Regularly, I take a moment to notice what I can see, hear, smell, taste, and feel. This simple practice quickly brings me into the present moment.

    Overcoming Challenges

    Cultivating awareness and presence isn’t always easy, especially when dealing with chronic pain or the demands of daily life.

    Whenever I think I don’t have time, I remind myself that even a few mindful breaths can make a difference. Starting small and gradually increasing practice time has helped.

    When my mind won’t stop racing, I remind myself that this is normal. The goal isn’t to stop thoughts but to notice them without getting caught up in them. I gently redirect my attention to my chosen focus (like my breath) whenever I notice my mind has wandered.

    And when it felt too uncomfortable to focus on my body in the beginning due to the pain I was experiencing, I started with brief periods and focused on neutral or pleasant sensations, gradually building up tolerance for being present with discomfort.

    —

    Awareness and presence are powerful tools in the healing journey. By cultivating these practices, I’ve transformed my relationship with pain, fatigue, and anxiety, allowing me to reclaim my life and fully engage in the activities I love. Healing is not just about alleviating symptoms; it’s about reconnecting with the body, understanding its needs, and responding with compassion and wisdom.

  • 5 Pillars of Mindful Awareness That Transformed My Life

    5 Pillars of Mindful Awareness That Transformed My Life

    “When things change inside of you, things change around you.” ~Unknown

    When I was twenty-three, I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety. It was not until two years later, when I stopped taking medication, that I discovered I had a mental health disorder linked to my menstrual cycles.

    Meditating daily has been foundational for my well-being. It helps me manage the physical expressions of anxiety and bad moods. It allows me to be more accepting of myself and grateful for the many positives in my life.

    But it is the awareness journey that mindfulness has paved over these last seven years that has reached so many different corners of my life.

    The awareness I developed from regular practice seeps into my life as a positive multiplier, pushing further progress in emotional regulation and health. It inspired me to start journaling daily. It encouraged me to face myself, my fears, and my choices.

    With awareness comes meaningful change. I completely pivoted my life, walking away from my career in the investment industry to prioritize things that I discovered I valued the most.

    This is just one transformation that has come from developing different types of awareness. Together, these form the pillars of a healthy, fruitful relationship with myself and the world around me.

    Everybody’s awareness journey will be different; you cannot know where yours will lead. But in case it helps with your reflection and journey, I am sharing the questions I faced on mine.

    Awareness of Emotions: Taking Back Control from the Unconscious

    Mindfulness practice revealed how much my emotions had a hold over me. I previously saw no separation between myself and my emotions. I let them convince me of things that weren’t true and lead my decisions.

    But now my relationship with my emotions has transformed from one of “I am this feeling” to “this feeling is happening to me.”

    Awareness of feelings reveals some key things. Firstly, emotions are temporary. Secondly, many emotions come from an instinctive, animalistic part of us, cropping up to protect us. This means they can often impact our perceptions and rationality.

    Emotions are there to serve us, as is our stress reaction. But we must recognize these bodily reactions for what they are—processes that need completing. Stress and negative emotions are often linked to significant health problems, but the power to minimize their impacts is within our reach.

    With awareness, I recognize my changing views, desires to act, and needs to service all the different parts of myself. The latter includes the person I am at my core, the part that houses my rationality and values. Quick, emotional reactions do not tend to represent this part.

    At first, it was difficult to accept all the parts of myself that awareness uncovers. But it paved the way for enhanced emotional regulation and management. I now know how to take the messages my emotions are trying to send me, feel them, settle them, and act in a way that represents all parts.

    When we do this, we change unconscious reactions, led by emotions, to conscious responses. It’s okay if we still have racing thoughts; it’s how we act that matters. We take back ownership of our lives from our emotions by making constructive choices.

    Reflecting on your emotions:

    • Can I name my emotions and the feelings toward the events or people involved?
    • How did the desire to react manifest?
    • Why might I feel this way, and what are my needs?
    • Does this point to any unhealed pain, fears, or insecurities?
    • How did my feelings and perceptions change, and what contributed to this?
    • Which thoughts are supported by evidence, and where do I need more clarity?

    Awareness of Capacity: Getting the Best Out of Myself

    When we are not feeling like our best selves, we naturally blame our circumstances or problems. We often completely overlook how much our inner space influences our feelings, our functioning, and what we get out of the world.

    By paying attention, I discovered how so much inside of me is always changing. My motivation, my energy, and my physiology change across the month. Patterns started to appear—times when my self-doubt and limiting beliefs were louder, or when my cognitive or physical strength were weaker.

    Some things cycle naturally. Some are heavily influenced by “too much of this” or “too little of that.” I see the links between physical factors, mindset, and progress.

    You can consume all the motivational quotes about success and personal growth out there, but if you do not prioritize your health, you are setting out on the wrong foot.

    Intuitively, we function best when we look after ourselves. We are most confident when we can recognize our self-doubt for what it is.

    With awareness, I can identify and meet my needs. Whether that be self-compassion practice when my self-doubt is loud or fueling my brain when it feels slow. I also match activities to when they best suit my capacity, working with myself instead of beating myself up.

    Reflection questions for awareness of capacity:

    • When do I feel most energized, motivated, creative, focused, and confident?
    • What are my motivation and energy killers and boosters?
    • When do I find it easiest to make decisions?
    • Which activities work best for when my brain feels slow, my body feels weak, or my social capacity is low?

    Here are some things to consider: sleep, nutrition, movement, connection with nature, time with loved ones, stress management, and downtime.

    Awareness in Relationships: Finding Peace and Improving Connections

    Reflecting on some past relationships, it often feels like I wasn’t a part of them at all. Driven by unconscious reactions and people-pleasing, they hardly felt authentic, and this really limited their richness.

    We can learn a lot about ourselves from our approach to relationships. Our deepest traumas manifest in our triggers. Our actions are mostly driven by our fears and insecurities, often underpinned by the need for validation and fear of rejection.

    Once we deal with these at the root and take back our life from our emotions, we enter a new space. Challenges with other people stop becoming reasons to walk away or make an enemy, but instead become opportunities to build something stronger. Or at least they give us a chance to act more authentically.

    Awareness of my own changing feelings, needs, and typical behaviors provides a level of empathy that is nothing less than superhuman.

    Known as a main ingredient for successful relationships, empathy is the understanding and patience we need to lovingly consider things from another’s perspective. Most of the time, everybody is trying their best to navigate the world and their relationships, acting in ways they’ve learned from their experiences rather than out of selfishness.

    Boundaries are still key when there is a misalignment of standards and values. But empathizing is useful for finding acceptance where needed. Where alignment exists, empathy is the tool that helps relationships grow and enriches connections.

    Reflecting on relationships:

    • What are my values, wants, needs, and expectations, and do I know where they come from?
    • Do I approach things authentically, or do I have ulterior motives?
    • What challenges do I often face in relationships, and what is my approach usually?
    • What assumptions do I make about how others should behave?
    • Do these answers reveal areas of required self-work?

    Awareness for Connection: Feeling Present in the World

    Becoming aware and being present are one and the same thing. When we practice mindfulness, we pay attention to the present moment. Mindfulness isn’t just about cultivating self-awareness; we also train our brains to be aware of everything around us.

    Before my awareness journey, I lived in my head. Mulling over events, worrying about things that could be, and constructing scenarios, I took attention away from everything around me.

    With mindfulness practice, you transform your relationship with your thoughts, just like you do with your emotions. You realize thoughts are just thoughts, and you don’t have to get so wrapped up in them. They become much easier to let go, and with time, your mind can become quieter.

    When we practice being present, we train ourselves to notice the little things around us. I hear the birds in the morning. I feel the wind against my skin. I see the pattern on the tie of the person sitting opposite me.

    Awareness of the world is connection to the world. And it is connection that ultimately helps us feel mentally well. This kind of awareness gives us the sense of grounding we need to get out of our heads and feel alive in the world.

    Maximizing external awareness:

    • Practice awareness of sounds, sensations, and smells during meditation.
    • Take mindful moments during the day for a few deep breaths.
    • Get out into nature.
    • Make activities mindful by engaging the senses. What can I see, hear, smell, and feel?

    Awareness of Living: Leading an Intentional Life

    Previously, I worked toward other people’s ideas of success and things I thought I “should” have or do. And I know I’m not alone.

    Again, fear underpins a lot of our motives, as we dread being judged or not accepted. We often prioritize conforming over doing things that are meaningful to us personally. We lack self-compassion, compare ourselves to others, and find it hard to say no.

    Intentional living starts with really understanding why we want the things we want and do or don’t do certain things. Then we can take ownership of our life direction and make choices in line with our values, not what we feel is expected of us.

    With awareness, we can trust that any consequences of living authentically are insignificant compared to the benefits.

    It is totally possible to go through life passively, going with whatever is presented to us. It is easy to pick up short-term pleasures and continually get sucked into the moment. But if we do this, we will always be haunted by a sense of unfulfillment.

    Awareness shines a light on passive living and encourages us to enjoy the present while making decisions for the long term.

    Reflecting on your approach to life:

    • Why do I want the things I want?
    • Am I measuring progress by comparing myself to others?
    • What is meaningful to me, and what are my values?
    • Which parts of my life lack alignment to these?
    • What do I think is expected of me, and how can I deal with these pressures?
    • When did I last make active decisions or changes for alignment in my life?

    Your Awareness Journey

    Ultimately, this is a journey that will never end. We are constantly changing, and life around us is forever moving, so there will always be a need for reflection. You might become great at recognizing your feelings and staying present, but it will still be something you should practice to maintain.

    When we accept that, like our mental well-being, awareness is not a destination, we can enjoy continually managing life rather than redundantly wishing for things to be different.

    With awareness, life becomes an art. Regardless of what it throws at you, you have a powerful tool to navigate and make something out of it.

  • How My Old Dog Taught Me New Tricks

    How My Old Dog Taught Me New Tricks

    “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” ~Lao Tzu

    With two rambunctious kids, a stressful job, and a house to maintain, life was hectic. For many years, my children begged for a dog, and I would always say, “When you are older and life slows down a bit.”

    Time was ticking by, but life was no less chaotic when my then preteens made yet another pitch. With more than a little trepidation, we brought home a little ball of Golden Doodle fluff who we called Murphy. How much trouble could he be?

    In a short time, our cute puppy grew into a hundred-pound goofball. He fit into our lifestyle completely, which is to say, he added more mayhem to the already full and frenetic life we led. We adored him for the love and fun he brought to us, but I wondered when he was going to get over the puppy phase and slow down.

    After two years together, he still yanked us along like rag dolls as he chased squirrels on our ‘walks.’ We tried, and failed, obedience training. Each day, he presented us with a newly chewed shoe or freshly gnawed windowsill when left to his own devices.

    The final straw was when he unzipped my purse with his snout and ripped up my passport, requiring me to declare to the City Clerk that “the dog ate my passport” in order to replace it. Something had to change.

    Instead of considering how Murph’s wild behavior might be a reflection of our own lives operating at warp speed, we settled on an external solution to his destructive antics: We doubled down and naively got a dog for our dog. A year-old Shih Tzu named Teddy Bear joined our merry maelstrom.

    The kids called him Ted, a more ‘manly’ handle, and he settled into our house as his own. While things didn’t exactly slow down with his addition, Ted’s entertainment value was immediately apparent.

    We would pause to laugh as Murphy and Ted wrestled, both growling and sneezing to indicate it was all playful fun. Murph would pick up Ted by the neck and run around the house. Not to be outdone, and despite being outweighed by his brother sixfold, Ted would stand underneath Murphy’s chest, where he couldn’t be reached, and nip at his forelegs, sniper style.

    Ted’s only ‘trick’ was to seek me out when his big brother was getting into trouble, ratting him out for a tasty treat. My ridiculous Poodlehead never held it against his little pal, and I have since surmised that this was a ruse they cooked up to get treats that they could then share at their hapless owner’s expense.

    We continued to race through life and its requisite ups and downs, joys and heartbreaks. Ted and Murphy continued to bring us together in laughter. They joyfully passed eleven years together before the Dood became ill and sadly crossed the rainbow bridge.

    His friend Ted was a little lost for a time. One day, I tried to soothe him by suggesting we go on a car ride. My son Michael exclaimed, horrified, “Mom, that won’t help. The last time you took his brother for a drive, he never came back.” Ouch, but true.

    Still, over time, Ted got used to his place as top dog of the household. At twelve, he had slowed down somewhat from the rambunctious mophead that had enjoyed a good run around the yard in true ‘zoomie’ fashion.

    Rather than pulling at the leash like it was a race to the finish, he now trotted along beside me, sniffing every bush, tree, hydrant, and bug encountered along the way. Initially, I was impatient, tugging him after me in a bid to finish and check off ‘walk completed’ in my imagined to-do list. I was frustrated by the slowing; I was used to the go-go-go of my life.

    ‘What’s the rush?’ Ted’s plaintive eyes would ask when I dragged him away from the latest enticing smell. As I sat in exasperation after one such exchange, I turned to watch Ted quietly sleeping on the couch. His soft snores added a contented rhythm to the silence in the room.

    I reflected: The kids were grown and living their own lives. The rush of birthday parties and soccer games was behind me, and life was shifting into a slower gear. Perhaps it was time for me to consciously step back from the former frantic tempo and embrace the spaciousness of a new perspective.

    Walks started to take on a more contemplative pace. I let Ted take the lead—to stop and start as suited his mood. As he sniffed through the messages left by his fellow canines, I would look around me to pass the time.

    I noticed the buds on the trees and the lilting robin’s song in spring. I took in the heady fragrance of lilacs and lilies of the valley. I was dazzled by the brilliant yellows of marigolds and the purple lavender stalks. I crunched the autumn leaves under my feet, appreciating the natural transition that comes before the barren winter and the promise of new life ahead in the spring.

    We added music to our perambulations. Ted enjoyed a good eighties tune and never complained that it was outdated and passe. Eurythmics and The Clash topped his list. He especially liked it when I replaced lyrics and included his name: “There’s a breeze on the bike path. Walk the Teddy. Walk the Teddy.” (You sang that, didn’t you?)

    Sometimes we would dance along the sidewalk. Despite his age, Ted could keep the beat. And even though my rhythm might have been slightly out of time, Ted was as oblivious as I was joyous.

    While we didn’t break any speed records and my steps did not top ten thousand, we took in our surroundings with meditative awareness. Ted taught me the wonder and awe of the everyday by slowing me down enough to experience it.

    Recently, Ted made his way across the rainbow bridge at almost seventeen years young. I miss him every day but know that he will be frolicking with his brother, enjoying a good wrestle and sniping from Murphy’s underbelly.

    As for me, I honor our time together by remembering the lessons he left me. I reflect on my younger self and consider how life might have been different had I embraced these learnings when I was younger. How might I have enjoyed more quality time with my kids had I stepped off the lightning speed merry-go-round and simply embraced the moment?

    I am privileged to have the time now, in their adult years, to slow down, take note, and appreciate an afternoon of frivolity. I do not take this for granted, and I credit my beautiful Ted for his insight.

    I continue to enjoy daily walks with an attitude of gratitude and the spirit of my Zen doggo along for the fun. I stop to smell the flowers and feel the sun on my skin.

    The eighties playlist still blasts out its timeless tunes, and I think Ted may have even passed along a few of his cool dance moves. And I’m sure even Annie Lennox would agree with the truth in my off-key replacement lyrics: “Sweet walks put me at ease. Ted preferred to sniff at trees.”

    Thank you, my fuzzy friend. May we all find comfort and joy and embrace the beauty of slowing down through the new tricks my old dog taught me.

  • How to Find Peace When Your Mind Is Restless

    How to Find Peace When Your Mind Is Restless

    “Within you, there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself.” ~Hermann Hesse

    When I work with people who are suffering from anxiety, fear, grief, or other challenging issues, I like to take them through a simple exercise I call “The Noticing Exercise.”

    It’s my first port of call when helping people break free from mind-created suffering.

    It’s amazing how quickly, and effortlessly, people can move from suffering to peace, simply through shifting their focus to being aware of the present moment—noticing the sensation of the body touching the chair, the ribs expanding on the in breath, or the sounds in the room.

    Even deeply troubled individuals can experience peace the very first time they try this simple meditation.

    How is this possible?

    It is because peace is already there inside all of us. It’s an integral part of who we are. When the mind’s activity subsides, even for a moment, peace is what remains.

    The ocean provides a good analogy.

    At the surface, the water is constantly in motion. It never stops, even for a moment. But when you drop down into the depths, there is stillness and peace.

    It’s exactly the same with the mind.

    On the surface level, the mind is always active but, in the depths of our being, there is a natural peace and stillness that is unchanging… always present, always available. Being part of our essential nature, it can never leave us.

    Although this inherent peace is always there, it goes unnoticed in most people through the deep-seated habit of giving our exclusive attention to the surface movements of the mind.

    We are so pre-occupied with what’s going on at the surface that we simply fail to notice what’s happening in the depths of our experience.

    And, of course, there is nothing ‘wrong’ with any of this.

    Spending our days lost in thinking is the human condition. It’s what we all do.

    Being swept away by the restless waters of the mind is perfectly normal, particularly when we are faced with intense patterns such as anxiety, trauma, or grief. And yet, the fact remains that, despite appearances, there is a peace inside every one of us that is untouched by what’s going on at the surface, however intense it may be.

    Withdraw your attention from the mind, even for a moment, and it’s there.

    You don’t have to create it; just recognize what has always been there.

    Peace doesn’t leave you. You leave peace.

    Stress, anxiety, and unhappiness exist primarily in the form of thoughts.

    If you are able to become fully present in the moment, thoughts subside, and stress and anxiety are replaced by peace and stillness.

    Of course, most people will pick up their painful stories again as soon as the meditation comes to an end, but the fact they were able to be free of their suffering, even temporarily, provides us with clues for finding a more permanent solution.

    With practice, anyone can learn to withdraw their attention from the mind for longer periods of time and thereby extend the periods of peace.

    Have You Been Barking Up the Wrong Tree?

    Most people are looking for peace where it can never be found—not lasting peace anyway.

    It’s a bit like losing your keys in the house and looking for them in the garden.

    You’re never going to find them… because they are not there.

    Most people I help have been searching for peace through the path of self-improvement, often for years.

    And it makes total sense.

    If my mind is causing me trouble, then the obvious solution is to try to fix it—to ‘work on myself’ and try to convert all my anxious and unhappy thoughts and feelings into pleasant, happy ones. Try to create a new, improved version of myself.

    But, if you’ve been down this path for any length of time, as I have, you’ll know that fundamentally changing the mind is not so easy.

    The problem with this approach is encapsulated in the following quote from the Indian spiritual teacher, Nisargadatta:

    “There is no such thing as peace of mind. Mind means disturbance; restlessness itself is mind.”

    Like the surface of the ocean, the mind is constantly in motion. It is restless by nature.

    And, although there may well be fleeting moments of peace here and there, they will inevitably be followed by moments of agitation and disturbance.

    Restlessness is the nature of the mind. Trying to make it calm and peaceful is like trying to iron the surface of the ocean. It’s simply never going to happen.

    Making Peace with The Mind Just as It Is

    To find a solution that actually works, we must first understand the true cause of suffering. It’s not what most folks think.

    People believe, as I did for years, that the anxious, stressful, or fearful thoughts themselves are the primary cause of suffering.

    They believe that:

    • the mind is broken and needs to be fixed.
    • anxiety, fear, confusion, etc. are inherently bad or wrong.
    • there’s something wrong with them for having these thoughts.
    • they can’t experience peace or happiness until they are gone.

    These beliefs are the main reason people suffer.

    As the Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello said:

    “There’s only one cause of unhappiness; the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so common, so widespread, that it never occurs to you to question them.”

    What if, instead of spending years trying to fix the content of the mind, we focused instead on making peace with the mind, just as it is?

    What if, rather than fighting and resisting fear, sadness, envy, or confusion, you were able to accept them as natural expressions of the human condition?

    What would happen to your anxiety if you didn’t see anything ‘wrong’ with it?

    Or your sadness if you didn’t mind it being there?

    They may still feel unpleasant but, in the absence of resistance, they’d lose their power to affect your peace.

    We can wrap our non-peace in the peace of acceptance.

    You Don’t Need to Have a Peaceful Mind to Experience Peace 

    On the path of self-improvement, the goal is to find peace of mind.

    But this approach is unlikely to succeed simply because the mind is restless by nature.

    Here’s the truth:

    You can’t stop bothersome thoughts from arising, but you can stop bothering about them.

    One of my teachers used to say, “You suffer because you are open for business.”

    You entertain your thoughts and invite them in for tea—engage with them, ruminate over them, wallow in them, play them over and over in your head—and create suffering for yourself as a result.

    You don’t need to have a peaceful mind to experience peace.

    You need to stop giving your thoughts so much attention and importance.

    If you are able to accept whatever appears in your head, whether pleasant or unpleasant, with an attitude of non-judgmental acceptance, you will always be at peace.

    Acceptance is like kryptonite to the mind. It loses its power to disturb your peace.

    The Two Types of Peace

    There are two types of peace.

    There is the feeling of peace, which is a temporary respite from feeling restless or agitated. Like all feelings, it comes and goes, like clouds passing across the sky.

    Then there is the peace that exists in the depths of your being; the backdrop of peace that is unchanging, ever-present, and has nothing to do with what is going on in your head.

    Even in the midst of the most turbulent storm at sea, in the depths, the ocean remains calm and unmoving.

    There is a peace inside every one of us that remains untouched by the movements on the surface, no matter how intense.

    And it’s not difficult to find. How could it be if it’s already who you are?

    You don’t need to fix or change anything about yourself to experience what is ever-present inside you.

    You just need to dive below the surface and discover what is always there.

    The peace you are looking for is with you always. But you’ll never find it on the level of the mind.

  • Stay in the Right Lane: Let Yourself Slow Down and Enjoy Life

    Stay in the Right Lane: Let Yourself Slow Down and Enjoy Life

    “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.” ~Diane Ackerman

    Wow! My last weeks of my career. Though many days and weeks over the last thirty-four years have seemed to last forever, it truly is astonishing how fast time goes. And don’t we often try to make it go even faster?

    Our jobs are stressful. We are often under tight time constraints and deadlines. We have clients and associates who want and need things yesterday.

    We work in jobs we have very little control over. Add that to our daily responsibilities as parents, spouses, partners, friends, children to aging parents and—not to be forgotten—ourselves. It’s a lot.

    Maybe you are like me. When I was younger, I too often:

    • wanted to fast-forward to a new day, a new week, or a new season of life
    • wished time away
    • focused on that vacation that was months away
    • couldn’t wait until my kids were older
    • had my eye on that next job
    • sought to get through tough circumstances I was facing, or
    • desired to be where someone else was in life

    What did it cost me? Memories and opportunities. I don’t remember many details of when my kids were growing up because I was always thinking ahead. I was not in the moment.

    I missed opportunities to learn and grow because I was always focused on that next thing instead of learning what could help me in that next thing.

    I missed all the beauty this earth has to offer because I was driving too fast.

    It cost me time. I wished away something I can never get back. It cost me the fun of simply living life, my life.

    It has taken me sixty-five years on earth to figure out how to make every moment count. And, if I’m honest, it’s something I must work at every day.

    “Don’t focus on making each moment perfect, focus on the perfection each moment provides, be it a good one, or not so good one.” ~Jenna Kutcher

    Notice that I didn’t say “make every moment happy, productive, or memorable.” Just make it count. Be in it. Live it.

    There are many moments that aren’t happy. In fact, they can be downright sorrowful or exhausting. But, at the same time, they help shape you and enable you to grow.

    I missed many good moments in my life because I was too focused on making the ending happy or perfect to enjoy what was happening right before my eyes.

    A few years ago, my son and I met up with a good friend of mine. We started talking about our kids and what fun it was to go to all of their events when they were younger. I was pounding my chest by bragging about being at all of their events.

    My son, to his credit, challenged me. He said I was there physically, but I wasn’t really there. He told my friend I was always on my phone, or otherwise preoccupied. He was right. I was there but I can’t tell you about the goals they scored, the amazing moves they made, or the songs they sang. It was like a dagger went through my heart. But it was true.

    My dear friend Doug told me a great way he is trying to live right now. He said, “stay in the right lane.” I love that. We often want to get somewhere fast, so we pull into the left lane and zoom past everything to get to the destination. 

    I did that most of my life, in all areas of my life. As I start to live in the right lane, I am having an easier time being more in the moment. I am being intentional.

    I start my day with a routine of praying, journaling, exercising, and setting my focus to not be on one or two things, but to be awed by the wonder of what I might encounter. I intentionally set aside days where I do not have a set schedule.

    As I am more in the moment, I am experiencing all sorts of beauty, joy, amazement, clarity, purposefulness, happiness, and opportunity.

    When you look at my photo library, you will see mostly pictures of bugs, birds, flowers, and trees from my walks. My mind has space to be creative and I am finding clarity on the things I want to do in this season of life, for me. My relationships are flourishing because I am actually there, truly experiencing another person.

    Being present has also allowed me to see myself for more of who I am. I have often said I never felt I was good enough. I felt I had to do more in order to be enough. Now that I have more clarity on who I am, I want to do more, because I am enough. I realize that no matter what I do from here on out, I am good enough. Because of who I am, not what I do.

    Many have asked what I will do in retirement. Like, retirement is the end, so how will you live to the end? I am looking at it more as a transition into the next leg of my journey.

    I am going to continue to live in the right lane, enjoy every moment, create and experience new moments, and focus on the journey itself, not the destination. I plan to live as Laurie Santos puts it, “be happy in my life, and with my life.”

    “The most dangerous risk of all…is the risk of spending your life not doing what you want, on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.” ~Randy Komisar

    So how do you do that? It isn’t always easy.

    Have good self-awareness (know yourself and trust yourself). Be intentional. Make time for the people and things that matter. Make the time to think about what you really want in life.

    And slow yourself down.

  • Identifying the Pattern Is Awareness

    Identifying the Pattern Is Awareness

  • How Mindfulness Made Me an Empowered Introvert (and How It Can Help You)

    How Mindfulness Made Me an Empowered Introvert (and How It Can Help You)

    “Introverts live in two worlds: We visit the world of people, but solitude and the inner world will always be our home.” ~Jenn Granneman, The Secret Lives of Introverts: Inside Our Hidden World

    Never at any point in my life did I think I was an introvert. I always thought I was just a regular kid flowing with life’s experiences just like everyone else, and there was nothing strange about me.

    That was until I started being told I was too quiet, serious-faced, shy, and a nerd. I liked, and still do like, my own space and doing things by myself or with a very close friend. Spending time at home surfing the web, learning new things, and obsessing over the latest technology has always been my thing.

    I never liked the idea of being around groups of people, attending parties, and socializing for long periods of time because I felt weighed down and lacked energy for such activities.

    I would always feel anxious and self-conscious walking outside, and whenever someone approached and started talking to me, things would end up being awkward no matter how hard I tried to keep a steady conversation going.

    Such was my life. As I kept growing, it became so much of a bother that it started affecting how I perceived myself.

    I became more anxious—stressed about socializing and being outside, making friends, and even expressing myself in serious situations like job interviews.

    I also had a bad temper back then, and whenever I got angry, I turned into this ugly and angry bear that could not be calmed down by anyone. After my moments of anger, regret would slowly creep in, and I would chew myself up for all the mean things I’d said and done to others.

    “This is not the kind of life I want to live to my old age,” I thought to myself. Being the introverted nerd I was, I decided to do deep research and look for permanent solutions to change the situation for the better.

    In the research phase I stumbled upon the practice of mindfulness. The idea of training your mind to remain in the present moment and being aware of your thoughts, feelings, and sensations was kind of interesting to me, and I felt it could work for me.

    So, I took up the responsibility of learning about mindfulness and how I could get started and use it to improve upon myself.

    A few years down the line, after immersing myself in the practice and doing it daily, I have seen much improvement in my life and how I do things, and I couldn’t be prouder of myself.

    I have become more empowered and equipped to handle the aspects of my life that I had problems with before, and I’ve seen good results with them.

    5 Ways Mindfulness Empowered Me as an Introvert

    Here are the five ways mindfulness changed and improved my life for the better.

    1. Mindfulness made me feel comfortable in my introvert skin.

    Initially, I thought the only way my life was going to improve was by training myself to be extroverted.

    I had even created a strategy of how I would slowly become more talkative and vulnerable—how I would force myself to attend more social events, talk to as many people as I could, and tell them everything about my life. Then they would feel I’m being open with them and in turn open up to me, and life would become amazing.

    Looking back, that strategy was designed to help me live a lie. It was supposed to teach me to be everything besides myself, and I’m glad I didn’t get to execute the plan because I discovered mindfulness shortly after considering it.

    After practicing mindfulness for a while, I became aware of my nature as an introvert and how I did things in my life. I noticed that while there were many drawbacks to introversion, there were also many advantages.

    And extroverts face problems that spring from their extroversion just as introverts get criticized for their introversion.

    As an introvert, I often appeared to be boring and quiet, so many people disliked me, but a friend told me that because he was an extrovert, he had many fake friends who hurt him.

    That’s when I discovered no side is better than the other. Introversion and extroversion both had advantages and disadvantages.

    With that realization, I became comfortable being the introvert I was, and I thought to myself, “I’m going to hold onto my nature as an introvert. It may not be perfect, but at least I won’t be living a lie by pretending to be someone I’m not.”

    2. Mindfulness made me more confident.

    Self-acceptance is perhaps the best thing I got from mindfulness because it helped me feel comfortable with who I was, and as a result, my confidence increased.

    I no longer believed that it was bad to be an introvert and instead, focused more on the positive side of it. I also came to learn that extroverts envied me just as I envied them.

    While I thought being an extrovert was cool, I remembered that extroverted friends had once told me they wished they were like me. They thought my quietness gave me a mysterious personality, and being comfortable staying alone for long periods also made me powerful and independent. Remembering this added to my overall confidence and self-acceptance.

    I went from “Man, I wish I was more social and talkative!” to “Man, I love how I’m quiet and comfortable being alone!”

    Also, being aware of the anxious and stressful thoughts and feelings I had when I was among people helped me realize that they were baseless, and they were just that—thoughts and feelings. Things that would keep coming and going.

    They were neither the reality nor the truth.

    I had created exaggerated scenarios in my mind, which made me feel anxious and awkward around people. By simply being aware of them, without doing anything, they became powerless and the social anxiety slowly disappeared from my life.

    3. Mindfulness gave me mental clarity and focus.

    By learning to be aware of my thoughts, sensations, and feelings in the present moment, I had fewer thoughts and was also able to have more control over my feelings. Fewer thoughts, especially the anxiety-inducing thoughts, translated to more mental clarity and focus.

    Instead of having negative thoughts about how other people perceived me when I was interacting with them, or about how awkward I felt talking to them, I became more open and aware of the experience of speaking with people, and began going out more without overthinking it.

    That slight change of approach made it possible for me to look people in the eye when talking to them and keep a normal and steady conversation without someone realizing I was once a “socially disabled” introvert.

    On top of that, the reduction of distracting thoughts and the emotional control I got from the practice helped me improve my level of productivity in my education and work.

    It turns out when you have fewer thoughts to explore, your mind can maintain focus for a long period and your attention span increases.

    4. Mindfulness increased my self-awareness.

    By being constantly mindful throughout the day, I was able to understand myself better. I discovered the specific areas in my life I was good at as well as those I needed to work on.

    For instance, I noticed that when speaking to people, I would think before I spoke. This helped me avoid the embarrassment of saying thoughtless words that would make me look like a fool or hurt the person I was conversing with.

    I also realized that while I was strong with my communication, I lacked when it came to taking action. I took many thoughtless actions, which got me into trouble.

    With the tiny observations I made, and through the reflection of better approaches combined with determined and disciplined effort, I was able to improve and became a better person.

    5. Mindfulness brought me peace and inner harmony.

    Within a couple of years, I went from a socially awkward, constantly anxious, self-loathing person to a self-loving, more confident, mentally and emotionally stable person, which helped me feel more peaceful and in sync with myself.

    I didn’t have to pretend or think and do things from an extrovert’s point of view so that I would be accepted. I accepted myself as I was and discovered how other people love my introverted traits, and this brought me a feeling of satisfaction with myself.

    Moreover, I was free to think and act according to my nature, and that has made everything in my life work in harmony.

    How I Made Mindfulness Work in My Life (And How You Can Too)

    After researching and reading articles, watching videos, and listening to podcasts and teachings on mindfulness, I decided to take action.

    I began with mindfulness meditation because it is the easiest and most rewarding first step to mindfulness. It not only helps you learn how mindfulness feels and how to cultivate it but also trains you to be mindful without much effort.

    It is even more rewarding when you use guided meditations for mindfulness meditation. I worked with guided meditations for a couple of months before I could begin meditating on my own, and I saw good results.

    A guided mindfulness meditation will walk you through your whole experience, with the help of an expert who’ll explain how to relax your mind and body so you can have a fulfilling session.

    It’s simply the best place to start building mindfulness in your life.

    I began meditating for one or two minutes and increased the duration to five minutes, then ten, and then twenty as I felt more at ease with the practice.

    After I got comfortable with meditating, I started incorporating mindfulness into my daily life, practicing while eating, listening and speaking, showering, walking, and working.

    These techniques really improved my level of mindfulness and helped me be more aware of myself. The best approach is to begin incorporating these techniques into your life one by one. Begin with the one you feel is easiest to work with and stick to it for a few weeks. Then take up another technique and do the same until you find it natural to do all of them throughout the day.

    The goal is to do the regular activities more mindfully, and as a result, increase your moments of mindfulness through the day.

    I have seen mindfulness turn my life around as an introvert, and if I was able to become that empowered through it, I believe you can too. I invite you to work closely with mindfulness and see how it can spice up your life.

  • Why It’s Worth the Temporary Discomfort of Sitting with Intense Emotions

    Why It’s Worth the Temporary Discomfort of Sitting with Intense Emotions

    “Whatever you’re feeling, it will eventually pass.”  ~Lori Deschene

    Can you feel an intense emotion, like anger, without acting on it, reacting to it, or trying to get rid of it?

    Can you feel such an intense emotion without needing to justify or explain it—or needing to find someone or something to blame it on?

    After successfully dodging it for two years, I recently caught Covid-19. The physical symptoms were utter misery. But something much more interesting happened while I was unwell.

    The whole experience brought some intense emotions to the surface. Namely, seething anger about something that had nothing to do with the virus.

    In the handful of days that my symptoms were at their worst, I was absolutely livid. And while on some level it made sense that I was angry that getting this sick was both extremely unpleasant and delaying work on a project I was all fired up about, the anger was manifesting with a deeper-rooted blame.

    I grew up in a religious denomination that had a profound effect on my childhood and adolescence. It taught me through debilitating fear, division, and confusion. It ingrained black-and-white rights and wrongs for living, thinking, and being that had never made sufficient sense to me, no one could adequately explain, and were damaging for me on a number of levels.

    In the past couple of years, I worked through its various effects with shadow work, inner child healing, forgiveness, and even quantum energetic healing. Each of these modalities supported me immensely with healing different layers.

    But the emotion of deep anger I harbored clearly hadn’t gone away, and it simply needed to be felt.

    The more we learn to observe and witness our emotions, the more acutely aware we become of where they’re stemming from, and the more we’re able to notice and catch ourselves when we’re associating our emotions with narratives and situations that are not in fact to blame for how we’re feeling.

    Although I’d initially managed to fashion some connection between being unwell and the church I still harbored so much anger toward, I became increasingly aware that there was none. My inclination to blame the church was part of an ongoing pattern. And it was time to break this pattern.

    At the same time, I’d recently become very aware that whenever I’d hear mention of the church or any of its associated beliefs, a brief surge of anger would leap up in me. I was still feeling triggered.

    I was very ready to move beyond these patterns of blame and anger. And getting to that inner peace I so wanted to feel meant addressing this on an emotional level. I realized that what I needed was to actually sit with these feelings so they could be fully acknowledged and allowed to move through me.

    The only person who is ever responsible for your emotions is you. And your emotions are simply powerful feedback. They show up for one of two dominant reasons.

    Either they’re unresolved past emotions that are surfacing because they’re ready to be acknowledged and felt now, or they’re feelings that demonstrate how a situation is resonating for you—in other words, they’re your own inner compass.

    Sadly, although traditions like Buddhism have been teaching us how to develop emotional awareness for thousands of years, we’ve somehow landed on two dominant, ineffective responses.

    Acting on our emotions or trying to brush them under the rug.

    Brushing an emotion under the rug will only keep it trapped inside of you. Meaning it will resurface to bother you as many times as it needs to in the future until you deal with it.

    And the practices of toxic positivity fall under this category. Write a gratitude list and look for the best-feeling thought you can find, they say. In other words, avoid the “negative” emotion for now and let it fester under the surface a little while longer.

    Newsflash: No emotion is negative unless it’s fueling a negative action or reaction. It’s simply feedback pointing you toward growth or clarity.

    Which brings me to the next dominant response we resort to. Acting on the emotion (by yelling at someone, for example) will at least give it an opportunity to release but will most likely create consequences that won’t serve you. We’ve all been there and done that, so no judgment here.

    As I emphasized earlier, the only person who’s ever responsible for your emotions is you. And we tend to act on our emotions by deflecting this responsibility. So we learn, understand, and gain nothing from them.

    So, I sat with the anger. I was fully present with it—by itself, separate from any experience or event that I could possibly associate it with.

    I acknowledged it, felt its full intensity, and breathed through it. I sat with the parts of me that felt this emotion with compassion. I surrendered to letting it move through me.

    Despite having felt the intensity of this anger for a few days, it released fairly quickly when I leaned into it. And when it released, I was able to see pretty clearly why being ill had triggered this anger.

    I’ve also noticed that since this whole experience, the little surges of anger I’d previously felt have gone away. So far I haven’t felt those triggers since, which is a relief.

    Before I go any further, I want to acknowledge that many of us are carrying deep trauma that’s often too painful to even fathom triggering. So have compassion for yourself in whatever you feel, and don’t put off seeking the right support to work through your emotions if you feel you need this.

    Now, this might sound counterintuitive, and it’s incredibly uncomfortable to do at first. But real emotional awareness—and maturity—means sitting with the emotion and feeling its fullness.

    It’s identifying what this emotion is and how it feels. Including where you can feel it physically.

    It’s giving yourself some time and space to focus on really leaning into the emotion and separating it from any narrative or incident it may be associated with. Focusing on the emotion by itself in isolation allows us to process it. Without blame, justification, or self-pity.

    When you can truly feel, acknowledge, and breathe through it, it releases. And when it’s released, you’re able to understand what it represented for you. You grow through it.

    This may take time, but a feeling is only ever there to be felt. And until it is, it will be increasingly vociferous in how it tries to get your attention.

    This can require a lot of courage, especially because too many of us have been conditioned to fear feeling our emotions and believe that we can’t handle them.

    But if you need to cry, cry. If it feels intense, this is where deeply buried stuff is surfacing for release.

    And when you let an emotion move through you, you let it move out of you.

    This doesn’t mean that you’ll never feel another “negative” emotion ever again.

    But it does mean that you’ll understand how to respond to these emotions and allow them to be felt and understood with a lot more compassion.

    And that’s more than worth the temporary discomfort.

  • How Our Self-Talk and Language Can Sabotage or Support Us

    How Our Self-Talk and Language Can Sabotage or Support Us

    “Today I want you to think about all that you are instead of all that you are not.” ~Unknown

    “Love the pinecones!”

    This was a comment from a friend on one of my Facebook photos from a beautiful seaside hike filled with wildflowers and other natural wonders.

    When I responded with “It was a puzzle figuring out how to best photograph them” (not what I originally planned to write), she wrote, “Gregg, that’s such a fun part, isn’t it?” That comment was the brightening of a bulb that had already been going off in my head. It led to deeper self-reflection and awareness around my own self-talk patterns.

    We’ve all heard that how we speak to ourselves has a huge impact on our life. If your self-talk is largely negative, it lowers your self-confidence, drive, creativity, spirit, and enthusiasm for life. In short, it limits your self-expression and access to joy. If your self-talk is compassionate, understanding, and loving, it helps you to move through your life with much greater flow and ease.

    There are the more obvious ways negative language patterns show up, and then there are more hidden, subtle, or unconscious ways. Amongst the more obvious are the habitual ways we berate ourselves or call ourselves names.

    For example, if you are making dinner and just as you finish you knock the whole thing on the floor, how might you respond? It makes total sense to be upset or disappointed, but how does that upset manifest within you?

    Perhaps you think, “Geez, I’m such an idiot!” or “I’m so stupid!” If so, rather than simply expressing your disappointment over the action or result, you are taking one moment in your life and using that to malign yourself at your core.

    Even calling yourself clumsy can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe you feel it’s actually true. Perhaps others have told you that as well. The thing is, whatever we choose to tell ourselves, whether unkind or gracious, our brain looks for ways to prove those thoughts are true.

    You can acknowledge a mistake, express frustration over an experience, or even decide you want to be more careful in the future, all without casting aspersions on yourself. Name-calling or harsh language directed at ourselves is an example of the more readily visible forms of self-talk. But what about those hidden or unconscious patterns?

    That kind of negative self-talk can be far more insidious and more prevalent than you may suspect. I know it was for me. It’s something I’ve been internally exploring lately and why I was struck with my friend’s comment on my post. Discovering the hidden ways I hold myself small has led to developing more empowering language that serves me on a daily basis.

    Though I was affected by ADD (attention deficit disorder) my whole life, it was not until I was in my forties that I was diagnosed. The first book I read on the topic and perhaps my favorite is called You Mean I’m Not Lazy, Stupid, or Crazy?

    I loved the lessons I got from the book and all that I learned about the workings of my brain. For several years, though, I felt at odds with the title. After all, I reasoned, I never spoke of myself in those pejorative terms. At least not that I was consciously aware of anyway.

    Over time, though, I realized there is a part of my brain that has been actively trying to prove I’m not those things. And if part of my brain is trying to prove I’m not that, then another part must in some way be telling me that I am lazy, crazy, or stupid. That’s when I decided it would be helpful to start consciously examining my unconscious patterns for the voice in my head.

    I’ve noticed my persistent stories of “I don’t know how” or “it will be too hard,” which have been a mantra in my head since childhood. I’ve long been mired in those stories, though they can show up in sneaky ways.  For example, if I see a picture of a place I’ve never been, I have a habit of thinking with melancholy “I’ve never been there” or even feeling jealousy or envy for the photographer.

    While it’s not wrong to have such thoughts, and it makes sense for them to come up from time to time, I noticed I was letting a beautiful photograph put me in a state of dissatisfaction, or even feeling sorry for myself. I was perpetuating limiting patterns of victim stories instead of empowering myself. I decided when I recognized that pattern to play with new thoughts.

    That might involve using that beautiful photograph of a place I’ve never been to remind myself of all the amazing places I have been. Or it might be feeling a sense of joy that such places exist or gratitude that others get to enjoy them.

    Or it could be as simple as thinking, “Oh that looks so interesting.” Or even “How do I get there?” That last one could be said with an air of resignation as a way of holding myself small and complaining, or it could be excitement over the possibility, all depending on how I choose to hold that thought.

    It’s not just the specific words we use but what meanings we ascribe to them that give them their energy and power. I’ve found it invaluable to notice my energy as well as the words I choose.

    With the Facebook exchange about my picture and the puzzle of figuring out how to best photograph the pinecones, my first thought was to write, “I was struggling to figure out how to photograph them.”

    But then I thought, “Why am I saying it that way?” I did not feel in struggle. Why would I want to frame it that way to myself or anyone else? So I altered the wording. That change definitely felt more empowered and certainly less stuck in victim mode. But again, it’s not just the words, but noticing the energy as well.

    Because depending on how I choose to hold it, “a puzzle” could be a game or it could be a chore. I was already leaning toward the more positive aspect but with residue from my initial thought of “struggle.”

    So when my friend chimed in with “Gregg, that’s such a fun part, isn’t it?”, I felt light, happy, and energized. And in all honesty, I initially felt a little bit of embarrassment too. Because it really highlighted for me the heavier energy I had been unconsciously creating over an experience I had thoroughly enjoyed.

    That awareness brought excitement for the deepening realization over the ways I can allow my word patterns to create disappointment and sadness or excitement and joy in my nervous system.

    It’s not just about whether we overtly beat ourselves up but what patterns we use. I’ve had a lot of unconscious patterns that have kept me in the mode of victim of the world rather than the creator of my life.

    It’s an awareness that I am continuing to deepen. As I do, I notice I feel more resilient, get stuck in negative emotions for shorter periods of time, and have more access to joy and aliveness. In an instant I can change how I feel just by the way I speak to and about myself.

    You can create that for yourself as well. Here are a few steps to do so. Outside of step one, they are not in chronological order and may even happen simultaneously.

    1. Start simply by slowing down and noticing your patterns.

    Do you berate yourself? Do you use words that feel untrue or create some kind of internal discord or discomfort that would not otherwise exist, as I had when I was going to use the word “struggle”? If so, explore how you can change those patterns and choose more empowering phrasing.

    This is not about denying that sometimes we do struggle or feel sad or have hard things happen. But you might find that your language actually influences your perception and your feelings about your circumstances. You can view the same situation as an obligation or an opportunity; it all depends on how you choose to see it and talk about it.

    2. Revise your word choice.

    On my journey of monitoring my patterns, I noticed that I’d write things like “I can’t figure out xyz” when, for example, I wrote to a company asking for technical support. The word “can’t” has such a disempowering connotation. So I started changing my word choice to things like, “I would like your help to figure out…” or “I would like to understand how to xyz.” This difference can seem subtle, but the impact on my psyche was immense.

    With the word “can’t” I was literally stating I’m incapable of something, whereas in the other two examples, I’m simply acknowledging information that I lack. Which of those feels more empowering to you?

    The language can seem new and uncomfortable or foreign at first. Perhaps you don’t feel sure how to make the shift. Again, the first step is simply to notice. The more awareness you create, the more your brain will automatically start looking for ways to shift toward your desired outcome.

    In the meantime, if you feel comfortable sharing your journey, you can ask a trusted friend, family member, or coach to point out disempowering language when you use it.

    3. Notice how your word choice affects your energy.

    In the example above about asking for technical support, I noticed how my habit of saying “I can’t figure out how to xyz” was subtly chipping away at my self-confidence. It kept me in a state of frustration and my energy small and insecure.

    Making the change to “I would like to understand how to xyz” felt more expansive. I was declaring a desire to make a change rather than declaring what I was not capable of. That feels more empowering in my nervous system, but still not with the aliveness I’d most desire. Now I’d say something more akin to “I’m learning your system” or “I’m gaining clarity around your system. Please explain to me how to xyz.”

    Sharing in that way, I’m speaking to my growth instead of declaring a deficit. In my body, that last one feels powerful and assertive while still asking for the support I need. What feels most powerful for you?

    4. Be kind and compassionate with yourself.

    Don’t expect perfection. Be compassionate with yourself. If you notice you’re reverting to old patterns, rather than berate yourself, use it as an opportunity to be excited. Because it means you are noticing. As in meditation, the idea is to notice your wandering thoughts and come back. Each time you notice you are creating an opportunity for new and more empowering patterns to flow.

    It can be like learning a foreign language. Because in a sense you are. And just like learning any new language can open up whole new avenues of possibility, this one will as well, releasing shame and self-judgment while brightening and uplifting your world.

    For myself, changing my hidden patterns has helped mitigate the impact of historical victim stories that I’ve held. I feel more empowered, with greater energy to achieve my goals. If you give it a try, I’d love to hear what you are noticing.

  • How Shifting Your Attention Can Be the Cure for Anxiety

    How Shifting Your Attention Can Be the Cure for Anxiety

    “Anxiety was born in the very same moment as mankind. And since we will never be able to master it, we will have to learn to live with it—just as we have learned to live with storms.” ~Paulo Coelho

    “Am I focusing too much on my anxiety?”

    This very question weighed heavily on my mind as I found myself in yet another bout of anxiety. I was playing professional baseball at the time, and I just couldn’t seem to free myself from the constant and unending worrisome thoughts racing through my head.

    A lot of these thoughts centered around how I would perform the next game. What my teammates were thinking of me, whether they saw me as a valuable part of the team. I often thought about why I was playing baseball and if I was wasting my time.

    All of these worries did nothing but lead to further thoughts, centering around much of the same, leading to a terrible cycle.

    This was not the first time I realized the presence of anxiety in my life. It has been something I’ve dealt with for as long as I can remember.

    In college, I even worked with a sport psychologist who taught me coping mechanisms to alleviate the anxiety I felt surrounding baseball.

    We addressed my self-talk, with him generating a routine I could use the night before games. He also focused heavily on process goals. As focusing on the process, rather than the outcome, is a major way to reduce anxious thinking.

    After completing a master’s in psychology and beginning work as a mental performance coach, I felt as though I had a solid understanding of how to cope with anxiety. Why was it then that I once again found myself in its grasp?

    Well, the truth is, no matter how strong you build your mind and how much work you put in, anxiety will still find its way into your life. Some time or another, those pesky worrisome thoughts will enter your head.

    What matters is how long you allow those thoughts to stick around. And what’s interesting is, sometimes the more we try to rid ourselves of anxiety, the more we invite it to stay.

    That is the mistake I made, and why, after all my years of work and learning, I found myself faced with great difficulty.

    Energy Flows Where Attention Goes

    Have you ever heard this saying before?

    I’ve heard different interpretations of its meaning, but one I really resonate with is, wherever we place our attention will be amplified.

    This means the more we focus on our anxiety, the greater the strength we give it.

    So if we want to not feel anxious, one of the worst things we can do is try to not feel anxious.

    When I recognized I was giving my anxiety too much attention, I realized what needed to happen instead. The decision I made involved the same techniques I’m going to show you later in the article.

    For now, I want to address just a little bit about why we focus so much on anxiety in the first place.

    Can’t I Just Will It Away?

    I’m the first to admit to having fallen into this type of thinking in the past.

    Whenever I would grow overly anxious before a game or experience anxiety in my daily life (which was all too often), my natural response was to try and force the anxiety out.

    But that only worsened the problem. I remember feeling the anxiety actually grow within the more I tried to get it out.

    So why do we continue to believe we can rid ourselves of anxiety through focusing on it?

    The main reason is due to the fact we are anxious people in the first place. Do you know how hard it is to stop thinking about something? Especially when that which has captured your attention is as powerful an emotion as anxiety.

    So, one, the easiest option is to grow anxious over the anxiety, thus focusing on trying to will it away. Two, anxiety is a scary feeling. Having uncontrollable thoughts that lead to a dizzying feeling of dread is not fun.

    As a result, we try to get rid of it as quickly as we can. Removing our attention from the anxiety and trusting in some other technique does not feel as safe as simply focusing on how terribly we feel and hoping the anxiety will go away.

    But as I already said, giving too much attention to our anxiety only makes it worse. So, what can we do instead? The answer lies in attention, the shifting of attention that is.

    The Power of Shifting Your Attention

    Since we know where we place our attention is where our energy will be directed, a shift in focus can drastically improve our mental state.

    When I questioned whether I was focusing too much on my anxiety, it became clear to me that I was obsessing over why I experienced it, where it came from, and how I could get rid of it.

    So, I decided to make a switch and instead, give my attention to how I wanted to feel. This meant focusing on ways to feel confident, relaxed, and so on.

    Do you see the major difference? Understanding that everything is heightened based on how much attention we give it, you realize it’s only hurting you further to focus on what you don’t want.

    Once you accept the anxiety you feel, it’s now time to turn your attention onto how you wish to feel instead. Always focus on things in the affirmative rather than the negative. Pay attention to how you want to feel, not how you don’t want to feel.

    To become more relaxed and confident I employed the use of meditation and visualization.

    Using Meditation and Visualization to Train Focus

    I sit for mindfulness meditation twice a day and just relish in the moment.

    I have found the practice so powerful in training my mind to focus on the present moment. Not only has it taught me to give attention to feeling relaxed and calm, but the more present I am, the less anxiety I feel.

    That’s because anxiety, by definition, is a child of the future. To feel anxious means you are worried about what may happen or something not happening the way you wish.

    To practice mindfulness meditation, simply follow these steps:

    1. Get into a comfortable position with your back straight. I prefer sitting on my knees, but feel free to sit in a chair if that’s more comfortable.

    2. Set your timer. You do not want to be wondering if you’ve meditated long enough. Give yourself five to ten minutes if you’re a beginner. Choose a calming alarm, as you don’t want to be startled out of your mindful state.

    3. Close your eyes and begin breathing deeply and rhythmically. Focus on your breath and as your mind wanders, simply return your focus, without judgment. Thoughts will keep coming. The goal isn’t to stop them. It’s to allow and observe them, then let them pass.

    I also use mindfulness is during the day. Whenever I feel anxious, I’ll pause and take a few breaths to center myself in the present.

    I usually add some count breathing into this—breathing in for a count of five and out for ten.

    Visualization has been an equally powerful tool in training my mind to manage worrisome thoughts.

    After my meditation is complete and I’m relaxed, I visualize myself full of confidence, calm, and relaxed in different scenarios where I typically feel anxious.

    Once again, I am not seeing myself as not anxious, but rather as the way I wish to be.

    Usually, I’ll decide on one situation each day and visualize it in detail—what’s going on in my environment, who’s around me, what they’re doing. This allows me to mentally practice facing these situations with ease.

    Throughout the day, whenever I feel anxious, I bring this image back into my mind, reminding myself to operate off my ideal vision of myself rather than my past conditioning.

    These techniques have been tremendously helpful in shifting my attention off anxiety. And the less attention I give to feeling anxious, the less hold anxiety has on my life.

    If you are struggling with anxiety, I encourage you to ask yourself the same question I did, “Am I focusing too much on my anxiety?” You might be surprised by how your anxiety eases when you stop giving it so much attention.

  • How to Better Manage Stress So Little Things Don’t Set You Off

    How to Better Manage Stress So Little Things Don’t Set You Off

    “It’s not stress that kills us, it’s our reaction to it.” ~Hans Selye

    I was driving home from work, minding my own business, when a car cut in front of me.

    Pretty common in Sydney traffic, right? Normally, I would just brush it off.

    But not today. For some reason I couldn’t explain, that simple event set me off. I got so irritated that I pressed both my hands on the horn and started shouting at the other driver—who just gave me the finger and continued on his merry way.

    That’s when I lost it. How dare he do something like this?

    I was determined to get even. To teach him a lesson.

    I was so immersed in rage that I almost caused an accident just to prove a point.

    Not my proudest moment, I know.

    Have you ever been through something like this? Something trivial suddenly escalating to a new level of crazy?

    Well, the other day I witnessed my neighbor screaming from his balcony at a dude passing by, just because he had gangster rap blasting out of a speaker. Okay, I can understand that you don’t agree with his musical preferences, but is this a reason to pick a fight with a stranger?

    Or, one Christmas Eve at a crowded parking lot of the local supermarket, I had a lady lash out at me for touching her car door with mine, when I was trying to hop in while holding a couple of grocery bags. I had to use all my self-control not to jump down her throat.

    I guess this sort of things happen to all of us. You know, you lose your cool and end up shouting at your kids in the food court of the shopping center. Or, you snap at your partner for loading the dishwasher the “wrong way.”

    It is as if we all have a Mr. Hyde waiting to come out.

    But why does this happen? And most importantly, how can we control the impulse to kill someone?

    The thing is that the “event” in itself is never the root cause of a rage fit. It is just the last drop on a very full cup.

    For instance, the day of my road rage episode, I was going home from a day that didn’t go as planned. While driving, I was ruminating on the things that didn’t work and I was already on edge.

    So, when the other driver cut me off, it just unleashed something that was already in the making. And if it wasn’t this event, it would have been something else.

    I was simply stressed out and unable to be my best self.

    And you know what? All of us are continually exposed to stressors. From our worries and anxieties, relationship conflicts, existential crises, and poor lifestyle choices to background noises, overstimulation, and information overload.

    Which means that our cups are constantly full. And if we don’t deal with it, we’ll always be one drop away from overflow.

    But is it realistic to think that you can completely eliminate stress from your life?

    Heck no. This type of expectation would only create more stress. You’d be stressing about not getting stressed.

    So what can we actually do to live better?

    Well, you have two options: you can empty your cup on regular basis, or you can upgrade your cup size (if you work on both, even better).

    Emptying your cup is what is known as stress-relief strategies. Those are the things you do on regular basis to blow off steam, like going for a jog or taking a bubble bath.

    These activities help you take your mind off your problems, creating space for your body to calm down. During this time, your body shifts from “fight or flight” to “rest and digest” mode, which is necessary to replenish your energy and recover from stress.

    But the key word here is REGULAR.

    Because these strategies are not likely to work when you are already bursting at the seams (you know what I mean if you ever tried meditating when you had a lot in your mind).

    Nope. They need to be part of your daily self-care routine. My suggestion is to create the habit of blocking off space in your calendar for a little “me time.”

    I know what you’re thinking. “Are you kidding? I don’t have time for that.”

    Seriously, self-care is not a luxury. It is a necessity. For your sanity, and the safety of others around you.

    Now, there will be times in which you may not be able to relax even after a whole hour of deep tissue massage. Those are the times you get restless, lose sleep, and can’t function properly. That’s why you need to build a bigger cup (or a bucket) so that you’re better able to tolerate potential stressors.

    Upgrading your cup simply means investing time in building mindset skills. Skills to help you manage stress, deal better with adversity, and become a problem solver. As a result, you’ll be able to take more on without going cuckoo.

    It’s like developing a superpower.

    How? Here’s a little framework that can help you respond more wisely to stressful situations and minimize unnecessary stress.

    1. Becoming aware

    Awareness means noticing (without judgment) what is going on in your mind and body. It’s learning to identify emotions and feelings, thought patterns, and responses (how you react when something happens).

    This way you’ll be able to discover what sets you off and put a stop on knee-jerk reactions that you may have on autopilot.

    For instance, noticing that you get irritated when you feel disrespected, which leads to an acid remark from your part. Awareness gives you the opportunity to pause and choose a better way to respond.

    2. Practicing mental hygiene

    Mental hygiene means going through our mental rules and deciding on what is useful and what only causes us stress.

    The mind creates mental rules based on array of past experiences. The thing is that these mental rules end up defining how you’ll respond to an event in the future. That’s how we get stuck in vicious cycles.

    We create rules about how things “should” be done, how people “should” act, how they “should” respond in certain situations, how the world “should” work… With so many ideas of how things should be, we end up living in defense mode, constantly fighting against everything our mind judges as “wrong.”

    To move on, you’ll need to learn to let go.

    For example, I made a rule in my head that said that things needed to be neat all the time after growing up with a neat father. This was totally fine while I lived on my own. But when I moved in with my partner, it became a constant source of attrition. My Mr. Hyde often came out when my partner’s behaviors went against my internal rules. So, I decided to let go of this rule in order to have a peaceful home life.

    3. Rewriting the rules

    The truth is that all beliefs serve a purpose. They are the code of conduct that guides our behaviors. So when we decide to get rid of a rule, we need to make sure that the unconscious need behind is being met in another way.

    For instance, to be able to let go of the rule I mentioned above, I had to ask myself why it was so important to have things organized. With a little bit of soul searching, I came to realize that when my environment was neat and orderly, I could process thoughts and emotions more efficiently, which meant that I felt more in control of my life. This helped me put things into perspective and develop new guidelines.

    Now, I allow myself to make things neat, but I don’t obsess about it anymore. That means that I don’t get upset when my husband leaves a dirty sock here and there. I just remind myself that having a peaceful environment is more important. And I developed other ways to feel in control of my mind and body like adopting a meditation practice and building an exercise routine.

    So now I ask you, how full is your cup? And most importantly, what can you do to prevent spillage?

    If this’s all very new to you, you could start by creating a self-care routine that helps you empty your cup on regular basis. And if you already have one, then work on upgrading your cup. This way you’ll be less likely to explode over little things.

    Oh, and don’t get put off if you have slip-ups. Keep in mind that stress management is a skill that gets better (and easier) with practice.

  • How to Stop Reacting in Anger When You’re Triggered

    How to Stop Reacting in Anger When You’re Triggered

    “Freedom is taking control of the rudder of your life.” ~Yukito Kishiro

    “What’s for dinner?” It’s a simple enough question. Yet it’s one that has made me lose my mind at my husband on more than one (or ten or twenty) occasions.

    It’s not the question itself. It’s a valid question and one that needs an answer (at least by one of us).

    A trigger of mine is being asked to answer a question when I’m already in the middle of something, feeling overwhelmed, emotionally exhausted, or just sick of answering questions.

    So then I snap and overreact.

    I’ve come a long way in my personal growth journey, but I’m by no means perfect. I still react in anger but to a lesser extent and less often. I get mad, but I don’t stay there. I screw up, but I can apologize with humility and forgive myself.

    When we’re in reaction-mode to life’s challenges, we aren’t in control. We react in ways that are not in tune with how we want to be.

    Learning to navigate our triggers not only enables us to take back control and enjoy life more, it has an amazing trickle-down effect to those around us too. It better connects us in our relationships and models for others or our children what it looks like to be gracefully resilient so those in our circles can mimic the same.

    So, what does it look like to react in anger?

    Someone at work criticizes you and you instantly get defensive.

    Your partner asks you to do something when you clearly have your hands full, so you immediately get pissed.

    Plans change unexpectedly, and you panic or get irritated.

    Someone in your life is controlling or manipulative, so you either get scared and shut down, or feel livid and lash out.

    Someone does something that goes against your core values like being mean or inconsiderate or lying, and you explode.

    It can also mean reacting to your own thoughts or actions and getting angry with yourself for “doing it again,” being lazy, or failing.

    And all that leads to feeling guilty for saying things you don’t really mean or making a mountain out of a molehill, or maybe even rehashing past events.

    It can lead you to beat yourself up again for how you handled things in the past.

    And it can leave you feeling misunderstood because you recognize that your reaction stems from something deeper than this one incident;  a culmination of events, or some underlying fear created this trigger for you.

    Why We Are Reactive in the First Place

    We are reactive or over reactive when our stress response is triggered sending us into fight, flight, or freeze mode.

    We react on autopilot. In this space, we aren’t in full control, and it’s hard to see things clearly and objectively.

    Sometimes our triggers relate to events from the past. For example, you may get triggered when someone ignores you because your parents frequently neglected you when you were a kid, causing you to feel unimportant. Other times, our triggers are events that make us feel out of control.

    For example, one of my triggers used to be slow drivers on the highway. I would instantly snap into fight mode and get angry. I’d drive too close to them or shake my fist (or special finger) at them, honk my horn, or speed past them in a fit of rage.

    Sitting here calmly as I reflect back on my past, reactive self, I’m a little embarrassed and shocked remembering the actions I took while angry. That’s because I’m in a calm place and my fight mode is not initiated, so I have full control at the moment. I wouldn’t do any of those things when I’m in a healthy mental space—those choices don’t reflect the kind of person I want to be.

    When we react from a place of fear and anger, we rarely feel good about the things we say and do.

    How to Stop Being So Reactive and Respond to Stress More Calmly

    We don’t have to let our fear and anger control us. At any time, we can make a choice to respond to life from a calmer place. Here’s how.

    Prioritize self-care so you’re less likely to feel overwhelmed, exhausted, or on the verge of snapping.

    If you overextend yourself or regularly neglect your needs, you’ll likely feel triggered by even minor annoyances because your default state will be imbalance and agitation. And you’ll find it nearly impossible to handle major issues because you won’t have the inner strength to handle them. Take good care of yourself, mentally, physically, and emotionally, and everything will feel more manageable.

    Set yourself up to not be reactive by identifying your stress triggers.

    What things lead you to react in anger or fear? Awareness is key here! Create a list of things that you know trigger you, and why.

    Then describe how you typically react when those triggers occur.

    For example, a trigger of mine has always been other people getting angry at little things that I don’t think warrant being angry about.

    Funny enough, my reaction to their anger was anger! I would get mad that they are angry and yell at them to be calm. Obviously, this strategy didn’t work for me.

    Then ask yourself, “How do I want to respond instead”?

    As I reflected on how I usually reacted to my triggers, I realized I would rather remain composed than lose my cool and flip out. If I could pick any response to other people being angry, it would be for me to stay calm and in control.

    And that’s one of the main reasons I realized I have such a strong reaction to other people’s anger. I think that the “right” way to be in this world is to be calm, kind, and compassionate. When someone reacts in the polar opposite way, it conflicts with my values, and ironically, I end up getting angry with them.

    This is why this step is so important. We often react in ways that are not in tune with our values when emotions are running high, so we need to consciously decide, in advance, how we want to respond in stressful situations.

    From there, think about what you are trying to control that you have no control over.

    At a certain point, I realized that some people are going to get angry, and I won’t agree with their behavior. My anger stemmed from judging their reactions and wanting to control how they were feeling and behaving. I have no control over other people. I may be able to influence them, but I will never be able to control them.

    If traffic triggers you, you may be trying to control your time because being delayed makes you feel anxious. If chaos triggers you, you may be trying to control your environment to create a sense of safety. If angry people trigger you, you may be trying to control how other people react and experience stressful situations.

    Now, ask yourself, “What do I have control over?

    Since I don’t have control over what other people do, and wanting to control them was creating anger within me, in order to reach my desired response of staying calm and in control I had to shift my focus to myself. Because the only thing I have control over is what I do.

    So when someone else is angry and I think they’re overreacting, I can take some deep breaths, step away from the situation, and ask the other person how I can help (in an effort to help calm them), or just sit back and allow them to process the situation however they need to in that moment.

    I started to notice that as I stopped reacting to anger with anger, the people around me showed less anger over time. And when they did get angry, they didn’t stay angry as long.

    I started to realize that they were often mimicking me, whether they realized it or not. Of course, part of it was that I was no longer adding to the anger and fueling it from my end too. But seeing what it looks like to stay calm and in control is an important skill to witness. It shows others what it looks like so they can do the same.

    —

    We all get triggered at times, but we don’t have to say and do things we regret, which will ultimately damage our relationships and leave us feeling bad about ourselves. With a little self-awareness, we can stop reacting on autopilot and start responding to life from a calm, neutral place. Maybe not all the time, but more often than not, and we’ll feel a lot more peaceful and in control as a result!

  • How I Stopped Putting Everyone Else’s Needs Above My Own

    How I Stopped Putting Everyone Else’s Needs Above My Own

    “Never feel sorry for choosing yourself.” ~Unknown

    I was eleven years old, possibly twelve, the day I first discovered my mother’s betrayal. I assume she didn’t hear me when I walked in the door after school. The distant voices in the finished basement room of our home drew me in. My mother’s voice was soft as she spoke to her friend. What was she hiding that she didn’t want me to hear?

    I leaned in a little bit closer to the opening of the stairs… She was talking about a man she’d met. Her voice changed when she spoke of him. The tone of dreamy wonder when you discover something that makes your heart race. She talked about the way they touched and how she felt being with him.

    I felt my body go weak. I could not tell if it was sorrow or rage. All I knew was, she had lied to me.

    Several months prior, my parents had announced their divorce. My mother told me the decision was my father’s choice. She told me he was the one breaking up our family. She told me she wanted nothing more than to stay with us and be together.

    And now I heard her revealing that was not true. She wanted to leave. She was not choosing me. She was choosing him.

    Since I was nine months old, my mother had been in and out of doctor’s offices, hospitals, psychiatrist’s and therapist’s offices trying to find the cure of her mental and emotional instability.

    When I was a young child, she began to share her frustrations and sorrows with me. I became her support and the keeper of her pain. She had nicknamed me her “little psychiatrist.” It was my job to help her. I had to. I needed her stable so I could survive.

    I don’t remember when or if she told us that she was seeing someone. I just remember she was gone a lot after that day. She spent her time with her new boyfriend out of the house. As the parentified child who she had inadvertently made her caretaker, it felt like she was betraying me. She left me for him.

    I was no longer the chosen one—he was.

    I hated him for it. When my mother moved in with him, I refused to meet him. I didn’t want to get to know or like this man she left me for.

    I saw them one day in the parking lot outside of a shopping plaza. I watched them walking together and hid behind a large concrete pillar so they wouldn’t see me. The friend I was with asked if I wanted to say hello. I scowled at the thought. I despised him.

    Within the same year, his own compromised mental health spiraled, and they broke up. He moved out of their apartment. I didn’t know why or what happened. I only knew my mother was sad. Shortly after their breakup, he took his own life. From what we heard, he had done so in a disturbingly torturous way. It was clear his self-loathing and pain was deep.

    My mother was devastated. She mourned the loss of her love and the traumatic way he exited. She stopped taking her medication, and her own mental health began to spiral. My father received a phone call that her car had been abandoned several states away. I’m unsure what she was doing there, but she had some issues and took a taxi back home.

    He later received a call stating that my mother had been arrested for playing her music too loud in her apartment. Perhaps to drown out the voices in her head. She was later taken to the hospital without her consent and was admitted due to her mental instability.

    After several days of attempting to rebalance her brain chemistry with medication, my mother began to sound grounded again. The family decided she would move in with her parents a few states away from us and live with them until she was stable again.

    A few days after Christmas she called me to tell me how sad she was. She grieved her dead boyfriend. I was short with her. I was still angry for her betrayal. I didn’t want to continue being used as her therapist. The imbalance in our relationship was significant, and my resentment was huge.

    I loved her, but I could not fall back into the role of being her support without any support back. It was life-sucking. And I didn’t care that he was dead. She chose him over me. I was fine with him being gone.

    I don’t recall feeling any guilt when I got off the phone that day. I felt good that I had chosen myself and put a boundary in place to not get sucked into her sorrow. I was fourteen years old, less than a week shy of fifteen. I just wanted to be a kid.

    The next day, my mother chose to make more decisions for me and for herself. These were more final. She told her parents she was taking a nap and intentionally overdosed on the medication meant to save her. She died quietly to relieve herself from her pain and left me forever.

    That choice—my own and hers—would change the course of my life.

    The day my mother freed herself from this world was the same day I learned to become imprisoned in mine. I was imprinted with a fear that would dictate my life. I became quietly terrified of hurting other people. I feared their discomfort and feeling it was my fault. From that day forward I would live with the silent fear of choosing myself.

    My rational mind told me it was not my fault. I did not open the bottle. I did not force her to swallow the pills. I did not end her life. But I also did not save it.

    I learned that day that creating a boundary to preserve myself not only was unsafe, it was dangerous. When I chose me, people not only could or would abandon me, they could die.

    Of course, I never saw this in my teenage mind. Nor did I see it in my twenties, thirties or the beginning of my forties. I only saw my big, loving heart give myself away over and over again at the cost of myself.

    I felt my body tighten up when I feared someone would be mad at me. I heard myself use words to make things okay in situations that were not okay. I said yes far too many times when my heart screamed no. All because I was afraid to choose myself.

    The pattern and fear only strengthened with time. I learned to squirm my way out of hurting others and discovered passive-aggressive and deceptive approaches to get my needs met. My body shook in situations where conflict seemed imminent, and I learned to avoid that too.

    What I didn’t see was that this avoidance had a high price. I was living a life where I was scared to be myself.

    On the outside I played the part. The woman who had it all together. Vocal, passionate, confident, and ambitious. But on the inside, I held in more secrets than I knew what to do with. I wasn’t living as me. My fear of being judged and rejected or not having my needs met was silently ruling my life.

    So many have developed this fear over time. Starting with our own insecurities of not feeling good enough and then having multiple experiences that solidified this belief. The experiences and memories differ, but the feelings accompanying them are very much the same.

    The fear of choosing ourselves, our desires, our truths, all deeply hidden under the masks of “I’m fine. It’s fine.” When in reality, we learn to give way more than we receive and wonder why we live unsatisfied, resentful, and with chronic disappointment. Nothing ever feels enough, and if it does, it’s short-lived.

    The memories and feelings become imprints in our bodies and in our minds that convince us we can’t trust ourselves. That we can’t trust others. That we must stay in control in order to keep us safe. We learn to manipulate situations and people to save ourselves from the opinions and judgments outside of us. We learn to protect ourselves by giving in, in order to not feel the pain of being left out.

    We shelter ourselves with lies that we are indifferent or it’s not a big deal in order to shield ourselves from the truth that we want more. We crave more, but we are too scared to ask for it. The repercussions feel too risky. The fear of loneliness too great.

    In the end, our fear of choosing ourselves even convinces us we can live with less. That we are meant to live with less, and we need to be grateful for whatever that is.

    Do we? Why?

    What if we learned to own our fear? What if we accepted that we were scared, and it was reasonable? What would happen if we acknowledged to our partners, families, friends, and even strangers that we, too, were scared of not being good enough? Of being discarded, rejected, and left behind.

    What would it be like if we shared our stories and exposed our insecurities to free them instead of locking them up to be hidden in the dark shadows of ourselves?

    I’m so curious.

    Where in your past can you see that choosing yourself left a mark? What silenced you, shamed you, discouraged you from choosing your needs over another’s? When were you rejected for not doing what someone else wanted you to do? And how has that fear dictated your life?

    Choosing ourselves starts with awareness. Looking at the ways you keep quiet out of fear or don’t make choices that include your needs. Seeing where this fear shows up in your life gives you the opportunity to change it. The more you see it, the more you can make another choice.

    Start with looking at the areas of life where you hold on to the most resentment and anger. Who or what situations frustrate you? Anger often indicates where imbalances lie or when a boundary has been crossed. It shows us where we feel powerless.

    Make a list of the situations that annoy you and then ask yourself, what’s in your control and what’s not? What can you directly address or ask for help with?

    Note the ways you may be manipulating others to get your needs met in those situations and how that feels. Note also what you may be avoiding and why.

    How would it feel to be more direct and assertive? What feelings or fears come up for you?

    Then start with one small thing you could do differently. Include who you could ask for help with this step, if anyone.

    As for me, I have found myself in situations where I lied or remained silent to avoid being judged, in an attempt to manipulate how others see me. I have felt my body cringe with sadness and shame each time. It doesn’t matter how big or small the lie, it assaults my body the same.

    I have learned that speaking my truth, no matter how seemingly small or insignificant, saves my body from feeling abused by the secrets it must keep. Choosing me is choosing self-honesty; identifying what is true for me and what is not based on the way my body responds. I am not in control of others’ judgments of me, but I am in control of the way I continue to set myself up to judge myself.

    I have also found myself agreeing to do things I didn’t want to do in order to win the approval of others, then becoming resentful toward them because I refused to speak up for myself.

    Choosing me in these scenarios is honoring the fact that I will still be scared to ask for what I need, as my fears are real and valid, but asking anyway, even when the stakes feel high. It’s scary to feel that someone may abandon us if we choose ourselves, but it’s scarier to lose ourselves to earn a love built on a brittle foundation of fear.

    l cannot control the past where I have left myself behind, but I can control today, the way I forgive myself for falling victim to my human fear, and the way I choose to love myself moving forward. When I choose me, I have more love to give to others. Today I can take a small step toward change.

    Taking these small steps and building on them will help us to show ourselves that we can make progress in bite size amounts and prove to ourselves we are going to be okay. The small bites are digestible and give us proof that we can do it. This helps us build our ability to do more over time, while also decreasing our fear.

    If we look at our past, we will see the majority of our big fears do not come to fruition, and if they did, we survived them and gained knowledge or strength in the process.

    It’s not the action holding us back, but the memory of the discomfort we still live with. The more we move through these fears, the more that discomfort will decrease, and the more we will trust that we will be okay no matter what.

  • How 10 Minutes of Daily Meditation Can Calm Your Mind and Relax Your Body

    How 10 Minutes of Daily Meditation Can Calm Your Mind and Relax Your Body

    “Peace. It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble or hard work. It means to be in the midst of these things and still be calm in your heart.” ~Unknown

    I began the morning with a meditation. After taking my dog out and brewing the coffee, I sat in my sunny living room, my little dog Frankie nestled beside me. I perched cross-legged, a blue pillow on my lap for warmth. I closed my eyes and began to focus on my breath.

    When ten minutes passed, I raised my hands in appreciation. “Thank you for this day. Thank you for my family and for our health. Give me strength, wisdom, and love.” Then I extended my hands forward, “So that I may give strength, wisdom, and love.” Finally, I stretched both arms out sideways, wiggling my fingers in my peripheral vision, a reminder to be fully aware. This is how I start every day.

    It wasn’t always this way. My older brother Marc tried to get me to meditate when I was fourteen. Although he was a patient teacher, I didn’t understand the point of the exercise.

    “Let’s sit together. Close your eyes and concentrate on your breath.”

    “Why do I have to do this?

    “Just sit, Lise. It’s good for you to learn. We will do it together.”

    “OK, but why?”

    Marc tried, but I resisted. I stopped meditating as soon as he went back to college.

    Years later, as part of my psychology training, I took classes which touted meditation as a stress-reducing technique. During the classes, there were demonstrations which I always enjoyed. I sat back, breathed deeply, and felt a deep flow of relaxation inside me. But, back home, I had no follow-through. Once the classes were over, so was my meditation.

    My breakthrough into daily meditation happened in 2020, one of the few good things that arose from that dreadful year. I was home, virtually every minute of my life. I didn’t have to dash from of the house, brave traffic, and arrive at the office by 9:00. Mornings stretched more languidly. It was easier to find those ten minutes to breathe every morning.

    Now I sit every day. I scan through my body, noting points of tension, areas of pain and pressure. Simple awareness of the tension shifts any pain, and my body settles.

    My mind, free from my constant to-do lists, drifts along, as if floating on the waves of a gentle sea. I hear the sounds of the house around me, the heater outside, working mightily to warm our home; Frankie the dog beside me, sighing. My stomach muscles unclench. I notice thoughts drifting in. I don’t attend to them. The thoughts fade away. Peace.

    Of course, that’s when meditation goes well. Sometimes every minute slogs on. My scalps itches. “I forgot to return that phone call,” I think, and my body tenses into high alert. “Oh no, I have to write that woman back!” My throat tightens. “What if that editor doesn’t like my submission?” My stomach jams into a knot. I cannot let these thoughts go. “I suck at meditation. Why can’t I just breathe? When will these ten minutes be over?”

    Sometimes meditation goes like this. It isn’t always peaceful, and it doesn’t always feel good. The key, I’m told, is to keep at it. Like any skill, the more we practice, the better we get at it. It is no accident that we say one “practices meditation.” I didn’t get decent at writing in one year either.

    If you are like the fourteen-year-old me, you might be asking, why meditate at all? There are so many benefits I don’t even know where to begin; here is a partial list. Meditation…

    • Soothes anxiety: When you learn to focus the mind, your thoughts don’t spin off into anxious “what-ifs,” spiraling into anxious ruminations.
    • Calms anger: Focusing on breathing calms the mind, stopping our internal tirades over people who have wronged us.
    • Improves the immune system: The body is not designed to be in a constant “fight or flight” mode. When we are tense, our immune system works poorly. When we relax, our immune system resumes its work.
    • Lowers blood pressure: Meditation is a proven technique for improving hypertension.
    • Manages emotional reactivity: This is a big one. It is easy for me, sensitive soul that I am, to feel hurt and wounded by other people. Meditation allows me to detach from the provocations of the moment, and to tap into inner peace. Once I have calmed myself, I find freedom from reacting emotionally. I can bring more thoughtfulness and wisdom to my relationships.

    Happily, the benefits of meditation extend past the ten minutes into the whole day.

    Now that I practice regularly, I notice when my shoulders leap to attention. With mindfulness, I can lower those shoulders down.

    I notice when my stomach tenses up, and I can breathe that tension away.

    I notice when my mind anxiously swirls around my to-do list and I can tell my mind to relax.

    The awareness that comes from a regular ten-minute mediation follows me throughout my day, helping me stay calmer and more serene.

    A while ago, I was getting ready for a radio interview, as part of my recent book promotion. I had an hour to spare, and I thought I’d make a quick phone call to an insurance company.

    This “quick” phone call dragged into an infuriating forty minutes. I was on hold, listening to inane music, on some incessant torture loop. Finally, the customer service rep came on, but we had with a terrible connection. I could barely hear her, as she was undoubtedly on another continent, and I couldn’t understand her either.

    After a brief exchange, which I barely fathomed, she declared she couldn’t help me. I got off the phone in disgust.

    “I’m so aggravated! I just wasted an hour on the phone with this stupid company and now I have an interview in fifteen minutes. What a colossal waste of time! I have this radio interview and I am so upset I can barely think!”

    My husband gazed at me. “Why don’t you do your meditation thing?”

    I glared at him. I really just wanted to righteously complain. But my husband was right; I was a wreck.

    I sat in my bedroom and closed my eyes, focusing on my breath. Immediately I sensed my body’s distress. My heart rate was elevated. I breathed rapidly. My shoulders were raised and my stomach was in spasm.

    “My god,” I thought. “My body is completely dysregulated, all from one stupid phone call.”

    Quietly, I focused. I felt my muscles relaxing and my heart rate slowing. I ended the meditation, feeling like a different woman, and started the interview with a smile on my face.

    That is the power of a regular ten-minute meditation practice.

    Let’s be clear. Everyone, no matter how busy, has ten minutes to spare. You can do this, and build yourself a calmer, more peaceful life, in a healthier body.

    One final tip: it is best to find a regular time of day for your meditation practice. Do your breathing every morning, or every bedtime, or every evening after work. Otherwise, you will keep putting it off until later. If you are like me, you might even put it off for forty years.

  • How I Reclaimed My Life When I Felt Numb and Unhappy

    How I Reclaimed My Life When I Felt Numb and Unhappy

    “All appears to change when we change.” ~Henri-Frédéric Amiel

    The biggest life-changing moment in my life would have looked unremarkable to an outsider looking in.

    I was at a point in my life (my late twenties) where everything seemed to look good on paper. I had a great job, I was living in downtown Seattle, and I enjoyed the live music scene. Aside from not being in a relationship, I thought I had “arrived.”

    The only problem was, I was miserable, and I barely acknowledged it. A part of me knew that I wasn’t happy, but I tried to run away from that feeling by playing guitar, writing, or watching live music as much as I could.

    My other avoidance tactics were working long hours at my day job or socially drinking at “hip” bars in the city.

    But every time I came home, there I was. Still grappling with my feelings and trying to understand why happiness was so fleeting.

    I had also recently broken up with someone that I cared about but knew was not healthy for me. She was a heavy drinker, and because I tended to just blend in with my partners, my drinking had increased substantially when I was with her, and I felt horrible (physically and emotionally).

    It was a messy ending, and it left me even more confused. I should be so happy. “Why aren’t I?” This nagging thought haunted me for several months.

    Moment of Awareness and Choice

    One afternoon, I came home from work and mindlessly went through my routine. Dropped my bag off by the door. Changed into comfort clothes. Went to the refrigerator and opened a beer.

    I then plopped on the sofa and turned on the television. This was my routine for several mind-numbing months.

    When I reflect back on this moment, I can see that I was absently flipping through every channel available through the cable box. Interested in absolutely nothing. I would take a tug on the beer in one hand without even tasting it while changing channels with the remote in another hand.

    I was literally in a trance and not really processing anything. I was running on autopilot, without any conscious awareness, as channel after channel flipped by.

    And that’s when it happened. It was like the background noise in one part of my mind suddenly became amplified. I could hear thought after thought running through my mind like a CNN news crawl.

    The shocking part, for me, was how negative these thoughts were. “You’re no good. Nobody loves you. You’re a failure. You’ll never find someone who loves you. You’re not worth it.”

    I also had the realization that I’d heard these thoughts before but had chosen to stuff them down or mute the volume through distraction.

    But here they were. Loud and blaring. I was forced to face them once again.

    I was in a state of disbelief for several minutes while some choice expletives escaped my lips.

    Once the shock wore off, there was an overwhelming sense that I had reached a huge fork in the road.

    One choice led to stuffing these thoughts back down to wherever they came from and going back to sucking down a beer mindlessly watching television.

    And then, magically, a second choice came out of nowhere. Stop everything and just sit with these thoughts.

    I remember simply saying, “Huh!” out loud. I never realized that I had choices. I was programmed to run and hide.

    I became aware that this was a prodigious moment for me. I could feel chills run through my entire body.

    The choice was: Go to sleep again or just be present and experience these thoughts.

    Something deep within me knew which path to choose. It was the strongest sense of knowing I had ever experienced. I also knew that if I didn’t get on this train right now, I may be lost forever. It almost felt like a life-or-death decision.

    It was in that moment of choice that I finally gave in. I stopped resisting and avoiding. I chose to sit in the discomfort and not run away and hide anymore.

    The Choice to Pursue “Better”

    As soon as I made the choice to stay and be with these negative thoughts, my body jumped into action. As if someone else was not at the controls.

    In one long, swooping motion, I turned off the television, went over to the kitchen sink, and dumped out the rest of my beer. I then took a deep breath, walked to my living room, and sat cross-legged on the floor.

    I’d never meditated before but had heard of it. I was strongly interested in Buddhism when I was in college but never took the steps to explore what it was all about. I figured there was no better time than now to just try it.

    All I know was, in that moment, I made the firm decision that I was just going to sit and be with my thoughts. No matter how intense of a ride it would be or how crazy just sitting in silence seemed to be.

    I still remember those first moments of being in silence. It was a bittersweet experience. The bitter side was experiencing all of the mean and nasty thoughts running through my mind at full volume. There didn’t seem to be an end to it.

    But there was also a sweetness in the silence that was bathing my experience. There was a peace here that I had never experienced before. It was like being cuddled in a warm bosom, and I soon felt the negative words less scary to be with.

    I can’t remember how long I sat in silence on that first day, but it was at least a couple of hours. I remember opening and closing my eyes several times. I was checking to make sure I was still in my living room.

    It was like figuring out if you can trust wading into a lake you’ve never been to. Slowly, step by step. And certain moments I needed to take open my eyes and just allow myself to feel comfortable before going further.

    There were also moments where I felt “myself” leave my body, which honestly scared the H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks out of me. It was such a foreign experience. Even though I could feel some sort of a chord holding me to my body, I had never experienced being able to pop out and look down at my cross-legged self below. I was both intrigued and a bit freaked out at the same time.

    But I then started to hear a different voice coming in. A gentler voice.  One assuring me that everything was okay.

    I was guided to just be with the process and that I would eventually get comfortable and not need to pop out of my body. And for the first time in a long time, I started to relax.

    Eventually, I noticed that by letting my thoughts just float through, they would start to fade away until there was just sweet silence, and then more thoughts would come back at a lower volume. I still had no idea what I was doing, but I was feeling better and that was all that mattered.

    I didn’t realize it, but just sitting with my thoughts was making a statement. I was now broadcasting, “I want to learn how to be happy and more loving. I am not going to run away anymore.”

    From that moment on, I came home from work every day and just meditated. I got rid of my cable box and allowed myself to be open to new opportunities. I was guided by a friend to hire a life coach and started to address things in my life that prevented me from experiencing happiness.

    For example, I realized that I’d deadened my ability to tap into emotions because I worked in the aerospace industry, where it was all about facts and data.

    By using my new friend, awareness, I started to identify emotions that I had never really processed, examined, or tried to heal. One particular healing moment was visiting the anger I held from going to an all-boys Catholic high school. I was one of the smallest kids and got picked on from time to time.

    I didn’t even realize how much anger was simmering below the surface. It wasn’t until I was aware of it and then had permission to express my feelings, that I was finally free of my long-held anger about being teased and bullied.

    I also faced the fear I’d developed after being in an airplane crash at nineteen and had a beautiful moment of release with tears flowing like the Nile. It never occurred to me that I held onto to so much trauma and that it was begging to be released.

    The more I became aware of my past and released it, the lighter and happier I naturally became. I caught myself whistling to work one day, something that I hadn’t done in years!

    I also got into Buddhism and energy healing and soaked in all forms of spirituality that interested me. It was a joyous time of learning and trying.

    But ultimately, I knew that just learning was not enough. I needed to practice the ideas of love, healing, and forgiveness in the world.

    “Leveling Up” with Awareness and Choice

    When I look back on that moment where I finally stopped and chose a different way to be in the world, I recognize that was the most defining moment in my life.

    Sure, I have attended many spiritual workshops, retreats, and trainings and have had “mountaintop” experiences. But they never would have happened if I hadn’t made the choice stop and be completely present with my thoughts.

    Our minds are constantly in and out of awareness (awake) and unawareness (asleep). It takes diligence and practice to stay awake and to make loving choices.

    Think about how much of your day you’re actually aware of your thoughts or habits vs. when you are on “automatic pilot” doing tasks or zoning out over social media.

    Here are some ways to remain aware and at choice throughout your day:

    1. Set a goal for the day. Something like: “I want to be aware of my thoughts at work and think lovingly.” Set an hourly reminder on your phone to check in throughout the day.
    2. Put a post-it note with the words “Awareness and Choice” next to your work space or area where you spend most of your time to remind yourself to be present with your internal experience. Place it where you will see it often.
    3. Schedule meditation “dates” throughout your day. See if you can sneak in five five-minute meditations throughout the day. Set reminders if you need to.
    4. Pick someone in your life that you have a hard time being with (especially at work). Have a conversation with that person and watch your thoughts. Choose to see them differently in the moment (as best as you can).
    5. At the end of the day, review the thoughts you had about yourself or others. Go back to times in the day where you were hard on yourself or someone else. Replace those thoughts with ones you would rather have said to yourself.

    Awareness and choice are a powerful duo that can change your life for the better. Both are needed. Awareness is taking in what’s present. Choice is taking steps to move your awareness in your intended direction.

    Look to see where you can benefit from awareness and choice in your life. Then set your compass toward happiness and enjoy the journey!

  • The First Thing You Need to Do If You Want to Change Your Life

    The First Thing You Need to Do If You Want to Change Your Life

    “Awareness is the greatest agent for change.” ~Eckhart Tolle

    There are two ways to live life.

    One is a more reactive approach, where you fight back when you encounter challenges in your personal or professional life. The other is a more proactive one where you are mindful of the trends within you and around you and ready with your surfboard whenever a big wave hits!

    The only difference between the two is awareness.

    Awareness empowers you to make conscious choices based on an understanding of yourself and the situation, to notice what your choice created, and to then choose again. This is why awareness is powerful. By becoming aware, you are snatching control back.

    Merely observing your thoughts and behavior can spur positive action.

    Big words. How am I so sure?

    Just by tracking my sleep, I was able to gain insights into what aids my sleep and what disrupts it.

    When I started tracking my food, I realized calories don’t matter but macros do. I then changed how I consumed food.

    Journaling allowed me to observe my mental chatter and learn from it. It made me aware that most of my anger and frustration stems from lack of sleep, food, or water.

    Tracking my finances made it easier to make tough calls with my spending.

    I didn’t make these changes overnight. They took days and months of being aware before the changes actually happened.

    Awareness is knowledge. Knowledge gives you power. Power makes it easier to change.

    In the absence of awareness, you react mindlessly to your surroundings because all you have is the movement of thought. Your reaction will then depend on your past experiences and conditioning.

    If in the past, you dealt with stress by eating, you are going to reach for your favorite snack. If your past experience taught you to raise your voice to get heard, you will easily shout when you are being ignored.

    You start to believe what you are experiencing is reality when actually you are experiencing the narrative your mind created as a reaction to what is going on around you. Without awareness, you confuse what is happening in your mind with reality. You are at the mercy of the conditioned mind.

    “Awareness is all about restoring your freedom to choose what you want instead of what your past imposes on you.” ~Deepak Chopra

    Most of us are clueless about why we do what we do, how we present ourselves, and how others perceive us. And we get stuck in negative patterns as a result.

    Here are some ways you can improve your awareness so you can improve your life.

    Practice self-reflection.

    This allows you to take a step back and ask probing questions of yourself. As Ferris Bueller said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

    Ask yourself: Why did I react this way? Why is this making me sad? Why am I so against this viewpoint? Where did this belief come from? 

    Doing this will allow you to make stronger connections. It will make your convictions stronger and give you the fuel to argue your viewpoint in a civil manner. It will also make you aware of your bad habits and thought patterns.

    For instance, self-reflection has taught me that I have a tendency to eat unhealthy food when I haven’t gotten enough sleep. I also have a tendency to shut myself off from people when I am angry instead of talking to them calmly. Knowing this about myself, I am able to catch these unhealthy habits and choose healthier responses.

    Journal.

    Journaling is a great tool for self-reflection, since it helps you understand and challenge your thoughts and beliefs, and it’s also an incredible stress reliever. It acts as a brain dump. Think of this as a parking lot for your thoughts. Just like your back feels lighter when you take off your heavy backpack, your mind will feel lighter and less stressful once you dump your thoughts on a piece of paper.

    You can do this once a week, once a day, or even once every fortnight. All you need is a diary and a pen to get going. Trust me, nobody is so busy that they cannot take five minutes in a day to journal.

    Take personality and psychometric tests.

    Whereas a personality test can give you insight into why you do the things you do, a psychometric test can help you asses your skills, knowledge, abilities, and characteristics. I am not a big fan of these, but there are scores of free tests available online. You might find yourself agreeing or disagreeing with the results, but they will give you some food for thought.

    Since they’re all based on some sort of questionnaire that you answer, I would recommend taking more than one to get a broader understanding of your strengths, weaknesses, and behavior patterns.

    Ask for feedback.

    There is a catch to this one. You need to be willing to take the feedback someone gives you without being offended or getting into an argument. If you can ask probing questions from them to dig deeper, even better!

    If you are uncomfortable with people pointing out your mistakes and shortcomings to your face, you can ask through email. This way you have time to digest what people write before responding and will be less likely to react defensively.

    Step out of your comfort zone.

    Once you become aware of your limitations, the next step is to push them and face your fears.

    I used to hate talking to large crowds or presenting in front of people. Nothing made me sweat faster!

    Since I was aware, I decided to tackle this by joining a student organization in college where my role was to go to different classes and present about the organization in efforts to recruit more students. It wasn’t easy, but within a year, I wasn’t sweating anymore!

    For you, this might mean setting a boundary with someone after recognizing your habit of letting people take advantage of you or applying for a job you’ve been interested in after recognizing that you usually hold yourself back with fears of not being good enough.

    This is how awareness changes your life: when you not only recognize what you’re doing and why but consciously choose to do something different.

    —

    Awareness makes you stronger. With awareness, you are able to bounce back faster after adversity. You are conscious of your insecurities and shortcomings. You have gone through the cycle enough times to understand what triggers them and how you can recover from them.

    For example, in my case, when I am feeling sad and depressed, I know I can recover if I take a nap or go workout. It helps me shake off the bad mojo.

    Awareness allows you to empathize with people. You can relate to the other person because you know the signs, having experienced them yourself. It becomes very easy to step into the other person’s shoes instead of judging them. In fact, it will come naturally after a while.

    Your agility increases because of your awareness. You can pluck yourself in and out of any situation when you want and are able to adapt and pivot as needed on much shorter notice. In other words, you are able to move, think, or act quickly.

    The pursuit of self-awareness also leads you to your blind spots. It uncovers the unknown and makes it known, so at least you are aware of it, even if you are not able to act on it right away.

    When I look back, I have been blessed to have experienced many moments of awareness discovering things either by myself or because someone in my trusted circle caught it. I am pretty sure when you look back, you will also be able to spot those moments where your transformation first began because of the awareness bringing it to light.

    The wheels of change begin to move with the first sign of awareness.

  • 4 Simple Techniques to Erase Subconscious Negativity

    4 Simple Techniques to Erase Subconscious Negativity

    “As you sow in your subconscious mind, so shall you reap in your body and environment.” ~Joseph Murphy

    The subconscious mind is like a computer’s hard drive.

    It saves whatever information you feed it, without any bias. It does not discriminate between useful information and trash information. It just saves everything!

    The subconscious mind learns through repetition. So if it’s fed the same information multiple times, it keeps overwriting it until the information gets etched in.

    As you would have guessed, such information is harder to erase.

    For example, let’s say you write “I am not good enough” on a piece of paper. Now keep overwriting on top of this. The more you overwrite, the bolder the text becomes and the harder it gets to erase it later.

    Let’s look at another example. When you first learned to ride a bicycle, you found it hard to balance. But you kept trying and could maintain balance for five seconds and then ten seconds and so on. Finally you could maintain balance for longer periods of time. Because of the repetitions, your subconscious mind picked up what it takes to maintain balance.

    Once the subconscious mind learns, it falls back on this information whenever it is required.

    So the next time you sit on a bicycle, the subconscious mind automatically switches on the default bicycle-riding program and without any effort, you start to ride your bike.

    What is interesting is that if you learned to ride the bike in a faulty manner, you will keep riding the bike in a faulty manner.

    For example, there are people who find it difficult to drive a car while wearing shoes. They can only drive the car barefoot! This is because when they were learning to drive, they did so barefoot. How do I know? Well, I am one of them!

    For me, learning to drive a car while wearing shoes was like learning to drive the car all over again.

    So what does this tell you?

    Once the information is fed to the subconscious mind, and is repeated enough times, it simply gets etched in the mind and is hard to erase later.

    Yes, it is erasable, but erasing it would require extra effort. This is exactly the reason why bad habits are so difficult to break. And this holds true for both physical habits and mental habits.

    Physical habits equate to stuff that you do. Like your daily routines.

    Mental habits are thought cycles like your self belief, your insecurities, your view of the world etc.

    In a way, your mental habits fuel your physical habits and vise versa. It’s cyclic in nature.

    Rewriting Negative Subconscious Programs

    As mentioned earlier, your subconscious mind is like a computer’s hard drive. And just like we can erase and put new software into a hard drive, we very well can reprogram data into the subconscious mind.

    Hypnotists have been doing this for ages.

    But the technique we are going to look at is far stronger than hypnosis. Plus it is very simple to do. In fact, the technique is so simple, you might be forced to think, is that it?

    So let’s see what this simple technique is.

    The best and most effective technique to alter your negative subconscious mind patterns is awareness.

    That’s right, you simply become aware of the subconscious patterns.

    Once you become aware, the additional actions required to make the change follows automatically.

    Becoming Aware of Subconscious Mind Patterns

    Subconscious mind patterns are called subconscious for a reason. They are below (sub) your level of consciousness. In other words, you are not consciously aware of them.

    For example, I used to have the habit of shaking my leg non-stop when sitting down, also known as restless leg syndrome. It would be many minutes, sometimes even hours before I would become aware that my leg was shaking and I would stop doing it. But moments later when my attention shifted to something else, my leg would start shaking again.

    What helped me eliminate this issue was to develop body awareness. I started to become more and more aware of what my body was doing at any given point. So whenever my leg would start shaking, I would become aware of it within a few seconds as opposed to many minutes like before.

    Over a period of time, the shaking stopped. I still do it occasionally but it is very rare. And each time I can catch myself quickly and stop doing it.

    Body awareness not only helped me tackle this issue, it also helped me become aware of tense body parts so I could relax them more often.

    For instance, I noticed that whenever I worked on my computer, the muscles around the base of my skull (known as the suboccipital muscles) would tense up badly. This would cause fatigue, headaches, and back pains. Body awareness helped me sense this and consciously relax my muscles whenever that happened.

    This is just one very small example of how you can overcome a subconscious habit by becoming aware of it.

    This habit is easy to catch as it is happening on a physical level. But there are many mental habits that happen on a mind level. You cannot see them; they just happen.

    For example, just like me, you might have the habit of judging others. The strange thing is that the judging happens automatically. The problem with this habit is that you not only judge others, you judge yourself too. It always works both ways. Also, what you perceive of the other can be massively different from reality because you perceive from your own belief system.

    The way to become free from this habit is, again, to become aware of your thinking patterns.

    As you become more and more aware of your thinking patterns you will be able to catch your mind judging others. As you catch yourself judging, you do not blame yourself or force yourself to stop; you simply become aware of it—“Ah, here I go, I am judging again!”

    As you continue to do this, slowly but surely, your judgments of other people will start to reduce.

    Developing a Deeper Awareness

    Awareness is a habit and the more you practice it, the more it becomes second nature. I find the following four techniques to be extremely useful in developing awareness of your physical and mental processes:

    1. Consciously watching your thoughts

    In our day-to-day life, we are lost in our thoughts for the most part. The goal is to detach from your thoughts for a few moments and watch them as a neutral observer.

    This practice can help you become aware of negative thought patterns. You will find yourself questioning your beliefs and thereby weakening negative beliefs and consciously replacing them with positive ones.

    Here’s what you can do:

    Sit comfortably, take a few deep breaths, and calm yourself down. Start to become aware of your mind producing thoughts without engaging with them. If you find yourself getting engaged with the thought, take a moment to acknowledge that and return back to watching.

    If certain thoughts produce strong emotions in you, feel the emotions instead of trying to suppress the thoughts. Divert your attention within your body and feel the energy behind these thoughts.

    As you watch your thoughts, you will become aware of many negative thought patterns running in you. Simply becoming aware of these patterns is enough for them to start disintegrating.

    2. Consciously feeling your emotions

    Becoming aware of your emotions helps you understand the thought-emotion connection—in other words, what kind of thoughts produce what kind of emotional responses in your body.

    This can help you weaken and release the hold of strong negative emotions.

    What I find works best is to consciously recreate emotional responses when you are by yourself.

    Let’s say certain situations cause strong anxiety in you.

    For example, there were times when simple things like walking into a crowded restaurant made me feel anxious. There was this feeling that everyone is looking at me and judging me negatively, and that thought gave rise to a set of emotions that clouded my thinking and made me feel extremely anxious and unwelcomed.

    When you are in such a situation, it is hard for the untrained mind to do anything. But there is a workaround. You can use this situation to train your mind when you get back home.

    When you are back home, you can sit down in a calm place and recreate that exact scenario by running it in your mind. Doing so will evoke pretty much similar emotions. This time though, instead of being lost in your thoughts and overcome by the emotions, you have a choice to consciously feel your emotions. Feel them fully as they arise without becoming afraid of them. As you feel your emotions this way, they start to lose their power over you.

    What you are doing here is becoming aware of thought patterns and the reactions they create in your body. This awareness slowly starts to dissolve existing thought patterns and their corresponding emotional responses.

    Next time you visit the same restaurant, you will be aware when certain thoughts start getting generated and your body’s emotional response. But because you have already felt your emotions consciously and because you are aware of your thought patterns, you will find that they have significantly weaker reactions. Continue this and soon the reactions would die down completely.

    3. Consciously feeling your body

    Becoming aware of your body can help you learn how to relax your body and thereby aid healing.

    For example, you might have body parts that tense up when you are engaged in work or some activity. For me, as I mentioned before, it was the back of my head and the suboccipital muscles (muscles near the base of the skull) that tensed up when I was engaged in work.

    This would lead to extreme headaches and back pain and would cloud my thinking, leading to frustration. It was only after I started becoming aware of my body that I could feel these muscles all tensed up and relax them consciously. I had to relax them consciously many times over while working and after a few months they automatically started to stay relaxed.

    A simple technique you can use to become aware of your body is to feel your body from within during a meditation practice. Simply feel the inside of your body starting from the soles of your feet to the tip of your skull. As you scan your body this way, find and relax various tension points along the way. If you find certain parts aching, spend some more time there and relax these parts.

    Relaxing your body is key to healing. The more relaxed your body feels the more rejuvenated you will feel. This exercise is best done before going to sleep, so you feel fresh and rejuvenated when waking up. In-fact, you can do this lying down in bed.

    Getting in touch with your body can also help you better feel and release your emotions.

    4. Consciously focusing your attention

    In any given point of time, our attention is divided between a myriad of things. Most of us don’t have any control over our attention. It just wanders like a wild beast anywhere it wants to go.

    This method will help you gain control over your attention. The more control you have, the better you will be able to practice the above-mentioned methods.

    For instance, you can feel your emotions for longer periods of time without getting pulled into thinking. Similarly, you can watch your thoughts longer without getting lost in the thoughts often. You can also stay mindful for longer periods of time.

    There was a time I found it extremely difficult even to read a few paragraphs of an article. Within just the first few lines, my attention would drift away into my thoughts. I would be reading, but not understanding anything. I would then have to re-read the lines again. This is what happens when you don’t have mastery over your attention.

    And the most effective way I found to gain mastery is focused meditation. All it involves is to divert your attention to your breath and keep it there for as long as possible. If your attention wanders, bring it back again. As you keep doing this practice, you will start to gain control over your attention and your ability to focus.

    —

    These four methods are the gateway to deeper awareness. They can be practiced together or separately, depending on what you find beneficial at the moment. I believe these techniques can help anyone become free from low self-worth, limiting beliefs, anxiety, depression, and all other types of issues related to the mind.