Set Yourself Free

freedomYou are responsible for where you are in life at  this moment – what you think about ourself and others and how you feel and whom you choose to share your life with.  Stress is literally a killer and if you are are unsatisfied with the way things are now, you  can choose to take personal responsibility to change them and set yourself free to become the best you that you can be.

Your thoughts create your feelings – Your feelings trigger your emotions – Your emotions activate your behavior, and your behavior produces the results you have in your life.  It’s your attachments and aversions to specific outcomes in circumstances and in relationships that are the root of your unhappiness.

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit. — Kahlil Gibran

On the surface, happiness, hope, and optimism appear to be three different terms for the same concept.  Close examination reveals differences.  Hope  differs from optimism in that optimism  is  a broader viewpoint on the  positive aspects of life, while hope tends to focus on specific goals or aspects of life.  Both hope and optimism correlate closely with happiness.

Optimist: Person who travels on nothing from nowhere to happiness. — Mark Twain

While it’s true that happiness is a choice, you can only make the happiness choice if you know what prevents you from being happy in the first place. The shortest path to true happiness is found through making conscious choices.  To be happy you have  to  take responsibility for your  life, plan and organize so you can affect change, and do things which lead to happiness.

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The following  are common guidelines offered to help those who are determined to set themselves free so they can live a more authentic life.

1.  Take stock of your life and decide what is most important to you.

2.  List your personal wishes, goals, and desires for a changed life.

3.  Isolate what is holding you back from living the life you want to live.

3.  Start thinking outside the box. Chart a course for changing the life you are living now to the life you want to live and begin your journey.

4.   Don’t seek other people’s approval to determine your own self worth.

5.   Don’t feel responsible for the happiness or unhappiness of others.

6.   Stop thinking you can change what happened yesterday by reliving it today.

7.   Stop explaining or justifying your actions to yourself or others.

8.   Live consciously in the present moment – the now moment.

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Inspirational reading

How to Change Your Life

7 Little Habits That Can Change Your Life, and How to Form Them

Feeling Stuck? 100 Ways to Change your Life

Balanced living: Vacations are a necessity

vacation message

One of the main reasons to take a vacation is to get some rest and recharge.  On vacation people tend to pack in more hours of sleep and exercise, as well as spend more time with family and friends–all of which are good for reducing high blood pressure.  According to a study conducted by  the Psychosomatic Society in Savannah,  men who take vacations every year reduce their overall risk of death by about 20 percent, and their risk of death from heart disease by as much as 30 percent.

Other vacation research involving women subjects revealed the odds of being depressed increases as the frequency of vacation decreases? In addition, those who do not take vacations and who perceive their home life as disrupting their work schedule are  headed for workaholism and a vacation can help them break their addiction.   Not surprisingly, they report that they feel more  exhausted, sleep deprived, less productive, and less sucessful than co-workers and collegaues who do take vacations.

Lastly, did you know that vactions can also improve your sex life whether you take a vacation with your partner or take a vacation alone?

Christine Louise Hohlbaum, author of “The Power of Slow: 101 Ways to Save Time in Our 24/7 World,” explains on the CNN website that workers who forgo their vacations aren’t doing themselves or their companies any favors. Even if they are physically present, they have often mentally checked out. “If people are overworked, they’re surfing the Internet. They’re not contributing to the bottom line,” Hohlbaum says. – What Are the Benefits of Taking a Vacation?

When it comes to living a balanced life, vacation are a necessity. Spending time enjoying life with loved ones can keep relationships strong,  and help you cope with the stress of  hard times.

When it comes to living a balanced life, I have found that relaxing vacations is a necessity for me. Whether I spend my down time alone or in company I benefit from my time away from the stress and train of everyday living, and return feeling refreshed and rejuvenated.

Sometimes my relaxing vacations amount to traveling far from home. On other occasions they are brief periods of respite spent at home relaxaing. My bottom line is that I to take need vacations every year. What’s your bottom line?

Benefits
Spending time enjoying life with loved ones can keep relationships strong. Spending time alone allows you to come reach inside and become closely in touch with what’s going on in there and make adjustments where required.

I think the benefits of taking relaxing vacations are:

  1. reducing stress
  2. improving overall health
  3. bonding and relationship building
  4. lifting the spirit
  5. stimulating happiness and laughter
  6. stimulating sense of adventure and creativity
  7. creating lasting memories
  8. improving work performance upon return

Read the full article > The Importance of Vacations, for Stress Relief, Productivity and Health

No that I have listed my top 8 benefits from taking a vacation,  I’m inviting my readers to expand that list while I am enjoying mine.

The Observer Within

buddha face Tim Ferris brings an analytical, yet accessible, approach to the challenges of self-improvement and career advancement through what he calls “lifestyle design.” His 2007 book, The 4-Hour Workweek , a self-improvement program of four steps: defining aspirations, managing time, creating automatic income and escaping the trappings of the 9-to-5 life.

Tim describes our modern worker society as believing that responding to email is doing actual work. We’ve become a society of digital bit pushers that have no more found a way to be happy than the pencil pushers that have come before us, except now everything buzzes, flashes, beeps and demands our attention. And it feels good to engage in that finite moment of Pavlovian validation so we keep doing it. But in the end we have accumulated nothing but a digital log of empty experiences that have done nothing to advance our respective goals in life and we wonder why we are so miserable.

Each of us  has to face the truth of our lives based on the decisions and belief systems in which we have invested. If we don’t like the results then it is up to us to change,  and that’s easier said than done because it’s hard to view yourself  objectively and thus understand what to do next.

Are subconscious beliefs sabotaging your personal power?

What’s at your core? It’s not always easy to slice into the center and uncover our core beliefs and values. When we do this we may find some very negative ones left over from childhood. If you got more “I can’t” than “I can” messages as a child, you are probably having more “I can’t” than “I can” experiences as an adult. In other words, if you heard messages from parents and other authority figures that told you that your opinion didn’t count and that your actions didn’t matter, you are likely to have subconscious beliefs that mirror those ideas. The result is often a person with deep insecurities about their ability to positively affect the course of their lives.

Some people overcompensate for this feeling of powerlessness by making a career out of becoming powerful. Usually this sense of power is achieved by acquiring money, possessions and social status. Unfortunately, these external signs of power seldom satisfy the gnawing feeling of insecurity and powerlessness within. People with authentic power can have an abundance of money, possessions and social status, but their personal power does not come from the things they have, but rather from who they are.

Your self-esteem profoundly influences how others view you. If your self-esteem is high, other people will tend to see you that way also. However, if your self-esteem is low, others will respond accordingly with a lack of confidence and trust in you.

The way people treat you is a reflection of your subconscious beliefs. If you want to change how you are treated, you need to change the self-sabotaging beliefs causing undesirable treatment. As the saying goes, “If you can’t love yourself, you can’t expect others to.”

Sample Affirmations:

1. I deeply appreciate and accept myself.
2. I trust the decisions I make.
3. I trust the guidance I am receiving.
4. I do my best and my best is good enough.
5. I deserve to be happy.
6. I am worthy of the very best that life has to offer.
7. I acknowledge my ability and responsibility to make a positive difference in the world.
8. I actively embrace the opportunities that come with change.
9. I am true to my personal vision.
10. I am willing to take the risks necessary to live my life openly and honestly.
11. I give myself permission to do what I love.
12. I am proud of who I am and I am a good person.

To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.

The Internal Observer < – click the title to view the youtube video.

The Eternal Observer is a powerful tool for self-improvement and personal development. The Internal Observer is an aspect of the Self, the part of the psyche capable of self-observation, evaluation and reasoning. During our journey through life, we face different situations that are both challenges and learning experiences. Many times our paths seem to reach a crossroads. At these moments, the only resource to be accessed comes straight from the Light and the knowledge of ones own soul.

Through developing and installing an Internal Observer we widen our personal ability to be self-reflective and therefore enabling ourselves to be more aware of our environment, interactions and relationships.

The Humanity Healing Network is offering series of free classes to help you achieve Self-Mastery in your life. The Internal Observer is one of the tools you will learn.

FMS, CMS Spring Conditioning Update

This winter I became sedentary as the pain of the fibromyalgia FMS flare-ups and the chronic fatigue CFS symptoms I experienced were severe, and I became severely depressed. Insomnia became a factor along with exhaustion. I lost muscle tone and weight and descended from being fit to becoming becoming unfit very rapidly. Continue reading