Martha Beck’s 7 Steps to Creating the Life You Really Want…

A simple guide to mapping out the journey of your lifetime.

I read this article recently in O Magazine and found it a clever way of practicing introspection. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did…

Odysseus just wanted to go to Ithaca. No, not the one in upstate New York—the one in ancient Greece. He dreamed of it the whole seven years he spent trapped on the island of the nymph Calypso. Eventually the pitying gods ordered Calypso to free him, at which point he managed to build a boat and set out on what he hoped would be a brief and pleasant journey.
Ha.
At every turn, Odysseus’s travels were filled with surprises. He conquered monsters at sea only to find worse ones waiting on land. He encountered seductions that sent him half mad with longing. Finally, in the Land of the Dead, he got clear directions from a seer who, oxymoronically enough, was blind.
Does this ring any bells for you? Maybe you, too, feel stranded in your life, awash in a turbulent sea, or lured by the Siren song of a terrifying love. Or maybe you just hope to experience Winnipeg someday, if only for a long weekend. Fortunately, you have your own internal “blind seer”. It can feel its way into the future and draw you a map. I mean literally. Our project today is to help you create a map of your own epic tomorrows—a magically morphing guide that will get more detailed and accurate as you travel.

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Feeling Overwhelmed? Remember “RAIN”

Four Steps to Stop Being So Hard On Ourselves.

When I was in college, I went off to the mountains for a weekend of hiking with an older, wiser friend of twenty-two. After setting up our tent, we sat by a stream, watching the water swirl around rocks, talking about our lives. At one point she described how she was learning to be “her own best friend.” A wave of sadness came over me, and I broke down sobbing. I was the furthest thing from my own best friend. I was continually harassed by an inner judge who was merciless, nit-picking, demanding, always on the job. My guiding assumption was, “Something is fundamentally wrong with me,” as I struggled to control and fix what felt like a basically flawed self.

It’s like we’re in a trance that causes us to see ourselves as unworthy. Yet, I have seen in my own life, and with countless others, that we can awaken from this trance through practicing mindfulness and self-compassion. We can come to trust the goodness and purity of our hearts.

Break Through Creative Blocks with this Unconventional Drawing Technique

Clarity of thought, creative breakthroughs and inner peace whilst having a vacation from your overactive mind?

Sound good?

You need to sharpen your pencils.

An all-too-familiar creative roadblock

If you’ve ever had a tight deadline for a project or been trying to finish that latest article that seems to never end, you’ll appreciate the desperation that can start to creep into your thinking.

You’ve been working for what seems like days, thinking and re-thinking, writing and rewriting, trying to unleash that one idea, that one genius brushstroke to finish the piece. But it keeps eluding you and you start to feel… slightly hysterical!

Logically you know there must be a simple solution, but if the answer doesn’t come easy, avoidance tactics creep in and you ask yourself a couple of dangerous questions:

Would checking my email help?

Would Google know the answer?

It can become increasingly difficult to break the cycle of the same idea milling around in your head. What we need is a fast track to creative clarity.

8 Energy Zappers—and How to Avoid Them…

Call it a personal energy crisis. On the surface, your life seems full enough—maybe even too full—yet you’re running on empty. You feel stretched thin, stressed-out, drained.
Sound familiar? It’s an epidemic, as described in Boston-based psychotherapist Mira Kirshenbaum’s revelatory new book, The Emotional Energy Factor. The most common complaints Americans bring to our doctors, she says, are: “I feel tired all the time,” and “Why do I feel so blah?” Once possible physical causes of fatigue have been ruled out (a crucial first step), many doctors diagnose mild depression and reach for the prescription pad. But is this really depression—or just depletion? And why do some people always have energy?

You Are a Genius: 5 Steps to Creative Freedom

By Mark Matousek

You are a genius but probably don’t know it. Each of is born with a specific gift that exists nowhere else in all of creation. In ancient Rome, it was well understood that everyone had his or her own genius, a spirit whose sole purpose is to inspire our lives and guide us to our destiny. But we have forgotten this wisdom.

We’re told that genius is miraculously rare, instead — think Leonardo da Vinci or Stephen Hawking — and based on bizarrely high IQs. But genius, in truth, has more to do with desire, courage, passion and focus than it has with psychological testing. Genius informs the voice of your deepest self — the still small voice within — that guides you forward in mysterious ways having little to do with conscious will and much to do with learning to listen.

What gifts are you here to offer the world? No one else can do it for you. “There is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique,” as Martha Graham knew. “If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it.”

Perfect Strangers

by Angela Soelzer Ragosa

Perfect Strangers

Me:

I wish you all the best!

Perfect stranger’s reply:

But you don’t even know me…

Me:

I really mean it; I wish you all the best…

Perfect stranger’s look:

Puzzled…

This exchange brought me to the page this morning. I wondered why this person seemed so unable to wrap his head around the concept of a perfect stranger wanting all the best for him… Was it not plausible in his mind for someone completely unfamiliar to him to feel true empathy and compassion for him? Intrigued, I suddenly found myself weighing all the possibilities… I began to question what happened in his life in order for such distrust to exist.

I wondered who this person is…

I wondered about the shoes he’s walked in and the miles he had walked in those shoes… I wondered what his parents were like and did they embrace him with a loving ease? I wondered how much praise he had received for a job-well-done, if in fact, he had ever received any praise at all… I wondered what made this skeptic tick… I wondered if he could feel and come to know the unconditional love & support for him from a perfect stranger…me. I wonder…

The Desire to Change: You’ve gotta want it…

If you desire radical change in your life, you must WANT radical change. In today’s vlog I riff about the importance of surrendering to our desire for change. If you don’t truly want to change then you’ll continue to stay in the same cycle. I encourage you to join me in the ego outing process and share a habit you’ve had trouble changing. Getting honest is the first step to true surrender.

The Shadow Effect

by Debbie Ford

photograph by Richard Brocken

You can view his work…

http://www.saatchionline.com/richardbrocken

Whether you want to believe it or not, you have a dark side. When you start to ignore it or push it aside, it begins to make decisions for you and strips you of your conscious choices. Maybe for you it’s the foods you eat or the mean words you speak, but it’s there. In The Shadow Effect: Illuminating the Hidden Power of Your True Self, co-authors Debbie Ford, Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williamson shed light on your shadow issues to help you deal with them with compassion, instead of fear.

The conflict between who we are and who we want to be is at the core of the human struggle. Duality, in fact, lies at the very center of the human experience. Life and death, good and evil, hope and resignation coexist in every person and exert their force in every facet of our lives. If we know courage, it is because we have also experienced fear; if we can recognize honesty, it is because we have encountered deceit. And yet most of us deny or ignore our dualistic nature.

How to Boost Your Confidence

Want to look and feel confident, even when you’re quaking in your boots? Strike a pose, say researchers at Northwestern University.

Sit back in your seat with one arm stretched across the top of your chair, your chest out, and your ankle crossed over your knee. Did you just feel a drop in anxiety and a surge in feelings of competence? Turns out that simply placing your body in postures that project power triggers two key hormonal changes. When researchers assigned study subjects certain postures (expansive or constricted) and roles (manager or subordinate), it was the seated posture that gave people the biggest shot of confidence. “The position raises levels of testosterone, a hormone that drives us to take action,” explains author Adam Galinsky, Ph.D. “At the same time, it reduces cortisol, a stress hormone.”

Easy secrets for body confidence

Easy secrets for body confidence

By WeightWatchers.com

Photo:Google Images

Not happy with your reflection or brimming with body confidence? Unsurprisingly, you’re not alone. But sadly there are too many women are embarrassed with their bodies and giving their figure the thumbs down. New research from the University of Queensland shows that about 80% of Australian women are unhappy with their body image.