Facing your past and what is hiding below can be a very daunting task. My experience in digging into the past and discovering why I am feeling what I am feeling, why I am who I am is just so positive that I want to encourage you to go for it!
- Unhappy with your work?
- Unhappy relationships?
- Unfulfilled and unhappy life?
- Parts of your life that still bring pain or discomfort when mentioned?
Whatever you are facing, your past holds the key to your future if you haven’t “cleaned the house” already and got your head in order.
If you don’t let the past be past, you can’t change your future state. You want to acknowledge and understand why you make the decision the way you do – decisions that got you to where you are today. That are unconsciously driving your life today. Why? So that you can now start making different decisions. Decisions that will take you where you want to be. Because if you don’t, you will just get more of what you are getting now.
And where you are mentally, with your thoughts and emotions, you will also end up in the physical world. These 2 worlds can’t diverge in the long run. You are manifesting exactly what is in your mind. You see the world exactly as you are.
Start discovering what is below your consciousness.
One technique I would recommend as a starting point is meditation.
Start meditating so you start noticing your feelings and emotions. Meditation is an amazing practice to give yourself the possibility of choice. Meditations give you the window of opportunity to choose your reaction. Like Victor Frankl, psychologist and Auschwitz survivor said:
“Between the stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space lies our freedom and power to choose our responses. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
You can read more about meditation in my post on improving step by step.
Meditation is an amazing practice to open this space for yourself. This space will guide you to personal freedom.
You will be free from thoughts and actions that don’t serve you. You will still have those, but you will have a choice to subscribe to them or not. And you can say “NO” when your mind wants to delve deeper into worry or gossip or other habitual patterns of yours.
This is the start of something amazing. Meditation will upgrade every single effort you make in all areas of your life. Especially personal development. But everywhere else also as meditation practice is a step toward consciousness. Presence.
To change any habit in your life, you first have to be aware of it. Unfortunately, most of us are not even aware of our habits. And awareness is the first step toward change. The moment you catch yourself going to the fridge for something sweet and delicious just after you said you won’t eat anymore, is your opportunity to react differently.
A fascinating term I would like to talk about here is “Moral licensing”, a term coined by Kelly McGonigal in her book The Willpower Instinct. For example, you want to lose weight. You finish an amazing workout session. Then you get home and you see an amazing piece of cake in the fridge. Here you have 2 choices. The first one is that you remind yourself you would like to be fit and healthy and don’t eat the cake. The second is you say to yourself “I have been very good today by exercising, I earned the right to indulge. And you eat the cake. But by doing this you totally forgot what you actually want. Being fit and healthy. This is how you let yourself off the hook and actually did something that you didn’t want to do.
How our mind plays tricks on us. Our primal instinct for survival is preferring calorie-rich food but by doing that we are sabotaging our higher-level wants. We give in to our first-order consequence where we feel pleasure because the cake tastes so good. But disregard our second and third-order consequences of looking good and healthy or even living up to an age where we can actively play with our grandchildren. We end up with the first level which is not rewarding but only offers momentary pleasure and not lasting fulfilment.
Practising meditation will give you the ability to make a conscious choice if you want to eat that cake or not.
This is the first step so that your decisions won’t be automatic. But in any case, you have to ask yourself “what do I really want?”
I hope you choose what you really want and what will make your life meaningful and amazing.
Lan