The Mind-Body Connection to Conquer Challenges

Written on February 21, 2011 by Beginwithin in Begin Within, Mind-body Healing, Techniques

Mental Emotional Physical

We all have a physical body, emotional body and mental body and they all influence each other. I’m sure you’ve had the experience where alot of mental stress (mental) makes your irritable (emotional) and exhausted (physical), or when eating too much sugar (physical) and made you feel agitated (emotional) and not thinking straight (mental). There are many examples you can think of where it’s clear that one body is affecting the others.
You can use this to your advantage. If one body is feeling down, use the other two bodies to bring it back up. For instance, if you are down-in-the-dumps emotionally, use your physical and mental bodies to bring yourself back up. Instead of sitting glued to your seat in a slumping position, change your physiology!  Stand up, push your chest out and takes deep breaths. Instead of telling yourself how miserable you are, change your thinking!  Tell yourself what you want, not what you don’t want.  “I can change this! It’s just energy and I can bring it up again.” Think of a time when you felt really, really good or think of something  you really love to do. Start thinking of everything you are grateful for, and it will be impossible to stay in a slump.
If you’re mentally stressed, use your physical and emotional bodies to help it relax. Take deep breaths, think of a relaxing time at the beach or in a spa. Feel yourself there and and bring back that physical and emotional state.  Realize that everything you are doing, you’re doing in the present moment, right now. Feel your body, feel the air against your skin, feel your breathing.
If you’re physically ill, use your mental and emotional bodies to enhance your health. Visualize your body healed, deeply feel how wonderful you feel in good health. Remind yourself how your amazing body is healing on many levels and encourage it. Your immune system will respond. Your vitality will go up. Your subconscious will know what to do and be fully inspired to heal.
As you go through your day and encounter challenges, ask yourself what your three bodies are experiencing and use them to help each other. The more you do this, the more mastery you will achieve and the more empowered your life will be.

Live Like You Were Dying

A professor once told my class, “In order to live your life to the fullest, you must think about your death every day.”
At the time, I felt too busy to think about my death because I was consumed with law school applications and endless deadlines. But the words came creeping up to haunt me one day.
After I graduated, I moved to Boston to work at a law firm downtown before attending law school the following year. I wanted to be a lawyer because I thought it would be a lucrative, challenging career, allowing me to live what I thought would be a “fulfilled life.”
At first, I was thrilled to be a full-time employee at a law firm, but as time passed, I realized that id didn’t make me happy. And I was surprised. For so long I thought it was what I was meant to accomplish. It was hard to consider that perhaps it wasn’t the right path for me.
I just wasn’t happy at my job. I felt like I was missing the days and living for the weekends. I worked from 8-7, I never saw my friends, and my relationship was crumbling.
I expressed this issue to many of my co-workers, and most of them said something along the lines of, “That’s life.”
Still, I felt certain the “real world” didn’t have to make me feel so unhappy and unfulfilled. I also knew that it might be hard to change directions, but if I didn’t, I would never feel any different.
Suddenly, like a ton of bricks, my professor’s words came to me, and for the first time I thought about death.
Immediately, I thought of my Uncle David who died when I was younger. David was living in Los Angeles, pursuing a career as an actor. When I reached middle school, he died of AIDS. He was 38 years old.
Being young, I had always thought about how his death affected my family, particularly my grandmother, but I’d never thought too much about what things were like for him before he died.
In retrospect, I imagine he felt he was living his life fully, even though it got cut short. He had found the courage to use his time to do what he really loved.
Any of our lives can be cut short without warning—but we can decide whenever we want to use our time to reach for our dreams. That’s a fulfilled life.
Looking back, I realize I’d doubted my choice to go to law school, but I was afraid that if I didn’t see it through, I would have wasted a lot of time. What crazy logic, when you think about it: To avoid admitting I’d wasted time, I was willing to keep on wasting it.
Once I realized I wanted to make a change, the next step was to start dreaming. That was the easy part. Since I was in high school, I wanted to start a company called How to be a Redhead with my sister, Stephanie.
It would begin as an online community for redheads with future plans of a beauty line. The two of us have always had a very special connection. It could be that we’re both feisty, spunky, natural-born redheads, but we believe it goes deeper than that.
We believe our mission in life is to do something together, as one. And that’s just what we did.
My first step was to leave the law firm. It was one of the easiest decisions in my life because right then I didn’t have a single reservation, not even about the financial risk. I knew I only needed my sister’s support and my belief in what we can do together.
Suddenly, our best friends rallied around us to help.
Photographers, wardrobe stylists, hair stylists, artistic directors, business entrepreneurs, and web designers all came together for us. I never would have imagined we’d have this type of support, and I wouldn’t have known until I asked for it. It was amazing!
Though the future is uncertain, I now feel energized and alive when I wake up, knowing I am doing something I love with someone I love.
I imagine my Uncle David would be proud because we are living our lives following his courageous lead.
If you find yourself in a place where your days feel mundane or you feel unfulfilled:
Think about that inevitable moment when you’re looking back on your life. It gives you a better perspective what’s really important. Suddenly it’s less about what you feel you should do, and more about what you really want to do with the time you have.

Take time to reflect. When I was struggling with my job and the choice to attend law school, I meditated and practiced yoga daily to reflect on the areas of my life I wanted to improve. These exercises helped me gain the strength and courage to make a major change in direction.
Follow your intuition and listen to that little voice inside of you. It is there for a reason.  Life can be a gift, but it’s one we need to give to ourselves.

On Bad Choices

"People we care about often make bad choices. Sometimes the choices they make land them in jail, or bankruptcy, or a seemingly never-ending pit of despair. We cannot change anyone else but us. Regardless what choices other people make that negatively impact their lives we are not obligated to suffer with them. Loving ourselves is choosing not to trade our happiness for another person's misery." - Regina from 'Romancing Your Soul'

Managing the Challenges in Your Life

"How do you manage challenges in your life? Fight, resist, whine, ignore, confront, accept, embrace, get busy, become stuck, surrender, create, adjust, persevere? It seems as though the most successful people see challenges as a natural occurrence in the human experience and then choose to rise to the occasion. Their inner Warrior heeds the Call to Action."

Inspiration for the day (and everyday hereafter.......)

"Don't ever let somebody tell you, you can't do something. Not even me... Alright? You got a dream, you gotta protect it. People can't do something themselves, they wanna tell you that you can't do it. You want something? Go get it. Period."

Pursuit of Happyness Scene

www.youtube.com

"Do not pursue the past.
Do not lose yourself in the future.
The past no longer is.
The future has not yet come.
Looking deeply at life as it is.
...In the very here and now, the practitioner dwells in stability and freedom.
We must be diligent today.
To wait until tomorrow is too late.
Death comes unexpectedly.
How can we bargain with it?
The sage calls a person who knows"

For that which you judge......

"For that which you judge, judges you; and that which
you condemn will condemn you. Yet that which you see
for what it really is will see you for what you really are.
And therein will be found your peace." – Neale Donald Walsch

True Practice

"Intelligent practice always deal with just one thing: the fear at the base of human existence, the fear that I am not. And of course I am not, but the last thing I want to know is that. I am impermanence itself in a rapidly changing human form that appears solid. I fear to see what I am: an ever-changing energy field. I don't want to ...be that. So good practice is about fear. Fear takes the form of constantly thinking, speculating, analyzing, fantasizing. With all that activity we create a cloud cover to keep ourselves safe in make-believe practice.
True practice is not safe; it's anything but safe. But we don't like that, so we obsess with our feverish efforts to achieve our verison of the personal dream. Such obsessive practice is itself just another cloud between ourselves and reality. The only thing that matters is seeing with an impersonal searchlight: seeing things as they are. When the personal barrier drops away, why do we have to call it anything? We just live our lives. And when we die, we just die. No problem anywhere."

- Charlotte Joko Beck
(Everyday Zen)

The Truly Good

"When you think everything is someone else´s fault, you will suffer a lot. When you realize that everything springs only from yourself, you will learn both peace and joy. Pride leads to violence and evil. The truly good gaze upon everything with love and understanding." - Dalai Lama

How to heal your inner child

It doesn’t matter how old you are, there is a little child within who needs love and acceptance. If you’re a woman, no matter how self-reliant you are, you have a little girl who’s very tender and needs help. If you’re a man, no matter how macho you are, you still have a little boy inside who craves warmth and affection.
As children, when something went wrong, we tended to believe that there was something wrong with us. Children develop the idea that if they could only do it right, then parents and caregivers would love them, and they wouldn’t punish them. In time, the child believes, There is something wrong with me. I’m not good enough. As we grow older, we carry these false beliefs with us. We learn to reject ourselves.
There is a parent inside each of us, as well as a child. And most of the time, the parent scolds the child—almost nonstop! If we listen to our inner dialogue, we can hear the scolding. We can hear the parent tell the child what it is doing wrong or how it is not good enough. We need to allow our parent to become more nurturing to our child.
I have found that working with the inner child is most valuable in helping to heal the hurts of the past. At this point in our lives—right now—we need to begin to make ourselves whole and accept every part of who we are. We need to communicate with our inner child and let it know that we accept the part that did all the stupid things, the part that was funny looking, the part that was scared, the part that was very foolish and silly—every single part of ourselves.
Love is the greatest healing power I know. Love can heal even the deepest and most painful memories because love brings the light of understanding to the dark corners of our mind. No matter how painful our early childhood was, loving our inner child now will help us to heal it. In the privacy of our own minds we can make new choices and think new thoughts. Thoughts of forgiveness and love for our inner child will open pathways, and the Universe will support us in our efforts.- Louise Hay