Tag: mindset

Self-worth and Emotional Pain (short post)

“Lack of self-worth is the fundamental source of all emotional pain. A feeling of insecurity, unworthiness and lack of value is the core experience of powerlessness.”
Gary Zukav & Linda Francis

I think on a more basic level emotional pain comes from the perception of lack and loss, or a fear of these things. Whether it’s a faulty perception of ourselves such as “I’m never good enough,” “I’m a failure,” etc, or from loss where were afraid we’ll never feel whole or be happy again.

These perceptions that cause our suffering aren’t permanent. We don’t stay stuck in them forever, but it can sometimes feel as though we will.

I believe these perceptions cause so much pain because they aren’t in alignment with our true nature on a spiritual level. We certainly feel powerless when we don’t recognize or accept or own value. It will cause recurring problems in relationships, mental health, and limit or careers and social lives as long as we keep believing and acting as though we don’t matter.

February 20, 2020
How to Protect Yourself From Other People’s Negativity

by Mandie

When I was a kid, it seemed like I felt pain more than anyone else around me. Not just physical pain, but emotional pain. I cried easily, over many things. I had an especially hard time when people were fighting around me, and I didn’t even have to be involved. I could feel the negative energy and felt upset and overwhelmed. I didn’t have a constructive way of handling it.

Maybe other people felt just as much pain as me and were simply better at not showing it. Or maybe they learned how to not let it get under their skin the way I did. I will never know. (I don’t believe being sensitive is a bad personality trait that we need to get rid of. It’s driven me to become good at relationships and communication and it’s in large part the reason why I have a compassionate and empathetic personality.)

For years I’ve searched for ways to maintain inner peace, or ways to stop mental and emotional chaos once it’s started.

Here are the most powerful lessons I’ve learned, broken down into five sections below:

1. The real source of our pain

Your thoughts and judgments cause emotional pain – not other people’s words or actions. I used to focus my attention on trying to get other people to change, or my environment to change, to make myself feel better. Although these things can influence how we feel, if we focus only on changing our surroundings and not ourselves, we’ll be playing a game we can never win. Eventually, I grasped the idea that trying to control another person’s behavior is impossible. I shifted my attention to the only thing I could control: myself.

Once I began researching this idea more in depth, I came to understand that not only is controlling someone else’s behavior impossible, it’s also pointless. Whatever problem we’re blaming them for really resides within our thinking.

Here’s what I mean: Two different people can witness the same interaction and perceive different levels of negativity in the exchange. This is due to our own unique set of beliefs through which we view the world.

“Negative” interactions can actually give us opportunities to change something profound in ourselves if we let them. If we perceive things as negative, we are affected negatively. If we perceive things as positive, or at least try to find a silver lining, we are affected positively.

2. Responsibility

Learning that my perceptions and judgments were the true source of my emotional pain is changed my outlook on life significantly. I learned I could influence how much or whether or not I suffered, and I no longer felt afraid of how others were going to act or how I was going to react.

It’s empowering knowing this. But, like Uncle Ben says in Spiderman, “…with great power comes great responsibility.” Once you understand that your interpretations of things matter more than whatever anyone else does, you can’t deny your responsibility – for the way you treat others, the way you treat yourself, and how happy or miserable you are.

It’s easier to blame other people than take responsibility for your inner peace. You feel better about yourself if you can blame others. You get to be the victim and receive attention from others for your suffering which makes you temporarily feel better. You can’t blame others for your suffering anymore. If you do, you’re lying to yourself.

“Accountability breeds response-ability.”
– Stephen R. Covey

3. The two selves: love and fear

I believe that we are more than our bodies and our minds. I believe we have some sort of soul, spirit, or higher consciousness that is beyond our bodies and minds that we have yet to fully understand.

This part of us is said to be our true self – which is pure unconditional love, creative, limitless, cannot be harmed, and never dies. In many spiritual schools of thought, this higher part of us is made up of the same energy that makes up the entire universe and binds everything together.

Some people call this part of us God, or at least say that it’s connected with God. However, when we are young and begin to develop language and understand our place in the world, our minds create an idea about who we think we are (called the Ego in psychology), and how we think the world works based on fear, lack, and limitation. We suffer because we believe the lies our mind creates and try to live as if they were true.

4. The more someone is hurting, the more hurtful they will usually act

Remember the last time you heard someone say something to you that hurt you? The truth is more than likely they were stressed out and/or upset. They were probably functioning from fear. If you reacted by feeling attacked/defensive and wanting to attack back, that means you let their fear pull you in so that you started operating from fear as well.

Albert Einstein said, “You cannot solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that created it.” You can’t solve fear with more fear. The only way to solve fear is to meet it with love. If you can recognize that when someone is attacking you they’re in a state of fear and then you respond from love instead of attacking back, you will help them as well as yourself.

Of course, you can still communicate to them how you felt about what happened and stick to your boundaries, and that doesn’t mean you’re coming from fear. It means you’re acknowledging the situation and having an honest dialogue to improve your relationship. Acting rude, cold, passive aggressive, or attacking back means you’ve let fear win.

“If you do not have control over your mouth, you will not have control over your future.”
– Germany Kent

5. Accept your emotions – don’t try to change them

Sometimes when I’d get upset about other people’s negativity, I would end up being more upset about how I felt about it than about what originally happened. Because I did not want to be so easily upset all the time, I would get upset with myself for feeling upset! As you can imagine that only made things worse. If you understand that your feelings can’t hurt you unless you stay in that negative state for a long time, you can accept them and move on much easier.

You can say to yourself, yes, I feel really pissed off and really upset about what happened and that’s okay. Your feelings will pass like clouds in the sky. When you don’t like how you feel, you try to make yourself feel differently. That’s when you get stuck. You’re trying to force your feelings away because you see them as being bad, and you will only feel worse and worse. Acknowledging that it’s okay to feel upset will lead to a much faster turnaround from your state.

What strategies do you use for handling other people’s negativity? Add your favorites in the comments!

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(Also published on Addicted2Success.com. Image credit: Unsplash)

November 27, 2019
Function From Love and Watch Life Love You Back
Have you ever noticed when something really good happens to you or you’re in a really good mood, other things in your life seems to effortlessly fall into place? People say and do things and events play out in ways that boost you up even more? Conversely, have you noticed that when you’re in a bad mood or one unpleasantly jarring thing happens, other things in your life begin to spiral downward as well?

That seems to be the case more often than not, in my experience. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence and here’s why:

Everything is energy

“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.”

— Albert Einstein

Einstein believed everything is energy. In addition, he’s saying there are different frequency levels things vibrate at (think radio waves). Things we perceive as physical are vibrating at a lower frequency; things we can’t perceive at a higher one. Since humans are a part of the universe, that means we too are made up of energy. I believe we are vibrating at different frequency levels as well, depending on our level of consciousness (which can change).

This explains why some people ‘just click’ when they first meet, why some close relationships seem to grow apart for no reason, why we enjoy a particular kind of music (different music = different vibration frequency), why that can change depending on our mood, why some people can sense energies that others can’t, and a whole lot more.

Our energy affects our environment and other people.

It seems the whole universe is one big cosmic energy interaction that has a kind of order and purpose that we could study for a lifetime and still not completely wrap our heads around. I’ve heard the idea that our energy affects everything else from several other sources as well, and it would make sense if everything is connected.

Scientific sources have also stated that we can affect things consciously. One example is Dr. Masaru Emoto, author of New York Times best seller The Hidden Messages in Water, who studied the effects of human intention on water crystals. He claimed that positive thought, prayer, music, and written words created symmetrical, aesthetically pleasing crystals when the water was frozen, and negative words and thoughts created distorted, ugly crystals.

We are not a victim of our life; we are the creator of it.

The Celestine Prophecy, a spiritual adventure story (one of my all-time favorite spiritual growth books which I reference in other articles), talks about this concept as well.

“…the basic stuff of the universe, at its core, is looking like a kind of pure energy that is malleable to human intention and expectation in a way that defies our old mechanistic model of the universe–as though our expectation itself causes our energy to flow out into the world and affect other energy systems.”

— James Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy

You may have heard of the law of attraction: the idea that we can consciously create our reality from our intentions and beliefs. Whatever level of vibration we are functioning from will attract things in life to us which are of the same vibration. I think the law of attraction is misunderstood and over-simplified sometimes, but as long as we focus on raising our energy level with honest and pure intentions, I believe it will benefit us and everyone around us.

But there’s another more physical way we create our reality I don’t think is often talked about. We make thousands of decisions every day on how we do everything: our word choice and tone of voice we use while speaking to others, how we drive, how we move and carry ourselves, whether or not we decide to say hi to our neighbor, whether or not we run that errand, whether or not we eat that cookie, and on and on. (This is my husband’s theory, and it’s pretty awesome.)

Whatever our strongest, most persistent beliefs are about ourselves and the world, will literally create that reality for us through our actions.

For a lot of people, these daily behaviors are mostly unconscious; not true for people who have developed self-awareness. But all of these actions are a reflection of our state of mind and vibration level. If we want to change it we can work from the outside in – by conducting ourselves consciously in the way we would if we were at the level we wanted to be.

How do we raise our energy level?

To raise our energy to the level where life loves us back, I believe the answer is by getting into a state of consciousness where love, appreciation, joy, or faith fills us up and leaves no room for the fear and insecurity of the mind.

Here are 11 simple strategies to get you started:
1. Meditate. People have been meditating for centuries. There are many different ways to do it, but the purpose is always to bring your awareness out of your head and realign with your true self.
2. Recall a memory that evokes an emotion like love, safety, or gratitude, or use your imagination to generate the feeling.
3. Go somewhere with beauty, like nature, to bring your awareness to the present and good emotions.
4. Focus on your breathing. It can calm your mind and bring you back to the present.
5. Engage in thought-provoking/inspiring conversation with someone.
6. Exercise.
7. Do something to make someone else smile.
8. Let go of your worries and trust that everything will work out. Trust in whatever you trust in, that everything will be okay (I know, it’s harder than it sounds). Everything is as it’s meant to be.
9. Spend time with your favorite pets (animals naturally vibrate at a higher frequency than most humans).
10. Do something you love to do.
11. If you have nagging thoughts about an unresolved issue that are making it hard to be present, do one thing toward resolving it.
If you’re having trouble raising your energy level due to stubborn, dis-empowering and dejecting belief systems, try this. I say this in almost every one of my articles: You have to become aware of the thing you want to change before you can change it. Practice observing your thoughts, emotions, what you say when talking to others, and how you behave. Once you’ve gotten insight into your belief systems, question the belief’s validity. Is (this) belief I have about (that) even true?

“Questioning illusions is the first step in undoing them.”
– A Course in Miracles

Once you start consciously being able to raise your energy level you may find more people attracted to you, drawn like moths to a light. (If you have an issue with that you can set boundaries. You’re in charge of your life.) People will sense your change on an intuitive level and want to be around you more. They will also be lifted by your energy. They will feel happier, more inspired, think clearer, and be more creative. You’ll naturally bring out the best in others while you bring out the best in yourself – a win-win!

Summary

Everything in the universe is energy, and vibrating at different frequency levels, including us. Everything is connected. Not only does our energy affect everything else but we can consciously put our intentions out into the world and life will reflect them back to us. Another underrated way we create our reality is by every action we take and every word we say. How we conduct ourselves is a reflection of our state of mind/frequency level, and if we want to change that we can conduct ourselves consciously. When we raise our energy level we bring out the best in ourselves, in everyone around us, and we begin to see that life is happening for us, not against us.

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May 21, 2019
5 Happiness Blocking Lies You May Be Believing

by Mandie

Happiness…You want it. I want it. We all want it. But how many of us truly know how to attain it? The search for happiness motivates people from all walks of life to do all kinds of things – quit a job, change spouses, move, have a family, buy a new car, or start a new hobby. In contrast, the belief that happiness cannot be attained motivates people to take measures as extreme as committing suicide.

Some of us are fortunate enough to discover truths about what brings happiness, but many of us are living out our lives with false ideas about happiness stuck in our brains and we never stop to examine whether or not these are true.

The First Lie: Wanting happiness is selfish

The first misconception that gets in the way of being happy is the belief that wanting happiness is selfish. Some of us think we don’t deserve to be happy. We think that putting others above ourselves at the cost of our own needs will make us happy and better people.

But this is backward! If we are not fulfilling our own happiness, how can we have the energy to share happiness with others?

The Dalai Lama, arguably one of the top experts on happiness in the world, agrees in his book, The Art of Happiness:

“…survey after survey has shown that it is unhappy people who tend to be most self-focused and are often socially withdrawn, brooding, and even antagonistic. Happy people, in contrast, are generally found to be more sociable, flexible, and creative and are able to tolerate life’s daily frustrations more easily than unhappy people. And, most important, they are found to be more loving and forgiving than unhappy people.”

The more we allow ourselves to be happy, the more happiness we can share with others.

The Second Lie: Happiness comes from things outside of us

If you believe that events, situations, other people, and objects cause your happiness (or lack of it) then your life will be stressful! You will try to control things and people in your life so that you will be happy.

The problem with this approach may be obvious: you can’t control things and people in your life, at least not one-hundred percent of the time. And because you can’t succeed, you’ll live in fear of what bad thing is going to happen next, of how others are going to treat you, and of your own emotions.

What does cause happiness then? The root cause of emotion is arguably our thoughts. Try thinking about something that makes you happy, and not feeling happy. Can you do it? Neither can I. It is equally impossible to think about something that you dread and not feel miserable. The Dalai Lama put it this way, “happiness is determined more by one’s state of mind than by external events.”

Abraham Lincoln may have been wiser than even he gave himself credit for. He understood this idea as well, as this famous quote illustrates:

“We can complain that rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.”

He also stated that,

“Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.”

Who knew that the Dalai Lama and Abraham Lincoln shared the same philosophy?

You get to choose how you see the world. That doesn’t just go for rose bushes; it goes for events, situations, people, or anything you encounter in life.

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
– Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

The Third Lie: Our happiness is not our responsibility

Because you now know that the way you think about things creates your happiness, taking responsibility for your happiness is essential. If you don’t, you’re right back where you started — waiting for, hoping for, and attempting to control everything outside yourself to make you happy. It’s like flushing your winning lottery ticket down the toilet. No longer is it totally accurate for you to say, “You made me mad” to your loved one. They may have made it easy for you to be mad, but it was your perception that ultimately caused your emotion. That is taking responsibility for your happiness.

The Fourth Lie: We are our minds

Another misconception that blocks our happiness is thinking that our thoughts, beliefs, and ideas along with our bodies are all that we are. We are more than our minds and bodies. We have a soul, a spirit, a higher-self, a consciousness, whatever you like to call it. You can confirm its existence by asking yourself one question:

If I am but a body and mind, yet I can observe my mind…who then, is doing the observing?

Without the awareness of this separation we can allow ourselves to become victims of our minds. Our minds play games with us and sabotage us: I’m incompetent…I’m so ugly…I’m an idiot…I’m never good enough! Sound familiar? In contrast, the part of us that is separate from our minds is loving, trusting, inspiring, wise, and confident. If we have no awareness that the lies our mind tells us are separate from our true selves, we can get sucked into believing the lies.

The Fifth Lie: It doesn’t hurt us to live incongruently

Many people don’t realize that 1) They are living incongruently, and 2) That living congruently matters. What I mean by living “congruently” is living where what you value, what you say, and how you act match up. When these things don’t match up, you can struggle with self-worth issues.

It’s hard to be happy when you don’t feel good about yourself. Deep down, a part of us seems to know when we’re not being true to ourselves. But if you change your words and actions to match your values, you give your old beliefs no ground to stand on.

Summary

If you want happiness, start by ditching these false beliefs. Remind yourself that 1) wanting happiness isn’t selfish because you can spread more good in the world when you’re happy. 2) Don’t be a victim by believing that the world outside you dictates your inner state; take back your power by knowing that your perception dictates your inner state. 3) Treat your power with responsibility. That may mean you try to stop blaming other people and events for your unhappiness. 4) When you hear that voice in your head putting you down and doubting you, remember that you are not your mind. You have a higher spiritual self, that is the real you, and is separate from your fearful mind. And 5) Work on aligning your values, your words, and your actions, and you’ll be well on your way to being the happiest person you know.

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Photo credit: Zohre Nemati on Unsplash

April 26, 2019

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