5 Ways negativity helps you

When asked to choose adjectives they would use to describe effects of negativity on their life, the vast majority of people would reply with more negative thoughts.  Common human reactions to negative feelings include denial, indifference, repression and even ignorance these feelings are created at all. This misses the crucial issue: that negativity serves you.

If you reflect on conditions you have experienced that evoke anger, frustration, bitterness or other similar sentiments, then you are likely to conjure up images of people and places you would prefer to forget.  Part of you may wonder how this could be a piece of a healing process.  Consider these five ways that negativity helps you to turn your life around for the better;

1) It raises your awareness. From the moment you become aware of a negative thought, mood or sensation, you have no reason to feel discouraged. In fact, this is a sign you are redefining success. In order to stop identifying with inner states and ego, and stop permitting them to control you, you must move beyond your own reactions. You must view them from an external perspective. As you reach this juncture, you realize many other people do not know what they do.

2) It encourages detachment. Contrary to popular belief, discomfort is not meant to generate fear or your impulse to repress or run from these feelings. As you shift focus, you realize negativity actually encourages you to step back from your conditions.  This empowers you to view your life with greater objectivity. You are being taught to examine situations from different vantage points in order to better understand yourself. Detachment may be used to gain deeper insight.

3) It shows opposites create balance.  You may have heard for every action there exists an equal and opposite reaction.  The same can be said for feelings.  As you learn about love, you also learn about fear.  As you learn patience, you discover the point to impatience.  As you experience a sense of justice, you are also formulating views of injustice.  You discover two sides balance every picture.

4) It teaches how the mind operates.  It may surprise you to discover the mechanism for self-justification.  The mind distorts facts. It prompts you to condition certain kinds of counter-productive perception.  You decide what you like and dislike, perpetuate an internal judge. This is depersonalized through awareness.  You move from getting emotional about things, to noticing thoughts, feelings and subtle ego motives.

5) It guides you to deeper insight.  As you discover how your thoughts create opinions, you also gain insight into reasons for your rigid positions and narrow-minded ideas about identity.  You gradually learn any suffering you feel can be alleviated by taking responsibility for your inner state.  You can develop strategies to become more consistently alert, more attentive to the nature of your thoughts and feelings as well as why you create them.  You open up to new ways of "seeing."

Barack Obama & 10 lessons to excel

The inauguration of of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth U.S. President is meaningful to everyone, even if they do not know it yet. This man represents different things to different people, but in many ways, he symbolizes the realization of a dream.

Your own dreams may invite you to follow a similar road or, a road far less travelled.   You may be inclined to ignore what bothers you, or be unwilling to delay action when having patience would be more suitable.  In the end, you are totally dependent on yourself to initiate and follow through on plans.  Consider ten lessons I gain from Obama to help you excel;

1) You can be anything you choose. Society and people around you will tell you what they believe you can and cannot do. These views may emerge from prejudice, history, bias, judgment and counter-productive emotions.  Venegeful thoughts only limit you.  Your action reveals to what degree you accept society's rules and status quo standards. As you move beyond them, you realize you create your own rules.

2) You realize synchonicity matters. You can choose to take advantage of everything you perceive to happen. Many people will say they cannot realize a goal. Why? Excuses include; "it does not feel right" or, "circumstances are against me." Reframing what you sense and feel enables you to realize everything happens for good. You need not grasp why people view events as they do. Everything is a sign to help you. 

3) You sense serendipity is in your favor. When you seem to be in a certain place by accident, you are not.  In fact, you have an aptitude for having revelations by accident.  This mindset actually defines the direction of your life.  Some people take advantage of this and become more aware of their inner power.  Other people do not.  Your choice is best for you.

4) You know you conquer obstacles.  As you recall the experiences and choices of your ancestors, part of you may be think walls in front of you are intimidating.  Remind yourself how far you have already come to get where you are right now.  You would not be able to reach milestones unless you were the kind of person determined to grow.  You already demonstrate commitment, focus and drive. This inspires you to continue directing it in ways that make sense.

5) You turn your face to God.  This can be viewed as symbolic and spiritual rather than religious.  It shows your faith in higher forces that guide you to make choices that feel good, that are for the right reasons, and that serve others. It is not what you do that matters, but how it makes you feel, and how it recognizes the universal equality and potential of every person.  You become more willing to find meaning in things greater than your role or results from a single project or experience.  You find value in shared spirit, in making gestures of generosity, showing humility and compassion. 

6) You need not keep your enthusiasm in the closet.  Each time you act to share how you feel, part of you you may suppress it.  In the past, you may have been teased, criticized or reprimanded.  You may have broken down and cried in frustration.  Yet real people show you that you are loved for who you are. You are encouraged to communicate what brings you joy in life. As you move to accept yourself, then you discover communities, settings where you feel more welcome. You send vibes based on love or fear.

7) You are encouraged to grow in ways that resonate. People often assume one must learn things in a certain order or that certain interests cannot go together. People will judge your choices based on what they would do. They react according to their discomfort and whether they choose to face it. If changing focus resonates with you after doing something completely different, then do it. If you switch directions, jobs or activities in ways that do not seem logical to others, that does not matter. Do what feels right. Listen to your intuition.

8) You move to view yourself as you are. As you remove your own labels, you progressively remove the excuses that prevent you from acting instinctively. You move to decondition beliefs and behaviour that no longer serves you. When you tell yourself someting is not possible because of the color of your skin, your religion, gender, or some other external feature, then you do not allow yourself to view the real you.

9) You sense intrinsic value in everyone.  As you transcend self-created obstacles, you begin to develop altruistic attitudes limitlessly. You realize to practice love and compassion effectively requires the willingness to deepen insight into yourself. You stop telling yourself reasons why things cannot be done and choose to focus on creating ways they can. You sense you merit opportunities to create and measure your own joy and fulfillment.

10) You choose to acknowledge problems and act. Progress evolves from taking responsibility, not from denial, playing victim or, trying to "pass the buck." If you see garbage on the ground, you can choose to do nothing because you did not do it or, you can choose to pick it up, inspire others to make different choices.  Many people sense what is wrong or why their efforts are not working, and yet, they do nothing.  You will not outgrow your counterproductive habits until you choose to explore possibilities open to you to reform.  This is a process of recognizing the need to respect yourself and others differently, and to find the courage inside to change.

5 Myths shattered about death

Many people believe they die. They do not agree on what this means or what will happen after that. Some individuals are convinced they have already died and returned to live again. Others feel they are always dreaming and will awaken at the point of death. Still others sense they communicate with the spirits of people supposedly dead.  Many refuse to discuss it.

What happens in the here and hereafter sparks curiosity, fear and controversy. Humans create myths as ways to distract them from what they believe is the inevitable. Now, what if false collective beliefs are used to justify a social institution? What if discussions on death actually invite you to learn to think for yourself? Choose to shatter these myths about dying;

1) You should avoid the subject. Many people do not speak about death as it evokes discomfort in them or, they assume it would bother others.  People who choose not to explore a subject at all do not permit themselves to question what they are told to be true. In fact, diverse perspectives exist and many belief systems to support them. How open-minded you are is said to affect your perception and experience.

2) Your fear will grow with age.  Your state of mind is not age-related.   Imagination affects your health and well-being. It can contribute to joy and anxiety at any age, and shapes how you deal with losing control and facing uncertainty. You are given myriad conditions to learn to adapt to transitions. Life experience gradually prepares you to be less shocked with change as it occurs, including what is expected as death.

3) You will take all you acquire. If you choose to agree, then possession and ownership become vital to you in the physical world.  Egyptian civilisations believed they would take physical possessions and even slaves and animals along to help them on the Other Side. Yet, curiously, objects are found still lying in their tombs.  Another view is all you take with you is your attitude and intangible wisdom. The rest is left behind.

4) Your awareness will not help you. How you think determines what you feel and experience wherever you are.  As you decide to explore what does and does not define you, beneath the conditioning and external appearances, you will begin to move beyond a cycle of suffering. You will gain insight into permanence and impermanence.

5) You must die yourself to understand. If you believe you are an energy being that died and returned to learn more lessons, then you underestimate how much insight you already have.  As you evolve to attune to energy, you enter new levels of awareness to help shatter your human-created myths. Reality is that you experience life to expand your knowledge of emotion, to become more discerning, to learn when attachment and detachment are appropriate.  By sensing the true nature of things, including yourself, doubt fades and trust emerges.

10 Reasons to face your fear

Everyone experiences fear. What sets us apart are the reasons why we create it, the ways we choose to react and whether we choose to learn from it. You can develop practical exercises to build confidence and break down your own illusions. This has potential to shift your perception and more if you allow it.

Brace yourself: every instant, you choose to imagine reasons for fear. You decide whether or not it will control you. You opt to confront your fear or not. Your behaviour sends out energy. People read it. You are inviting them to tell you what you think of yourself. Your words, posture, and gestures mirror for something deeper. Consider these ten reasons to face your fear;

1) You never know where disppointment is taking you. To reflect on jobs, relationships or roles you feared losing, lost or left actually paints an encouraging picture. Note how versatile, resourceful and resilient you become. Conditions stretch you to explore talents you never even knew you had. You accumulate knowledge in life stages and can share lessons. Your intrinsic value never changes. How aware you become determines how you share it and where this takes you.

2) You have reason to admire yourself. Exploring discomfort evokes intense feelings. Things may not appear to run smoothly. You may feel drained as you exert energy struggling against odds or an enemy you would prefer not to name. It may be a major inconvenience. And yet, underneath it all, your tenacity, staying power, and will to grow are astounding. Note where you have been got youwhere you are.

3) You can choose to reinvent yourself. Any turning point in your life invites you to rediscover your own courage. You are constantly gaining new insight into your personality and core nature. This helps you grasp which parts of you shape and perceive problems and which parts imagine how to solve them. As you choose to identify and develop certain traits and mask or disregard others, you reinvent how you view your strengths and weaknesses and what you manifest to the world.

4) You eliminate confusion. Just because you encounter fear, this does not mean you know why. The choice to explore possible reasons why enables you to dissolve misconceptions and eliminate confusion. This is also a means to learn how to atune to feelings inside yourself you did not notice before.

5) You raise awareness to new levels. Learning to step back and view fear from different angles enables you to increase your objectivity about yourself. This new awareness can carry over to how you viewother things. You may come to expand your perspective exponentially.

6) You redefine personal satisfaction. Human beings are on a silent quest to prove themselves. You have the power to create fear and also to use it to serve your own ends. Among your choices, you can opt to feel disoriented and negatively affected or, you can also decide to use fear to empower you on the path to greater independence, confidence, self-sufficency and self-mastery. You can draw the line before arrogance.

7) You move to sharpen self-discipline. As you learn you exert more power over your mind and control over your thoughts, you can learn to decide which thoughts to create and perpetuate and which ones to dissolve. As you discern what is not destructive or dangerous, you replace that with love.

8) You realize time is not your enemy.   Many people are unaware that perceived time is an illusion. Human beings create it for their own ends.  You decide if this will serve you and if so, how.  How long you sense a fear may increase the intensity and draw your attention to it more effectively.  Facing fear helps you begin to realize you are growing differently. Time and fear complement each other. To realize time is not your enemy enable you to sense how much it serves you.

9) You realize you can behave wiser. If you believe that you have finite amounts of time and energy, then you also believe what you can accomplish is limited and the time you have can become saturated.  As you decide to narrow the focus of how you think and what you do, then you learning to pay more attention to the demands you place on yourself.  You become more aware of how deliberate intent can be used to undermine or serve your own unconscious priorities.

10) You unveil the truth. People will jumpt to fear what they cannot readily explain or understand. Rather than accept something mysterious for what it is, rather than listen to your gut, you may deny or ignore possibilities that ly outside your comfort zone. Choosing to face your fear is an exercise in accepting levels of uncertainty.  It is an exercise in building faith and trust in phenomena you did not initially desire to see.  As you dissolve fear, you begin to sense differently. You expand the parameters of joy, bliss and open senses you forgot you had. You are already relearning how to use them.

4 ways to keep perspective

Every moment, you encounter situations with the potential to disrupt your inner peace.  You create a life based on your ideas of stability, security and what is required for survival.  Your mind sets you up to receive extraordinary gifts of insight.  This process helps correct your mistaken ideas about existence. 

When events unfold such that you lose a job, become ill, break-up in a relationship, feel challenged or jolted out of a state of comfort, then you learn how you thought things were is not how they are.  As you go through transitions of perception, you benefit from four ways to keep perspective;   

1) Focus on love and compassion.  Emotions that do not serve you stem from ignorance of how things are.  As you choose experiences that evoke healing emotions, this dissolves ignorance.  That is, when you consciously decide to send love to all people, including those who seem to hurt you, you begin to realize everyone helps trigger your revelations.

2) Develop a kind heart.  Tolerance is a stop on the road to deeper understanding.  Our moral strength is repeatedly tested as a way to encourage us to shift our sense of who we are.  As you imagine yourself changing places with a person to whom you are initially indifferent, callous, jealous, angry or negative, then you begin to sense why painful influences inspire a kinder heart.  Do unto others as you would have done unto you.  The nature of energy you send will come back to you.

3) Cultivate selflessness. Whenever your reflex is to place distance between yourself and a person or situation, ask yourself if your motivation is self-interest or something else.  The right thing to do is to put the needs of others before your own. It is a process to realize how this translates into your life and what sort of mindlfulness you are willing to create.

4) Favor mental flexibility.  In cases where you allow yourself to be too rigid, you are more likely to generate emotions and attitudes that do not serve you.  Where mental discipline is deliberate and conscious of intent, you grow to pay closer attention to detail.  This allows you to discover how the focus of your attention at a given moment creates beliefs that can be detrimental.  You find impetus to change.