5 ideas to build your self-reliance and redefine dignity

Every human being is unaware of their own gifts that exist on many levels yet remain consciously unacknowledged. Even you are aware of things people are conditioned not to discuss. Part of you may patiently wait for others to discuss them. Part of you is ready and willing to make a different choice.

Even now, you silently reflect on what it means to demonstrate and experience self-respect. You may do this for yourself, for loved ones or strangers who re-evaluate their self-perception during illness and a personal journey to their inner healing. 

Everything in this life teaches you.  You are unconsciously evaluating how you define living with dignity, what kinds of life choices would not offend your view of an acceptable existence. You are judging which lifestyles would work for you, deciding what you would or would not be desirable. You are anticipating based on misperceptions that require attention.

We are each our own prophet, not because we all accept it is possible toforesee the future, but because we are slowly accepting we read energy and signs in the present. We sense what feels right and are acknowledging we have the courage to be more honest with ourselves. Consider these five ideas to build self-reliance and redefine dignity from where you stand;

1) Recognize your own patterns of avoidance of responsibility. To bravely move to assume responsibility for your own perceived problems will humble you, move you, and transform you forever. What do you believe should be done?

2) Acknowledge and explore hidden resentment. The way you choose to live your life, perceive and use time, contributes to your stress and attitude as if you were fueling a fire. What you resent about others reflects hidden things you fear and resent about you.  Which choices no longer resonate with you?

3) Attune to how you perceive and respond. How you are conditioned to experience life is based on learning at a given moment. Yet people carry conditioning like baggage and apply it to situations inappropriately. What would you change next?

4) Notice you are no longer who you were.  What you learn when you have certain faculties, mobility and experience no longer defines your point of reference when your baseline changes. What you are taught at different life stages is not always transferable to others. If your abilities strengthen or weaken, this is simply an invitation to reset your baseline.

5) Choose to rethink what it is to be genuinely loving.  An evolving sense of health and well-being invites you to grow from perceived disappointment.  This means you learn to love yourself despite not always meeting your own expectations, regardless of what other people define as their ideal, freedom, independence or desirable conditions for them.  Only listening to others traps and constricts when you have the power to define your life mission, your sense of dignity every moment.

Thich Nhat Hahn & a tip to help you understand

Thich Nhat Hahn is a Zen master who reminds us love is what we nurture as we develop our capacities to take care of others and ourselves. He inspires us to learn to generate loving energy toward ourselves.  Only then will we gain expanding insight into love and evolve to nourish and care for others well.

In reading about Thich Nhat Hahn's life journey, you rediscover a different kind of heart of compassion within yourself.  You may care for loved ones who suffer from illness or, be relearning to care for yourself.  What matters is the effort, the will to learn, the instinct to love. As you ask, 'what else could you be doing for others?', do you also care for you?

Hahn shares this story worth mentioning:

When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don't blame the lettuce.  You look for reasons it is not doing well.  It may need fertilizer, or more water or less sun.  You never blame the lettuce.

Yet if we have problems with our friends or our family, we blame the other person.  But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce.  Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reasons and arguments.

That is my experience.

No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding.

If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change. You will find peace in every step, providing you choose to perceive it, for it is always there.

Believe the odds are in your favor

Every new experience evokes a new world inside you. That is, you expand on what you thought you knew and realize there is more to this life than what you had previously thought.

Now, many people regularly go through life feeling like they hold the weight of the physical world on their shoulders. They seem to attract other people's perceived burdens, absorb heavy energy, and clutch tightly to the familiar because it is there.

This is a reminder that impermanence is reality.  You may exert an enormous amount of energy in an attempt to keep things as they are, but it will be to no avail.  You are not meant to keep people as they are at a given moment. Life as you know it will shift like the crust of the earth that is in constant motion.

You experience perpetual changes, but you are also raising awareness to discern the good in all of it.  Life is a process. This is not meant to scare you or cause you to feel as though you cannot count on anyone or anything.  Believe the odds are in your favor. Your health, happiness, and peace are waiting for you to rediscover them.   Your outlook begins and ends in you.

What if getting younger is not a dream?

People view their lives in fragments.  As you notice your mind racing, you may feel perceived phases enable you to focus or, feel less overwhelmed with all that appears to unfold for you. 

Whether or not you realize it, you schedule and set deadlines as if everything is a race with the invisible clock. You imagine life as symbolic sand in an hour glass where time is running out.  What if this is an inaccurate assumption?  What if time is a dream and getting younger is not? What it is all your choice?

Bob Proctor is a motivational speaker and teacher from The Secret who shares a view on aging.  During a recording he made in 2006, he remarked people assume getting older means getting tired, weak, sickly and increasingly inactive.  He also stated that at seventy-three, he felt he had more energy than many people he had met who were twenty three.  He said, when people tell him old people should slow down, he said that is a pile of crap. He believes you should speed up.

Have you ever asked why people of similar ages can appear and act so different?  Why does a retired colleague of my dad's make it to base camp at Mount Everest even though he has a brain tumor that surgery did not cure? Why do other retirees without such health problems have less will, stamina and drive? Why do some seniors take far younger spouses? Could it be a tireless libido? Heredity is part of it, but there's more. 

Some people are grateful to develop gray hair and wrinkles while others engage in a constant battle with time.  What does it really mean to go against your nature? People undergo botox, cosmetic surgery and procedures to preserve or prolong an appearance that is impermanent. Why focus on the physical?

Consider people with serious illness which confines them to bed and may adds years to their external appearance.  Happiness comes to represent the simple fact of being alive. The evolution they are invited to undergo inside heals years of bitterness, anger, pride and destructive thinking.  They come to feel happier and more at peace than ever before.  Are we each not choosing to redefine our own fountain of youth?

Society teaches aging is a choice.  You can take this literally or figuratively.  You can decide to age gracefully in your heart, mind and spirit, regardless of what other people expect to observe in your physical body. Committing to a certain mindset can feel a bit limiting.  Despite this, how you think actually determines your joie de vivre and vision of freedom.

If you are aware of aging relatives, you may also begin to view aging differently, even if you feel youthful.  To align ourselves with our most precious values is what empowers us to refine a changing sense of purpose.  The idea of youth or aging becomes less important than learning to let go of everything but life itself.  Every moment, we redefine survival.  Where we are, our state of mind and physical form matter less than how we feel.  Freedom from aging can come anytime we choose to evolve with the events of our own lives.  We can cherish memories, but release the past and ideas that do not serve us.

10 things that are helping my friend recover from cancer

Increasingly, people are realizing they know someone who has had cancer or, who is experiencing it right now. You may have known this experience yourself. Illness and healing are very personal journeys. No two people's experiences are exactly the same.

Youmay read biographies of seemingly miraculous recoveries and wonder how on Earth it is possible. You may ask yourself what is happening with your own body, mind and spirit, or those of someone you know. You may be ready to consider things you had not before.

In speaking with friends and loved ones who have been caught off guard with a variety of symptoms, I have put together a list of 15 things that are effectively helping one close friend recover from cancer. If you have another illness or know someone suffering from an ailment, these ideas could help. Healing is not specific to one kind of illness. It is a process that begins inside;

1) Believe you are already healed. Positive, mentalenergy goes a long way to manifesting well-being. If you do not believe in your inner power, then doubt sends out undesirable vibes into the universe.

2) Surround yourself by people who believe you will recover. To choose a personal and professional entourage who believe in your ability to stretch and gain something meaningful from your illness will help you grow and heal.

3) Respect the healing power of rest. The physical body works in mysterious ways. You are constantly mending and repairing, but at a different rate when you slow your pace. Sleep is a time when the body undergoes incredible levels of repair. Honor that.

4) Realize you have intrinsic value. Who you are is not based on how you appear, on what you can or cannot do. As you grow inward to accept what you can do at every moment, then you are sowing seeds of love. Self-acceptance has invisible, healing power.

5) Challenge yourself based on your current capacities. Chronic pain, fatigue and weakened faculties alter your energy level. Nonetheless, you can always find sources of motivation. It can be as simple as  getting yourself to the toilet, finding strength to sit up or get out of bed, or getting dressed. Each effort is a milestone.

6)Periodically redefine your priorities. In order to get the most out of where you are and how you feel, it makes sense to re-evaluate your situation in ways that reinforce progress.  It is not how many things you do that matters but. Focus energy in directions that move you forward.

7) Focus on your developing resiliency. You are in better shape that you give yourself credit for.  The more you reinforce the positive points about where yo uare and how far you have come, the more strength your will develop on mental, physical, spiritual and other unseen levels.

8) Limit your intake of news media. Tv, radio and other sources of media tend toward a negative slant. You have no need to hear about murder, casulaties and conflict during your healing journey.

9) Focus on what you can do. rather than think about lack or disability, focus on every step you take as being an encouraging one. You need not measure things in phyicality or temporality. Gauge based on feeling.  As you realize you control how you think and feel, you can focus on joy, determination and healing in ways that make sense to you at every moment.

10) Break everything down into steps you can handle. If you feel the need to learn things from scratch, then do not be afraid to do that. You only ever compete with yourself.  This is not a race. Patience, understanding, tolerance and faith and trust are the kinds of qualities yo uare developing in new ways.