Archive for April, 2010
Throwing Out the Garbage in Your Mind
By Judith Parker Harris
Block: Lack.
Buster: Love.
Sandy Brewer, coach and spiritual guide writes, “Lack is the four-letter word of judgment and doubt. Love is the four-letter word of creation.”
Which will you choose today?
I choose love and I choose it over and over again, because judgment and doubt have an insidious way of sneaking in and infecting my thoughts. Before I fall prey to the judgment/doubt virus, I choose love and start all over again.
Many times I compare a human being to a house. Just think of all the things we accumulate in our homes – drawers and drawers and closets full of clutter that we hardly look at, let alone use. Well, our body house is made up of an accumulation of conversations: Conversations we have about ourselves, conversations we have with other people and conversations they have about us when we leave the room. Many of those conversations are over-whelmingly negative because they are made up of the disappointments, failures, prejudices and false assumptions left behind by various teachers, preachers, pundits and peers. Many times they are conversations of lack.
So, let’s say you have a spring cleaning project to clean up your house. What do you throw away? Clothes that no longer fit; keepsakes that have lost their meaning; papers, books, pictures and remembrances of times, places and people you have left behind long ago… The litmus test is this: Does this object serve who I am today? Does it fill me with love or lack?
The same process goes for cleaning out the conversations in our heads. Do the conversations serve who you are today or do they keep you helplessly tied to an old version of yourself, a version more like someone else, not the authentic you?
Today, choose to love yourself. Take a positive action and erase an old conversation or two. Let judgment and doubt hang out with lack in the garbage bag of mind clutter that you are throwing away.
Good riddance, Lack! I choose Love!
Believe In Your Dreams to Reach Your Destination
By Judith Parker Harris
Block: Lost Your Sizzle.
Buster: Take Your Dreams Off Hold.
In a recent LBN Report, Elvis Presley was quoted as saying, “When I was a boy, I always saw myself as a hero in comic books and in movies. I grew up believing this dream.” He also grew up accomplishing his dream, certainly as a heart throb hero, scintillating singer and romantic lead in many movies.
Over the past few weeks I have sat across from many new clients who have lost their passion or sizzle for life. Our work always begins by reconnecting them to their dreams.
What have you dreamed and not accomplished? Are you stuck in a career that doesn’t satisfy you or in a relationship that isn’t working, or simply in a rut of being bored with your life? Do fear, anxiety and stress have you running in place like a hamster on a wheel?
If so, it’s time to reconnect with your passions? What are your passionate five? It should be easy for you to reel off five things you feel passionate about, but if you’ve lost your sizzle you may have to try harder to make a conscious effort to reconnect. Here are five things off of my Passionate list: My husband; Sharing my experience through public speaking and seeing the light bulbs go on in my audience members’ brains, Dancing, Travel, Busting Through Blocks.
Your turn. Write down 5 things you feel passionate about currently. If the way you make your living or spend the majority of time in your days does not show up on your list, you may need to re-career, or at least re-design what you are currently doing.
One of the positives for some of those who have lost their jobs during the economic downturn has been the discovery that they really wanted to do something else. Years ago, I was in the advertising business until health issues made me re-career into self-help, writing, speaking and consultation. What do you think I dreamed of as a child? I dreamed of speaking to huge, international audiences and changing their lives. Bingo! That’s my new career.
One client of mine spent years as an attorney and entertainment executive and hated it. Our exploration found she had a love for travel, a flair for turning interesting fabrics into enticing clothes, and a real sense of what women “comfortable in their own skin” wanted to wear. She started a successful design company, and everything in her life improved including her battle with weight and her relationship with her son.
Please take a little time to do a Passion Treasure Hunt in 3 easy steps.
1) Write down 3 to 6 things you dreamed of as a child.
2) Write down 5 things you feel passionate about now.
3) Connect the dots between your childhood dreams and current passions. Where they intersect or simply relate to each other, write down actions you can take to make the dreams and passions more a part of your life today.
The sure way to put sizzle back into your life is to: Figure out where you are in your life; Figure out where you want to be in your life; Take action to make that happen. The actions will be fueled by your dreams and passion. Hey, it worked for Elvis.
SPRING CLEANING
By Judith Parker Harris
Block: Stuck in the feeling that something’s missing in your life?
Buster: Renew your passion; Define it, feel it and take action.
Why are we so in love with Springtime? Could it be because the air is fresh, the sky sparkling blue, the wildflowers vibrant and everything around us looks new again? How wonderful it would be to feel that way about our lives. To look at a loved one as if for the first time. To find renewed energy and passion for our life’s work. To re-discover what attracted us to our best friends. To look in the mirror and see a face and body without age, without worry and with eternal beauty, vibrancy and peace.
Unfortunately, it’s possible to get so stuck somewhere in our lives that we forget how to put spring back into our hearts. I want you to discover springtime internally and allow it to wash your lives with the freshness of a spring shower. Once you discover your internal spring, you can tune into it year round.
A wonderful place to start is in your closet because, if you’re like many of us, inside your closet you will find a representation of every age, stage, phase and size of you. You can even find out what’s missing in your life, because the associated clothing will not be there. Throw out things you haven’t touched in one year. Make a section for out-of-date clothes and see if they can be updated. If not, get rid of them. Make another section for clothes that you are simply hanging onto for sentimental reasons: First date with the love of your life, first time you weighed your absolute drop-dead gorgeous weight, If you’re not going to wear them again, get rid of them and make room for more firsts. We’re often holding onto a lot of emotional baggage in our closets. Clean out that troublesome closet, and you’ll make room in your life for all sorts of new people, experiences and activities.
The closet is a great metaphor for cleaning out the thinking and emotional patterns that are cluttering up your life. Are you trying to get back to a time, a feeling, or even a memory of yourself that probably doesn’t apply anymore?
There are a lot of feelings attached to old, negative thoughts and behaviors. When you want to clean out the closet of old thoughts and emotions, you need to write a new script. For instance:
Old thought: I’m incapable of starting my own business.
Old feeling: I’m unworthy. I’m less valuable than others. I’m not as important.
New Script: I am ready and capable of starting a wonderfully successful business.
New Feeling: I feel joy in my new endeavor. I am valuable, talented, recognized and appreciated.
Every time you feel drawn back by a negative thought, switch your thinking to your new script and feel the feelings you have attached to the script. Attaching a feeling to your thought gives it power and puts it into action. The opposite is true when you’re clearing out the negative. You must detach the feeling from the negative thought and sweep both into the garbage. Your new scripts will become your eternal Spring.
Make a clean sweep this Spring and enjoy the power of living in your actualized desires.
Take a thinking and feeling inventory.
What thoughts do you no longer desire to have?
List 1: Rewrite the unwanted thoughts into positives that work for you now and throw out or burn the old list.
What feelings do you no longer desire to feel?
List 2: Acknowledge the feelings and allow yourself to feel them. Then release those feelings through a breathing exercise. For instance, exhale the bad feelings, then inhale and replace them with an opposite, more positive feeling.
What fears are you holding onto?
List 3: Date this list and then fold it up and put it away into a “doubt box.” Let the fear and doubt go as you make a conscious choice to release it to the box and not think about it anymore.
What anger still remains in your system?
List 4: Get the anger out. You can do so either through exercise, shouting, or by writing an anger letter that you do not send. Then forgive and move on. Don’t ever hold onto anger.
Now take out another sheet of paper and make a list of your desires. Look at your four thinking and feeling inventories. Are there any things on the old negative lists that you can rewrite into positive desires? If you have completed the 4 steps listed above and have cleaned out negative thoughts and feelings, you have done your Spring cleaning. Congratulations! You’re now ready to live your life based on the desires you have listed in your journal. Make it happen!