Happiness Archives - Page 3 of 3

Six tips to improve your body and self- image so you can be happier and healthier

January 17, 2012 by admin Leave a Comment

Let’s face it, in this culture how much you weigh is as important as how much you earn. I am not saying I agree with this, but there are things you can do to boost your body and your self- image that might be the key to unlocking your inner power.

Focus on how you feel not how much you weigh. A negative body/self- image colors every aspect of your life. Research shows that long term successful weight loss requires you change the way you see yourself to keep your weight in check. Your weight is not the only thing that defines you. When you eat in a healthy way and do some form of exercise daily you will feel better.
“Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.” This was said by Kahlil Gibran, an inspirational writer and philosopher. People respond to your inner light. So try cultivating inner beauty which has to do with making eye contact, seeing the beauty in another, giving people the gift of your presence and smiling at people even if you do not know them.
Know that you are good enough just as you are even if you have to lose weight. People respond to you in accordance with how you see yourself. Make friends with your “inner critic.”
Become a more interesting person. Take up a new hobby, something you feel passionate about and cut back on the TV time. Haven’t you had enough of reality?
Cultivate self- love and compassion. As hard as it may be to believe, recent research is showing that self-compassion can be your greatest source of strength trumping so called willpower which is based on discipline and negative self-talk. If you are kinder to yourself and treat your set-backs as learning experiences with compassion you will find it easier to change.
Become the observer of you in a non-judgmental way. If you overeat or over indulge, these are distractions that keep us from dealing with what is really going on underneath. Instead of feeling bad because you think you have no self-control, ask yourself what need the action was trying to fill or feed? Acknowledge that perhaps you were looking for happiness or comfort in the wrong place.

If you want to make change easier, be healthier, lose weight successfully or whatever, understand change is a process and has a lot to do with how you see and view yourself than just deploying discipline and willpower. I would also suggest down-loading one of my guided hypnotic meditations such as Unlock your potential. This is a great way to start changing how you think.

Keys to Successfully Changing a Habit

December 13, 2011 by admin Leave a Comment

Do you feel you are constantly repeating unwanted unhealthy patterns you can’t seem to break? No matter how hard you try, you never get anywhere except more unhappy. This makes you feel like you are lost, stuck in a rut, a negative loop going nowhere. Or maybe you have accomplished what you thought would make you happy and instead of feeling happy you feel empty. I have built my practice around helping people get unstuck, re-create themselves and find true fulfillment and joy in their lives… from that place I help them go places to they ever thought they could go.

I know how you feel because I have been there and have done it. I recreated my life and spent over ten years helping people do that too. I have successfully developed a unique approach that helps you take charge of your mind which is the gateway to your willpower so you can change any habit or pattern, and create a more satisfying or healthy one.

Most people who come to me say they either they know what they are supposed to do only to lose focus and not do it, or they don’t know what to do anymore because nothing really works or sticks. This emptiness and sense of disillusionment is what leads to all of our subtle addictions in life. Overeating and numbing out is one of the biggest ones. The reason most people don’t just “do it” is because they are using a limited amount of their willpower. Because change has to come from within, and it is only when you understand how your mind really works and how to make it work for you that you can make meaningful change become a reality. Change requires effort and determination. People are unfortunately looking for a magic bullet or a pill. There are things you can learn to do.

Here are some of the keys to successfully to changing a habit:

Knowing how to eliminate the automatic pilot way many of us live our lives.
Create and build a vision that is consistent with your true joy and happiness
Take action small steps towards it everyday
Be unrelenting, persistent and yes never give up.
Learn how to master fear.

The problem is that the human personality is naturally resistant to change without the necessity of need, nothing changes. The truth is that change and the having the qualities that lead to success takes will power. Willpower is in your head. So there is really no way around it –you have to learn how to take charge of it and undo the conditioned aspects of you mind that keeps you locked in a stuck position in a feed back loop repeating what you do not want. It is a mind set.

How do I help my clients change their mindset? By changing the way they approach life. People who are successful are not smarter, they just look at things differently. By successful I also mean, happy and fulfilled. This way of looking at things includes the ability to use your imagination, the creative part of your brain, to visualize, see the bigger picture, and not give up or go to the negative when things are not going the way you thought or intended.

If you were not born like that you can develop them. There are proven techniques I teach that can show you how to change the way you look at things and from that place guess what…everything changes. Its magical. I know because I used to be a negative person, glass half empty, and always thinking if things were good it never lasts. This process is based on the powerful mind training techniques of yoga and meditation and taking it into your daily life…it is like yoga for the mind.

This meditation and refocusing practice I created… how to be Sexy, Smart and Sane changed my life. It makes meditation easy and gives you the ability to recreate your life by gaining control of the power that is within you that is lying dormant. Order the Home study program I developed How to Make Mediation Easy and start taking charge of your life now. I am also available for private coaching, to teach this to groups and for public speaking engagements or workshops.

Why you should start meditating and stop thinking?

December 9, 2011 by admin 2 Comments

If you were a vibration of energy wouldn’t you want to vibrate at a high frequency, just like beautiful music, perfectly coherent? That is what meditation does, it raises your vibration and helps to undo the old patterns of the brain that keep you locked in a less desirable frequency. If you want to take charge of your health, lose weight, and get off auto-pilot learn how to meditate.

Meditating daily is like putting money in the bank. You are able to deal more effectively with stressful situations as they come up without having them be harmful to your health. People are attracted to you because we all respond to wave frequencies without even being aware of it. The higher the frequency the more attractive you become. It was once said to me by someone very wise, I don’t care how much Botox you use to clear the frowns on your forehead, if it doesn’t get rid of your anger, it won’t work.

I tried for many years to learn how to meditate. I am very appreciative of the training I did with Jon Kabat Zinn who created MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction) Meditation. I am also grateful for the work of Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz who developed an awareness practice very similar to what Jon means by mindfulness that is taught at UCLA. This practice helps people to overcome anxiety and OCD without the use of medication. This process is also helpful for anyone who is stuck in a negative pattern or mind state which is everybody at some point in their lives.

Mindfulness along with meditation is of course two of the steps in the Eight Fold Path as written by Buddha. The Eight Limbs of Yoga written by the so-called father of Yoga, Patanjali, also includes breath work and mediation to assist in the journey towards more enlightenment.

I also studied with Sherrie Wade creator of Transformation Meditation. But, it was my “initiation” experience with Brijendra, who resides with Sherrie at an Ashram in the Himalaya in an area called the Valley of the Gods that helped me to turn the corner and make meditation a way of life. Part of the gift he gave me was his personal breathing practice and how he gets into meditation. He told me I was free to share it with who ever wanted it. So I decided to create my own version of this and it is now available for on my website.

Any diet or health approach you follow will be made easier if you meditate because meditation is a mind training exercise. You will also find it easier to do follow a healthy lifestyle because you will begin to vibrate at a higher frequency. Our thoughts feelings and emotions have a vibrational frequency. This has been proven by Dr. Hawkins’s ground breaking work which you can read more about in the book Power vs. Force.

The program I developed for home study also includes the mindfulness practice I developed based on the all of the above is called the Pausing Technique. This is how you start to train the brain, so that when you find yourself in a stressful situation, you are able to drop into what in meditation we call “the space.” By doing that, you strengthen your ability to act consciously and not automatically. This is how we find our power, live consciously as opposed to being on auto-pilot. The following quote by Viktor Frankyl explains this beautifully:

“Every human being has the freedom to change at any instant. In between stimulus and response there is a space, in that space lies our power to choose our response in our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Through the practice of mediation and observing your thoughts, you develop the power to be more conscious and decide what you want to think, feel and do and thereby gain control over the automatic reactions of the brain. This is the beginning of how you cultivate mind power. This is the real secret, you have to be able to have a high vibration to your thoughts and feelings. Put another way you get what you think, but it is not easy to change your thoughts if you don’t like what its getting you.

As with anything it requires that you do it for at least six months to build a habit. To read more about how change or create a new habit read this.

Overeating, obesity, and the 7 biggest myths about happiness

September 10, 2011 by admin Leave a Comment

Many people overeat and can’t break free from their bad habits because the habits are serving a purpose. What we really want is to find more meaning and purpose in our lives which makes us feel happier.

Research shows that we are not that good at figuring out what makes us happy. There are a lot of myths about happiness. So if you think that by losing weight or fulfilling any one “goal” you will be happy, think again.

The real goal is to find a bigger meaning to what you want and focus on that; such as improving your health, or having more energy to do fun things with your loved ones. Most of the myths you will see are around the fact that we seem to misinterpret pleasure for happiness.

Happiness Myths:

1. Happiness is a final destination…you aren’t suddenly happy one day. Taking care of yourself and your “happiness” factor requires a daily commitment and certain habits you were not necessarily born knowing.

2. Being happy depends on how your day is going. When you understand nothing is bad or good, it’s all how you see it you’ll understand how happiness is an inside job.

3. I’ll feel good about myself after…having a daily spiritual practice like sitting in meditation and or journaling will help you feel a deep sense that things are unfolding “perfectly”…as they are without feeling tossed about by the “ups and downs” of life.

4. Eating and pleasure is happiness. The fleeting happiness that is pleasure based will never satisfy you in the long run.

5. Denying my feelings makes me feel better. Your feelings serve an important function, to serve as an internal guidance system. If you make a habit of listening to your feelings, they will give you clues as to what you need to do to get back on track.

6. You’re really okay with the way things are and don’t like change. Why have a life that is just ok? If deep within you sense there is something more…it never too late to get on the right destination that will help you fill what is missing.

7. You either are happy or you are not, it’s a character trait. There are actually skills, and ideas you can learn that can help you turn lemon in lemonade, enrich yourself by learning from your life, and feed what your soul is really hungry for…and it’s not what gets talked about on TV or in the media.

So what is it that makes us happy? Finding meaning in our lives and doing things that bring meaning to our lives. If you figure out how to do this, you will find it becomes easier to lose weight, and to change any unwanted habit that is really a cheap substitute for what you really want. Let me know what you think makes you happy.