When we speak in absolutes like these we limit ourselves, which creates anxiety because we feel stuck, like there is no way out. We all use them. Here are a few examples:

• I will NEVER lose this weight!
• I ALWAYS lose at this game.
• ABSOLUTELY not!
• I would NEVER take a chance on that, it’s too risky.
• If you EVER talk to me like that again…

There are many others that we use but you get the idea.

These words limit us, limit our potential. We must make every attempt to become aware of when we are speaking with absolutes. They are powerful words and very limiting to the creation of our future realities.

Re-read the statements from above or look at some of your own and question them.  This is how we must speak to ourselves (and others) when these words slip out.

For example:

• I will NEVER lose this weight!  Never??
• My husband is ALWAYS late, it make me so mad!   ALWAYS??

When we question the absolute, we find that it’s not true! This powerful act of simply questioning the statements that we make to ourselves and others can relieve created anxiety. Anxiety is born from the future feeling hopeless and having no control over it.

Becoming aware of our speech, listening to what we are saying and dropping or questioning the absolutes will help in shifting our emotional states. The ego/mind likes absolutes and chooses to use them often, it’s very limiting. Without absolutes we can be hopeful and even optimistic about our futures.

Feel this statement in the heart center,  “I will never lose this weight!” This is when we would question this statement, “Never?”  “Well, maybe just not right now, it just feels hard today.” “Maybe someday but not now.” “Maybe if I hired a trainer or joined a gym that would help.” “If I even walked 20 minutes for 3 days a week I am sure it would help me drop a few.” “Maybe never is the wrong word.”

Every statement we make creates our future. Don’t allow absolutes to limit your future. Release absolutes from your vocabulary and realize that sky is the limit for creation of our realities; we just have to pay attention to what we are saying and challenge the limiting words we are using.

Every spoken word or statement is creating our next move, our future realities. Yet we limit ourselves and make ourselves feel stuck with how we speak.

It’s time we tune into our statements and conversations.

I hear people say statements all the time like…

“ I am so depressed…” “I am so fat…” “I am so upset with my husband, he frustrates me to no end!” “I hate my job.” “I can’t stop crying, this grief is consuming me.” “I can’t stand my in-laws, we will never get along.”

All of these types of statements make us feel stuck and disempowered with no solution. They create a certain level of anxiety within us, and if we don’t release it, it only builds and gets worse!

We state these types of statements to our friends or family and then they give us feedback and validation (that we are right to feel this way) and typically we walk away not feeling any better, still stuck with that bad feeling.

A very easy solution we can all do to open up our limiting speech is to add two simple words that can change our reality…”For Now.”

By adding “For Now” onto the end of a sentence it helps us to realize that our current agony is actually temporary. It empowers us, helps us to realize that it won’t be forever, in fact, it’s temporary.

Feel the difference between “I am so depressed…for now” “I am so fat…for now” “I can’t stand my in-laws…for now”   “I hate myself…for now,” try it on a few of your own statements. It feels so much better than our dead end way of speaking with no hope for change in the future. The “other way” of speaking creates drama and at times puts us in the victim status. No one likes how that feels.

Life changes like the wind, one day we are in love the next we are not, one day we are working for one company and all of a sudden we find ourselves in another position with another company, we may swear that yoga is not for us and then before we know it we are enjoying weekly classes, one day we find ourselves sad,  and another day we are happy.

We find our lives changing all of the time. Change and release limiting thoughts simply   by adding “for now” at the end of a sentence, and know that life for you too can change for the better, we simply need to be open to the possibility and allow it in.

What we focus on determines our state. When something happens in our day, we get to choose how we see it-through the eyes (or filter) of the love end of the spectrum or from the fear end of the spectrum. If we choose to see something from the fear side of the spectrum, we may experience anger, fear, frustration or perhaps resentment. It’s all a choice. Have you ever been with someone and watched a movie with them and you cry and they don’t or vice versa? Have you ever been with a group of friends and someone in that group told you about something that happened to them and that friend was raging mad and upset about it. But as you listened, you could not understand why she was so upset; in fact half the group could not see it. This is due to our filters of how we see and experience the world. If our filters are set in more of the fear spectrum, we will have experiences in our lives that get us upset or angry easily. We tend to experience more of the victim mentality if our filters are set down in fear.

Likewise, if we have filters that are more on the love side of the spectrum, we don’t get bothered by much and have happy, balanced days most days. It takes a lot to get us down. It’s like that saying goes, “Is your glass half empty or half full?” Half empty people live more on the fear side of the spectrum and half full live on the love side.

So how do we change? It’s a choice. When something in our experience happens, we in that moment get to choose how we react, most of us just react. The next time something happens, slow down and ask, “Is there any other way I can see this?” “Was my husband really just being mean to me or could he be upset about something else?” “I know my friend really loves me so her reaction doesn’t make sense to me, I’ll give her time.” or how about this one, “That guy just cut me off and almost hit my car…is it possible he isn’t thinking properly? Could something terrible have just happened in his life this morning?” I remember when my father passed away, I cut people off (unintentionally) and probably should not have been driving. There are ALWAYS many, many ways to see and interpret an experience. We base our reactions on our past and what our parents did or what we learned from friends or even media. We get to choose differently.

Empower yourself with your thoughts and ask yourself the next time something happens, “how can I see this from another person’s point of view, in fact let me see if there are multiple points of view and let me choose the one that feels best to me and makes me feel best about myself.”  Choose the thought that feels best and we begin to live from the love end of the spectrum and happiness will prevail and become our dominant emotional state.

The more we consciously choose coming from love the faster our neuro-pathways in our brain change and eventually coming from the love spectrum becomes our natural subconscious (automatic) preference.

My 12 year old came in from school and said he had a bad day and that he “needed” a bath. I realized in that moment how often both of my kids take baths not because they are dirty but because they, “need them.” I thought to myself, how intuitive of them.

As we know, bath time is a time of not only cleansing dirt but is also a time of relaxation. We all know that ads “Calgon take me away!” Bath time is where let go of all of our tensions and frustrations from the day. But there is actually more to a bath.

When we add 2 cups of sea salt to our bath and soak for 20 minutes we cleanse our emotional field.  This field of energy that we all have exists off of our physical body. Imagine a bubble of soft light/energy that encircles the human body, this is the emotional body.

When we leave our home and encounter another human being, whether we know them or not, we step into their energy field. Unfortunately when we step away from them we also take “their emotional stuff” with us. We may take their good mood or bad mood, their fight with their boss, their depression or their elation  over getting engaged-all of it.

Have you ever left the house in a great mood and by the time you got home you were in a terrible mood? When we absorb someone’s emotions from their energy field, we feel their emotions-good and/or bad!

Sea salt baths remove other people’s emotions that have attached to our field but also balance out our energy centers, our chakras to create an extra peaceful state.

Recently after having some interactions with a family member I felt a lot of anger and frustration bubble up inside of me.

As my day went on, I realized an hour had gone by since our interaction and I was still holding the negative emotions from our interaction.

When I tuned into my body, I felt shortness of breath, a knot in my stomach and a heaviness on my chest.

Thinking back to our interaction I realized (1) there was no solution to the problem (I could not fix her or the problem) and (2) I am allowing someone outside of myself to ruin my mood, my health and as time went on, my day.

By holding all of this negative energy, it hurts no one but me!

If I could see inside my body, I would guess my blood pressure had risen dramatically, the aging process had been accelerated due to all the stress chemicals being released and by holding this negative emotion to me to it disconnecting me from my connection to God/the universe. It’s like pinching off a hose with water running through it. I am doing this to myself!

So when in a mood or emotional place like this, with no resolution what can we do?

A technique that I find works remarkably well for instances like this is called The Sedona Method.

With the Sedona Method we ask ourselves a series of questions regarding our mood and/or emotional state. The question and response dialogue used with Sedona creates an outlet for stored negative emotion(s) to exit.

Here are the steps of this process: (I will use my experience as an example)

1. Ask yourself: “What is my NOW feeling?   (ANGER)
2. “Could I welcome or allow it?”  (YES)
3. “Could I let it go?”   (YES)
4. “Would I let it go?” (YES)
5. “When?”  (Now)

While asking these questions to yourself really tune into your body, many times you will actually feel the energy/emotions release out of your body. Really sit with each response to the question. Be honest with yourself.

If you should get a “No” answer to any of these questions, ask yourself this question: “Would you rather feel that feeling or be free?” Allow yourself to really sit with your response. Be easy on yourself with the answer, this is a process.

You can use this with yourself or with another person and ask them the questions. The idea behind this method is to continue to release emotions until you reach either a neutral or a happy place. For me, I released anger, frustration, resentment, fear then annoyance which eventually got me to a neutral place.  With each round my negative feeling state lessened.

Our emotions are layered and we must work through the layers to find neutral. The nice thing about Sedona is the speed at which you are able to shift. An experience like this for me took as little as 10 minutes to find neutral or happiness. Once you work this technique a few times you’ll find it to be as fast as it is easy to use.

For more information on the Sedona Method go to: www.sedona.com

Have you ever left your house and felt great-happy, joyful, just in  a  good mood, and run your errands only to come home feel fatigued, stressed, and angry or some other negative emotion?  Yes, maybe your errands fatigued you or maybe stressed you or did they? Have you ever met a friend for lunch, a nice lunch, and left feeling some negative emotions and you don’t know why? When we feel negative emotions “out of the blue” and can’t put our finger on where it came from it’s probably not ours!

Here’s what happens:

Quantum physics has proven that when you break the human body down to the smallest particle, it’s energy vibrating. Likewise, our thoughts and emotions are also energy. Negative thought or negative emotion vibrates slower (which is why it feels heavier) and positive thought or emotion vibrates fast (which is why it feels light). Our energy field expands when we are in a good place, in fact, the more we step into a happy, or positive emotional place and feel it, the larger our energy field expands. Just to give you an idea, your energy field (if you are in a really great mood) can be in a 30 foot radius outside of your body.

Someone that is in a bad mood has dense, heavy energy around them and their field may be only inches off of their body. When you with your huge energy field, sweeps through their energy field, you pick up all of their “stuff,” all of their negative emotions. Now you have someone else’s despair, anger, frustration, stress etc. in your field and it weighs you down. This can happen at the grocery store, the mall, work, at lunch with friends etc.

A few of my own examples: A while back I had coffee with a friend. I had just finished writing a new workshop that I had been working on and was on cloud 9! We met for coffee, she had a smile on her face the whole time and things seemed great. However, I left there feeling so exhausted and depressed (out of the blue) and could not wait to get home to lie down and take a nap. I got home and before lying down I went outside and did a few things to “clear my field” and my energy bounced back to where I was before our coffee. I called my friend and I asked her how she felt during coffee and she said she was great until the end when we were getting ready to leave. She was hoping to see the guy she wanted to date and she didn’t and immediately felt depressed and exhausted. She had to go home and take a nap! So I picked up on her emotions, cleared them and “my” depression and fatigue immediately lifted and I went on with my great day. Another example happened recently with my husband. I was in a really energized, good mood, ready to stay up late and work after the kids were in bed. He got home from work and we had a conversation, after that my energy began to get low. I begrudgingly finished making dinner and could not wait to crawl into bed. I told my kids to call my husband for dinner and he was taking a bath and had fallen asleep! He came out and could not stop yawning. We put the kids to bed at 8:30 and crawled into bed, both of us exhausted. I lay there for a moment and remembered how energized I was, I traced it back to our conversation and realized his emotional state “slid” after our conversation and I picked up on him! I cleared myself and felt much better again. He later told me that your conversation really made him feel “off” emotionally. What you can do if this happens to you/clearing techniques:

1. Stomp your feet outside on the earth (or inside if it’s freezing out) and shake your arms then legs, as if throwing the energy off of them. You can also brush (with your hand) the energy off of your arms and legs as well. Hold the intention that you are shedding all energy and emotion that is not yours.
2. If you are a yoga person, the beginning of the sun salutation where you sweep your hands over your head, cleanses your energy/auric field.
3. Draw figure 8’s or the Infiniti symbol in your energy field, all over, big and small.
4. Visualize yourself taking a shower with beautiful cleansing light washing over your body and energy field. Again, hold the intention that you are cleansing your field of all negative energy and emotions that are not yours.

Awareness is the key to this. Pay attention to how you feel and when your feelings shift. It’s amazing how often we lose our happiness because of someone else’s emotions on us. Enjoy these easy techniques for maintaining your balanced emotional place.

My friend said to me a couple weeks ago, “How am I going to get it all done?”

She said, “I am in the process of moving from one house to another house, my husband is out of the country, I have 4 kids under the age of 8 (twins under a year) and I have not even begun decorating or shopping for Christmas!”

And we thought we had it tough…

The fact of the matter is, we ALL have a ton to do and even more of it to do around the holidays. As Christmas approaches it’s as though time gets eaten up twice as fast as usual and you end the day asking yourself, “Where did the day go?”

Getting back to my friend from above, my response to her was, “Do nothing.” Well technically not nothing but for the moment you do not do a thing. What we forget to do when we get crazy busy is to pause and prioritize.

When we feel overwhelmed with a million things to do we forget that we have the universe on our side.  What I mean by this is the Law of Attraction. The Law of Attraction states that what you think about comes about. So if you are thinking, “I am too busy and don’t have time to get anything done!” Guess what will manifest for you? That EXACT circumstance!

So here’s the plan for manifesting exactly what you need to get done right on time.

1. When we feel crazy busy, like we are spinning out of control, the first thing you do is STOP! Even if it’s for a couple minutes, a pause is quite necessary to give your brain a break. We must slow the ego down, this is what is driving us to “think” we have no time.
2. Prioritize. Write a list of the things that need to get done, with the top of the list being the most important.
3. Keep your list out in plain sight, so you can see it and others (physical and non physical) can too.
4. Focus all of your energy on one task at a time. When #1 is done, cross it out-it’s incredibly fulfilling and gratifying to cross out a completed task.

I write my lists on a big dry erase board where I can see it and notice what I am to focus my energy on next. When we divide our energy between multiple tasks, it actually takes longer to complete each task.

What I find is that once I take my tasks and pull them from my head into the world on a board or on paper, many items get crossed off my list without me lifting a finger.

Recently, I had on my list to stop at a store in the mall to pick up a Christmas gift for a friend. A few days after I had added this to my “to do list” a friend of mine called me to talk and when I asked her where she was going, it turned out she was walking into the mall to go to the same store I needed and was happy to pick up the gift I needed.

Things like this happen ALL THE TIME for me. I put on my board that I want new office space. I have yet to drive around looking for space but have had 3 clients in 2 weeks come in to tell me about perfect office space, exactly what I am looking for. All because I paused for a moment, decided what kind of office space I wanted and wrote it down (which launched it out into the great universe), the space can now find me. It’s that simple.
During this holiday season, pause and set your priorities. Allow the universe to cross off some of your “to do’s.” It will make your life magically easier.

Thanksgiving is the official mark of Christmas being less than 4 weeks away which manifests holiday shopping, holiday stress, holiday craziness…or does it have to be that way? Absolutely NOT! We naturally default into the holiday insanity unless we choose not to. We forget we have the ability to make choices with our brains and not fall into the collective consciousness of “holiday stress.”

A technique that I use to create and maintain balance in my life is the Alternate Nostril Breath. It is as easy as it is powerful. This breath can be done anywhere and can be done for just 4 minutes and have profound results.

This breath balances the left (thinking) and right (feeling) hemisphere’s of the brain. After just a few minutes there is a release of neuro-transmitters which calm our system and create an anti anxiety anti-depressant effect to our nervous system. This also creates a more balanced person and improved brain function since both halves of the brain are functioning properly.

This is considered to be the best breathing technique to calm the mind and the nervous system.

Other Benefits:

1. Cleans and clears impurities from the lungs

2. Calms and controls negative self talk

3. Improves quality of sleep

4. Lowers blood pressure

5. Boosts energy

The Technique:

1. Right thumb closes off right nostril.

2. Inhale slowly through left nostril

3. Pause for a moment

4. Close left nostril with ring finger and release thumb off of right nostril

5. Exhale through your right nostril

6. Inhale through right nostril

7. Use thumb to close of right nostril

8. Breathe out through left nostril

* This is considered to be one round. Begin with just 2-3 rounds and continue to work your way up to 10 rounds.

When faced to speak up for ourselves and speak our truth, we avoid it at all cost. Confrontation feels scary to many of us. However, there are times when things should not be swept under the carpet, statements need to be made, boundaries need to be set.

Speaking up for ourselves is not about being mean, it’s taking care of ourselves and setting a boundary. A boundary simply teaches others how you want to be treated.

When we speak up, it gives the other person the opportunity to self reflect, look inside themselves and contemplate their words and actions. This ultimately is where authenticity is born, from going within and acting from our highest good. Therefore, it’s as much of a growing opportunity for you as the other person.

Speaking up is healing on may levels, don’t miss the opportunity to become more authentic.

I hear this statement all the time in my practice. Much to your surprise, if you are a crier, it does NOT equate to being an emotional person.

A person that is emotional is completely in touch with what they are feeling. These people are deep, well aware of what choices they make in life and why.  Knowing how you feel raises your awareness to all new levels. To “feel” your way through life rather than “think” your way through life produces vastly different experiences and outcomes.

Practice asking yourself, “How do I feel” instead of “What do I think about this,” and begin to open your heart up to become authentically emotional.