• 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.

There are a couple factors to consider as to why we are feeling so much fear.

The first is that of law of attraction. This law states that like attracts like, in other words, like thoughts attract more like thoughts.

The second is the amount of fear on our planet right now. This is happening for a few reasons. The first we can consider is Iraq and the war we have participated in for years. Secondly we have had numerous natural disasters over the last few years.  Lately these events have been one right after the next, major catastrophic events all over the US and even the world, from hurricanes and flooding to earthquakes. How does this affect us?  When one single person has a fearful thought, it literally launches out of us and finds other like thoughts and they collect or clump together. This is also known as the collective consciousness, a collection of thoughts that collect that are similar.

Think of the smog in San Francisco. It’s a thick layer that rests over the city. This is what happens to all of our thoughts only it’s two fold. All of our fearful thoughts get launched out into a collective consciousness “smog” in our atmosphere that sits there and continues to accumulate. Here’s the problem, we not only add to it but we have easy access to it when we have a fearful thought. Remember because of law of attraction, like thoughts attract like thoughts, so when we have one fearful thought, we have an entire planet wide collective consciousness of fear that we pull from that adds to our already negative feeling. It literally dumps into our own consciousness when we have one negative thought.

The third and final ingredient to this is something people are already talking about which is 2012. I plan to write a separate posting on this but for now I will say that with 2012, it is NOT the end of time, in fact it’s a very exciting time. But what is happening as we approach 2012 is that time is speeding up. What this means for us is that we are attracting in these fearful thoughts much faster than in the past. So we have one fearful thought and it attracts in the smog (collective consciousness) from our atmosphere of other heavy negative thoughts, one comes in and another one and another one. It happens incredibly fast these days. It’s a real slippery slope once it starts.

I have asked so many people lately if they are experiencing this and I get a unanimous, “YES!” “What is going on?”

So now we know what’s going on but how do we prevent these moments, hours or even days of anxiety, sadness or even depression?

First of all, know that it’s not really anxiety or depression, so don’t run out and grab anti-depressants. At least until you try a few things.

Here are some tips to help stay out of the fear consciousness:

1. WATCH YOUR THOUGHTS! We must stay on top of every thought. When we experience one little thought that comes from fear, we must turn it around immediately. Don’t let them build. This means we must live very aware, very present moment. Do not let them slide down the slippery slope creating anxiety/depression.
2. STAY GROUNDED Make sure to do exercises that keep your energy in your body. Do yoga, take a walk or go for a run, do some visualizations for grounding. Get your feet on the earth.
3. SALT WATER BATH Soak for 20 minutes in a sea salt bath to cleanse your auric field. The aura (the energy field that sits outside our physical body) is a collection station of all thoughts we have as well as other people’s thoughts that we are near. Put some quiet music on in the bath, do some deep breathing and/or meditate. Relax and release while soaking. Use 2 cups of sea salt in your warm bath.

If you have already slipped down the slippery slope, here’s what to do:

1. GROUND YOURSELF
2. REMIND YOURSELF WHATS REAL. Our negative thoughts tend to take us on a crazy roller coaster ride down very quickly. Just today my husband texted me while I was getting on an airplane to head home and he said we needed to cash out our investments and that the stock market was going down and had fallen 200 points today already. We have lost almost everything 2 years ago for various reasons and I was not about to lose our last and only investment. I texted my husband and told him to do it but realized it was in my name and his hands were tied. The flight attendant came on and told us to turn off our phones. My head began to race…”We are going to lose everything like our friends did in the market crash after 9/11.” “Why didn’t I sell last month like my sister told me to, blah, blah, blah” .” My thoughts continued and I felt the knots in my stomach arrive and then the tension in my neck and shoulder then I said to myself, “WAIT A MINUTE…STOP!” “Michelle, you are out of balance!” I promised myself not to let that happen and to be as conscious about these moments as I possibly could be. So I immediately stopped my thoughts, closed my eyes and began some slow deep breathing, ceasing all thoughts. I then reminded myself of what was real,” would we really lose everything in 1.5 hours during the flight home?” I decided to chose the thought “No.” I began to ask myself a list of questions that were real and in the moment like, “if we lose almost everything could it someday come back?” I decided yes. I asked myself if I knew for sure that the market was going to crash today. I decided, I did not know for sure but felt like maybe not totally crash.  I began to climb out of the dark hole I had fallen into. I forced myself to reach for the thoughts that made me feel better. This 10 minute process (at the most) turned me around from sliding into complete anxiety and panic to peaceful and calm. I then began to put in positive empowering thoughts about our finances (creating in a positive way and not negative). I felt great, got off the plane got home and called my planner and found that the stock market had begun to come back and now it was only down 90 points.

All that stress for nothing! BUT it was an amazing experience and was so happy to experience myself fall out of balance and then shift back into it in 10 minutes. It’s really that easy, it just takes desire and effort.

During this time of so much fear on our planet the greatest tool I have utilized for myself has been awareness. We MUST slow down and catch our negative thoughts and our negative feelings before they take us down. It’s imperative that we do this and we do it as soon as we experience the slightest negative thought or feeling, it will maintain balance within our emotional state and not allow the fear to creep in and take us down.

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.

Disempowerment, depression, anxiety, simple stress, big stress, loss of focus, anger, over eating, drinking or spending, suffering of any kind, the list goes on and on….All of this starts with a thought.

It’s time to monitor our thoughts! Each experience we have whether it be negative or positive begins with a simple thought. The question is, do we choose to  buy into it or not. The key word being CHOOSE.

We CAN disagree with what we are hearing in our minds.We are not helpless to our thoughts.  Our thoughts randomly and continuously come throughout the day. It’s time we ask ourselves, “Do they make me feel good?” OR “Do they make me feel bad?” It’s time we pay attention to what’s free flowing out of our minds. When the first, very small negative thought occurs, pay attention and notice that another one follows a bit larger than the first, then the next a bit larger etc. It’s very rare that we get hit with a whallop of  negative thoughts at once. BUT, the small one’s can build into giant one’s in about a minute. This is due to the Law of Attraction that states “like attracts like.” Therefore, one thought attracts another thought just like it, and with a lot of emotion behind it, that next thought is bigger and stronger than the first. This is why we sometimes feel like we were hit with an avalanche of negative thoughts. It’s a powerful law. This is also why awareness is SO important and stopping the FIRST negative thought as it comes into our awareness.

SO WHAT CAN WE DO?

TALK BACK to ourselves. When we hear that first negative statement, decide if you want to accept it or not. Here’s a hint….if it makes you feel bad, don’t accept it!

For example, if we hear ourselves saying something like, “I’ll never find a new job in this economy, I’m stuck!” We can respond, to that statement inside our heads and boldly state to ourselves, “Not true!” In that moment, the negative feed that’s coming down the pipeline has stopped!

HAVE A STATEMENT READY

When we hear, “I’m not good enough,” “Not pretty enough,” Won’t pick me because…””Never lose weight…etc. ” Pick a statement, they come all day long! What we can do is have a statement ready to combat the negative statement. So when we hear anything at all that’s negative, we can say “CANCEL,”  “I LOVE MYSELF,”  “I AM WORTHY,” “I AM POWERFUL”or “NOT TRUE!” etc. pick an empowering statement that can be said immediately after the negative statement and use it.  Sometimes the positive statement has to be said over and over. Just keep saying it!

THE CHALLENGE

Try for the rest of the day today not to say anything negative about yourself or anyone. I am not asking to be positive, just stop every time a negative thought comes to mind. This is excellent practice and ultimately if practiced often, life changing.

Our THOUGHTS are SO POWERFUL, they create our realities. We MUST pay attention and begin to talk back to ourselves when we have negative statements or thoughts. Once a negative statement begins, it’s a slippery slope and the others come fast. If we stop them quickly, after hearing the first one, it is without a doubt that our lives, our realities will begin to show up differently, better, more joyful, it is law.

My mind kept telling me that it would only get worse as the work/travel for work/sports/school- schedule went on. Less time, more to do, less time, more to do….(the broken record in my head). I began hearing myself state to my friends and family, “I have no time to get it all done!”” I’ll never get everything done.” “I’m so stressed!”

The kind, ever so perfect universe and the law of attraction simply matched my thoughts and beliefs of “so stressed and not enough time” and created for me more and more items on my to do list! So today I awoke with rapid heartbeat and the slight anxiety that I had had for days was full on anxiety, as I replayed my drama in my head.

I knew the only way out of this anxiety was to sit. Meditation is THE BEST drug on the market AND it’s FREE!  My ego/mind kept telling me for days that I had so much to do that I had no time to sit and “do nothing” (as my mind would tell me-(to meditate) so I kept pushing it off.

I chose to do it anyway…

In my meditation after a few minutes of silence I asked for guidance on how to help me to “find my way home.” I needed to hit “reset” on my life and get back to balance.

I immediately felt a “whoosh” in my heart center and then felt warmth fill me up and then expand out into the room. I sat in silence for minutes (which felt like an hour) and asked how to maintain this state. I heard very clearly the word, “Live in the Present.” I felt so light and peaceful, as if a warm comforter had been wrapped around me. I sat in gratitude for a few moments and decided to get up and go for a walk.

As I walked I saw the birds and the colors so differently, they were vibrant and beautiful, like I had never seen! I then had a thought about how I could not wait to blog about my experience and I began to think about what I was going to say. As my mind began to race again I heard very softly, “present.” I realized that I was completely out of the present and had allowed my ego/mind to take over and bring me into the future of writing my blog. I couldn’t believe how easily I had slipped out of that magnificent state. I chose to jump back in and as I did my power walk, I looked at everything as if seeing the outdoors for the first time. It was work to stay present moment as throughout the rest of the hour my mind kept drifting to the past or future and then I would redirect to present.

What an amazing walk I had. For those of us that have a difficult time sitting in silence and meditating, this is another fabulous way to meditate-Walking Meditation. It takes work and practice to live in the moment but the more we do it the easier it becomes.

Anything that can shift anxiety to peace in minutes is worth trying and incorporating into our daily routine. Even if it’s just for a few moments a day, practice living in the present, it’s where anxiety and stress DON’T live.

Enjoy!

MEDITATION

Meditation is sustained and unbroken concentration that leads to a highly focused mind. Meditation moves us from using our subconscious mind to our conscious mind. Living in the conscious mind, trains us to live with more focus, proficiency and creativity and less disorganized, chaotic and scattered.  Meditation will actually help you to think in new ways and gain deeper perspective on experiences. You will find that you are not bothered by things that might have bothered or even upset you in the past.

Other benefits of meditation include:

• Slows the release of hormones in response to stress
• Stronger immune system
• Reduction of anxiety
• Lowers blood pressure
• Decreases muscle tension and headaches
• Increases serotonin production (low serotonin levels are linked to   depression, obesity, insomnia and even headaches)
• Substance abuse, alcoholism and cigarette smoking have all been helped by meditation
• Increases compassion for others
• Self Acceptance

The list goes on and on and these are just a few ways  that meditation can be life changing.

HOW TO MEDITATE?

Find a nice peaceful area, and sit quietly (don’t lie down), set your timer (by setting a timer you are not constantly interrupting your practice by opening your eyes and checking your clock) and just clear your mind. As thoughts come in, imagine an ocean wave rolling in and pulling them away, gently, slowly then return to silence. Another visual is to see the words falling off a cliff then the cliff is empty. Any visual will work, have fun with it. Remember, meditation is a practice and even people that have done meditation for years for hours per day still call it a practice. The human mind must be trained NOT to have thoughts and it takes practice! So be easy on yourself.

Meditation seems difficult to some people, I often will hear, “I have tried but I can’t!” YES YOU CAN! Meditation is the simple act of quieting your mind. For many people having a focus, like a mantra helps them with mediation. Pick a mantra like “peace” or “OM” or any word that you are drawn to and simply state it over and over again, slowly. You can even sing it out loud or to yourself. The point is to concentrate fully on that word and that word only. When other thoughts drift in, repeat your word/mantra.

You can meditate while walking, riding a bike or even driving! It’s simply clearing your mind and thinking of nothing! Try driving home from work without your cell phone to your ear or the radio on and repeat your mantra out loud for 10 minutes, it’s so incredibly powerful. The next time you go for a walk be present moment with what you are noticing, do NOT bring your iPod or your cell phone, remain present moment and focused on what’s around you!

HOW LONG TO MEDITATE?

Meditation is not something that you have to do 60 minutes a day to begin with. When you first begin a meditation practice, begin with 2 or 5 minutes per day. Stick with that for a week until you feel you are ready to extend your time. Continue extending your time to 15-20 minutes per day and if you can maintain this amount of time-great! If you can only commit to 10 minutes per day this is great too. Spending even a few moments a day of being mindful is far better than not spending any time. It would be nice to have a goal of 20 minutes per day at some point; this may take some time to accomplish and it’s OK.

Be easy on yourself and celebrate even your smallest accomplishments, even your 2 minute victory. You may feel like 2 minutes is nothing but I guarantee you, you are benefiting your brain in more ways than you could ever imagine.

I then realized that it had been 2 months since my last blog post, 6 weeks since my last true meditation and a week since my last deep breathing session. And what do you know…I feel out of balance! I asked myself how did I get here and realized how tricky the ego/mind can be. I remember so many times hearing myself say, “Oh, I need to write about THAT,” and “Wow, I really need to meditate or do my breathing.” And what I would inevidably hear every time was…”Later…”

When the ego takes over (or when we allow it to take charge) it feels that we need to “do” more and more to feel good and feel calm. The problem is that it’s the exact opposite! We need to stop what we are doing and meditate for 5 minutes or do some deep breathing or just STOP the treadmill we are on and just be for a few moments. It’s in these moments of “nothingness” that we find peace and regain balance. When we don’t stop, we fall out of balance. The ego/mind has it backwards it tells us to do more, go, go go, don’t stop!

It’s amazing to me how quickly we can fall out of balance when we don’t take time for ourselves. One of my favorite things to do is to write and it would wind up last on my list!

I have learned a lot about balance in the last 2 months and now feel grateful for the experience as I can write about it. We all have our things that will pull us out of balance if we let them. Meditatation/breathwork/quiet time is like hitting reset on our computers, clearing the slate. It lets the ego/mind release the grip it has on us and our to do list. It allows for us to hear our own God given guidance, our intuition to guide us to what we do next and what we cross off our list next.

This piece is partly a review of Eva Hoffman’s book Time. But Father Martin Boland frames this with his own reflections:

We can become so focused on busyness and speed that we begin to lose a proper sense of ourselves. Individuals can feel that their lives are “spinning out of control” or worse, are about to “break down”. The common response to the question, “How are you?”, has become “I’m busy.” We define ourselves in terms of frenetic activity. At the same time, other aspects and dimensions of our life (family, friendship, the social and the spiritual) are eroded by the constant pressures on our time. “We are money rich, but time poor.”

We MUST stop for ourselves and reset. It will create more time, but more importantly peace and bring us back to balance.

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.

There are actually many ways to keep in balance and not get sucked into the collective consciousness of “holiday stress.” The holiday’s can be joyful from Thanksgiving through New Years. In fact the tools that you will read about throughout the next 6 weeks are tools that can be used throughout the entire year to maintain peace, balance and joy in your daily life! So learn the techniques now and continue using them throughout 2010.

The first tool that in this holiday series is:

MEDITATION

Meditation is sustained and unbroken concentration that leads to a highly focused mind. Meditation moves us from using our subconscious mind to our conscious mind. Living in the conscious mind, trains us to live with more focus, proficiency and creativity and less disorganized, chaotic and scattered.  Meditation will actually help you to think in new ways and gain deeper perspective on experiences. You will find that you are not bothered by things that might have bothered or even upset you in the past.

Other benefits of meditation include:

• Slows the release of hormones in response to stress
• Stronger immune system
• Reduction of anxiety
• Lowers blood pressure
• Decreases muscle tension and headaches
• Increases serotonin production (low serotonin levels are linked to   depression, obesity, insomnia and even headaches)
• Substance abuse, alcoholism and cigarette smoking have all been helped by meditation
• Increases compassion for others
• Self Acceptance

The list goes on and on and these are just a few ways (relating to holiday stress) that meditation can be life changing.

HOW TO MEDITATE?

Find a nice peaceful area, and sit quietly (don’t lie down), set your timer (by setting a timer you are not constantly interrupting your practice by opening your eyes and checking your clock) and just clear your mind. As thoughts come in, imagine an ocean wave rolling in and pulling them away, gently, slowly then return to silence. Another visual is to see the words falling off a cliff then the cliff is empty. Any visual will work, have fun with it. Remember, meditation is a practice and even people that have done meditation for years for hours per day still call it a practice. The human mind must be trained NOT to have thoughts and it takes practice! So be easy on yourself.

Meditation seems difficult to some people, I often will hear, “I have tried but I can’t!” YES YOU CAN! Meditation is the simple act of quieting your mind. For many people having a focus, like a mantra helps them with mediation. Pick a mantra like “peace” or “OM” or any word that you are drawn to and simply state it over and over again, slowly. You can even sing it out loud or to yourself. The point is to concentrate fully on that word and that word only. When other thoughts drift in, repeat your word/mantra.

You can meditate while walking, riding a bike or even driving! It’s simply clearing your mind and thinking of nothing! Try driving home from work without your cell phone to your ear or the radio on and repeat your mantra out loud for 10 minutes, it’s so incredibly powerful. The next time you go for a walk be present moment with what you are noticing, do NOT bring your iPod or your cell phone, remain present moment and focused on what’s around you!

HOW LONG TO MEDITATE?

Meditation is not something that you have to do 60 minutes a day to begin with. When you first begin a meditation practice, begin with 2 or 5 minutes per day. Stick with that for a week until you feel you are ready to extend your time. Continue extending your time to 15-20 minutes per day and if you can maintain this amount of time-great! If you can only commit to 10 minutes per day this is great too. Spending even a few moments a day of being mindful is far better than not spending any time. It would be nice to have a goal of 20 minutes per day at some point; this may take some time to accomplish and it’s OK.

Be easy on yourself and celebrate even your smallest accomplishments, even your 2 minute victory. You may feel like 2 minutes is nothing but I guarantee you, you are benefiting your brain in more ways than you could ever imagine.