thoughts

Are You Ready Yet To Unhook Your Life From The Past?

My home sits near Hwy 101 on a rural part of the Oregon Coast. I see huge trailers and RV’s go by every day. So it is no surprise that I would use the following metaphor:

Today I realized that for all my life I have been towing a trailer behind filled with the past, overloaded with faulty programming, jammed with false beliefs and full of trained self-doubt.

For many years I added more and more emotional and mental junk to this trailer. I needed lots of will power just to plod along through life and try to keep my head up. 

Too much time was spent thinking I am not enough, good enough or deserving. My mind was trained to be a non-stop judging machine of others and myself. I found it easier to play the blame and complain game than to take responsibility for my own life. 

Have you run into any of this? If so, you understand how heavy your trailer can get.

10 Questions To Make Your Life Even Better

I find myself bringing up the importance of questioning often lately. So I decided to invite you to join me in the questioning process.

It’s always helpful to question your thoughts, ideas, and beliefs; also where you are in life. If you don’t question, there is no doubt, you are the biggest barrier to what you want.

I invite you to examine the following 10 questions because they will enable you to make the inner changes necessary to moving your life forward in hugely positive ways.

Do You Want To Continue Your Story Or Move Toward A Larger Possibility

What do you tell yourself about who you are and what your life if about? That is your story. How does your story limit you?

Like computers, you have a set of basic programs that run your life. Many of your programs contain out-of-date stories that too often limit how well you function.

Much of your earliest programming needs serious upgrading. Yet you continue daily to replay that programming with your thoughts.

These programs can be upgraded to expand your life.

By the time we reach adulthood we have very deeply grooved programs about:

The Ten Commandments For Healthy Living

No, this is not a mythical story about a guy coming down from a mountaintop. It is more about the basics of what you need to keep in mind to live a vibrant and healthy life. (Thought you might appreciate these ideas for 2013)

These commandments may actually be more useful than the original ten in stone. More useful because they are about the well-being of your mind, your heart, your body and your spirit.

One day in my early 20’s something became very clear to me. I was walking up a long set of stairs and was breathing hard. I made a clear decision in that moment to be healthy and keep fit.

I made that decision because I wanted a long and vibrant life. I knew then that my choices about my well-being would shape the rest of my life.  

Since that day my study and exploration of health and fitness has been a key part of my life. I have learned there are a number of universally important ways of being in the world that optimize health.

The following are 10 Commandments For Healthy Living. I offer them as a guideline for you in creating a life of true health and well-being.

Your Choice: Joy Or Suffering

Recently something became very clear to me. I have known this idea for many years but it has taken time for me to really understand the impact of this statement: We shape our experience of life moment-by-moment by our thinking. 

We all have the opportunity to live a life of joy and happiness. It is a choice we make throughout each day. If joy is not the choice then the results often included suffering. Suffering is a product of our mind running us, not us running our mind.  

The following is a summarization of the mental obstacles to living a joyous life:

What Is The Nature Of Your Mind?

When asked to tune into what is going on in the mind, most people listen for a minute or two and then let their thoughts take over.

In my work I often have people spend time becoming acquainted with what is going on in their mind. Most have difficulty because the mind can hardly sit still especially without practice.

What I have noticed in my own exploration is my thoughts are endless. Research states that people have approximately 50,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. You can do your own research.

Try sitting down for 15 minutes and noting down each time you have a thought. You will be surprised at how much is going on upstairs.

These thoughts represent a lifetime of programming. About 80-90% of the thoughts we have today are the same thoughts we have had over and over again. Imagine a powerful computer running the same script repeatedly. This is the nature of your mind – it keeps repeating itself.

Would this inner script shape your experience of life?

Where Is Your Soul Located And Does It Have An Email Address?

In the past few years or maybe it has been all my life, my soul has been trying to keep me heading in the right direction. You know us humans we are always going off course following some tangent of desire or tripping ourselves up with our thoughts.

The voice of the soul is a quiet one. It whispers wisdom for me to listen to or not. It can be in the form of an intuition, an inner guide, a flash of insight or inspiration or the knowing messages from an open heart.

How does your soul communicate with you? Do you listen?

Shrinking Self-Doubt To A Whisper From The Past – Simple Solution # 3

This is another in the simple solutions series that offers a quick on-the-spot strategy to deal with inner issues. To have self-doubt is to be human. However self-doubt is not necessary.

66 Moments of Choice Sure To Set Your Life On Fire

Exploring life is what I write about. As you explore the following choices be aware that they have great power in shaping who you are and how you live your life.

The choices you make every day will either fill you full of light or send you down in flames. Some will be less dramatic but each choice has such influence over your sense of self and the kind of impact you have in the world. 

The following are 66 of the moment-to-moment choices you are given to explore on a daily basis. Choose wisely; be guided by your intuition, your heart and your higher nature.

5 Simple Ways To Chill Out That You Can Share With Everyone You Know

Is your life a rollercoaster of thoughts and emotions? Maybe you have grown impatient with yourself and you wonder when you are going to get your act together?

Good luck doing that without taking a step out of the ordinary and leaving the habits and grooves of life behind. You are stuck in a muck of your own design.

Stop the poor me. Stop the noisy inner critic. Neither ever works for the better. Instead, raise your head up, look into a mirror and see the great possibility in those windows of your soul. You are in truth a soul in the midst of a human experience. Not the drama you find yourself caught up in.

To Be Present

This moment is all that matters in life.

If you are fully present, you are a gift to the world.

Here and the now is the only place where things can happen.

If your mind resides in the now, true joy, love, peace and freedom are possible.

In this moment your thoughts determine your experience of life.

The past no longer exists; memories are thoughts in this moment.

You never arrive at the future because you never leave the now.

Fear, worry and anxiety can only come into your life when your thinking is trying to place you in the past or the future. The mind has the ability to take you out of being present but it can never remove you from the reality of the now.

If you spend too much time regretting the past and worrying about the future you may totally miss out in living the joy of the present moment.

Many people live with the mindset of once I finish school, or once I am in love, or once I have a family, or once I have a good job, or once I am a millionaire, I will be happy, but they will never find happiness except in the now.

All possibilities only exist in the now.

Practice: Now in this moment, only be aware of your breath, breathe in and feel you body fill with oxygen, pause, then breathe out and feel your body release, pause, and then breathe in again. Whenever you take a moment to follow this cycle of the breath, you bring yourself fully into the infinite possibilities of being fully present in your life.

My work with clients focuses on taming the mind. I help bring you into the most powerful and effective states of mind, emotions, heart, body and higher nature. Sign up today for my email and contact me (joseph@josephbernardphd.com) so we can move your life into the now, where what you want can be created.

 



3.5 Simple Steps To Inner Peace In 2012

How is your year going so far? This is going to be an amazing year and challenges could arise that could make it hard to find your peace within. I have a free guide to inner peace here at this blog if you want to access it – look above in Free Stuff section.  I also want to offer you a basic plan you can use every day to build a momentum of inner peace within you. Everyone one can use a little extra inner peace in reserve.

Here are my three steps for you to have more peace of mind in 2012:

1.  Occupy your own mind by becoming mindful. With about 50-60,000 per day there is one heck of a lot of things going on upstairs. If there are old stuck ideas, negative inner dialogue, or a critical voice going on in your head then becoming mindful is essential to your well being. You cannot have any inner peace if you thought keep you feeling worried and depressed. 

Take the time to become acquainted with the tone and content of your thoughts. Notice what is going on up there by listening inward. Most people believe their minds are doing just fine until they really listen to how they talk to themselves, how they beat themselves up, how they judge themselves so harshly or how they have such unrealistic expectations on who they should be. Albert Ellis, a famous cognitive therapist, says, “People need to quit ‘shoulding’ on themselves.” If your inner talk is unkind then it needs to change.

Being mindful is a way to be kind to your mind. If you get to know how you think and talk to yourself, you can better shape your experience of life.  Mindfulness enriches your experience of yourself because it is about finding who you are and just being present in a supportive way.  This makes inner peace much more available. In the future I am planning on doing a series of short video podcasts on mindful practices

Remember you are not your thoughts.

2.  Be in touch with how you feel. Your mind is the source of most of what you feel. If you mind is off course your emotions may be very disruptive to any sense of peace within you. The place to begin with feelings is to note what you feel, acknowledge those feelings and then accept them as okay. Feelings naturally change on their own when they are acknowledged and accepted.

Feeling can be understood as signs of how you are doing or at least how you think you are doing. If you have feels of fear and worry then something is not going well for you and a change of direction or focus may be needed. If you feel at peace then your mind and your circumstances are most likely how you want them to be.

A peaceful heart is a key component of feeling at ease inside. Your heart when open and flowing with compassion and loving-kindness will bring peace to how you feel. If your heart is closed and guarded there will not be peace inside.  If you want to feel at peace, open your heart and let it flow out into the world in ways that feel good to you.

Peace and hope can only happen in the now.

3.  Exploring your silence is so important. Your days can be full of noise, your mind can be overflowing with words, your body uptight with tension, and your feelings like a rollercoaster. Sometimes you can get go so out of touch with yourself that you don’t feel at home in your own heart. Silence is the way back home.

Silence is golden because in the silence you access your higher and more peaceful nature. Your higher nature shows you how to live your life in ways that feel right and that allow the best in you to be expressed. This intuitive knowing you have is always waiting to guide you towards more peaceful and rewarding outcomes. Listening to your intuition reduces suffering.

In the silence is also the voice of your soul, this is your connection to the collective and infinite wisdom of humanity, the universe and the Divine. When you sit quietly with your soul, you know peace as it truly is. This peace is the pure freedom to be all that is possible within you. In the silence of your eternal nature there is a world of peace that extends forever.

The peace of silence is a wonderful oasis in trying times.

.5  Slowing down is part of finding the silence. You live in a hurry and worry world filled with impatience.  Sometimes even to wait for a moment is a bother. Impatience can be off the chart. Slowing down is easily as taking a less direct path to enjoy the moment, to see the beauty, to tune in and just be with yourself. Try a day when you start slowly, go patiently and wind down before you ever wind up.  Smell the roses, watch kids play, dance to a song, read something that lifts you up, write a poem. Slowing down feels so good.

*My new posting schedule is going to be Monday and Thursday*. Sometimes I may add other shorter posts during the week. I am really focusing on additional writing, new directions I am exploring, and ways to make more of a difference, so my posting will be less frequent. Let me know if there is any way I can be of assistance to you.