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Sometimes people want someone else to fix their problem, or they turn to improper relationships, drugs and or alcohol. In some cases the doing it to yourself can be as simple as having an uncontrollable need to emotionally dwell or express your deepest thoughts to other people who simply will not understand, do not want to understand and don’t respect you for doing it. If you have to express deep thoughts do it in a diary, or with a councilor not in everyone else’s ear. Remember, generally people don’t want to know about your drama because it overwhelms them or it’s simply too much unless they are a very special person, so don’t be angry when they don’t give you the type of comfort or support you want. People want to avoid going deep into emotions, it’s a scary place and people don’t generally like having to go deep, face their fears and their own possible reality. But to heal your life, you must ultimately go deep, allow yourself to face the fears, and by facing them they dissolve. Just like a phantom in the night. People can be afraid of taking responsibility; they just don’t want someone to rely on them. People fear things which challenge their reality, it doesn’t matter if its religion, spirituality, beliefs or values. People like what they know, and are terrified of what they don’t know or haven’t experienced. Find a qualified counselor to talk to, if you’re caught up in the thinking try to balance it with some exercise, go for a walk and look up at the clouds and trees when you walk, don’t look at the ground. Take care whom you share with and how much you share. Be aware of dwelling in the emotions and needing to find an answer, as often there simply isn’t one. Unfortunately the truth is that often-bad things do happen to good people. Remember every day is a new beginning. Mud Slide or Mind Slide your choice? Keep your mind focused on what’s happening in your immediate environment and keep yourself aware of where your thoughts are taking you. Staying too much in the emotions brings on confusion and what I call the Mud Slide and getting lost in mind screwing scenarios, of if, and. but, is also a total waste of time and energy. Keep your hands busy, keep yourself on track, and keep focused even if that focus is reading a book, watching a movie, or going for a walk. Try to be productive without being over the top on the avoidance scene. How do you avoid sinking in the mud? It’s simple be a little self aware and make a choice – it’s that simple. Allow yourself 10 minutes a day to get totally emotional and feel the depth of your sadness and then make a choice to do other things. Be like me write books, dig in the garden, go for a walk, talk to a stranger, clean the house, do anything you feel to do which will bring about a positive result, read a book which has a good story. Don’t let your mind be in control of you, take control of it. Make the conscious choice to focus your thoughts on things that lift your spirits, like music, art, and reading, what ever you find food for the soul that makes your heart sing. Here are a few questions for you: How many times do you get in your car and don’t think about where you are or what’s going on around you. How many times have you driven down the road lost in your thoughts and not even noticed where you were driving or what was going on? I’m sure you’d agree that its pretty stupid thing to do, but how many times do you do it? Most people do it 99% of the time and wonder why they have road accidents! How many times do you do one thing and be thinking about something completely different? Then you wonder why people get angry with you and feel insulted that you are not giving them your full attention! Tip: Try to stay focused on what you’re doing right now in this moment. Look for things to do which need you to concentrate on them, but cant cause harm if you mind does happen to wander. BIG WARNING: Remember that although your life has been shaken up, there are still people around you who need you too. Atomic fall out can happen if you’re preoccupied and not giving your attention to those people who matter most, so if you’re wandering about lost in thoughts feeling sorry for yourself. Your partner will feel unacknowledged and unlovedYour children will feel unimportantYour boss is more likely to think you’re incompetentBut ultimately the big price you pay is:Your missing out on life because your not living it in the now!Memories are the ghosts of the past wafting in through open windows and taking you on journeys out of the now into the past. Have you ever noticed how much we entertain ourselves by telling stories to our selves in our heads? Task for you: Spend the next 5 minutes just being aware of the chatter going on in your head. I think you will be astounded at how much you chat away to yourself and the chatter goes on all sorts of tangents and makes up hundreds of irrelevant scenarios of if I do that he will do that, and then I will do this……..All of which is a complete waste of time. If you catch your mind wandering you can simply affirm today is………………………………….. (Monday the 5t July 2004.) Remember: Where you are depends upon where your thoughts are. And 98% of what you think and worry about never happens! If the constant chatter in your head is getting the best of you, then get out and do something: Go for a walk go to the gym if you can afford it, do some study, do anything but keep your energy moving. The worst thing you can do is let your mind and body to just sit and vegetate. I know when faced with such hardship the mind does terrible things, and your find yourself thinking things like I don’t want to go on, I don’t want to keep living. It’s often at that point we retreat to our beds and sleep, and sleep and sleep. Or we look for someone to tell our story too, or we head for the addiction what ever it is. BE AWARE – of what you’re doing and WHY you’re doing it. When you think you want to die - in reality the problem is not that you want your life to end you just want the pain and hardship to stop. You actually want to start living! It’s your soul screaming out “LET ME LIVE.” So how do you GET A LIFE? Well you take it one day at a time, some people are so fragile when life has turned them upside down they have to take it one minute at a time. The important thing is that you don’t make it any harder than it has to be in order to restore and rebuild your world, and all that that involves. FACTS: If you’re feeling guilty about situations or circumstances you will find ways to sabotage and create suffering. So deal with the Guilt! Face it head on, just like they do in AA. If you cant tell the person because they are no longer here, in this world. Then find a quiet place and talk to their photo, I can guarantee they will and do hear you! If you need to then apologize to the person, tell them your angry for leaving you, tell them your sad but make amen’s, do what ever you have to do to put things right. But deal with it! You can’t move on if you’re carrying a heap of guilt with you. If you’re angry with yourself, you will mentally beat up on yourself, your life will manifest more and more dramatic circumstances until you finally find the courage to ask the hard questions. So find a way to call a truce! Allow yourself to be human, and being human means that we all make mistakes from time to time. We don’t mean to make mistakes but we do it’s a part of the human condition of learning! If we never made mistakes we would never learn anything. Remind yourself that you have always done the best you could with the skills and knowledge you have had, and you can’t do what you don’t know how to do. Look at the situation honestly and then make the commitment to learn some new skills so this won’t happen again. Stick to the commitment and let go of the guilt. A friend once said to me, “if you’re into guilt you’re playing God.” And they were absolutely right. If you are blaming others for your situation then you have not honestly recognized that the choices you made and the way you communicated may have been a part of bringing you to this point in your life. Give yourself a break! It’s not about what we did or did not do, its not about who did what to who or how, it’s about how we can rebuild our lives and in doing so create a better life than what we had before. Feeling sorry for yourself won’t do! To stop the mind slides you can begin by finding or making your own easy affirmations. Get some books on self esteem and positive thinking, look honestly and don’t be afraid to ask yourself some confronting questions such as: am I co-dependent? Did I listen to my gut feeling about what was happening? Could I have done it differently? What skills do I need to learn so this doesn’t ever happen again? When your mind is running riot and your head is spinning make the conscious choice to take control of the situation. REMEMBER: you are not a victim of your thoughts; you have the power to choose the focus of your thoughts. Quite your mind: Whatever relaxes you and is not harmful, do it. Take a long bath, have a massage, listen to soft music, take a walk on the beach, find ways to let your mind slow down. You can use meditation or affirmations to help you relax. Make up an affirmation! An Affirmation is a word or a sentence, which synchronizes with the heartbeat. Words like Heal-ing, hear-ing, love-ing, are all good words to use as a mantra, or affirmation. When you repeat the word over and over it simply distracts the mind. It lets you get out of the negative head space your in and allows the physical body to relax.
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