Tag Archives: self-love

Somethings to Consider

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6 Thoughts That Will Make You Instantly Happier

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happier

Our thoughts are everywhere. Sometimes they can be handy in figuring things out, or sometimes they can overcomplicate things when they don’t need to and many times they just can’t help but be there, including now as you read this article. The bottom line is: your mind always has something to say.

Although practices such as meditation can be great tools in quieting the mind from its rampant chatter, the greatest tool we can ever develop is to regain control of the roller coaster that our mind takes us on. No matter how often it has something to say, it’s ultimately always up to us in how we choose to react to what it has to say. Just like at an amusement park where we have the choice of which roller coaster we would like to ride, we also have the choice as to whether we let our life’s roller coaster be the 5 out of 5 intensity of the BEHEMOTH, or the 1 out of 5 Jolly Taxi.

Rather than always trying to quiet the mind, here are 6 thoughts that we can all implement right now to throw our mind for a loop and make us all instantly happier:

1) When Has Laziness Ever Gotten Me Anywhere?

We all have a lazy bone within us, and many times succumbing to that laziness can be a great experience and an awesome opportunity to unwind. The issue arises when that lazy bone holds us back from doing something that either needs to be done or involves something that we are passionate about. All of the world’s greatest thinkers, athletes, artists, builders, etc., all became that way because they refused to let laziness control their life.

“I can’t relate to lazy people. We don’t speak the same language. I don’t understand you. I don’t want to understand you.” – Kobe Bryant

The bottom line is, in this life you are never going to be younger than you are right now, so if not now, when?

What to do if your mind objects: Rather than basking in the idea of how nice laziness can feel at times, and ultimately letting “I don’t feel like it” dictate your decision, choose to look at the other option. Think of how great it feels to accomplish or be a part of something once you get yourself engaged in it. Let that guide you to say “yes,” with the icing on the cake being how much better the relaxation will feel afterwards with the added incentive of having done something.

2) I Already Have Everything I Need

How many of you have ever heard someone say something like this to you? I’m going to start eating healthy and taking care of myself once I finish this project at work, break-up with the girl I’m dating and get my own place. This thought series -or any other one similar to it -I like to call the ultimate creator of being stuck in a limbo state. We identify a change we would like to make, something we are passionate about, but we choose to hold off on incorporating it until a handful of other cards all fall into place. The all too common end result? Those cards never line-up as we expect them to and years go by without us ever exploring the healthy life that we’ve always wanted to.

What to do if your mind objects: Remember that no matter how full our plate currently is, we can always make time to incorporate something that is important to us (think of how we always manage to make time to deal with emergencies.) Even if just in small doses at first -such as making one homemade lunch a week in the example above -these steps show our mind that we are choosing to take control and gets ourselves on a path to a happier version of our self.

3) I Choose To Focus On The Journey, Not The End Result

The world is a vast place with over 7 billion people. Rather than seeing this as a cool fact, many of us see it as a justification as to why we cannot do anything that will have a significant impact. Since our mind will obsess and compare with things of great magnitude, we will often choose to not even bother partaking in or initiating something that we are passionate about -something that if we did, would make us happier.

What to do if your mind objects: Keep two rebuttals in mind: (1) even the grandest things started small, (2) even the smallest thing has an impact on the entire world at a conscious level. We still have plenty of room to grow, but even Collective Evolution started as just 3 guys with an idea, an idea that slowly developed into the website, social media platform and film production company that it is today.

4) I Am Exactly Where I Need To Be

Comparison is at the core of many toxic thoughts, whether it be towards another person, a personal expectation or a socially developed norm. That being the case, our mind often loves to dwell upon the idea of being a failure to this point, which for many people can lead to “settling” or “rushing” to try and get themselves “there” as quickly as possible. Why not instead work on selling yourself on the idea that we are always exactly where we need to be?

What to do if your mind objects:  Whether or not your mind chooses to agree with you being exactly where you need to, we can all agree that no matter what, there is nothing we can do to change the past. That being the case, choose to accept your life for what it has been, love yourself for who you are now and be present in the now, with no regard towards regrets. Choose to move forward rather than spend any more time thinking about how things could have gone differently.

5) I Can’t Please Everyone

The mind is a very powerful creator, and speaking from personal experience, one of the areas that it particularly loves to create within is the idea of how others will react to something that you do. It will often create and obsess to the point that many of us choose to hold ourselves back from doing something that we felt pulled to, just to avoid the potential ridicule or friction that may or may not come from others in our life.

What to do if your mind objects: The first thing to note is that more often than not, people are far too consumed with their own lives to ever carry through on the ridicule that your mind expected them to. But even if they do, is it really worth holding yourself back to avoid facing? When you choose to let the potential opinion of others dictate your life you ultimately choose to willingly place yourself in a “safety” box that will likely never expand to explore many of your passions. Does that sound like happiness?

6) I’m Beautiful Just The Way I Am

This is by far the most specific of the thoughts that I chose to put on this list, but I feel its placement is justified because of the superficially obsessed world that we live in. Whether we’re married, chronically single or have never been kissed it’s amazing how many of us regularly inflict the idea of being ugly upon ourselves -myself included. Whether it be focused on particular aspects of ourselves that we feel fall short, or our entire physicality as a whole we seem to love thrusting negative thoughts towards this awesome gift that we have the privilege of inhabiting.

What to do if your mind objects: Choose to opt out of the world’s “idea” of beauty and accept yourself for who you are. Whether or not the rest the world chooses to play along there is nothing more attractive than a person who is comfortable and confident in their own shoes. Be who you are and try throwing some nice comments towards yourself for a change.

from:    http://consciouslifenews.com/6-thoughts-will-make-instantly-happier/1177318/

Deepak CHopra on Forgiving Yourself

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Deepak Chopra: The One True Key To Forgiving Yourself

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By Deepak Chopra

The spiritual leader and author of What Are You Hungry For? The Chopra Solution to Permanent Weight Loss, Well-Being, and Lightness of Soul examines how we can find self-acceptance.

Somehow, even in a culture that values forgiveness, guilt isn’t so easy to erase. If you have done something you are deeply ashamed of or guilty about, your feelings lie somewhere on the following scale: I did a terrible thing; I have a terrible secret; Someone made me feel that I am a terrible person; or, I am a terrible person.

These statements are mixed together in our psyche, and getting them straight is the key to forgiving yourself. Doing a bad thing is not the same as being a bad person. Imagine a small child who is caught taking cookies from the cookie jar, and her mother scolds her. If the child is young enough, she can’t separate “I did a bad thing” from “I am bad.” And since the one who is making her feel guilty is her mother, the guilt that results comes with absolute authority. (This is one reason some psychologists claim that the gods and goddesses are actually stand-ins for our parents — they make us feel small, weak and vulnerable by comparison.)

As an adult, let’s say you do something that by your standards is a guilty action. You cheated on your income tax or on your spouse; you faked a job resume or got a good friend into trouble. You can’t forgive yourself by simply putting the bad action in proportion and moving on.

So what to do? The most effective ways to rid yourself of guilt are the following:

1. Confess to an authority figure and ask for their forgiveness.
2. Perform an act of atonement.
3. Pray for divine forgiveness.
4. Perform a ritual of contrition and appeasement.

It’s often pointed out how psychologically effective the Catholic confessional proves to be (all four approaches to erasing guilt are included). But the effectiveness of these steps diminishes if you don’t have deep faith. Even if you have no religious faith at all, the key to forgiving yourself remains the same: You must believe that you have been forgiven.

In most cases, living with guilt is far worse than going to the person you have wronged, confessing your misdeed and asking to be forgiven. Even if they say no, you have brought your guilty secret to light, and that’s a major step.

Some people are so ashamed that they can’t bring themselves to tell anyone their secret. The result is the worst kind of guilt, that festers inside with no chance for relief. If you feel that you have this kind of deep guilt, you must still find a way to believe that you are forgiven. You may have to take baby steps to get there. For example:

1. Write a letter confessing your secret. Include every detail. Take your time to make sure that you have left nothing out. When you are certain that the letter is complete, perform a ritual where you burn the letter or consign it to the sea — anything that will totally obliterate it. As you do this, say, “I put my guilt behind me. Now it belongs to God (or the universe).” Repeat this ritual several times, as needed. You may not completely absolve yourself, but you will be bringing your guilt to the light, which is the only place where healing psychological scars can occur.

2. Put your misdeed on someone else’s shoulders, imagining that the guilt isn’t yours. Now sit in judgment. Write out in detail what punishment this person deserves, and at the same time include reasons for mercy. Consider the balance between punishment and forgiveness. Most guilty people will be much more lenient on someone else than on themselves. This exercise gives you a perspective on your guilty feelings.

3. Adopt a mantra that you say to yourself the moment that a guilty memory or feeling arises. The following phrases are particularly effective: “I’m not that person anymore;” or “My attention belongs in the present;” or “I am not here to suffer anymore.” Choose the appropriate phrase and repeat it, without fail, every time you feel guilty. In this way, you are not only telling yourself the truth, for you aren’t the person anymore who committed a past misdeed, but you are also giving your brain a new, more positive input. This will help to wean it off the old wiring that keeps messaging guilt long after guilt is deserved.

No matter how big or small your guilty secret, no matter if your guilt is nagging or crushing, the goal is always the same. Do whatever it takes until you truly believe that you have been forgiven.

from:    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/10/how-to-forgive-yourself-deepak-chopra_n_4697921.html?utm_hp_ref=gps-for-the-soul&ir=GPS+for+the+Soul

The 6 Words for Love in Ancient Greek

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The Ancient Greeks’ 6 Words for Love (And Why Knowing Them Can Change Your Life)

Looking for an antidote to modern culture’s emphasis on romantic love? Perhaps we can learn from the diverse forms of emotional attachment prized by the ancient Greeks.

by Roman Krznaric

posted Dec 27, 2013

This article originally appeared in Sojourners.

Grave relief. Photo by Tilemahos Efthimiadis.

A Greek sculpture from the fourth century B.C. Photo by Tilemahos Efthimiadis / Flickr.

Today’s coffee culture has an incredibly sophisticated vocabulary. Do you want a cappuccino, an espresso, a skinny latte, or maybe an iced caramel macchiato?

Eros involved a loss of control that frightened the Greeks.

The ancient Greeks were just as sophisticated in the way they talked about love, recognizing six different varieties. They would have been shocked by our crudeness in using a single word both to whisper “l love you” over a candlelit meal and to casually sign an email “lots of love.”

So what were the six loves known to the Greeks? And how can they inspire us to move beyond our current addiction to romantic love, which has 94 percent of young people hoping—but often failing—to find a unique soul mate who can satisfy all their emotional needs?

1. Eros, or sexual passion

The first kind of love was eros, named after the Greek god of fertility, and it represented the idea of sexual passion and desire. But the Greeks didn’t always think of it as something positive, as we tend to do today. In fact, eros was viewed as a dangerous, fiery, and irrational form of love that could take hold of you and possess you—an attitude shared by many later spiritual thinkers, such as the Christian writer C.S. Lewis.

Eros involved a loss of control that frightened the Greeks. Which is odd, because losing control is precisely what many people now seek in a relationship. Don’t we all hope to fall “madly” in love?

2. Philia, or deep friendship

The second variety of love was philia or friendship, which the Greeks valued far more than the base sexuality of eros. Philia concerned the deep comradely friendship that developed between brothers in arms who had fought side by side on the battlefield. It was about showing loyalty to your friends, sacrificing for them, as well as sharing your emotions with them. (Another kind of philia, sometimes called storge, embodied the love between parents and their children.)

We can all ask ourselves how much of this comradely philia we have in our lives. It’s an important question in an age when we attempt to amass “friends” on Facebook or “followers” on Twitter—achievements that would have hardly impressed the Greeks.

3. Ludus, or playful love

This was the Greeks’ idea of playful love, which referred to the affection between children or young lovers. We’ve all had a taste of it in the flirting and teasing in the early stages of a relationship. But we also live out our ludus when we sit around in a bar bantering and laughing with friends, or when we go out dancing.

Dancing with strangers may be the ultimate ludic activity, almost a playful substitute for sex itself. Social norms may frown on this kind of adult frivolity, but a little more ludus might be just what we need to spice up our love lives.

4. Agape, or love for everyone

The fourth love, and perhaps the most radical, was agape or selfless love. This was a love that you extended to all people, whether family members or distant strangers. Agape was later translated into Latin as caritas, which is the origin of our word “charity.”

C.S. Lewis referred to it as “gift love,” the highest form of Christian love. But it also appears in other religious traditions, such as the idea of mettā or “universal loving kindness” in Theravāda Buddhism.

There is growing evidence that agape is in a dangerous decline in many countries. Empathy levels in the U.S. have declined sharply over the past 40 years, with the steepest fall occurring in the past decade. We urgently need to revive our capacity to care about strangers.

5. Pragma, or longstanding love

Another Greek love was the mature love known as pragma. This was the deep understanding that developed between long-married couples.

Pragma was about making compromises to help the relationship work over time, and showing patience and tolerance.

The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm said that we expend too much energy on “falling in love” and need to learn more how to “stand in love.” Pragma is precisely about standing in love—making an effort to give love rather than just receive it. With about a third of first marriages in the U.S. ending through divorce or separation in the first 10 years, the Greeks would surely think we should bring a serious dose of pragma into our relationships.

6. Philautia, or love of the self

The Greek’s sixth variety of love was philautia or self-love. And the clever Greeks realized there were two types. One was an unhealthy variety associated with narcissism, where you became self-obsessed and focused on personal fame and fortune. A healthier version enhanced your wider capacity to love.

How Should We Live by Roman Krznaric.

This article is based on the author’s new book, How Should We Live? Great Ideas from the Past for Everyday Life.

The idea was that if you like yourself and feel secure in yourself, you will have plenty of love to give others (as is reflected in the Buddhist-inspired concept of “self-compassion”). Or, as Aristotle put it, “All friendly feelings for others are an extension of a man’s feelings for himself.”

The ancient Greeks found diverse kinds of love in relationships with a wide range of people—friends, family, spouses, strangers, and even themselves. This contrasts with our typical focus on a single romantic relationship, where we hope to find all the different loves wrapped into a single person or soul mate. The message from the Greeks is to nurture the varieties of love and tap into its many sources. Don’t just seek eros, but cultivate philia by spending more time with old friends, or develop ludus by dancing the night away.

Moreover, we should abandon our obsession with perfection. Don’t expect your partner to offer you all the varieties of love, all of the time (with the danger that you may toss aside a partner who fails to live up to your desires). Recognize that a relationship may begin with plenty of eros and ludus, then evolve toward embodying more pragma or agape.

The diverse Greek system of loves can also provide consolation. By mapping out the extent to which all six loves are present in your life, you might discover you’ve got a lot more love than you had ever imagined—even if you feel an absence of a physical lover.

It’s time we introduced the six varieties of Greek love into our everyday way of speaking and thinking. If the art of coffee deserves its own sophisticated vocabulary, then why not the art of love?

Roman Krznaric is an Australian cultural thinker and cofounder of The School of Life in London. This article is based on his new book, How Should We Live? Great Ideas from the Past for Everyday Life (BlueBridge). His website is www.romankrznaric.com and he tweets @romankrznaric.

from:    http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/the-ancient-greeks-6-words-for-love-and-why-knowing-them-can-change-your-life

Are You Suffering from Soul Loss?

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20 Diagnostic Signs That You’re Suffering From “Soul Loss”

soul loss4th February 2014

By Lissa Rankin MD

Guest Writer for Wake Up World

Our entire culture suffers from what the shamans call “soul loss,” a loss of meaning, direction, vitality, mission, purpose, identity, and genuine connection; a deep unhappiness that most of us have come to consider as simply ordinary. The soul is our source of absolute uniqueness, a place within that connects you not only to your own value and essence, but to the value and essence of every other living being. What makes soul loss so subtle and dangerous is that very few people have realized that it has happened. Most of us do not know that we have disconnected from our soul and have come to accept as normal a numbness and lack of meaning in our lives.

Because we all belong to this culture, we all suffer from soul loss. Soul loss is epidemic and blinds us from seeing the potential for joy and wholeness in ordinary life. When you heal from soul loss, you see familiar things in new ways so you can increase your joy in what you already have.

Not sure if you’re suffering from soul loss?

Here are 20 diagnostic signs that signal soul loss:

1. You feel like you’re not as good as other people.

2. You yearn to be of service, but you have no idea what you have to contribute and why it matters.

3. You find yourself striving in vain for an impossible-to-achieve standard of perfection.

4. Your fears keep you from living large.

5. You’re frequently worried that you’re not good enough, smart enough, thin enough, young enough, [fill in the blank] enough.

6. You feel like a victim of circumstances that are beyond your control.

7. You feel like your daily life is meaningless and task-driven.

8. You often feel helpless, hopeless, or pessimistic.

9. You protect your heart with steel walls.

10. You often feel you don’t really matter and your love doesn’t make a difference.

11. You’re always trying to fit in and belong, but you rarely feel like you do.

12. You feel beaten down by the challenges you face in your life.

13. You suffer from a variety of vague, hard to treat physical symptoms, such as fatigue, chronic pain, weight gain or loss, insomnia, skin disorders, or gastrointestinal symptoms.

14. You struggle with being able to accept love and nurturing.

15. You feel depressed, anxious, or chronically worried.

16. You feel like you’re not appreciated enough.

17. You find yourself often judging others.

18. You frequently numb yourself with alcohol, drugs, sex, television, or excessive busyness.

19. You feel disappointed with life.

20. You’ve forgotten how to dream.

How Soul Loss Shows Up At The Doctor’s Office

As a physician, I’ve had years of experience diagnosing soul loss in my patients, but Western medicine has no framework for this kind of diagnosis, and as doctors, we’re not taught to treat this kind of suffering, so we wind up mistreating it. What people suffering from soul loss need is the deep medicine of reconnection with the soul, but in our culture, we tend to treat soul loss too superficially.

We treat the chronic pain with pain medication. We treat the insomnia with sleeping pills. We treat the weight issues with diet and exercise. And most damagingly, we may label soul loss as mental illness, such as depression, and cover up the symptoms with psychiatric medications that may make things worse by slapping a Band-aid on a wound that’s not healing underneath the bandage.

The Treatment You Really Need

Sometimes the soul needs space in order to heal, and this may require the courage to make some external changes in your life. Perhaps you need to switch careers in order to give the soul more room to breathe. Perhaps an unhealthy relationship is constricting the soul, and it’s time to get into therapy, set boundaries, or even end things. Perhaps you need to find more people to love or relocate to a place that helps your soul come alive.  Perhaps you need to give your soul permission to engage in more creative activities. Such eternal changes may be part of the prescription the inner doctor of your soul writes.

But very often, those kinds of major life overhauls are NOT NECESSARY!  Reconnecting to the soul allows you to find peace and happiness right where you are in ways that are much simpler and more profound than you might think. It can be astounding to discover that you’ve had what you needed all along and have been looking in all the wrong places. Perhaps all that is needed is to see the life you’re already living in a different way.

10 Ways Your Soul Guides You In Daily Life

If you’re suffering from soul loss, what can you do about it? The first step to healing from soul loss is learning to reconnect to the guidance of your soul. In order to help you, Kitchen Table Wisdom author Rachel Naomi Remen and I are offering a free teleclass 10 Ways Your Soul Guides You In Daily Life. We’ll be teaching you one surprising vehicle the soul uses to speak to you loud and clear, how to interpret not only the green lights that affirm your path, but the red lights that redirect you, a way to ensure that the people you surround yourself with reflect back to you the voice of your soul and not the voice of your fear, a tool for interpreting how your soul speaks to you via the body, the one feeling that is always your soul talking, and more…

from:    http://wakeup-world.com/2014/02/04/20-diagnostic-signs-that-youre-suffering-from-soul-loss/

Healthy Emotions to Foster

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Jim Sniechowski, PhD

Co-creator, The Fear of Being Fabulous (TM)

The 5 Key Emotions of Success

Posted: 10/28/2013 3:51 p,

How do you know when you are successful? What clues do you need to demonstrate that you know you’ve made it whether you’ve reached a life goal or just completed an important project? With regard to how you feel, should there be a difference in feeling between the sizes of your achievements — small, medium, large, colossal?

No doubt there will be an intensity difference. You can’t expect the same level of intensity across an entire range of possible successes. But the intensity of your experience should not alter the emotional experience itself. For example, if you are pleased with something you’ve done you can be exhilarated or quietly thoughtful, but the fact that you are pleased does not change. Only the expression and emotional intensity of your being pleased changes.

With that, here are five key emotions that will let you know you’ve succeeded — not that you’re on your way, but that you have actually reached the success you intended.

Ease/Comfort With What You Are Doing

Once you’ve succeeded at something you know what you’re doing. What was once a struggle in the learning process becomes a graceful implementation. Why graceful? Because you’ve become confident in your ability to deal with what life brings you. You’ve done it and furthermore you know you can continue, and that’s what brings the comfort; that comfort is the source of your ease.

Patience With Yourself and Others

Patience is tied to your confidence because in knowing that you can handle what life brings you, you can deal with whatever comes your way. No need to panic. You know you will take the time to see things through because things take time. Success is about quietly and steadily persevering or being diligent, especially in the details.

Trust of Yourself and Those With Whom You Work

Trust is an issue of reliance. You can count on yourself to come through. You can rely on your own integrity, your strength, your ability and the ability of those you work with. You can be sure, within your experience, that what’s needed to be taken care of will be. So you can relax and be confident of your own expectations, of your vision and the choices you make, and you can know that the world will support you and your intentions.

Compassion With Yourself and Others

There’s no need to measure yourself against others, or against any extremes. The locus of control of your life is solidly centered within you. There’s no longer any need to seek perfection. You can assess all of the factors that make up any moment, and take the time to think critically and evaluate as deeply as you need, because you know what you’re doing. Your gut and your heart can lead the way.

Satisfaction That Comes With Success

Very deeply within you, you know you belong where you are. You live with a confident acceptance of your talents and your limitations without any need to grasp or seize to prove to yourself that whatever skills and talents you possess won’t fade away. In other words, your success is not just a one-off. You can let go of unwarranted self-judgment that you’ve wasted time. You haven’t. All those moments, even those in which you were doing nothing, have come together to make you who you are. And it is you, all of you, the whole of you that is now successful.

These emotions are part of every success you’ve achieved, even the small successes on the way to a large accomplishment. Watch for them. They are the brick and mortar of enjoying who you are and who you are becoming.

from:    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-sniechowski-phd/the-5-key-emotions-of-success_b_4103830.html?utm_hp_ref=healthy-living

Evita Ochel on Heart-Centered Living

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Awakening to Heart-Centered Living

12th March 2012

By Evita Ochel

Our world is in the midst of a major change, and we are awakening. Awakening today from years, decades and centuries of living stifled by illusions and limited by controlling beliefs and unconscious thoughts. Today, we have the chance to step into the light of consciousness and see the world, life and ourselves through a lens of clarity like we never have before. We have the chance to see through the illusions, the drama, the propaganda and all that has kept us asleep, busy and distracted from the truth of all that is.

But what will we do and how will we react as we wake up? For many around the world, the awakening is a rude one and it is bringing about various levels of anger, resentment, frustration and despair. Many of the things, people, organizations and systems we put our trust and faith in have failed and betrayed us. Many of our first responses thus are to strike back, get even, attack, retaliate and expose that which has enslaved us for so long. And while all of these actions may have some merits and many of us may feel justified taking them, there is something else to consider, something very fundamental about this awakening that is much more powerful to put into practice.

At the root of this awakening is a very important foundation—the foundation of the heart. For eons humankind has led life ruled by the mind, which has to this point been largely untapped and unconscious where its full potential lies. Despite this, logic, reason and rational thinking were valued over empathy, compassion and emotional feeling. We were taught to be strong, competitive, the “fittest” and focus on personal desires without regard for how it will impact others or nature. Yet something about this did not feel “right” – did not feel natural to many of us, and is today one of the biggest factors driving this awakening.

In the midst of evolving as life on this planet, we neglected one of the most important aspects of ourselves. We have denied, suppressed and alienated our heart. And so today, we are not just awakening, we are awakening to heart-centered living.

The Meaning of Heart-Centered

“Love doesn’t need reason. It speaks from the irrational wisdom of the heart.”  – Deepak Chopra

The foundation of heart-centered living is love. Pure and simple. Therefore, when we embrace or step into heart-centered living, we are allowing love to be the guiding force for all that we think, say and do. We are moving out of fear-based paradigms and moving into love-based paradigms. How this plays out in everyday life on a practical level is huge, and has massive implications for all life on this planet. Our hearts are starved and we are finally coming back to ourselves, healing ourselves and healing our planet. For example, it is no coincidence that heart disease today is our number one killer. While I will be the first to say that healthy eating is vital to our physical survival and quality of life, beyond this physical nourishment is something much bigger. Our overall energetic frequency of the thoughts, words and actions we experience influences our mind-body connection and this is reflected in the state of our personal health, and collectively in the health of our planet.

Therefore to understand what heart-centered living is all about, there are three main areas that are the building blocks for putting a heart-centered approach into action on every level of our existence.

Compassion for Self

For starters, it means growing in and nurturing self-love. Yes, we actually start to put ourselves first, but not from an Ego perspective, but from a heart perspective. When we wake up to heart-centered living, we understand that we are the central point of creation of our personal reality. Until we understand love personally and experientially, and learn to love ourselves, we are of little value to ourselves, others and our world. Until we learn to really love ourselves, we will continue to engage in destructive behaviors that harm the self, others and our planet. This applies to everything in life.

A person who has a high degree of self-love is incapable for example of being in a destructive relationship, or over-eating, or using toxic substances, or subjecting themselves to any other physical, mental, emotional or spiritual harm. The higher your level of self-love the more compassion you exercise in all of your thoughts, words and actions towards the self and all of life’s creation. And in case it is not yet clear, this has nothing to do with selfishness, but with being awake and aware enough to know that we can only give what we are and what we have. Therefore if we do not have love within us, how can we give love to others? Or kindness? Respect? Compassion? Etc.

“Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. Your really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.”   – Lucille Ball

Compassion for Others

Secondly, it means a unity-centered attitude in how we interact with others. We begin to value things like community. We come to understand that we are all from the same source on this planet, and thus one human family. We begin to see ourselves in all of the “others” with whom we come into contact with everyday. And because we would not hurt, cheat or abuse the self, we would not do this to any other being. But again, for this to take effect, we have to first apply the point above with respect to increasing our self-love. And when we do apply the highest level of self-love we can at any given time, we immediately change our thoughts, words and actions towards others, for we take on the highest level of empathy no matter who we are dealing with.

We realize that only peace is natural in how we interact with others, releasing fear-based behaviors that are centered in violence, war, and oppression. We begin to understand the real meaning of justice and equality, knowing that it just does not make sense for one to have more than enough, while the other struggles with not enough to survive. Discrimination, judgement, and prejudice get released as we come into full awareness of what it means to be one. We stop fearing our differences, and instead celebrate our unique diversity.

“Love for others and respect for their rights and dignity, no matter who or what they are: ultimately these are all we need.”   – Dalai Lama XIV

Compassion for Nature

Thirdly, it means a high degree of stewardship when it comes to all of nature and our planet. The more we love ourselves, and love the communities that we share this Earth with, the more we make sure that our home—planet Earth—is kept in the healthiest state it can be.

Living from the heart means we know that every body of water on this planet is like the blood that runs through our body, and in order to be healthy, we cannot pollute either. We begin to be mindful of our actions in how we preserve clean air, both inside and outside our homes. We begin to show the highest level of compassion for all animals, and plants and all other species of life on this planet. Nothing is seen as worse than, or more worthy than. We stop discriminating between species as to which ones we call our pets, and which ones we abuse or kill. We begin to take a high degree of reverence for nature knowing that it has a sacred balance, and we learn to work with it, rather than against it.

Living from the heart and being stewards of this planet also means that we do not try to impose our will or control nature or any of its species. We are just one aspect of nature that has the choice to either live with the sacred harmony, or destroy the harmony of life on this planet.

“There is hope if people will begin to awaken that spiritual part of themselves, that heartfelt knowledge that we are caretakers of this planet.”   – Brooke Medicine Eagle

From Mind Wisdom to Heart Wisdom

In closing, I wish to share with you my personal philosophy for my life, which today I keep as simple as possible – live consciously using the wisdom of the heart and the power of the mind.

May we remember that living from the heart does not mean that we abandon the power of our mind. To do so, would be to enter a new imbalanced way of existing on this planet. We cannot deny any part of ourselves to live from our highest potential – not our mind, not our heart and not our soul. We are multidimensional beings, both on a physical and spiritual level and we are today learning how to truly put that into action and live our lives from the most holistic and balanced foundation.

Ultimately, at our essence we are love. We are not fear, or anger, or greed, or competition. As we continue to awaken, may we continue to grow in love, and exercise all that we are in how we relate to ourselves, others and all living and non-living things on this planet. May we always focus on the solutions, rather than the problems, and truly be the change we wish to see.

About the Author

Evita Ochel is an author, speaker and holistic living expert. She is the editor of two online publications:EvolvingBeings.com – to awaken and inspire people to expand their consciousness and connect with a heart-centered way of life, and EvolvingWellness.com – to awaken and inspire people to attain optimal health and wellness through natural health and nutrition. Evita is also the founder of the Healthytarianmovement and author of the newly released book “Healing and Prevention Through Nutrition”.

from:   http://wakeup-world.com/2012/03/12/awakening-to-heart-centered-living/