The Way To Happiness

Archive for January, 2010

Can you remember a time when you became a little irritated with someone and made a sharp comment that may have hurt, one which you later regretted? Have you ever writhed in the pain of emotional agony over some loss or missed opportunity? Do you recall a time when you felt so overwhelmed by emotion that you withdrew from everything and everyone? In any of these cases to a lesser or greater degree the emotional part of your brain has produced a questionable response or perhaps a response that you may have regretted later.

Researchers generally agree that there is an appropriate ‘alarm’ system in the brain. This system effectively overrides the thinking part of your brain in emergencies and causes an action or reaction that can be life saving.

The same system causes you problems when it creates inappropriate and unreasonable responses in your daily life in non-life threatening situations. Maybe your loved ones see your anger and it hurts them or your relationship to them. Perhaps you experience other consequences that would have been averted had you greater control over your emotional brain.

You can exert control over the reactionary part of your gray matter. The first step is realizing why these unwanted and seemingly uncontrollable responses happen. Just being cognizant that your emotional alarm system sometimes triggers at inappropriate times is half the battle. With awareness, you will be primed to take the next step.

Using your will to produce a calmer state is the second step. You’ll want to exert some effort from the rational or thinking part of your brain. Your thinking mind must not be timid and should be a bit stronger in applying a conscious influence over your emotional reactions. You can learn to control the alarm response with persistence and patience and reset the threshold to a more appropriate ’setting’.

Once you begin to recognize the emotional response before it happens, you begin to develop the ability to stop that response and engage the more rational part of your brain.

When successful, you will find that you no longer ’snap’ at others. You will be happier and your emotional side will not run ramped like an out of control team of horses racing away with the wagon of your rationality.

Instead, you may find yourself becoming calmer, more relaxed and better able to handle situations in a way that helps everyone and allows the wonderful person that you truly are to shine through.

Developing a more compassionate and kinder nature may help. Becoming less quick to judge a situation and more understanding of the perceived transgressions of others may be useful in resetting the threshold of your emotional alarm system.

Ridding yourself of thoughts of arguing or fighting with others may also leave you in a better state of mind. Allowing things to happen naturally and letting go of the need to be in control of every situation will allow you to feel better about yourself and the world around you.

Consider practicing that sage-like advice that comes from a most unusual source, bumper stickers. You have probably seen the ones that say, “I practice random acts of kindness’ If you actively do so, you may find your threshold for emotional responses naturally adjusting upwards.

Checking inappropriate responses is a great reason to pay attention to your emotions and feelings. Yet, there is a an even more positive benefit that hasn’t been mentioned yet.

Consider this quote from the inside front jacket of Daniel Goleman’s book, “Emotional Intelligence”. “Emotional Intelligence includes self- awareness and impulse control, persistence, zeal and self-motivation, empathy and social deftness. These are the qualities that mark people who excel in real life: whose intimate relationships flourish, who are stars in the workplace. These are the hallmarks of character and self- discipline, of altruism and compassion -basic capacities needed if our society is to thrive”.

Clearly, you have the power to make changes that vastly improve the quality of your life and the lives of those around you. The answer rests within and can change your world.

In life coaching, the decision making required for a breakthrough to a life of happiness is often asked about. In response to it, I have summarized my personal recipe for happiness.

Link:
How to Create Your Happiness to Suit Yourself

I’m sure you read a lot of times this sentence : you need first to love yourself.
But what does that mean? Is it about getting you a hot chocolate when you are cold? Is it about getting you a new dress when you feel like it? Is it doing whatever you want when you want it? Is it about putting warm clothes on when it’s freezing outside?

Loving yourself means to learn to treat you like a loving parent would do with his child.

When you are an adult, and I assume you are, you still have an Inner Child inside you. These are your emotions. At that level you still react like a child of 3-4 years old. Your emotions can not get older or mature. But you can get mature. You can learn how to respect them and how to handle them. You can learn how to take care of this Inner Child.

When you are not aware of your Inner Child, you try to live in an adult world like a 4-year old boy or girl. You feel all alone, afraid of the big nasty world there outside, not knowing what to do, where to ask for help, how to protect you. This is a very difficult way of doing. You will always feel afraid, fearful, doubtful, tired. It is hard to try to survive as a child in a grown up world. You will feel angry and afraid most of the time, and lost.

Why is that? Because nobody takes care of that Little Child inside you.
Let’s say your name is Charlotte. You are 42 years old. Inside you lives the little Charlotte. She’s four. When you are busy in the outside world taking care of other people, of business, of getting around, of doing a thousand things every day, the little Charlotte will feel overlooked. When you’re always running to help others, to make sure their needs are fulfilled, you will be exhausted every night and cry in your bed. Sometimes you will get temper tantrums. You will feel very angry without any reason (but still there is one, a big one!).

All these big emotions are attempts from your Inner Child to get your attention.
Imagine you have, besides your children, husband, collegues, parents, friends, a little four-year old girl named Charlotte. Nobody ever notices her. Nobody takes care of her. Whenever she tries to tell something and get some attention, you shout to her “Shut up!”. You say “I have to take care of my parents, my work, my husband, my paperwork, my friends, my other children, my house? I don’t have time for you!”

How do you think she will feel? What do you think she will do? First she will try to get your attention by showing big emotions. She will cry a lot, she will scream and shout, maybe she’s getting aggressive from time to time. You think you’re angry at the outside world, but it is Your Inner Child that is angry with YOU! She’s sad and angry because you don’t care about her! You act as if she doesn’t exist! Nothing is worse than acting as if our Inner Child doesn’t exist. This means trying to live as if WE don’t exist.

The worst feeling in the world is being unloyal to one’s self. Nothing is worse than this!

How many times did we ignore what we felt, to please someone else. How many times did we say to our Inner Child “Shut up, you are not important, the other one is far more important than you are, go away, I don’t want to hear you, I don’t want to see you”? Awful isn’t it? And we do this every time we let come the desire of the other one before ours.

This little Charlotte inside, what will she do? She will give up after a while. After trying a long time to show her emotions, she will give up. She will get very tired of all this and she will say :”It doesn’t matter, she doesn’t love me, she doesn’t want to take care of me, I’m not worth it”, and she will get depressed.

Of course you will think you get depressed because of others, because of your work, because of your children, because of your husband or parents.
It is nobody’s fault. But you have to learn how to take care of this Inner Child which is suffering from your lack of attention to her.

When, after getting depressed things still don’t change, there’s one weapon left to catch your attention : little Charlotte will get sick. Or she will get an accident. Maybe that way the adult Charlotte will learn to give finally attention to her Inner Child, which is as real (if not more) as a real child of flesh and blood.

You need to learn how to be a loving parent for yourself.

What does that mean?

First you need to develop an Inner Mother. If you were lucky and had a loving caring mother, you can take her as an exemple. Otherwise you need to invent, to create this Inner Mother, which is your feminine caring energy. Everytime you have an emotion, your Inner Mother should ask your Inner Child : “What happens, my darling?” Listen to what your Inner Child has to say. Than you go on with the dialogue. Inner Mother says : “Come here. Come in my arms, I love you as you are. I love you with what you feel.”
Doing that, the heaviness of the emotions will drop pretty much. Than you say these words : “I understand”. These words are very important, because most of the time we don’t feel very “normal” having the feelings we have and we try to ignore or suppress them, which makes them heavier. “I understand, my darling, come here in your Mothers arms, I love you.”
Stay with these words and feelings for a while, and than ask :” What do you need?”
Whatever the Child answers, you say : “We will ask this of your Father”.

And here starts the task of your Inner Father, who is there to protect you and to act for you in the outside world. You would never send a four-year old asking for a raise at work or getting to resolve a conflict at school or with the neighbours, would you? So why do you try it? Send out your Inner Father to take care of whatever you have to do in the outside world. Your Inner Father is your male energy, which enables you to make decisions, to take action, to follow your inner guidance (which is located in you Inner Child, also called Intuition) and to manifest your Child’s desires in the world.

When your Child has a need, for instance to call someone or to go somewhere to arrange something, imagine that your Inner Child stays at home with his Mother who takes care of his feelings (“I understand you’re afraid?”) and that your Inner Father (another part of your being) goes out there to act. Your Inner Father is that part of you which is able to handle stress, to take action, to arrange conflicts and all other stuff that has to do with the outside world. If that part is missing because you didn’t have a good model when you were little yourself, you will have to create and develop it.

Of course your Inner Child, Mother and Father are all parts of you. It is all you. It is just a model to understand what is happening inside you and how you can learn to love yourself.

Loving yourself is listening to your Inner Child, taking his emotions seriously, understanding what he feels and taking action in the desired direction. Loving yourself is having this dialogue with yourself every morning when you open your eyes, every evening when you go to bed, and every time you have an emotion.

Loving yourself is building a strong inner connection with yourself.
It is creating your own loving family, inside you. You will never feel alone anymore. You are already three! Call it your Trinity. Wherever you go, from now on you go with your Inner Family. Your are not alone. You are loved and you are protected. You listen to yourself and take care of that precious little Child that has been waiting for so long to get your attention and love.

This is inner healing.

1. MEDITATE Meditation helps you to slow down and look within. Take a few minutes each day and focus on your breath. Feel yourself breathing in and out. If thoughts come into your mind just release them with your breath as you breathe out. This is a great tool for learning to be present …

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