Listening to Your Heart

Is your life out of sync with your priorities? Do you feel like you're a hamster running on a wheel? Have you forgotten who you are? Social conditioning teaches us to be logical and "use our heads". When you only use your head, your experience of yourself and the world is limited. You miss out on the vital information the rest of your body, heart and soul is giving you. Benefits: The same neurological tissue found in the brain is found in the heart. The heart is a second "brain" and our emotional center. Listening to your head and your heart is crucial to good decision-making about your life, your business and your relationships. New Focus: Put your hand over your heart and focus there - what is it telling you? Connect with your body. Your body gives you a tremendous amount of useful information that you may not be conscious of. For example, when your mother-in-law visits, does your stomach tie up in knots? When your boss yells at you, do your shoulders turn into stone? When you feel passionate and alive, does your chest feel warm and open? When we ignore the body's message, we lose out on valuable information designed to let us what works for us and what doesn't. Benefits: For many people, fear manifests as a tightness in their chest. This is valuable information, especially if you aren't aware that you are afraid. Your body alerts you to what makes feels passionate and what doesn't. The body is a fount of wisdom designed to tell you when you're on the right path and when you aren't. New Focus: Notice the messages your body is giving you right now. Try a self-massage to find areas in your back, neck or shoulders that are tense or knotted. What other areas of your body feel tight? Which ones feel relaxed and loose? Use this information as another key to listening to your inner wisdom. Listen to your intuition. Intuition is simply knowing something without knowing exactly how you know it. Connect back to a time that you had a "gut feeling" about something - the job that you knew you shouldn't take, even though it looked good on the surface or the relationship that just felt right for you. That's your intuition talking to you. Benefits: Gut feelings are a wealth of information. Remember, your intuition is never wrong, although your interpretation of it may be incorrect. When your intuition calls to you, trust it. Practice makes perfect when it comes to using your intuition effectively. New Focus: The next time you need to make a decision, check in with your intuition. Experiment with trusting it. When you follow your intuition, what happens? When you hear it and disregard it, what's the outcome? Notice your self-saboteur*. Each of us has our very own special saboteur. The saboteur is the voice in your head that says, "You are not good enough." "Who do you think you are?" "If you take this new job, everyone will find out what a fraud you are." The saboteur's job is to "protect" you from taking risks and making changes. Benefits: Learn to distinguish between your voice and the saboteur's mumbo-jumbo. Notice how the inner critic drives the choices and decisions you make. New Focus: Simply notice the negative voices playing in your head. Notice the times when they crop up. Recognize that the voices aren't you and they aren't true. Learning to separate your own voice from that of the saboteur is a powerful and life changing tool. Identify limiting beliefs. We each carry a set of beliefs that we live by. Certain beliefs you hold consciously, while others are mainly unconscious. Beliefs develop out of past experiences and our interpretations of those experiences. Some of the conscious and unconscious beliefs that you develop limit your ability to grow and move forward in your life. For example: One of your goals as a successful entrepreneur is to make a lot of money. You discover that you have a belief - a limiting one - that it's wrong to make a lot of money. Until you begin to alter your beliefs about money, it will be more difficult for you to achieve that financial success you desire. Benefits: Learning to notice a limiting belief allows you to become conscious of it, and then change it. Releasing a belief that limits you puts you back in the driver's seat of your life. You, rather than an old belief, make the choices that are right for you and allow you to fulfill your potential Ways to spot a limiting belief: You tell yourself that you only have one or two choices in a situation, or "no choice" at all. Your inner critic expresses his or her opinion. The inner critic's opinion is generally based in a limiting belief. A decision may appear to be black and white to you, or an either/or situation. You have decided that "this is the way the world is." You make a decision based on fear. You feel constricted and notice that you lack clarity about a specific situation. New Focus: How does a particular belief allow you to attract what you really want in life? How does it prevent you from attaining your goals? When you reach an obstacle in your path, make sure that it's not an old belief in your way. When important questions like "What do I want?" or "What's the right choice for me to make?" surface in your mind, consult your inner voice. You possess the answers you need to live a life that feels successful and fulfilling. Listening to your inner voice can lead you on a path that feels deeply satisfying. Your business and personal lives will flourish with this new level of trust in yourself

Begin Your Day with Gratitude

Many of the simple things in life can be reasons for being grateful. These are often things that we tend to take for granted--our health, family, friends, our livelihood--until they are brought to our attention or taken away. Remembering to be grateful daily for one's health, family, friends, a job during a recession, having a roof over one's head and food on the table is a good way to start living with gratitude. As each year ends and a new one begins we have the opportunity to stop and reflect on the current state of our lives and remember to be grateful. Each New Day can give us the chance to start anew and is an excellent time to start keeping a Gratitude Journal, as a written reminder of for all that you have to be grateful. Begin Your Day with Gratitude If you begin looking at each breath as a blessing, then suddenly everything in an ordinary life becomes a miracle-delighting in the colors of the setting sun, feeling the rain on your face or smelling the amazing fragrance of a single perfect rose. Expressing Affirmations of Gratitude Living Life with Gratitude An Affirmation is "a positive short statement that you repeat to yourself to help you work toward a goal in a positive frame of mind" or on that "has been specifically worded for the purpose of reprogramming the subconscious mind with positive and spiritual thoughts." You can get yourself to feel more grateful about life and to live with gratitude, by practicing some simple affirmations. Simple Affirmations of Gratitude Affirmations to Live Life with Gratitude This is a series of affirmations that you can use to live life with more gratitude. Upon rising think: Today I am grateful for... Perhaps the simplest of grateful affirmations: Life is good.

I am a huge believer in giving back and helping out in the community and the world. Think globally, act locally I suppose. I believe that the measure of a person's life is the affect they have on others.

Five Ways To Get A Life

Shorten your workday by 30 minutes. I promise you'll get more done than if you put in your usual nine to ten hours. That's because committing to leaving earlier gives you a deadline and forces you to eliminate the little time wasters (silly interruptions, procrastination, perfectionism) that eat up your day. Avoid multitasking. Recent studies show that it can take the brain twice as long to process each thing it's working on when switching back and forth between activities. By learning to focus fully on one project at a time, you can regain the extra hour or two you crave. Just don't squander it on mundane chores! Break the habit of total self-reliance. Insisting on doing everything yourself burdens you and prevents others from feeling valuable and needed. Delegate more at home and at work, and free your time for things you love and excel at. Capture all your to-dos in one place. People who haphazardly write lists on stray notepads, Post-its, and backs of envelopes waste time wondering what to do next and worrying that they're forgetting something. Choose only one tool (planner, Palm, notebook) to track everything you need to do, and prioritize from the top down. Start every morning with the most important item, not the many small, easy tasks. You can always squeeze the little things into the gaps. Conquering the big to-dos gives meaning to your day. Schedule one purely joyful activity each week. Think of an activity—dancing, reading, playing guitar—that you haven't done for a long time and that brings you instant happiness. Put it in your datebook as a nonnegotiable appointment with yourself, and watch the quality of your life transform.

Affirmations and Positive Thinking

Affirmations are small but key positive messages to the self. They are used as reminders, helping to keep positive messages at the forefront of our consciousness. Not only is it important to regularly think these affirmations, it is a great idea to leave them lying around the place, where you will occasionally notice them. Some are very powerfully reinforced by looking at yourself in the mirror as you speak them Affirmations are a very powerful tool in supporting positive thinking and are very effective in changing life patterns and perspectives. I have produced 2 Affirmation CDs Heal Your Life - Chants and Meditations Heartfelt - Affirmations to Release the Past The benefit of positive thinking is medically well established. Affirmations allow you to consciously harness the power of positive thinking and direct it to specific areas of your life that need attention or where you want to bring about change. The great news is that affirmations really work and can transform your life! Affirmations and positive thinking are very powerful tools that can bring about healing and change. But BEWARE, negative thoughts are just as powerful and can be very self-destructive. Whilst we have no real control over the world and certain aspects of our lives, we do have control over the way we interpret and react to it. If you suspect you may have a lot of negative thoughts running through your mind subconsciously then it is worth doing some clearing work whilst dropping new positive affirmations in, this can be done on a weekend workshop, with a practitioner or by using techniques such as non-dominant hand work and guided meditations. "The thoughts we think and the words we speak create our experiences" You experience your interpretation as an internal dialogue. Thoughts, judgements and feelings are ceaselessly swirling through your mind. Thoughts like: I like this; I don't like that; I am afraid of this; I am unsure about him/her. This internal dialogue is not random, it is generated from a deep level by your beliefs and assumptions which have been formed and accumulated from the time you were born. It is worth remembering that a lot of these assumptions and beliefs were formulated as a child and have never been re-examined and therefore may be highly inappropriate to you as an adult or just simply wrong. When someone's interpretation changes, a change subsequently takes place in their reality. Thus we can make big changes in our lives by changing our thinking. "When your interpretation changes, so does your reality" Making Changes in our Thinking Awareness - Firstly, it helps to become aware of your thoughts and meditation can help us in the process of getting back in touch with ourselves. Just stopping and taking a second to think about why we are reacting to something or someone can also help us to get back in touch with what is really going on inside. Alternatively, we can just accept that our thoughts, whilst probably helping us in the past, may not be serving us now and just choose to re-programme ourselves with positive thoughts that heal and nourish us. The process of doing the new affirmations will start to release the old negative messages whether or not we are aware what they are.

Louise Hay

Louise Hay is a famous author and pioneer of self-healing guidance. She has written many books, including the original 'Heal Your Body' and 'You Can Heal Your Life' books; and these have become international best sellers. The teachings of Louise Hay have helped thousands to heal their lives and find a better way of living. Enabling them to realise that the power to change their lives, lay within themselves. By identifying and resolving issues from the past, releasing negative thoughts and behaviour patterns and finally embracing the healing effects of love and forgiveness, she has mapped out a path to life transformation. Her work encompasses many well established disciplines including meditation, positive affirmations and the development of self approval. As a metaphysical counsellor she has devoted her life to assisting others in discovering and using the full potential of their own creative powers. It could be said that all the wonderful works that Louise has done over the course of her life could be put down to the traumatic time she had in childhood. She was raped at the age of five and experienced abuse in various forms for most of her formative years. Having had a successful career as a model and coming out of a marriage after fourteen years she began working with and learning from, the Church of Religious science. Out of this work she produced the first version of the "Heal Your Body" book which was then more of a list of physical ailments and the likely emotional/mental causes. When Louise was subsequently diagnosed with Vaginal Cancer, whilst obviously a shock, it came as no real surprise as she had already learned of the effects of anger and resentment on the body and with her background she knew this was a likely cause. Having focused her attention on reading, learning and in some cases trying just about every kind of alternative treatment and cleansing programme, Louise realised that the key lay in loving herself. Six months later doctors confirmed what Louise already knew, that there was now no trace of cancer in her body. What more proof did she need In hindsight it is easy to see the wonderful progression that Louise made and that without that initial traumatic childhood we may not have the valuable gifts that Louise has shared with us. Louise now has a successful publishing house "Hay House" which she created herself , through which she publishes her own and other similar authors books. Whilst not involved now, for years she ran the successful "Hayride", a regular gathering for those with Aids which still carries on today. As she enters the next stage of her life Louise has tended to focus more on her "Elders of Excellence" development work, encouraging people approaching their later years to take their rightful place in society as teachers of wisdom.