Solitude by Imapix
Many excellent posts exist that help us to organize the ways we can improve our lives. As someone who has been through a lot of personal and professional change, I always remember that the only rule for changing my life is to get into and stay in action. It usually doesn’t make any difference what I do as long as I do something.
One of my favorite bloggers, Leo Babauta of Zen Habits, has written his Handbook for Life: 52 Tips for Happiness and Productivity. His suggestions for using these 52 tips are: (1) pick and choose the tips that are most helpful to you, (2) don’t do them all at once, (3) experiment, (4) none are guaranteed, and (5) these are not in any order.
From Nerds Do It Better, 100 simple ways to change your life for the better. This article is divided among the these categories:
1. Health—Good health is the foundation of a good life, so make these improvements, and they’ll resonate out to the rest of your life.
2. Social—Take these steps to change your social life for the better.
3. Emotional—Improve your emotional life with these simple strategies.
4. Financial—Make these changes to improve your life’s financial outlook.
5. Mental—Improve your mind by taking these simple steps.
6.Habits—Make these changes in your daily life to improve upon yourself.
7. Work—You spend so much time at work, but probably don’t often consider how you can improve upon this important facet of your life.
8. Community—Getting involved in your community is a great way to improve upon your life.
9. Environment—An excellent way to improve upon yourself is to reduce the negative impact you have on the world.
Some other quick links to improve your life:
My Top 10 Productivity Blogs for 2009 from organizeit.co.uk
GTD Refresh, Part 5: Building the Weekly Review Habit from lifehack.org
Singletasking: The Next Trend in Web Working?
You Travel Far to Discover Home by Ben
“Inner child is the carrier of our personal stories, the vehicle for our memories of both the actual child and an idealized child from the past. It is the truly alive quality of being within us. It is the soul, our experiencer throughout the cycles of life. It is the sufferer. And it is the bearer of renewal through rebirth, appearing in our lives whenever we detach and open to change.” Jeremiah Abrams
If you can help someone get in touch with the creativity inside them, you have helped a person discover the beautiful self he/she is inside. Our joy lives in our creativity which is the joyful, playful child inside. The self-esteem school of helping people requires living in the head. Getting in touch with creativity requires living in the heart.
“In the adult there lurks a child—an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and that calls for increasing care, attention, and education. This is the part of the human personality that wishes to develop and become whole.” Carl Jung
The inner child is a popular topic for many types of blogs. Some of the posts include the following ideas:
1. In Considering the Inner Child, Dr. Stephen Diamond writes: “We were all once children, and still have that child dwelling within us. But most adults are quite unaware of this. And this lack of conscious relatedness to our inner child is precisely where so many behavioral, emotional and relationship difficulties stem from.”
2. In How to Tame Your “Inner Brat”, according to psychologist Pauline Wallin, we need to “tame our inner brat” by aligning and squelching the nagging voice in our minds that fuels our dissatisfaction; in other words, that holds us “prisoners of our thoughts.”
3. From Livestrong.com, in an article about inner child, the following questions are answered:
The “inner child” is the…
How did the “inner child” get there?
What is the unfinished business of the “inner child”?
How does the “inner child” come into being?
What are the signs of activity of the “inner child”?
What messages did the “inner child” need to hear, but which went unsaid?
What are the negative consequences of suppressing the “inner child”?
What nurturing messages can you give your “inner child”?
What are some steps by which you can help heal your “inner child”?
Reflections on the Arctic Sea by Will Hybrid
“It requires a tremendous leap of faith to imagine that your own childhood—punctuated with pain, loss, and hurt-may, in fact, be a gift. Certainly the unhappiness you felt was not, in itself, a blessing; but in response to that pain, you learned to cultivate a powerful intuition, a heightened sensitivity, and a passionate devotion to healing and love that burns deep within you—and there are gifts that may be recognized, honored, and cultivated. You are not broken; childhood suffering is not a mortal wound.” Wayne Muller
I believe most of our emotional pain comes from experiences and misconceptions that happened during our childhood. One of the current books I’m reading is The Inner Child Workbook: What to Do With Your Past When It Just Won’t Go Away by Cathryn Taylor.
Her book is about our inner children. The inner child has been a subject of study for several years. But Cathryn suggests that we have several inner personalities. She specifically has chapters about the infant self, the toddler self, the young inner child, the grade-school child within, the young teen within, the adolescent within, and the young inner adult.
In the introduction by Rokelle Lerner, she mentions that inner child work demands courage and tenacity. She writes “the goal of inner child work is not to blame; rather, it is to awaken the childlike wonder and spontaneity and integrate them with an adult sense of responsibility and protection.”
The tools she recommends for healing are : (1) guided imagery, (2) verbal and written dialogues, (3) mirror work, (4) drawing, (5) using pictures from magazines, (6) activities, and (7) rituals.
For beginning, she recommends that this book not be used if:
1. Do not use this book if you are not interested in being able to feel your feelings.
2. Do not use this book if you are on prescription mood-altering drugs unless your work is supervised by a professional.
3. Do not use this book if you are in early recovery from chemical dependency. She recommends that you have twelve to twenty-four months of abstinence.
4. Do not use this book in isolation.
