a) Learn to “gentle” yourself during these periods.

b) Gauge your reactions to future events by asking yourself how you feel about this and learn to listen to your feelings. Feelings aren’t right or wrong, good or bad, but are only appropriate or inappropriate. So let your feelings be.

c) Many times we use our energy to try to change or stop what change is coming. Learn to “read” the change that is coming and make early decisions about which part of the change you can accept.

d) Bless what there is for being and let go of the rest.

e) The “blame and shame” game is a total waste of energy. The way to evaluate this is to ask if finding the “culprit” solves the problem. Generally, the answer is no—the rug still needs cleaning, the door is still locked, the work is still undone. Ask yourself is you’d rather be right or be happy.

Links for making change:

1. From the Positivity Blog: “How to Chill Out: 3 Habits That Help Me”

2.  From Pick the Brain: “5 Ways to Change a Habit”

3.  From Letting Go: Finding Hope through Al-Anon: “Voices in my head-Friends forever”

Photo credit.

Recovery is a spiritual journey. I believe we are souls with a human body. On my 40^th birthday I decided that I could take it with me. I could take my soul with me when I die. That was my conscious recognition of what would be the main theme for the rest of my life. Having had a spiritual awakening in January, 1977, I have sought to do God’s will for my life since then.

Having said that, I also recognize that many people who need recovery relief in their lives are turned off by spiritual guidance per say. So I have chosen to create an online addiction recovery center as a center for help, guidance, and direction.

In this, my 32^nd year of sobriety, and at the present age of 68 years, I am going through the hardest life experience I have ever had. I have decided to use my energy to move forward with my life. So I don’t spend time with any magical thinking to run away from reality. I have no job. I have spent the past four years writing which has culminated in 6 blogs. But I am receiving no income from them.

I have few readers due to many factors, I’m sure. So I am rereading the master bloggers that I read and love (see yesterday’s post “The Best Help”). From them I learn how to move forward in the blogging world.

One of the suggestions that I read was to combine two ideas together. I noticed several years ago that people who have changed the world with their creativity have combined an old product with a new twist. Ray Croc didn’t invent hamburgers. But he combined hamburgers with a clean environment. Who has not gone to McDonalds for the clean restrooms?

So I am combining my love of learning and teaching about our inner children (mislabeled as our inner child) with solutions for living in the real world. I will be adding healing direction with the problems each of us faces daily. I hope this will help others as much as it will help me.

I learned fifty years ago, if you want to learn about something, teach it. Teaching provides the vehicle for my sharing with the world. Not coincidentally, I have returned to the Twelve Step meetings with a much greater frequency. I know that nothing outside my self can heal me. So I begin the journey to my new self. She is waiting inside me and needs to be extra protected now.

God is good and is my constant companion and guide. I used to feel like I was the clay and He was the potter. Now I feel that I am in the stream of His consciousness. Heavy, I know, but this has been a 35 (11/24/2011) year journey.

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Each of us has unique talents and interests. These differences are the foundation for finding what you love to do. Discovering our life missions, calling, or career/job takes allowing yourself to be with you in peaceful spaces. Don’t use your brain or your mind to try to “figure” it out. Instead allow yourself to explore yourself and your talents and interests.

Steve Jobs in the commencement address he gave last year to Stanford University told three stories in what he called connecting the dots. The name of the address was: “You’ve got to find what you love.” The dots included the choices he made that later led to some of his amazing career development.

The choices were:

(1) He dropped out of college formally but stayed at the school for another 1 ½ years to take the courses he liked. One of those courses was calligraphy which later became the fonts for our personal computers.

(2) He was fired from Apple but started Pixar and NeXT during his readjustment period. Pixar created the first computer animated feature film, Toy Story. Apple bought Pixar and rehired Jobs.

(3) In 1994, he was diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas. His type of cancer was curable with surgery. But the lesson he learned from this experience is that death is life’s main change agent.

Our time here is limited so his message is to enjoy it and find what we love to do in life.

Photo credit.

For today I am reposting one of my posts about “Using Spirituality for Change”:

As we shift our feelings and thoughts to positive from negative, we become aware of the power that we feel inside. We are becoming aware of our soul. The soul is bigger that just our mind. It includes our dreams, our feelings as well as our thoughts.

I don’t think that we can try to attain the awakening of our soul in any other way than by choosing to put ourselves in the presence of the God of our understanding. Many centuries ago, a wonderful monk lived and wrote Practice in the Presence of God.

He taught me, centuries later, that all I had to do was practice presenting myself to my God. I didn’t have to do anything else but put myself in a place where the God of my understanding could communicate with me.

Prayer is when I communicate with my God and meditation is the practice of listening to God. Although I have tried many times to maintain the principles of meditation to my life, I have never been able to do meditation in the recommended ways.

Instead I set aside time several times a day to “check in” with Him. When I present myself to God for His answers, I come in a spirit of peace and quiet. I rarely “hear” anything. Instead I sense directions or guidances from Him. If my direction is God’s will for my life, the going will be easy. If I am trying to force something to happen, I will become stressed about it.

The difficulty is in getting out of God’s way. If I think that I know exactly the direction of God’s guidance, I have learned that it is probably my ego answering me. Another way that I use to understand God’s direction is to not do anything to force the outcome. I do the footwork and leave the outcome to Him. This is especially hard when all that maybe needed is a phone call.

If I don’t receive some kind of guidance, I realize that the answer may not be no, but rather may be later. This letting go releases great energy and feelings of belonging. “Let go and let God.”

How do you know that someone–regardless of age–is spiritual? Certainly not because they say they are. The best evaluation is to see the fruits of the Spirit manifested by them. The fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, kindness, self-control, patience, faithfulness, goodness, longsuffering and gentleness as listed in Galatians 5:22-23.

Wikipedia identifies mindfulness as “the practice whereby a person is intentionally aware of his or her thoughts and actions in the present moment, non-judgmental”. Although my faith is based in Jesus Christ, I am thankful that He has given me the gift of openness to explore and implement practices from other faiths.

In 1976, when I began implementing breathing exercise with meditation practices, I immediately knew that finding my center and focusing on my breath in and breath out enabled calm and peace to flow through my body. Being human, I learned in a moment what has taken a lifetime to implement. Transcendental meditation has been found to decrease heart rate and blood pressure because the mind-body connection prospers when one experiences peace and calm.

Photo credit.

The following quote is reprinted from a website that I can no longer access. If anyone knows the author’s name or new website, please email me. I believe wholeheartedly in what he is saying.

“You see, I believe we can get past this thing called alcoholism and addiction. We can get past it by taking advantage of every opportunity for abstaining that we encounter. For most people that includes a period of time in a 12 Step Program. If it’s not AA right off the bat, almost ALL Treatment Centers refer clients to the 12 step programs anyway. So if you haven’t done it already, go ahead, bite the bullet and put a little time into AA.

One thing you’ll learn there is what Not to do if you really want to stop drinking. You will have many, many opportunities to study people as they stumble through the obstacles they place before themselves on the way to sober living. There are tricks to not falling prey to self-destruction while learning to not drink, and it’s less painful to learn those lessons second hand. I learned a lot of them there.

The bottom line for everyone is that if you really want to get sober, you will get sober. It doesn’t matter what your gig is, it could be the fishing cure, church, a hot new babe, 12 steps, or plain hard assed self-preservation. When the nickel drops and you know what you need to do to get the job done,,,, go ahead and do it. And do it like you never did anything before, because getting sober takes all the passion you’ll ever have. Staying sober, it gets a lot easier after the first 10 or 15 years.”

I love reading and writers who know how to use words to make me feel something. I don’t live in my head any longer. Nor do I allow my feelings to dictate the direction for my life. I was reading through my favorite blogs today and came upon this: Ragamuffin Ramblings: Seeing what God can do..
What really got my attention was part of one of his sentences:”the blasting cap that started the implosion of my old life, and the beginning of new life out of the rubble of the old.” I never tire of reading about new beginnings that lead people to change their lives in radical ways. William James reported over 100 years ago that college students are particularly prone to spiritual conversion. He recounts 2 types of conversion experiences. One is the sudden, immediate conversion which is what I experienced. The other is a slow growth into the spiritual direction of God leading a conversion experiences.

Lewis Rambo has attributed seven characteristics to conversion experiences. “Conversions 1) take place within a given personal and social context, including the symbolic; 2) are catalyzed by a crisis, which can assume many guises; 3) involve an active search or quest for an answer, provided the potential convert is intellectually, emotionally and religiously ready; and 4) are mediated by an encounter with an advocate for a particular resolution, whose strategy and methods must match the needs of the potential convert. Conversions also require 5) interaction with the community of faith and result in both 6) a commitment to the new faith in the form of experienced surrender to it and 7) significant personal consequences through the exercise of it.”

A reader’s strategies for coping with adult ADHD and procrastination

B

Break out of your comfort zone to achieve success

6 reasons why you should be your own boss

Beyond thinking different to doing different

C

An exercise in changing yourself

Change-here’s how!

Hoping to change careers in the New Year? Try these seven radical steps

Using your decision=making style to improve your career planning

Choose to be gracious every day

Changing your mutual fund portfolio

10 ways to embrace change

Could you achieve more by doing less?

Conscious living–seven tips

D

Seven simple steps to realizing your dreams

E

F

Falling in love with your  life

G

H

I

J

What to do if you are unhappy at your job

Simplify your job search with RSS and Google Reader

K

L

Lessons from Africa: how to stay sane when things don’t go as they should

5 ways of using limits to get more enjoyment out of your life today

How layoffs can sometimes be a good thing

Luck is no accident: 10 ways to get more out of work and life

M

How to create the habit of daily meditation

Ways to keep your mealtime sane

Motivation to stay sober

To change the world, change your mind

N

Need help with your New Year’s resolutions

New Year’s resolution: build your strengths

No limit for better

O

P

Find your passion–6 tips to discovering what ignites your fire

Productivity bleeds through

365 day project–explore your potential

6 steps to finding your true purpose

Q

R

S

Setting yourself up to succeed

Sleep tips: how to make going to bed fun

20 powerful beliefs that will push you toward success

T

If it matters to you, keep track of it

My transformation from high school drop out to surgeon

U

V

W

Creating a good work environment and a great brand

5 reasons why you might not want to work for yourself

X

Y

Z

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Change Yourself:

How to change yourself—long article from ezine articles:

http://ezinearticles.com/?How-Do-You-Change-Yourself?&id=10264

10 tips to change yourself from a dedicated couch-potato to a gym enthusiast   Written by Gretchen Rubin of the Happiness Project.

http://blog.liferemix.net/10-tips-change-yourself-dedicated-couch-potato-gym-enthusiast

Fun makes change easy: harness the power of your inner child

(Includes TA)

http://www.evenhappier.com/2007/01/if_you_decide_to_change_get_th.html

Tom Helsen ‘Change Yourself’(You Tube) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGxr-utCzoI

Do You Need a Life Change?  http://www.squidoo.com/changelife

Resources:

Change Agent at Work:

Fastcompany.com—change agent for years—check archives for article about this resource– http://www.fastcompany.com/search/fc?filter0=%22change+agent%22

Understanding the Change Process

Leadership and Change

http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/leader/leadchg.html

Resources:

Managing change

http://www.work911.com/managingchange/index.htm

Managing Change – Understanding How Individuals Change
Resistance To Change – How and Why People Resist Change
Managing Change – Step By Step Change Management For Change Leaders
Managing Change – Key #1 – Empathy
Managing Change – Key #2 – Communication
Managing Change – Key #3 – Participation

Change Your World:

What do you want to change in the world?

www.change.org

Lists 2057 ways to change our world

Has a changes page to list progress:  http://www.change.org/changes

Main 8 are:

1)    End global hunger

2)    End dependency on oil

3)    Eliminate child labor worldwide

4)    Protect endangered habitats

5)    Promote fair trade

6)    End homelessness

7)    Save Darfur

8)    Stop global warming

You Can Help Change the World! http://www.squidoo.com/changeworld

Are you happy with your weight right now? If not, I recommend using this new vocabulary menu served up below.

1. I banned the word “diet“ completely and renamed my actions as “do-it.” I wanted to ingrain into my brain that I was really going to do it – lose this weight!

2. I “appreci-eat” my food. This word is all about slowing down how you eat, which allows you to taste and appreciate food more, which leads you to eating less.

3. I now label foods as “forward” and “backward.”Every food I choose to eat helps me become more conscious of how it either moves me forward to my fab weight or backward to my flab weight.

4. I’ve relabeled my eating habits as “the old me” and “the new me.” All your habits in life come from your identity. If you think, “I always overeat late at night,” guess what? You do! If you think, “The old me used to overeat late at night, but the new me can resist pigging out – even on chocolate,” guess what? The new you will be very much going forward to a fab weight, instead of backward to your flab weight.

5. I swapped mere tiny “willpower“ for “wall-power!”Nothing is able to break through my wall of commitment!

6. I began talking more about ways to “increase my appetite for life.”  After all, if you want to be a slim, healthy person, it’s essential you swap the pleasure of food with life’s multitudinous other delights. If you want to lose weight, you must make sure your appetite for life is far bigger than your appetite for merefood. How do you increase your appetite for life? Stop allowing yourself to focus on depressing life circumstances — including focusing on being depressed about your weight. All this negative focus will only lead you to feeling bummed and wanting to pig out. Instead, consciously focus on happy life circumstances you enjoy doing, and create more of them! Swap chips and salsa for salsa classes! Stop eating cake, and start painting fruit baskets! Recognize how the joy of taking photos lasts longer than the joy of ice cream!

7. I recognize when I’m “do-it-ing” to become my slimmest, I’m not merely looking to create “a better number on my scale.” I’m looking to permanently adjust my “masochistic equilibrium level.” What’s this and how does it work? Well, it’s as if each of us grew up feeling comfy with a certain level of happiness. When this happiness concentration shifts, even if it’s upward to feeling incredible big happiness, then a lot of us feel twitchy and overeat, thereby raising our weight upward so as to lower our self-love, so as to lower our happiness, which reverts us to our familiar “masochistic equilibrium level” leftover from childhood. Basically, if you want to get and stay at your slimmest weight, you must be ready to throw out these old childhood emotional  leftovers. When you’re truly ready to be happy in life, then you’re truly ready to be happy about your weight.

II. “What are You Waiting For” by Carolyn Rubinstein:

The action itself is not what we fear – it is our thoughts that are restraining. Break free from those thoughts and move towards action. Soon enough, small steps will become the equivalent of a giant leap toward the creative, the passionate, the driven, and the anew. Use these four steps to aid yourself in the process of revitalization.

1. Ask yourself tough questions. What is the cost of inaction? Create a “why not?” list and ask yourself if the benefits outweigh these negative thoughts. Think about the consequences of the status quo internally and externally.

2. Accept rational accountability. Decide to change your inaction and make yourself accountable for both your actions and inaction. I grew up learning that there are actions of commission and acts of omission. We are equally responsible for what we do and don’t do.

3. Follow your own advice.If a friend were in the same scenario, what advice would you give him or her? Taking a step back from the problem or scenario might help you gain objectivity. Sometimes being too entrenched can cloud our judgment.

4. Always listen to your intuition.Do a gut check and gauge what the heart and mind can’t. Remember that this requires little thinking… What’s your first reaction? How do you viscerally respond to what’s going on? If you have strong feelings, listen to them.

The bold action that you take doesn’t have to be anything grandiose; it can merely be a step away from ambivalence and inactivity. We may not always get our decisions “right,” but there is something both beautiful and powerful about taking action. What are you waiting for?

Are you stuck in a comfort zone? Or have you successfully overcome the strong magnetic pull of this place of inaction? Share your thoughts, questions, or sage advice below. (If you don’t typically leave comments, begin taking bold action by starting today!)

III. Jill Chivers writing for Illuminated Mind. Net posted “Three Ways to Deal With Difficult Emotions“:

The following excerpt is taken from her third way–transforming the emotions:

“a) Labelling — putting a label on the emotion. This works best when you are succinct — if you talk too much about or enter into a dialogue with your emotions, it tends to increase the level of painful emotions you experience. So short is better – sit with the emotion for a moment, give it a label, let it go. I was a conference call the other day and found myself getting agitated by what someone was saying. Instead of pushing that emotion down or trying to ignore it, I gave it a few seconds of attention, asking myself what is this emotion? When I found it – annoyed – I did a quick label “I’m feeling annoyed” then let it go – so much easier to do after I’d quickly labelled it. The other thing that works well with labelling is using a metaphor – “this emotion is like….” I’ve used this approach in corporate workshops for years and I can tell you it works. We did an exercise where we used metaphor cards to help identify emotions. This emotion is like a herd of zebras – there’s dark and light here. Or this emotion is like a garden path – it’s taking me somewhere. It doesn’t have to make logical sense (metaphors often don’t); your unconscious knows how it folds together. This is not a process you need to share – it is largely an internal process.”

“(b) Reframing — putting a different interpretation onto the same set of circumstances (or “facts”). This is an effective “braking” mechanism – it puts the kybosh on your strong emotional pain in smart order. It’s a version of Shakespeare’s tenet that “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”. How you sort and ‘file’ the event makes all the difference in the world to how you feel about it and how it affects you. You can label it horrible, bad, terrible….. Or you can print out a different label like “useful” or “I learned something important” or “the upside to this was…”. Even if you’re not sure if this possible or that there’ll be a single answer to those questions, try it. You’ll be amazed at how your unconscious will deliver an answer to you, if you only ask, be still, don’t judge and listen.”

“WARNING: Reframing painful events takes effort! Rock calls it “metabolically expensive”. That means you have to effectively delete the original scene and re-direct/script it into a better-serving scene. This is akin to a director re-shooting, re-editing (maybe even re-casting) and re-shaping the scene in a movie. Reframing takes time and energy but it is worth it because it is so powerful. The good news? The more you practice, the better you get at it and the easier it becomes. And the quicker you muscle in those poorly filed memories, the easier it is to reframe them in a way that helps you more effectively deal with that crazy thing called life.”

Photo credit.

Earth From Heaven by hamedsaber

One of the main considerations in reinventing yourself is to prepare yourself financially. Take Away the Worry offers the following quiz for preparing yourself financially.

“Take this quiz to how prepared you are financially to make a change:

1. Do I have cash reserves in a savings account that equals at least three month’s of my essential living expenses?
2. Do I know how much my monthly essential living expenses are? Do I set aside time every day or every few days to monitor my checking accounts and pay bills?
3. Do I keep my credit card balances at zero?
4. Do I enjoy my money without having to go into debt to purchase things I desire?
5. If I had to fly across country, could I purchase the tickets without having to charge them to my credit card?
6. Could I live on 60 percent of my current include for the next couple of months?
7. Do I regularly check my credit report and know my credit score?
8. Do I consistently save for the future?”

“If you find yourself answering “no” to two or more of the above, you may want to look for a temporary income source as you work on reinventing yourself. It doesn’t have to be big and it doesn’t have to be steady. Save this income for retirement purposes and try to live on your earned income alone.”

I am calling this post financial freedom because I have allowed poverty thinking to dominate my life. I grew up in a household that used money as the battleground. Both parents used money for emotional needs. So I guess I chose at a young age to fear making money and being secure financially. Consequently, I have always struggled to keep myself living at a poverty level. I’ve come to believe that one of my basic concepts about myself has been that I didn’t deserve to be content and secure. I know that money alone is not the answer to anything. But constantly struggling about money is very tiring on the mind, body and soul.

Some quick links for financial help or ideas:

25 Essential Books About Money: Financial Wisdom from Your Public Library

Are Trolls Ruining Social Media?

http://www.freemoneyfinance.com/2009/06/your-own-personal-money-stress-test.html

Gardening for Health, Wealth, and Independence

By Athena's Pix

Robert Bacal’s article (“Understanding the Change Process-How Individuals Change“) lists eight ways change can be managed in the workplace. His Ideas are:

Organizational change will succeed to the extent that individuals in the organization, themselves change.

Steps in the personal change process:

1. Contact stage
2. Awareness stage
3. Understanding stage
4. Positive perception
5. Installation stage
6. Adoption stage
7. Institutionalization
8. Internalization

Some of the other articles by Robert Bacal are:

Managing Change – Understanding How Individuals Change
Resistance To Change – How and Why People Resist Change
Managing Change – Step By Step Change Management For Change Leaders
Managing Change – Key #1 – Empathy
Managing Change – Key #2 – Communication
Managing Change – Key #3 – Participation