Tuesday 22 January 2013

Clean Up with Love

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Click to go back to the main menu for Mickie Kent's Love Your Mind, Body and Soul Series

“There is that one point in your life where everything falls into place, and everything just clicks. It could a precious memory of gentle youth you hold dear to your heart, or that wild triggering event in your business or career when you soared to the next level. We know the feeling of that one perfect day; that feeling of everything working, coming together. The amazing thrill of hope, passion and excitement, all rolled into one. This is what I like to call the peak of life, but many of us will fail to reach it until we can remove all noise, clutter and unwanted thoughts in our way that sabotage us from our mind.”
— Mickie Kent

On the subject of long-lasting life transformation, experts tell us it doesn't matter if you meditate for longer hours, it doesn't matter if you fall into deep state of hypnosis, and it definitely doesn't matter if you suppress your negative thoughts, and drown it in positive thinking - because you need to first need to face what some have termed as your "shadow side".

It is thought we must call our shadows out into the light, and then embrace them, and forgive them; but refuse to allow them to rule our life. It is only then we can find redemption, and move on to do good things. Because unless you can get "clean" in your head, you won't move up in your life. As an apt parable of modern times, the life of disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong - for using performance-enhancing drugs - has been a prime example of years of denial culminating in the public shaming of the drug abuse that went on in sport cycling history. If Armstrong had not "come clean" then his past would have held him hostage.

Do you feel haunted by decisions you have made (or haven't made) in the past? Do you have a list of things you wish you had never done or said? Do you feel you missed certain opportunities because you made the wrong decisions? If you answered "Yes" to any of these questions, then your past is holding you hostage.

7 steps to keep from living in the past and missing out on today

  1. Meditate. Use a centring meditation technique to learn to relax your body and brain, quiet your mind and create a tranquil mental state where the emotions of the past do not pollute the present. Be fully present – focus on your breath, focus on a song or a mantra, and any time your thoughts wander to the past, turn your thoughts to NOW. After some practice you'll find it easier to direct your mind's focus and keep it from straying to the past.

    Read about the power of meditation.

  2. Be grateful. When you can be grateful for everything that has happened, you release those old hurts. Make a real effort to be grateful for the experiences of the past, especially the difficult experiences. How have you grown from them? What did you learn? How have those experiences shaped you? Without these experiences, you would not be who you are today.
  3. Tell a new story. Incredible as it may sound, you perpetuate the past by telling the same story about yourself. Any time you perpetuate a story about yourself - "I can't do (whatever)" or "I've never been able to (whatever)" then how can you ever expect improve? You MUST align your speech and your goals. Even if you don't believe you can achieve your goals yet, you must speak as if you have 100% confidence in yourself. Drill it into your head that your goals are not only possible but achievable by YOU. Simply start telling a new story about yourself. Not in an arrogant or conceited way, of course. Just make your speech reflect your potential, not your limitations. Not much later, you will start believing what you say, and the old limitations of the past will be released.
  4. Forgive. Forgiveness does not mean condoning another person's behaviour (or even your own); it means letting go of the burden of anger, guilt, etc., and moving on. Sometimes forgiveness can change the world, especially our own.
  5. Evaluate. Remember that your past is only for you to learn from; it's not true of you now, if you keep it in perspective. Think about a past pain and evaluate its usefulness in your life right now. How does that past pain affect you? What problems does it cause? Does it make you happy or unhappy? Does it affect your relationships and interfere with your work? Does it keep you from going for your dreams? Guilt and shame can drain your energy. If a pain does not serve you well, then say, "I do not need this pain. It belongs in the past". You'll need to practice this, but you can completely release the emotional burden of a past event (and still retain the "cold hard facts" of the event in your memory). Use visualisation techniques to "see" the old memory without its emotional baggage.
  6. Take responsibility. You can't control what another person did or said, but have you taken responsibility for your role in the situation? Shift your mindset from being a victim to being a participant. What might you have done differently? You CAN'T go back and take that action now, so be grateful that you understand the lesson and that you are responsible for your actions, and relegate that memory to the archives. You don't need to visit it again if you don't want to.
  7. Accept. What happened in the past is history. If you carry anger, bitterness, resentment and guilt, experts in this field say it is because you choose to carry them, or see them as negative.

    There is a story that illustrates this point: Two Zen monks were walking and they came to a wide river. On the riverbank, they saw a young woman, crying because she needed to cross the river but did not know how to swim. She begged the two monks to carry her across the river. The younger monk immediately refused, since he was forbidden to touch a woman. The older monk didn't hesitate and without a word, he picked up the young woman and carried her across the river.

    The younger monk chastised the older monk for breaking a vow. As they walked, the young monk could not let go of his disappointment in his mentor's behaviour and his tirade continued for many miles until the two stopped for the evening. The younger monk continued his complaining, this time turning it to how tired he was after the long walk. With a kind look, the older monk said to the younger monk, "It is no wonder you are exhausted! I only carried the woman across the river. You have been carrying her all day."

    As in the story, you have a choice. While you cannot control the actions of others, you CAN control your response and you can control your choice to hang on.

In attempting to release the past consider this: What you focus on, expands. Do you want the past to consume your life? Do you want to miss out on life because you're stuck somewhere long ago and far away? Focus on NOW. Focus on living. Experts say we can use visualisation exercises to gently but firmly redirect our focus any time it reverts to its usual merry-go-round of regret. You do not need to live in the past. Make that choice today, to be in the now.

Click here to rewire your mindset for success!

Moreover, sometimes what seems a mistake at the time is really an opportunity realised with hindsight. It happens so often that the positive reason for something that seemed like a mistake is revealed to us later. And we can draw power from this: Any time you find yourself wanting to beat yourself up for something that happened in the past that feels like a mistake, remember that it is in our power to seize it as an opportunity to rise to the challenge.

Once you get into this mindset, you will find that it becomes much easier to let go of the past and free yourself to live in the now. In constantly reliving the past, we lose our present - so how do we reclaim our now? Have you ever replayed past mistakes in your head, over and over again until you make yourself crazy with guilt and regret? Or kept going back in time, wishing you could have a do-over? "If only" is a chain that holds you tied to the past, with a force that prevents you from fully enjoying the present, and freely creating your future.

Holding on to past hurts - which is what we hold on to long after we should have let go - strains relationships, makes us hesitate when opportunities present themselves, distracts us from work and our loved ones, and keeps us from missing out on the delightful and important moments we are living right now.

Learning to let go and release the past is so liberating, and so healing, you will wish you had learned how to do this long ago. Letting go of people (unhealthy relationships), desires, bad habits, regrets, guilt, limiting beliefs and other thoughts that consume your energy will allow you to move forward with happiness and a peaceful mind.

Although there are those who believe that the popular claim the brain is like a computer is a myth, some believe the mind is a lot like the operating system of a computer. They say that over time, both get cluttered with content that is essentially just "junk" that slows the system down and reduces its efficiency. Sometimes it even brings in bugs or viruses that further upset the overall operation of these computers (real or mental) and change their behaviour.

Unless you take actions to strip away the "crud", it just keeps building up and soon you are running all sorts of unhealthy "programmes" that do nothing more than degrade the quality of the operating system. But instead of periodically cleaning them out, like we might do with our computers, we allow the build up in our minds to just keep expanding. Eventually it takes it's toll.

One of the exercises experts suggest involves trying to clear your mind and think about something pleasant for just 15 seconds without having your mind be interrupted by any other unrelated or negative thought. Imagine doing this for 15 minutes, it turns out to be very difficult to do unless you have complete control over the operation of your mind.

Is your mind all clogged up?

Our parents taught us to wash our bodies, brush our teeth and clean our hands. But they never taught us to wash the junk out of our minds. Much like a fish tank, our mind can be an "escape proof" environment. For example, you can't "unthink" a thought. You can have a negative thought, and re-direct your thinking away from that thought - but you cannot unthink it. It's like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube, you can never get it all back in - something gets left behind.

Likewise, you have a negative thought, and like fish poop that sinks to the bottom of the tank, that thought stays in your mind, on some level, in some secret little hiding place - only to be "re-introduced" to your conscious mind at an inopportune moment. Point being we can cover up our emotions and mental stress for only so long. You can't undo a thought that does not serve you, you just have to figure out how to remove its "power".

Experts suggest the best way to do this and help us balance out our moods is with meditation. It helps put life in perspective. Take a moment, and look at how "far" your current mind allows you to go in your vision of your future self? If your answer isn't clear, then experts tell us there is too much waste in your mental waters, and we must get to cleaning it! All the doubts, fears, insecurities, etc., are junk floating around your mind clouding your vision of what is possible.

We are all vibrant, brilliant, wonderful and glorious beings. Every single time you know and believe that, you are eliminating the daily junk from your mind. As with the toothpaste example, those negative/limiting thoughts and beliefs may not go away entirely, but you can "blast" them out of your "mental tank" to such a degree that they no longer exist in your belief of what is possible. You get rid of the junk an don't allow it to muddy your waters or clog themselves at the bottom of the tank. With your mind clear and your dreams in front of you, there is little that you cannot do, see, accomplish, experience, achieve.

Armed with this confidence, you can do just about anything, because with grounded, realistic confidence you believe in yourself and accept your limitations. With such confidence you know you'll make the right choices. Without it you'll continue to struggle. This type of confidence is something you can develop over time, and through "mind cleansing" meditation, experts say.

Daily meditation helps us sit and cleanse away old thoughts and beliefs. It'll also sharpen your mind, and boost your energy levels. Whether it works by simply calming the mind and lowering stress hormones like cortisol, or by changing our brainwaves, meditation is like giving your brain a daily refreshing shower. Learn to use the breath to clean the junk out of the corners of your brain. It is time to give your brain a break with these recommended 4 simple tips.

  1. Create a quiet, uninterrupted space.
  2. Get into a comfortable seated position (or chair)
  3. Inhale for 7 seconds, hold. Exhale for 7 seconds. Repeat.
  4. Let your breath do all the work.

We all have our demons to face, but it needn't be something we have done "wrong". Sometimes the greater misfortune of others, such as Armstrong's drug abuse, can be a warning bell to help us keep our perceived problems, injustices, and adversities in proper perspective. By perspective, I mean about the capacity to view things on their relative level of importance. How right Socrates was when he said, "If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own."

Today you're passed over for a promotion, and you think the world is coming to an end. Tomorrow you lose your job, and a promotion is no longer important to you; you just yearn to have your job back. Then you lose your health, and suddenly you realize how good you had it when your only problem was not having a job.

One of the main reasons we have such difficulty seeing our everyday problems in a relative light is that we take ourselves too seriously. There's a fine line between pathos and humour, and one of the many advantages that a human being has over every other species is that we possess the capacity to transcend ourself, i.e., the ability to detach ourself both from situations and from our own thoughts.

That's the way things have been since time immemorial. Everything that exists today in spirit has happened before, and being able to see the lighter side of the story can help during hard times. Science tells us that men and women are strange "beasts" that go through life susceptible to the same influences they've always been susceptible to since the dawn of their time. No matter what happens, our lives are ultimately governed by influences - whether another's or our own. It might seem like we live in a terrifying world, but the important thing is to understand them and find meaning in them, and thus discover the keys to your own happiness.

Click here for 40 tips to a happier life.

Do you ever feel held back by things that have happened in your past? Or like your life has already "happened" and it's difficult to change course? Or frustrated by how slow things seem to change for you? When you are mentally blocked, or locked elsewhere (e.g., in the mistakes of the past, or the fears of the future) then you will find it difficult to choose to focus instead on taking action to change your life at present. We must forget the pain of the past, but not what it taught us, and to that there is one simple rule to follow: let more love and laughter into your life. With love we can forgive the past, and face our fears - while humour can help us detach ourselves and put our struggles into perspective.

As with the use of humour and transcendence, humans are the only living creatures who can laugh at themselves. We can choose not to see every problem, every injustice, and every adversity as a life-or-death matter. Not every bad break turns out to be a problem; not every problem is a bona fide injustice; and not every injustice is of major importance when juxtaposed against the millions of injustices that occur daily throughout the world.

To paraphrase Charles Dickens' first paragraph in A Tale of Two Cities: It was the best of times; it was the worst of times; it was, in fact, pretty much like any other time. Which is to say that crises come and go, but only one time in history is the world going to come to an end - and one thing about which you can be certain is that you won't be around to remember how it happened anyway.

Fortunately, we have been given the ability to view our problems in such a relative light, and learning to view things in this way is a skill that is almost certain to add many quality years to your life. And love, too, will most certainly add quality to our lives.

It is important that we understand love; there will be those critics that don't believe in love, or view it as just the science and physics of procreation - the will of life pushing us to join together and multiply for the survival of our species. However, love (even if it is only the pull of inherent genes within the law of physics) used as motivation and drive can bring sensory enlightenment to our lives. Love can heighten our senses. It can make us feel fully awakened, and give us the drive to operate in society as a cognitive part of a conscious whole.

Start co-existing with love.

It makes us care and protect our families, feel passion for our business to bring value to others, even respect our material belongings as aids to help us to function in life, but also providing the wisdom to know that those same material things are not the function of life. Love helps us contribute to the world, provide for our family, nurture and protect our children, apprentices and the next generation.

Love can help us "clean" our minds, become and fully aware and grounded. When we are faced with challenges, if we look at them with love, we can essentially hit the reset button of forgiveness, leave the problems where they fall, and instead pick up solutions to continue on our path to personal success.

We all been told by the money spinning gurus that if you want to attract your desires in your life, manifest reality from what you visualise, or live your true potential and life's purpose you have to clear away the noise, clutter and unwanted thoughts in your head. Well love is that spiritual technology, which we ignore like some 3,000 year old, long lost secret. But love is right beside us; we only need take one small step to bring it into our lives, to uplift us, and our days.

5 ways for an uplifting start to your day

Do you ever feel tired, numb, or disconnected from life? If you want to get your day off to an uplifting start, then experts recommend you develop morning rituals that give you a positive framework for the rest of the day. These steps for personal success are not difficult, but they do require your commitment to make them a part of your daily routine.

At the very least they will deliver happier results than stumbling out of bed, dashing to get dressed and cursing the day as you grab your jacket on the way out. Here are five morning rituals that you can wake up with and start living more fully - today and every day. The choice is yours.

  1. Early to rise: Farmhands seem to have latched onto something with their pattern of rising early in the morning. The quiet stillness of the morning is very favourable to clear thinking, quiet reflection and rejuvenation of your energy. In addition, rising early gives you time to calmly carry out the numerous activities that need to be done before you leave the house. If you have a houseful of room mates or family members, at a minimum get up an hour before they do. Give yourself some "me" time; love yourself and know that you are enough.

    If you're not a natural early riser, or even if you are, you can start your day slowly and with love by "kissing yourself" every morning. You can do this by taking long deep breaths, reading some power affirmations you have made, lighting a scented candle with your favourite scent, making tea and even writing down your thoughts if you're moved to. Even if you have to get up 15 minutes earlier, choose a time when your home is quiet and you're the only soul awake. Or ask the waking souls to share your solace, so you can each have your personal space. This step is worth it. You don't have to choose monk-like activities. Do what your kiss beckons you to do.

    Ask yourself: Are you always trying to be who you think you should be, rather than simply being who you are? Are you always trying to be perfect, pushing yourself harder and harder, trying to reach this unattainable goal (and, possibly, making yourself miserable in the process)? Isn't it time you start to honour and care for yourself? Begin to experience the power of self-love, and you'll start coming back to life.

    Discover your magic time.

  2. Shake (or stretch) a leg: You can take your pick of yoga, dance or taking a walk around the block, but shake a leg in the morning before you get fully into your day. Try and add some stretching exercises in there, too. A good stretch in bed can refresh you, while light exercise leaves you feeling more relaxed than you were before you worked out. You will also look and feel better when you exercise regularly, which can boost your self-confidence. It is not surprising that many people also say that solutions to some nagging problems come to them during their early morning exercise routine.

    Boost your mood with dance.

    You can also use this as an opportunity to connect with others. Do you ever feel like you're a solo act? Like you have to do it all yourself? It's great to be self-reliant, but this can lead to you feeling disconnected, overworked, and overwhelmed. Whenever you're feeling this way, remember: You don't have to go it alone. Partner up for a quick morning exercise with a loved one.

    Get physical for health.

    The more you let others into your life, the more you'll find that the world is filled with good people who genuinely want to help you, care for you, and connect with you. And when you do reach out and connect with these good people, you'll notice that your own heart becomes fuller, you'll feel so much more plugged in and alive, and you'll have more to give back to all those wonderful people in your life.

  3. Meditation is a key helper: Meditation gives you an opportunity to get your mind at peace. No need for 30 minutes of meditation and a roomful of candles. A quick 10 minutes will do well for starters. The hardest part in the beginning will be to centre your thoughts as numerous distractions flood your mind.

    Take your fear out of the driver's seat. We all feel fear, but that fear doesn't have to call the shots! Living fully - and soulfully - doesn't mean being fearless. It means listening to your soul and saying yes, even when your fear is screaming no! It means living on purpose and having faith that you'll always be supported. It means leaping toward your dreams even when you're scared. Living this way may not feel easy at first, but the more your soul overrides your fear, the more natural it becomes. Remember: fear is a weed that can only grow if it's watered - so stop watering it. Tend to the other flowers in your mind and heart, and pretty soon they will far outgrow the withered, dried-out fear.

  4. Count your blessings: You can lose sight of the great things and people that are already in your life, if you fail to acknowledge them. Take a moment to really be thankful for all in your life that brings you joy and pleasure. Be grateful for where you are starting from. We sometimes have a tendency to beat ourselves up for not being where we think we should be. And this just makes us feel even worse about ourselves. Accepting where you are right now in this moment - being OK with it, and even being grateful for it - is a great first step toward truly embracing your life exactly as it is, while still moving into the life you want.

    We need to actively increase our blessings, too. Although waking up early with the right mindset and eating a healthy breakfast after some exercise can help set us up for the day, cultivating what nourishes us beyond food and contemplation is also beneficial. What's the one thing you could do that would be all yours and would bring you lots of happy memories and smiles and thus increase your blessings? Take your passions out into the real world. Contemplate on how and when, but make sure you take the decision to just do it and dive in.

    Discover your passions.

    Remember that what you focus on increases. Start counting your blessings daily and look out for more to appear in your life. Sarah Breathnach said it best, "When we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance that's present, we experience Heaven on Earth".

  5. Brand new day: Put the past day away and fully embrace the brand new day that you have before you. Do not pull the old baggage of an unhappy yesterday into today. You can use your powers of visualization or active day dreaming to mentally create a day where things work out in your favour. See your world as a supportive and loving environment where all things work to your good.

    Open up to the gift of life all around you. It's great to focus on what you're doing - on the task right in front of you - but sometimes, especially if you're ultra-busy, that focus can turn into tunnel vision. When that happens, it's easy to forget that there's so much more to life. But when you take time to look around and open up to life, the signs, and the beauty all around you, your entire world changes. And you'll see how you fit into this beautiful world, how you're an integral part of an amazing whole.

If used right, love can make us a blank slate, where we can wake each morning and look at the world that wakes with us as though seeing it for the first time, with the awe of the newborn. Some even say it is only through love that we can fully experience the abundance of the universe, because unless you get intimate with your life, you can't understand its true purpose and passion. And if we can't understand life's purpose, how can we possibly hope to understand our own?

Thus to serve this greater understanding, we need to break the trance of negative self-talk and the behaviour that follows it to clog up our brains and lives. Bear witness to the negative self talk. Notice the chaotic noise, the ever-changing stories. Now pause and remember that the voice in your head isn't you. You are love, and so divine. And the real you isn't even you - some experts say you are beyond all knowing and attachment. But we forget this golden pearl of wisdom when the mad, wild voice holds us hostage. So the advice here is to notice the voice, but don't adhere to it. Give it a shape and a nickname if you need to. Anything to show you how separate that voice is from you.

Then, secondly, have compassion for yourself. We often confuse the mastery we can have over our emotions as somehow meaning that suffering is optional. Suffering is a natural part of life. We can't avoid it. We're not robots. The trick is how we face our suffering and the challenges it brings. It can also add perspective to all those smaller challenges. Those small things that don't touch us unless we allow them to. And when we are faced with deep and layered suffering, acknowledge it and then bear-hug it with compassion. Compassion is the medicine. Once you apply compassion you will be able to take the lessons and move through the discomfort. Residual soft-spots may remain, but they won't petrify you. We all have scars. They give us character. They're just a part of you. And when we understand this, only then how you see youself will be all that really matters.

And when we suffer from an absence of love in our lives, we cheat others and ourselves. Some of us will have heard the saying, "Everybody wants to go to Heaven, but nobody wants to die". In essence it means none of us get something for nothing, but we would all like to try. So, we think that love is about getting something for nothing, but it isn't - because love isn't about what others can do for us, but what we can do for ourself and others. Moreover, it's often been said that the truest sense of philanthropy is when one man plants a tree whose shade will benefit someone he will never meet; and some say the purpose of love is to make good people better.

But it's not about being a "suffering hero" to the detriment of yourself, so much so that you become a "victim". We want to save the world and ourselves within it. Love should be a win-win situation. The people we love will nourish our lives, and make us want to improve everyone we meet and everything we touch. Such enlightenment is a chain reaction, one act of love moves on down the line and continues. And through love, life has a habit of throwing up such remarkable connections, for when love returns back to you, you will often find it increased; because as I often say, love does not halve, but doubles in its sharing.

Love and fear can both inspire us to sacrifice, but only love inspires worthy sacrifice; the benefits of which can be felt even after death. With the support of love, we can view death is a necessary process rather than a devastating moment in time - it is a process, a transition, life ebbs away slowly. And if we view loss through the enduring qualities of love, we invariably will see to question the reality behind the reality.

Survey your life

This is the question great thinkers have asked since human consciousness evolved to ask it. What is the reality behind reality? Is physical life a hallucination? Is there some definable concrete reality, of which your own is a mere shadow? Is our earthly life simply one version of reality - not reality in its entirety, but a part of it? Is it, in itself, only an avenue through which we perceive what really is, or is this "picture" we are show by our senses all there really is until those senses stop projecting?

Some say that we see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With limited physical, feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos. But we need to be reminded how large the heavens are and how little time we have on this Earth to do what we're supposed to do - make the most of what we are, welcome love when we find it, and be happy.

If I hear you say, "Oh, is that all?" That's not only all, it is everything. Those that put their faith in love feel that reality must exist independently of our physically oriented consciousness, because love seems to transcend the physical (or make us want to at least). We believe love is filled with great potential, and feel heartened that we are its greatest potential to bring it to life. We are its vessels, and the source for its endless capacity. So we take it to our hearts - and sometimes love can speak to us without words, but with one look, or touch.

However, while we are creatures of physical awareness, we must be also interpreted through our neurological structure and our corporeal aliveness - and so, too, must love. Although we believe it adds spirituality to our lives, it is very much an earthly passion, too. It is the very reason, some would say, that down the centuries we have sought for the answers to life through love, because love makes us feel real, it makes us feel alive.

We are receivers of sensations. Physically our existence is perceived through the senses, and love heightens those senses. In that context of corporeal life, with the focus largely concentrated on the senses, belief is restricted only to the reality of their sensations. yet, there is adage that we should not think as much as we can see, but see as much as we think. Thus love expands our vision, to think out of the box. Furthermore, love helps to take us our of our own boxes, and labels and categories, where we are all individuals that defy stereotypes and given descriptions.

For instance, could imagine facing prejudice every day, even from your nearest and dearest? Could you imagine not having the freedom to walk down a street with your partner and not get assaulted? Could you imagine that happening in a Western democracy? Well it does every day. But it is not surprising when you consider the daily trials and tribulations LGBT people face in the fight to secure equality, or just to walk down a street with a loved one without being accosted, or called names. Just imagine how you would feel; I feel lucky that I don't have to live with that kind of daily struggle, but I want to share the difficulty with those that do.

Love then can create empathy for others, and turn sympathy into genuine concern. And we should also share that type of understanding love with our dark side, those aspects of ourselves that we would prefer to keep hidden. The way we feel - especially when we feel hurt or angry - is even said to lead to compromised health, as well as compromised personal and professional relationships. Hiding or suppressing our dark side is futile; it is these inner demons that we must shine a light on, face and forgive - in some instances just accept - and then understand with love. Deferring our emotional reactions, even if until we have enough time and safety to process it, will cost us.

This is what soldiers in the front line do, and it's like a credit card debt. You pay later but you pay 30% more. Repressing emotions is unhealthy. In Britain, experts say the "stiff upper lip" culture may explain why it lags behind other countries when it comes to beating cancer, for example. We can become very emotional, and unstable. It can affect our sleep and our dreams, and the cost is higher than it would be had we focused on our shadow side as soon as it reared its head. Recognising our own shadow side will help us further understand that everyone has their issues to deal with - we are not alone in our struggles.

We are all equal - in godliness and devilry - the dark and light is either balanced or imbalanced in us, and that is where the differences of our thoughts and actions lie - not necessarily that anyone is "better" than anyone else. Love is the great balancer in life, and arguably it is more a case of how much love we have in our lives that may ultimately dictate our personal success.

Love is the true balancer in life.

Some believe that all things are created by thought, including the brain's design and all things that affect it. Some even go so far as to say, when you take a substance that affects the body in a certain way, you are connecting to the thought that it is composed of - similar to a registered placebo effect where we believe the medication will cure us, so it does.

If we cling to the theory that everything is thought affecting thought, then the argument goes, if you could resonate well enough with the thought of the substance you're taking, you could experience the same effects even without actually consuming or coming into direct physical contact with the substance. The substance itself is simply a more condensed form of the thought. Even so, it is still your thought that attracted it into your physical experience. If you resonate entirely away from it, then even the physical substance will not have its programmed effect on you.

Read about the power of thoughts.

Adherents to this view say that a pill can contain substances that are programmed with the feeling of wellness to your body. A prestigious car can be programmed with the feeling of success. A book can be programmed with the feeling of genius. But you can also create the feelings without the physical things, and your feelings can attract the experiences and even the physical things that match it. Or you can experience the physical things and choose to resonate with the thoughts and feelings connected with them, and experience the results of those thoughts and feelings by your attraction of further matching experiences. It is all about alignment, experts say, whichever way it comes.

It follows then that we are what we think. Whether we like it or not our lives are created by the thoughts we think, and the more we think a thought the more it acts to colour our world, affect our actions, and create our reality. We have all heard this before and yet most of us continue to allow lower vibrational thoughts to affect our lives.

Some experts believe this is predominantly because there are so many thoughts flowing through our minds at any given time it can at least seem pretty impossible to control them all. In this context, then, cleaning our minds becomes a solution to gain clarity - a clean mind makes for a clear mind. It's not just about changing our thoughts, and quietening the mind, but providing a blank slate to start from a fresh perspective.

4 ways to clear your mind
  1. Watch your thoughts. One of the fastest, easiest ways to clear your mind is to simply allow whatever thoughts are there to arise, without any attempt to judge or change. The key here, though, is to pay attention with curiosity and openness. Awareness is the key. Thus before changing negative thoughts, analyse them first with emotional detachment. Sometimes taking a step back can help you see things from a different perspective.

    You might notice that such vibrational lowering thoughts like to show up when we are not really paying attention or lack focus. They sneak in and drop your energy levels. But by becoming more aware you will notice that if you catch the negative thought and stop it (i.e., by changing it to a positive thought for example) you can successfully maintain a high vibrational state.

    When you catch these thoughts, before you change them, don't try to avoid or ignore them. Embrace them, listen to what the have to say with objectivity. When you do, you might find the thoughts stop, the mind clears and a peace begins to expand into your space where chaos threatened only moments before.

  2. Busy hands help clear your mind. Ever wonder why gardeners tend to be so peaceful and how they can spend hours weeding the garden without a complaint? Or what the secret is to needlepoint, knitting, or pretty much any other fairly repetitive activity that many invest so much time in? Even tidying up the house, and household cleaning is believed to help clear the mind.

    For those not directly involved you may guess that it is the satisfaction of the finished product that motivates, and though that may be part of it, the real gift is in the ease in which the mind will slip into a quiet meditative space while the hands are busy with an activity that requires just enough focus to keep one aware and present.

    So the next time those 10 pounds of potatoes are waiting for someone to peel them, or the weeds are making it difficult to see the daisies, smile, roll up your sleeves and get those hands busy – for the busier the hands, experts say the clearer the mind.

  3. Question your mind to clarity. Our ability as human beings to experience pure awareness is hindered because most of us don't know what pure awareness is. There are strategic tactics that experts provide for us to use, however, that they say will allow us to experience it very systematically and quickly, so that we can allow our pure awareness to come out and create more harmony in our life. Experts suggest that one way we can do this is to "stop our thinking".

    This involves taking a moment to close our eyes and pay attention to our thoughts. Don't try to change them at this juncture, just observe them. Then ask yourself this question: Where will my next thought come from? Experts say that for most of us, when we ask this question, we should notice a gap in our thinking. If you don't, close your eyes again, and ask more questions. The trick is after asking each question to wait and observe what happens to your thoughts.

    Other questions you can ask is: How long until my next thought appears? What will my next thought feel like? What will be the shape of my next thought? As we ask these these questions, experts point out the "space" we will experience between asking those questions and having our thoughts start up again. In this way, it takes only a few moments to clear your mind of thoughts.

    Adherents to this view also believe that it shows we are more than just our thoughts (tied up by our past memories and future fears) and emotions, as we are still aware within that detached space in which we have successfully stopped our thoughts. They conclude that this space must be pure awareness, and that awareness is the foundation of what becomes you in form. Pure awareness is said to bring peace and relaxation to the mind, too.

    Simply by becoming more in tune with who you are, by critically questioning the thoughts in your mind and creating a "space" of pure awareness, you become more harmonious and more fulfilled. When you become more aware of yourself, and the mind experiences pure awareness, the mind and body is said to totally organise and heal. Knowing how to experience this pure awareness any time you want is a good method for clearing the mind.

  4. Using the power of brainwaves. There is a scientific field of thought that says all matter, whether organic or inorganic, animal, plant, or mineral is energy of specific frequency. Thoughts are also nothing other than packets of energy that can be thought of as acting upon the "physical" world - changing that world by changing the frequency by which the specific energy is vibrating. Masaru Emoto's controversial and disputed work with water crystals is often cited as an example of how thoughts (and words) can affect matter.

    Music is sound vibration that effects the listener at a core energetic level. According to some experts, music stimulates more parts of the brain than any other human function. Proponents to this theory believe that music can be used to speed healing, make you "smarter", and relax the mind. Everyone of us that has been exposed to music on any level knows that we are affected by what we listen too.

    Studies have also revealed that our brains emit specific brainwave frequencies, depending upon what emotional/mental/spiritual state we are in. Brain wave entrainment techniques are used to help ease the brain into very specific brain wave patterns, thus effectively helping the listener move into a specific state with ease.

    Read about brainwaves here.

    Combining these theories together, there are music tracks available that blend the power of music and brainwave entrainment to effectively help the listener move into any of a number of different states of being - including a relaxed mind. Although this can be achieved through meditation alone, many individuals now choose to supplement their meditation and yoga exercises with mood music to help the move from a hectic, chaotic state to a peaceful, clear mind. Some experts say it is a highly recommended addition to your collection of tools to clear your mind.

Taking time out to clear our mind not only sharpens our awareness, but interestingly also helps us make more time in our lives to do the things we want to do. We all want more time to get things done, but somehow each year the time seems to pass quicker, leaving you less and less time to do things. Like our cluttered thoughts, we seem to be racing from one place to the next, but never getting anywhere. We have even invented super fast gadgets to help us do more, but with every time saving device comes the paradox that overall we seem to have less time than before.

Not to get morbid about it, but some describe this feeling as us rushing towards the grave. And if I was to catch you in the hour before you died to ask you what you wished you had done with your life, the possibility is that you wouldn't speak about the things you have done which you regret doing. You would you probably speak about the things you regret you did not do, that you wished you could've done had you more time.

If only we had more time - this is not only a daily wish, but possibly could end up being our last wish, too. However, experts say that we can, us the power of the mind if we choose, to slow down time. Successful people know that their future success is created in their mind when they slow down and use it correctly. Right now you've slowed down, you've slowed down enough to read this.

However, awake or asleep, time passes at the same speed, but how quickly or slow time passes us will depend on how aware we are of the passage time. Similarly, experts say your lifetime is passing fast simply because you are not aware of the passage of the time, you are in effect sleeping through more and more of it as you age. When you become aware of the time, the time appears to slow down. As an example of this, just look at you being awake. Your waking hours take longer than your sleeping hours because you are awake and aware of your life.

As you get older you tend to do less and less new things, and you become more experienced at the things you are good at. As you do this you become less and less aware as you do them - going on automatic pilot. This is natural with us, we have a mind so powerful that it can perform billions of different functions every single second without having to interrupt us.

Occasionally our mind will prompt us when we need fuel or need sleep, but generally we are allowed to go about our lives while it performs more varying calculations in a second than all the computers in the world could possibly cope with added together. Simply put, experts are keen to remind us that our mind power is nothing short of the most amazing thing on Earth.

It is therefore, no wonder that as we age and become more efficient that our mind shuts us down on repetitive tasks. Now, if we are shut down we are not aware, and if we are not aware then we see the hours, days, months and years slipping away and seemingly going quicker and quicker.

As already mentioned, we all know that time is a constant and doesn't speed up or slow down, it is our perception of it that alters. according to this theory, therefore, we are using the power of our mind unconsciously to switch off our lifetime.

Read about the power of the mind.

Experts say this can be a good thing, because if it is our altering perception that "speeds" up our time, then we can also use our mind power to perceive slowing it down. This is just one little feature of our mind power. Some experts also believe, that in one sense, this is actually "creating" more time - because when you are aware time is made.

Break free from your waking sleep

Would you like to slow your life down, do more and feel more satisfied? The ability to do this is to not be asleep during the day. I don't mean close your eyes asleep, I mean your eyes are wide open, but you are not aware. This is what some call the waking sleep of the human race.

Start to live consciously.

Are you and everyone else in the world always in a rush to get somewhere? Yet have you ever stopped to consider, is all this rushing actually helping me, or hurting my life? Even if you have important deadlines to meet, if you become focused and aware, you discover you have all the time in the world to accomplish your goals, once you slow down time in your mind.

If you wish to slow down time, you have to notice the lack of any real value in rushing. Look at all the meetings, train rides, taxi journeys, rushing car journeys and notice how they could've happened anyway, but without the rush. And as we age our waking state becomes increasingly more like our sleeping one, this is why everyone seems to have less time for loved ones and the things they love to do. A child has an abundant amount of time, they do not even know time exists until adults have explained it to them. Likewise, animals have no notion of time as we do.

The point is that animals and young children live outside of the constraints of time and the good news is you can re-learn this too if you decide you can. Experts on this theory tell us that all you have to do is train your brain to accomplish what was impossible for you to "believe" just before you started to read this. This is how powerful your mind power is.

The method is to simply become present. Be where you are. If at any time you think, am I present now, then instantly you are. Your thought about it brings you back to the present. This is exercising your mind so that you can use the power of your mind to get out of the rut that weak minded training has allowed you to fall into. We will have heard that popular saying that the present is called the present, because it is a gift. It is all you ever have, and it is all you ever will have.

Don't sleep through the gift of presence. If you find yourself in your waking sleep, then interrupt your pattern. Stop, slow down. Force yourself to go slower, if you have to rush then deny it. Go the opposite way. Still do the task, but enjoy every moment of it without rushing or feeling the need to rush. Enjoy it, even if you don't like it, stop sleeping through your life and you will create more time just by slowing your life down.

Successful people are able to relax and enjoy the journey, because they know the path they are on will take them where they intended to go. And if you need things to help you slow down, they are everywhere, just go and watch nature, go and watch an animal - get some perspective. Focus on the moment you are in. Just watch and be where you are, feel yourself, feel your arms, your legs, your body, just BE there. As you slow down to watch and become aware, you are slowing down your perception of time.

Experts say that's all you need to do, just become aware and you can own the present again and you get to experience your life to the full again. Just as you did as a child. This also helps to clean your mind, and bring back clarity to your thoughts. And the clearer your mind, the stronger it gets, and the more powerful it is, the more you can control your time.

Some believers of this theory go further to emphasise that once we can accomplish this, there is no positive or negative aspects, there is just the present and the concious decision to enjoy it. Enjoy wherever you are in the present, living here is the very best place to live, because you are there anyway. You just need to bring your mind along for the ride.

So, will you be able to stop rushing so that you can stop to clear your mind and slow down hope that as you've been doing it for so long, one day it may start to work? Or are you ready to be realistic, take responsibility for your success and make it happen instead? And ultimately, as you notice how you are not present, be grateful for noticing it - because you will be given more opportunities to notice it. It will put you on your guard.

This is the path to becoming predominantly present and fully experiencing your life again, as you did when you were a child with no concept of time. Many of us become nostalgic, always yearning to re-create the feelings you had when you were young. Well, thanks to your awareness and the power of your mind, you won't need nostalgia to remind you of those feelings you'll regain.

Keep in mind that challenges are won when we face them; we get rid of our mistakes when we learn from them. However deep one buries a mistake, there are always dogs ready to root it out again. Face your mistakes, then discard them. It's easier said than done, but when you push yourself beyond your limits, you operate on heart. And when you operate on heart, your fears, your demons leave - demons of your past, the bad things that went down in your life as you grew up, your life experiences that shape who you are today.

You have a choice to let those demons free and live your life or to let those demons control your every move. If you push yourself beyond what you ever have before, you can get rid of some of your demons. We can only overome our fears by facing them. If you haven't pushed yourself harder than you ever have before, then maybe you're cutting yourself short on other aspects in your life? If you haven't pushed yourself further than you ever thought possible, than how do you know your limits?

Keeping in touch with cowardice, makes us lose touch with other important things that are happening in your life; connection with your family, finding passion with your job, giving to others who need someone like you to make their life better. Take the time, but more importantly, make the time to do this. Experts warn us that we will never have enough time to create your success in our personal and professional lives until we learn that successful people put their skills on auto-pilot, NOT their time. Instead of automatically rushing, they focus their mind, becoming more consciously aware to control their relationship with time.

If you feel it's time for you to stop sitting on the sidelines, looking at successful people and wondering if you will ever be one of them, then it's time to clean your mind of the past, refuse to be nostalgic and discard your fears of the future. It's time you decided to join the people at the peak of life, but to join them you need to climb high. To do so you need to clean up the clutter that shackle your feet. Clean up mind, clear your path and take your mind power to a whole new level.

Yours in love,

Mickie Kent

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