depression and stress management

Choose our thoughts

CHOOSE our thoughts. Decide what we think about. Proactively select them, for our experience of life reflects what we think about.

Yet, how often do we choose? Or even know that we can?

So often we lose ourselves in our thoughts. Immersed so deeply we didn’t even realized that they are thoughts – They’re not us.

We’re not even having thoughts at that point; the thoughts are having us.

Be aware of our thoughts. Don’t fight them. Don’t fear them. Or judge them. Just see them, watch them, and stay aware of them.

Eventually, maybe we can even choose them. Think about the thoughts we want to fill our mind with for a life of meaning and growth. Choose what we think about: our loved ones, what we’re put on this Earth to do, and anything that can help us grow.

Choose the light.

Let go of thoughts that don’t serve us. Let them go not just to forgive someone or some past, but also for our own sake:

Let go of resentful thoughts and narratives for our own sake.

Here, letting go is an act of kindness to ourselves. We deserve that and we can give it to ourselves.

We can love ourselves by letting go of resentment toward someone else.

The better we learn at choosing, and the better thoughts we choose, the better our life experiences become.

We can love ourselves.

Manifesting…. YOU

What would you like to manifest?

For what reasons would you like to manifest, it?

Many of us would manifest money, respect, love, children, and power. “Life would be better if only I had _____,” so our mind says. Sure, I would love them too!

Nothing’s wrong with external phenomenon. “Other” people and things. Anything that’s not “me”. They can make us feel good, very good in fact, and sometimes even elated.

But will they truly make us happy? For how long can we put off the search, the yearning, for something or someone “better”?

How about if we just bypass these intermediaries, money, love, and reputation, things that we think will bring happiness, and go straight to the source and directly manifest happiness?

You see, instead of chasing after the people and things that we think will bring happiness, and finding out later that we’re still wanting. Why not just figure out what happiness means to us, what it requires from us, and work from there?

So first, figure out what happiness looks like and means. To you.

Wisely choose how we define it. The lower the threshold the happier we become. The higher the bar the worse we feel.

A wine novice enjoying their box wine feels happier than a wine afficionado complaining about their vintage Bordeaux.

To the novice, any box wine, and perhaps no wine at all, can help induce laughter and other merriment. To the expert, no wine can ever be good enough, if “good enough” requires meeting some unobtainable criteria for perfection.

What we define to be “good enough” determines how good we feel. It’s not just our job, mortgage, or relationships, that determine our life quality. The way we think has so much to do with it, so much more perhaps.

We are responsible for and the generator of our thoughts. That means WE have the power to lower the threshold for achieving happiness, and therefore the power to make ourselves happier.

If we want to be happier more often, and who doesn’t? Then let’s lower the condition for happiness. Be happy when it’s sunny, and be happy when it’s rainy. Be happy when we get a raise, and be happy when we don’t.

Don’t let external circumstances determine when and if we get to feel happy.

Allow ourselves to feel happy.

Let our happiness depend on nothing and no one.

For me, happiness can just be a deep sense of wellbeing. When it’s quiet inside. It doesn’t need to require reliving my first love, college graduation, or any other memorable life events. Or gaining a better home, career, reputation, and love in an imagined future. Actually, when it’s quiet inside, I can enjoy anything. And when I can enjoy anything, I feel happy. Don’t you feel the same way?

If happiness depends on nothing and no one, then what is left?

YOU

So, YOU, and maybe ONLY you, have the power to provide true happiness to yourself.

And who is the “you” to be manifested? That is a question worth considering. In fact, we must answer that for ourselves. Figuring out and answering that question may be one of the reasons for being here in the first place.

Who are the inner children

Healer and author Terrence Real wrote about our inner “wounded child”, “adaptive child”, and “natural child”. Who are they?

The wounded child and adaptive child for me are repetitive thought patterns and automatic reactions that stem from unreleased energy created by traumatic experiences.

Frozen thoughts born from memories that no one asked for or wanted.

They repeat because they’re frozen.

To free ourselves, they need to be thawed.

To heal, one must pay attention to the wounded and adaptive children – these frozen and stuck thought patterns. To see them, and to understand how they think when situations, i.e., “triggers” arise.

They generate reactivities in our lives. I see it now. I overreact to something, even today, when my inner children — deep memories and thought patterns — are activated. They are scared and they protect themselves, they might even fight back when they feel endangered.

Remember they are thoughts of a small child experiencing trauma.

They don’t have the life experience of an adult, to think logically. They only know what a small child knew up to that point. That’s why their fears are disproportionate to reality today, why they are often more sensitive and reactive.

They are deeply ingrained thought patterns born from traumatic events. From memory.

If we don’t watch them closely, they can and will take over in unhelpful ways even if they are trying to help.

Unwatched, they still run our emotions and act out in ways that no longer serve us. And often hurt us and others. But it’s not their fault. Don’t blame them. Don’t judge them.

Grievances, thoughts of them. Like “how dare they treat me this way”? These are disturbances generated from recurring thought patterns stemming from unreleased energies of the past.

And we have to watch them not just when triggers arise, but in general. They may be making fundamental choices in our lives.

We must connect with these different parts (memories) of ourselves, get to know them, accept them, love and protect them. Stop criticising, feeling ashamed, and ignoring them. And learn that we are the first responsible person for our own inner children and ultimate happiness.

The Most Important Connection

Connection is the most important and fundamental need. The deepest desire. We want to love and be loved. To hold and be held. We seek connection with family, friends, with romantic partners. Without the right connection, something important seems missing. We feel incomplete.

Many of us seek this connection our entire lives. Never satisfied. Never complete. I fear this fate from time to time, if I’m totally honest with you.

Some of us may feel this way even if we’re loved and surrounded by love from family and friends.

Was Jerry Maguire right?

Until we connect with ourselves, can anyone or anything make us whole? And complete us?

What’s missing in our lives is not that special someone else. What’s missing in our lives is us. Our own love and presence.

We’d do anything for those closest to us. We’d sacrifice ourselves. We’d never let them down.

Do we do the same for ourselves? Do we accept our ourselves, with all our “imperfections”, give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, and give ourselves the patience and grace that we would with those we hold dear?

I have a feeling that no one and nothing can truly complete us until we give ourselves the same love, acceptance, understanding, and patience that we’d give our most important loved ones.

Listen to your inner voice. The self doubts, fears, and criticism. And know that you’re not the voice, the doubts, fears, or criticism. Those are thoughts. You’re the awareness.

It’s time to connect with the inner voice and let them know that you’re never gonna give them up. ❤️

*With apologies to Rick Astley. 🙈

The voice who expresses those feelings needs our love and acceptance the most.

You deserve love and acceptance from yourself NOW. You don’t need to be perfect. You don’t demand your loved ones to be perfect to love them. So why demand yourself to be prefect to love yourself?

Get to know yourself. The first and most important connection. The most important of VIPs.

YOU can time travel and change the past.

The past lives only in our minds.

While we can’t physically move ourselves back in time to redo the past, we experience the past in our minds.

But the mental experience, now, after the fact, is as real as we get to relive the past.

The past can be a tough place to occupy. Full of regrets, anger, and hurt.

That’s not the past I wish to experience in the present. The present is all we have. We don’t want to spend time in the present being upset about the past.

We can change the past for the better. When we change how we see the past. Reinterpret and recomprehend the past. Then the past changes.

It’s time traveling.

If we learn to reinterpret and recomprehend the past in a more constructive way, then we can literally change the past. For the better.

That’s what Time Travel Rescue is about.

Acceptance

All my life, I’ve been told to “accept” this or that when I felt unhappy. I never really knew what it meant. I never “felt” what it’s like to accept. If something or someone really upset me, or worse, wronged me, what does acceptance even mean? How do I accept, and why should I?

Years ago, I felt miserable at a prior job. The daily routine bored and tired me. I stressed daily, and struggled to sleep. Fridays brought a short reprieve, and Sundays returned the dread of the work week. Dwelling on my misery and being upset with the the fact that I felt miserable at work didn’t help one bit. I just kept feeling worse.

Had I read my own blog post about deciding to be happy, then I would have understood that in order to be happy I needed to stop doing things that made me feel worse. Easy, right?! But it was hard. Hard to stop dwelling and feeling sorry about a situation. It still is. It’s human nature, perhaps.

What should I have done? How and what could I have accepted?

Lately, I wonder if acceptance means accepting the fact that someone or something upsetting crossed my paths, without dwelling and begrudging the fact that the event or encounter happened.

It’s done. I can’t reverse time to undo it. My life won’t improve by me stewing over it. Accept the fact that I was in a job about which I felt miserable. Fighting and getting upset at that fact simply made things worse.

But acceptance doesn’t mean that I sit passively. I wanted better, and my life can improve only if I act in the present or future to reach that goal.

Although I can’t control people or events, and I can’t change the past, I can control what I think about and what I do. I choose to think about ways I can live constructively and move toward a better future.

So, save the energy I used to spend on getting upset about the past and use it to focus on improving the present and future.

And then, the thing or event or person that upset me, that I found hard to accept, may turn out to be a catalyst for transformation. A blessing.

I think that’s what acceptance means to me.

I feel better now…

I recently came out of a funk. and this is what I learned… 🧵

First: It’s okay to feel bad from time to time. Of course I feel down now and then. You probably do too. It seems to happen to everyone! Therefore, I don’t need to feel bad for feeling bad.

So why feel bad for feeling bad? Why torture ourselves? Just feeling bad without resisting may be enough. Be okay with the fact that I sometimes feel sad. Can you be okay with your sadness too?

We’ve all been taught that feeling bad is bad. We are taught to help someone feel better. We’re taught to make ourselves feel better right away! No one ever told me it’s okay to feel sad, or to feel bad in any way. “keep up the good work”. 😂

But you know what? I felt better after permitting myself to feel bad. I sat there, with my crummy feelings. I didn’t push them away, ignore them, run away, or distract myself.

I feel better now. Day by day.

If you feel bad, it’s okay! You’re okay! It’s normal to feel bad from time to time. You’re totally normal to feel that way. You’re not alone! We’re actually all in this together! You’ll be okay! ❤️

#mood #MentalHealthMatters

Mother and Father

I now think of “mother” as a state of being, not limited by a formal or biological connection. I have a mother. And I also have a Mother, the sum of my mother, aunts, grandmothers, and more. A powerful force in the universe, a loving and nurturing maternal energy.

Some of those who grew up not feeling fully accepted and loved might have been surrounded by love, actually. Along with the mother, other loved ones nurtured, protected, accepted, and loved them as a collective maternal presence. More powerful and loving together than any individual mother can be.

If we didn’t realize that, we might have underappreciated a great fortune of our lives. Some of us might have even spent years feeling lacking, unworthy, incomplete, and rejected while being completely enveloped by love.

I now think of “father” similarly. A protective, loving force with a tender side. Tough and maybe almost impossible to be completely fulfilled by one person all the time. So, let us think about, and feel, the love from our father, uncles, grandfathers, other family and even friends, and consider the possibility that the fatherly, paternal protective force we needed might have always been there, and will always be.

And may be, just may be, WE can nurture, accept, and love ourselves with that warm material glow. We can also provide, protect and love ourselves with that tough and tender paternal energy. In that sense, we become a part of the love that completes ourselves, we literally become the love that starts our healing.

Thank you for reading. 🙂

Release guilt

Do you want to feel happier? Are you willing to do what it takes to be happier? If you are, then start releasing guilt. Let it go. Learn to release it.

Here, the words guilt and feeling guilty aren’t legal or technical. They simply mean blaming yourself for something that has already happened, regardless of whether you’re actually responsible, or even whether you were there.

The human condition

We have so many ways of blaming ourselves and feelings badly. We blame ourselves for things we did or didn’t do, and for things we said or didn’t say.

Some of us even blame ourselves for things that we know aren’t our fault. For example, how many children blame themselves for their parents’ divorce or anything else that happened at home? How many continue to do so even after reaching adulthood and learning that it’s not their fault? The may know, intellectually or logically, it’s not their fault, but they still feel or believe it’s their fault.

It’s not your fault because hurt feelings you experienced, witnessed, or even caused come from fear, which leads to insecurity or even anger on one or both sides. They don’t reflect either or both people’s true selves. There wasn’t anything wrong with you. We’ll talk about this more in future posts. But in any case:

The human condition has made the urge to blame very strong.

But what happens when we blame ourselves? Have we often or ever felt better from blaming ourselves? Not from my experience.

Feeling worse seems to be the only result of self-blaming. Feeling worse is the opposite of your desire of becoming happier.

If guilty feelings come from blaming ourselves, and self-blame seems to always make us feel worse, the why do we keep doing the thing that makes us feel worse? Remember that:

We are the thinkers of our thoughts. No one else can think them. Blame is a thought. So we, not the external world, generated the blame. This self-generated action always seems to make us feeling worse.

How can we become happier by doing something that always makes us feel worse? If you choose to be happy, and you commit to do what it takes to be happy, then you must try blaming yourself less.

The futility of self loathing

Plus, blaming ourselves and feeling worse about the past does nothing to improve the situation.

When we blame, we judge ourselves harshly now for something that happened before. What happened can’t be changed. Only our feeling about it can.

Our feelings about, and understanding of, the past are the only things that we can change about the past.

So blaming ourselves seems to be a total waste of time too! The act of blaming not only makes us feel worse but also wastes the time and energy spent on blaming!

Why keep doing something like that?

Do this instead:

What if we blame ourselves less, and use the freed up time and energy to do something to improve things in the future?

Falling out with a lifelong friend because of a big argument and the things you both said? Accept the fallout. Blame yourself less for the things you said. Now you know that blaming can only make you feel worse.

Blaming won’t take those words back. Blaming yourself takes time and energy away from making things right, from simply relaxing, and otherwise enjoying life. Blaming is a waste of time. Why do something that’s a waste of time?

Instead of blaming, think about what can you do now or in the future to repair or resurrect your friendship. The only thing we can change about the past is our feelings about the past. But we can do things now and in the future to make things better. Neither of you can take back what was said. But you can stop blaming yourself for what you said, apologize and do things differently in the future if needed, and start forgiving your friend for what he or she said.

And if there’s nothing to be done about that situation or relationship, then think about how you can improve other situations or relationships. Indeed, it’s better to do almost anything else. Even doing nothing is better than blaming ourselves and feeling guilty.

Redirect your thoughts this way to feel better instantly …

Although external circumstances and people can seem to cause our unhappiness, the truth is that it’s entirely our own thoughts that make us so.

As mentioned in an earlier post,

Nothing and no one can think the thoughts in our heads. We are the only person in the universe who can think our own thoughts.

This is liberating. If our own thoughts create unhappiness, then our own thoughts likewise can create happiness.

The thought that something is lacking in our lives makes us unhappy: the lack of money, recognition, status, relationships, and a thousand other things that other people seem to have more of.

The more we ruminate on what we lack, the unhappier we get.

And when we finally get what we want, happiness often seems fleeting. A big promotion that we’ve worked on for years? How long does it take before we feel lacking unless we get the next? A big salary bump? How long do we feel underpaid again? For how long does that shiny new car make us happy?

A general sense of unease and dissatisfaction pervades much of our lives. Always seeking, plotting, getting, all for a brief moment of respite.

Is real happiness fleeting? If what we thought would make us happy is temporary and illusory, then can it true that what we thought we lacked also wasn’t the true source of our unhappy condition?

If that’s true, then perhaps …

The more we think about what we have, the happier we become.

Instead of perpetually seeking, what if we redirected our thoughts to what we can be giving? Here’s one of the best advice / life philosophy I’ve ever heard:

The meaning of life is to discover our gift and give it to the world.
– Mr. Dave Bechtel

What if we focused our thoughts on finding our unique talents and using them in service of others? Instead of worrying about what’s missing, what if we think about what we have in our lives, and create ideas about how to share them with others? How about focusing on how fortunate we are?

What is YOUR gift and how can you share it with the world?

Happy New Year! May you continue to be blessed and find ways to share your blessing. May all the good you share with the world come back tenfold to make your life even better.