A great movie!  So refreshing to see an original storyline – probably because it is true.  It brought back fond memories of my travels off the beaten track in Asia, and also reminded me how precious our freedom is, and how lucky I am to be born in a country where we simply take this for granted.

A moving true account of the life so far of Li Cunxin – a Chinese born ballet dancer of international acclaim, currently living in Australia.  This movie managed to make me laugh AND cry – the measuring stick of a good movie in my book.

It has become common to view these so called negative feelings as bad.  It’s not socially acceptable to spend too much time being angry or bitter, or moping around being miserable.  In response to that we tend to then deny these feelings when they arise, but the problem is, by denying them they don’t go away, they just get buried beneath the surface.  And that, I believe, is dangerous and unhealthy.  Beneath the surface they fester, and eventually explode in some way – either emotionally, or physically.

Louise Hay, is well known for her work around this issue and her best selling book – You Can Heal Your Life.  Her basic philosophy is that every physical health issue stems from a mental or emotional issue.  Disease is actually Dis –Ease within your self.  At the back of her book she has a listing of most physical ailments along with the probable cause of the Dis-ease.  Most ailments go back to a root cause of some kind of fear, resentment, anger, disappointment or lack of self worth.  Which brings us back to our problem – what do we do if we are feeling these kind of feelings and don’t want to make ourselves sick?

 The answer seems like a contradiction – the answer is to actually feel them.  A mind-body practitioner that I respect, Dr Dov Phillips, explained it to me with this analogy:

“When something makes us happy, we smile.  If we find something funny, we laugh.  With our “positive” emotions we feel no need to control them, we just let them happen.  The emotion is triggered, we respond, and then that emotion is gone, it’s on to the next one.  With our so-called “negative” emotions, we often don’t feel that it is appropriate to respond, so we store it.  Something makes us sad or angry, but we don’t feel like it’s ok to cry or yell, so we hold it in and control it.  We store it for later, but usually we never go back and release it.  So it gets stored and it builds up and eventually it causes us problems because we haven’t acknowledged it.  If we had acknowledged it when it happened it would have been gone immediately after, just like the thing that triggered us to smile and feel happy.”

 My concern was what if feeling the negative feeling caused a downward spiral – how do you avoid getting caught up in feeling miserable or angry, when you don’t want to feel like that? 

Dr Dov’s response:

“Where people get caught up is in their own stories.  Don’t attach a story to your feelings (ie, what happened to make you feel this way) or these will continue to replay in your head.  Simply feel the feeling – acknowledge what you feel, allow yourself to really feel that feeling, do whatever you need to do to express the feeling, and let it go.

 Written by Jacqui Thomas

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However, how many of us spend a large proportion of our time either dwelling on issues of the past or striving to create a fantastic future?  We are missing the here and now.  While it’s worthwhile to reflect on the past, and to visualise the future, most of us would benefit from focusing more attention on the present.

The present is simply the reality of your life as it is today.  Not how it could be, or should be, or you want it to be, but how it actually is.  Even though we may not like it, the present is perfect.  The way things are today are that way for good reason.  This is your actual reality.  It isn’t set in concrete forever, but it is what you have to work with at the present time.

To see how much of your attention is focused on the here and now, draw a circle.  Now divide it into three sections according to how much of your focus is spent on the past, the present and the future.  Be honest, you may be surprised.  I encourage you to work on increasing the amount of focus you have for the present by letting go of the past and also your emphasis on the future.  By all means, learn from the past, and always have one eye on where you are heading in the future, but try and keep the majority of your focus in the here and now, your current reality. 

If you can focus most of your attention on the present you will be more aware of your reality. This enables you to change and improve things you would like to be different.  It also makes you more aware of opportunities that arise today, which are easily missed if you are focussing on the past or future.  Best of all, this enables you to enjoy what you already have.  It may take some effort to get there, but aim for about 80% focus on the present, with 10% each for the past and the future.  The past is gone, and the future never gets here – all we really have is now.

By Jacqui Thomas

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The first step is to come clean and admit your mistake.  Although this may be difficult, you need to be honest and take responsibility for your mistake.  The sooner you do this, the easier it is to rectify it and the less negative consequences there are likely to be.  Don’t be tempted to lie, blame someone else, or cover up the mistake as this always makes the situation worse and the problems bigger.  As scary as it may be, the sooner you can own up and accept responsibility, the better off you will be in the long run.

Secondly, you need to apologise to anyone who has been affected by your mistake, and then do whatever you can to fix it.  Sometimes taking responsibility and apologising will be enough, in other cases some action may be required to repair the damage or resolve the situation.  If you’re not sure what to do to fix it, ask the people concerned what you can do to make things right.

Once you have accepted responsibility and done everything you can to correct your mistake, the third step is to let it go, wipe the slate clean and move on.  There’s no point beating yourself up over a mistake forever.  You’re only human, so don’t be too hard on yourself, just keep doing the best you can.  Learn from your mistake and try to ensure you don’t make the same mistake twice.

By Jacqui Thomas

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It might help to first define forgiveness.  Forgiveness doesn’t mean “what you did is okay”.  It just means “I am no longer willing to carry around pain and anger in response to your actions.”  This is where the benefits of forgiveness really come into play, as you are only hurting yourself by carrying around that hurt, anger and irritation.  This really equates to a double whammy – first the hurt from the original incident and then the ongoing hurt from letting it continue!

Work out what you need to do to be able to let it go and move on.  You may not be able to get the resolution you would like from the other party but by all means ask for it, if you can.  If you decide to go down this track, be sure to communicate your message and your desired resolve in a neutral manner.  If it comes across as an emotional outburst, the content of your message will be lost and all that will be heard is the emotion.  This usually results in an equally emotional response back, which won’t achieve the desired results.

Sometimes just communicating how you feel about the incident is enough.  This doesn’t necessarily need to be a dialogue with the other party.  Often just writing it all down in a letter to the other person can be a beneficial letting go process.  The letter doesn’t even need to be sent.  In fact, I recommend waiting for a couple of days and rereading it before sending it.  In many cases you will have moved on significantly just through writing it all down and clearing your head, and the letter can be disposed of.  If writing isn’t your thing then find a positive person who’s a good listener that you can pour your story out to.  Be careful not to choose someone who thrives on drama and problems, though, or they may want to dwell on how awful it all is, rather than help you let go of it.

For many people, the person they harbour the biggest grudges against are themselves!  Feeling hatred, anger, and resentment toward yourself is no fun at all, and quite simply, it will make you sick.  Guilt, blame and other negative emotions quite literally poison your system, and for what purpose?  Whether you’re feeling this way towards yourself, or someone else, there is absolutely nothing good that will come from of it.  We all make mistakes, each and every one of us.  Very few people are inherently bad, but we’re all fallible.  So whether it’s yourself you need to forgive, or someone else, do yourself a favour and let it go, it’s definitely in your best interests.

By Jacqui Thomas

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So what can we do if other people’s behaviour is affecting us in a negative way?  Although we can’t control someone else’s behaviour, we can control what behaviour we allow in our personal space.  We do this by creating boundaries.  Boundaries are imaginary lines that define what other people are allowed to do to us and around us. 

Here’s an example.  Jane hates cigarette smoking, but her best friend Lisa smokes a packet a day.  Jane cannot change Lisa’s behaviour and insist she give up smoking.  But, she can set boundaries around how Lisa’s smoking affects her.  Her boundaries are that Lisa cannot smoke inside Jane’s house or in her car.

For boundaries to work, people have to know about them.  Here is a step by step process to deliver your boundaries.

Step 1:  Inform the person about your boundary.  Eg, I don’t allow people smoking inside my house. 
Step 2:  Request that they honour your boundary by changing their behaviour around you.  Give them suggestions of how they could make it better.  Eg, If you want to smoke at my house, I would like you to smoke outside.
Step 3:  Insist that they keep to your boundary.  (This step may not be required.  Often when people know that they are doing something you don’t like and they have been given an opportunity to make it right, they will.)  Advise the person of negative consequences if they don’t honour your boundary.  Eg, If you are not prepared to smoke outside, you are not welcome in my home.
Step 4:  Follow through with negative consequences if the boundary you have set has not been honoured. 

It is human nature to test boundaries, so don’t give up if your boundary setting is not successful immediately.  The step by step process may need to be repeated before the person realises you are serious about the new boundary.

Lastly, for boundaries to be effective they also need to match your own personal standards.  It is pretty difficult to enforce a boundary, which is “do as I say, but not as I do.”

We’ve all heard sayings such as “you reap what you sow” and “you get out what you put in”.  The basis behind these is that what we put out into the Universe is what we attract back.  So if you’re putting positive stuff out, you will attract good stuff back, and if you’re putting negative stuff out then you will attract more of the same.

Scientists have long known that everything in our world, including people, can be broken down into particles of energy, and that similar energy is attracted to other similar energy.  In simple terms this means that we’re all radiating our personal energy out into the world.  But, our energy differs according to our mood and our feelings. 

We’ve all had days where nothing seems to go right and the more frustrated and angry we get, the worse everything gets.  Or days when we are really down and the more we wallow in our misery the more sorry for ourselves we feel.  Luckily most of us can also recall days where we feel fantastic and everything just seems to fall into place without too much effort.  We probably all know of people that always seem so happy and for some reason their life seems so wonderful and so easy.  We can probably also think of people who are always complaining about something and their life seems like one continuous drama.  Although we’re not aware of it, this is our power of attraction in action.  Just like magnets we automatically attract back into our lives the same sort of energy that we are putting out.

The great thing is that once we know about this we can put it to good use attracting lots of what we want into our lives.  The trick is to train yourself to feel positive feelings such as happiness, joy, excitement, contentment and satisfaction as often as possible.  The more positive you feel, the more good you will attract back.  With practice this can be as simple as making a choice to be happy, no matter what.

Try and minimise the negative feelings you feel such as sadness, anger, frustration, guilt, anxiety, stress and jealousy.  There will be times when things go wrong and you genuinely feel these negative feelings and that’s ok.  Just remember the price you pay for radiating this negativity and try not to hang on to it for too long.  You don’t want to attract back more of the same!

If you are stuck in a negative cycle it can be difficult to break out of.  Focus on anything you can that makes you feel happy, even if you have to pretend.  As you get better at it you will find that you genuinely do have more to be happy about, and the easier it becomes to feel positive.  You will begin to spiral upwards, instead of down.  Believe me, it’s worth the effort!

By Jacqui Thomas

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