A certain amount of independence is a good thing.  It’s useful to be capable of looking after yourself and to be responsible for your actions.  But being completely self-sufficient is counter-productive.  Being totally self reliant cuts you off from community which is essential for us to “thrive”, rather than merely “survive”.   

As humans we have needs beyond basic food and shelter.  We have an emotional need for community – to share, to love, to feel, to contribute.  Being part of a community is a two way street – you need to be able to “give” and to “receive”.  In order for the process to work effectively, receiving is equally important as giving.  One can’t happen without the other.  So it’s important to take your turn at both.

Sometimes we feel like we have to do it all, that there is no help available.  There is always help available, but you have to be willing to allow it.  Maybe you need to create some space to let the help in?  Allow yourself to receive.  Stop doing it all, so there is room for others to help you.  Ask for help and accept it graciously when it comes.  Let go of needing to control everything yourself, so other people can help you.  And remember that receiving help is just as valid as giving it.  Both sides of the equation are crucial to the process – so we all need to do our fair share of both!

© Jacqui Thomas, 2010 All rights reserved.

Most of us here in New Zealand truly do have a lot to be grateful for. We live in a beautiful country, we have the luxury of freedom, and we are relatively safe and trouble free. The vast majority of us have a roof over our heads, food in our tummies, the opportunity of good education and safe drinking water straight out of the tap. If we can add to the list good health and people who love us, then most of us really are quite lucky and do indeed have a lot to be grateful for.

Next time you’re feeling a bit down and life seems unfair, a great boost is to write yourself an exhaustive list of all the things you are grateful for. Don’t forget to include things that you probably take for granted but would miss terribly if they were taken away, these are usually the important ones! Don’t stop until you absolutely can’t think of anything else to add. I guarantee you’ll feel instantly better about your situation. It’s highly likely that once you have your “grateful list”, whatever it is you’re upset about not having will seem quite trivial in comparison with everything you do have. It’s quite true, no matter how bad things seem, there will always be someone much worse off than you, and I bet they would love to trade places and have all that you have.

You don’t have to wait until you’re feeling sorry for yourself to start getting into the habit of being grateful. A daily grateful journal is a lovely way to finish each day. Simply write down 5 things that you are grateful for before you go to bed each night. This gets you into the habit of focussing on what’s good in your life, rather than what’s wrong or missing. When you do this consistently not only do you feel much better about yourself, you also start a positive spiral upwards, attracting more good things your way. It seems we don’t get given any more until we appreciate what we’ve already got!

By Jacqui Thomas

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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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No matter how bad things seem, it is never forever, it always gets better.  Sometimes you just have to trust the process, and focus on your intended outcome, and remember that the rough patch will pass. 

Change, and/or the need for change, can often be uncomfortable, but this discomfort is useful.  Often it is a signal that changes need to be made and if they’re not made, the discomfort will increase until you do.  At some point, the choice may no longer even be yours to make, and change will just happen with or without you.  They say the Universe sends you messages, and if you don’t listen it turns up the volume!

The uncomfortable part can also come in the midst of change.  You can ride this out, knowing that the discomfort is a natural part of the reshuffle forwards onto better things.  Again focus on your intended outcome, trust the process, and know that the rough patch is part of working towards the better place at the end.

I’ve had two examples of this myself recently.  One being a flatmate situation that was no longer working.  I knew I needed to make a change but kept putting it off (avoiding confrontation perhaps?) until eventually the messages were getting so loud that I absolutely had to do something about it.  The process was uncomfortable, but by focussing on my intended outcome, I knew I could ride it out and in the end, it would all be alright.

A second example is a new website I’ve been working on.  There have been moments when I could very easily get bogged down in all the glitches and hiccups in the development process, and think it’s never going to work, that it’s all gone wrong.  But by remembering the Dalai Lama, trusting the process, and focussing on the desired end result, the challenges and issues have been worked through and we’re on track to get to the intended outcome.

This is true of any situation.  Change is the one true constant.  Learn to work with it and you can save yourself a lot of stress.

Written 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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