Wounds of Wisdom

You've heard of words of wisdom, I am here to talk about wounds of wisdom. We have all been wounded somehow. There are children who suffered abusive childhoods, women who have suffered awful marriages, and people who suffer at the hands of others. A few get out of this life unscathed; however, we all have suffered some wounds for the most part. Though pain is hard to forget, we need to remember that pain is part of nature’s wisdom that teaches us strength. 

I think people believe that the wounds pain gives are evil and should not happen to people; however, pain is inevitable and happens to people often. Pain is there to wake us up. You gain strength and experience from pain. Some people allow pain to define them. They become emotionally crippled because they cannot step into their power and allow pain to make them wise and strong.

Pain needs to be attended to. Unattended pain is like leaving an open wound to get infected. If you have a physical wound, you tend to it. You clean it, bandage it, and try to keep the infection out. We tend to care for our physical pain promptly by seeing a doctor or getting some medication. With emotional pain, we tend to ignore it and allow the scares to get deeper and deeper. We forget it needs to be tended to as well.

A harsh word can cut like a knife but can heal. Some people will take a harsh word and allow it to crush them for a lifetime. Rather than putting that kind of energy into feeling wounded, why not take that energy and move it forward? We should dance in the wisdom the wounds offer us rather than allow the wounds to crush us, and we should hold onto them as if our very lives depended on them. 

When emotional wounds do not heal, we may fear the wisdom they hold. How can we gain wisdom from an experience that we feel is permanent and inescapable? Well, the answer is to be willing to learn that wounds have wisdom, enough strength, and the desire to move through memory and experience peace.

Wounds produce wisdom only if you are willing to allow the past to catapult you into healing and focus your energy on the knowledge and wisdom you have gained. Practice gratitude and positivity while participating in forgiveness, and soon, you will see the wounds of wisdom.

Stay Out of Your Head

I get asked this all the time; “How do I stay out of my head?” Cultivating a way to get beyond what your head is telling you and trying to find a more peaceful path can be trying. I think it is because the solution is so simple. Be Mindful, stay in the now! When we begin to enter our heads with anxiety, stress, and worry, chances are we dwelling on the past, or we may be worried about the future. Keep in mind this keeps us from enjoying the moment and walking in peace. 

Staying out of your head means trying to come to terms with what the past has happened. No matter what you do, no matter what you don't do, you cannot change the past, and the future has not happened, so take a deep breath and practice patience and willingness. If you stay in the moment there is a big chance that you will not be able to dwell on negative thoughts. 

I know it is easier said than done. You can work through it by trying to focus on what is right in front of you. Look around you and notice how you feel. Listen to the sounds around you. Is it quiet or are there loud noises? Listen to your breathing. Are you breathing in deeply and exhaling? Be in your body at this very moment. You will be amazed at how focused you are on what is surrounding you rather than what is going on in your head. 

Now, try to surrender the clutter, that unwanted junk, and those thoughts going on in your head. You may have a “loop” of a painful memory or something that made you angry. Simply tell yourself you surrender these thoughts and attempt to bring yourself back into the now. You can stop that broken record by tapping on yourself. This is so easy, and we never think of doing it. Tapping on a body part like your leg, your arm, the side of your head, all these things bring you back to the now, the current. I look at tapping as a reset button. Here is the trick. You need to tap yourself in the same place every time because it becomes automatic, and this reset tells you to stay in the now.

I think the easiest way to stay focused on the now is by breathing. Just breathe! Your breath does not hold onto the past and does not take you into the future. In fact, if you pay attention, your breath will keep you focused on the very second. Focus on breathing in and out and how each breath moves you into the now and calms you. When all else fails, just breathe in the now, breathe out the past, and relax. Dwelling in our heads serves no purpose; it is a habit we create. Just remember you only have to be in the present now. Do what is right in front of you, focus on the here and now, and watch how easy it is to step outside your head and stay focused.

Courage: Acting Regardless of Fear

I was thinking about some of the fears that I have that stop me from moving forward or letting go. In my meditation I was trying to figure out why certain things in my life create fear. Then it came to me that my fears were not there to scare me, they were there to teach me courage. My fears are not my enemy, they are something to master. From that moment on, fear became my teacher of courage.

Courage is the ability to act regardless of feelings of fear. It is about following your natural instincts when the facts are against it. Courage is an accumulation of many small steps, and each day we speak the truth with integrity and own our responsibilities, we are walking in courage. When you build up your courage, you expand your mind; thus, creating new opportunities for growth. You are more likely to take risks that will guide you to an important positive future, where you may not have ordinarily challenged yourself to go. Fear will fall away when you build up your courage level.

When my cousin died, I was afraid. I had fear as he was my best friend and I was unsure if I would be playful and happy like I used to be. It was a fear that I played with. People kept telling me that I had strength and courage and to move forward. What they did not understand, was at times, courage was about moving ahead even though I did not have the strength. I learned during that time that courage was discovering new ways to find joy, even though my joy was out of sight.

So be courageous and commit to change and raise your consciousness. You can do this by acknowledging your fears and be ready to face them. Do what you fear! If you feel afraid of something try to just do it. Experience will soon teach you. Catch a glimpse of your own greatness and surrender to the outcome. Courage is about action. Not results. If you have the courage to act, you’ve succeeded. Courage is an action regardless of fear.

What's With What-Ifing

People seem to be preoccupied with “what ifs” and worst-case scenarios rather than the positives in life. There is a Swedish Proverb that says worry gives a small thing a big shadow. If that is true, then what ifs give small things a gigantic shadow? When push comes to shove, what ifing is misusing your imagination? Let's face it: imagination knows no bounds.

So when you really put your mind to it, we can all conjure up a number of things to what if about. We need to stop what iffing! We make fear up. What if I lose my job? What if he is cheating on me? What if I get cancer? What if someone breaks my heart? What if I can’t pay rent? What if what is what if?

We are anxious sorts. What if you just stop what-ifing and just start telling the truth? Fear and anxiety are caused by what-iffing. We tend to tell ourselves stories of things that have not happened. When you do the what-ifs, you discredit your own ability to handle life’s problems, assuming you’ll fall apart at the first sign of trouble. These irrational, pessimistic attitudes are not good for your mind, your body or your spirit. What-ifs are mental habits that can be broken. You can teach yourself to stay calm and look at life more positively. 

What ifs become worries, and worries become problems, and these problems can lead to unrelenting doubts and fears and can be paralyzing. They can sap your emotional energy, send your anxiety levels soaring, and interfere with your daily life. So how do you stop what iffing? It is simple. Stick to the facts, only the facts; stay in the now.

By sticking to facts, you are sticking to the truth and only the truth. There is no room to make things up when you remain in a fact. In fact, sticking to facts keeps your side of the road clean because you are not making up stories, and you remain honest with integrity. By sticking to the facts, the what ifing will stop, and you will be walking in peace in no time!

Outlook Determines Our Outcome

Recently I was talking to someone who was wondering what her outcome was going to be in a particular situation. She was not focused on what we were talking about. Instead, she just wanted to know what the outcome was going to be. 

My friend was anxious and had a rather negative outlook on the possible outcome. I asked her if she knew what the number one addiction was in our country. She seemed puzzled that at a time like this I would ask such a question. Finally, she said money. I said no, guess again. She was getting frustrated. However, she wanted to know and wanted to know now! I smiled and said OUTCOME. We are addicted to the outcome.

How you look at your world is through the prism of your attitude. We want a positive outcome all the time. I believe the outcome we get is what we put into it. The power of the mind is simple; you become what you think about. No secret there. Taking it one step further, your outlook determines your outcome.

Our outlook on life can either send us to our destination and keep us on track or derail us from accomplishing what we want. Your outlook is a state of mind. It can be an attitude, a passion, or a deep desire. It can also be a violation, rage, oppression, and discouraging. When you are looking for your outcome, what is your outlook? Are you optimistic or pessimistic? Do you see possibilities or are you stuck in the negatives?

When you make a choice to choose a positive outcome, it is within that moment of that choice that you are able to see the many wonderful possibilities. We can’t always choose what happens in life, and we will all experience challenges and obstacles; there is no way to get away from that. We do have control on how we view what happens in our life. It is important to look at situations and know you can learn from them in a positive way. This is truly how our outlook affects our outcome.

Love Is Energy

 

When I was a psychology student in college, a professor told me you can only love someone else as much as you love yourself. I thought he was crazy, and I recall being angry at him. How could that be? He explained how people spend so much time waiting for someone to love them that they forget to love themselves. It started to make sense to me, and I realized that in order to love, you need to know how to give love to yourself before you can share it with someone else. He explained that we share what we are. If we are negative or have low self-esteem, loving another person will not give us good self-esteem. Love will distract us, but it will not make us love ourselves.

I strongly disagreed with him at the time and was very vocal that we can love others more than we love ourselves. He was a jerk, and I wanted to drop out of his class. What did he know? Of course, years later, I discovered my reaction was so strong because he was right. I was young and did not love myself unconditionally. Years later, after my own process, I discovered what he meant: if we did not love ourselves, we would get in unhealthy relationships with others who do not love themselves. I learned that self-loving and self-loathing were not the same!

Today I say those same words to my clients, and with many of them, I watch the same reaction I had. With some they grow and flourish into wonderful self-loving people. That year in college I learned that love was the greatest antidepressant because many depressed people either do not love themselves or do not feel loved by others. That is why love can propel you into power. That was my introduction to learning the art of self-love.

Our self-love is a validation that we are lovable and we look forward to accepting the love which is offered to us. It propels us into a power where we begin to value our own opinion and not put so much value in what people think of us and the conditions they place on us in order to be loved. Don’t allow your worth to be measured by someone else’s feelings. 

When we harness the ability to love ourselves, we gain a better understanding that we can love ourselves even if others might not love us, and that is powerful! When we love ourselves enough and feel secured in the Belly of the Buddha, we are able to see that self-love increases our ability to love other people. Self-love increases the amount of love that we receive. Love is energy and energy is contagious, therefore, we enhance our ability to receive love.

Compassion is Vital

 

My dear friends were over at my home recently, and we talked about compassion for a while. Great conversation from two very compassionate people. We talked about basically how compassion, at its core, is about putting aside judgment, putting aside any hurt and just being there. It really is about understanding another person's struggles and wanting to help and not hinder. We talked more about compassion, what it means, and how vital it is for a person to survive.

I like to think I have empathy and compassion. I am self-taught. I was never taught it, but I certainly spent decades teaching myself and practicing the art of empathy and compassion. First, I had to learn the difference between the two. I find it easy to keep it simple. Empathy is feeling other peoples emotional experiences and see it and feel it from their perspective. In contrast, compassion is the desire to take action to help the other person.

I understand that it's a positive emotion that involves being thoughtful and kind and is related to sympathy and empathy. It is   feeling that person's pain and wanting to aid and help them. Mind you,  not to do it for them, but them not suffer as the word compassion means to suffer together.

When I think of empathy and compassion, the word altruism comes to mind. It is the principle and practice of concern for the well-being or happiness of other humans. Also different from compassion but very important. It means having a real concern for other people. You genuinely do so with compassion in your heart, not out of obligation, duty, or loyalty. No, it involves acting out of concern for the well-being of other people. It is an act from the heart, yet another thing many people are self-taught.

My morning talk with my close friends made me feel grateful that I was able to teach myself the skills. They say empathy is largely influenced by genetics and socialization. Man, I felt I was screwed. I mean, I really understand that some people are born with tendencies that make them more empathetic. I really understood that some people did not have that in their genetics, and I would need to experience empathy and altruism and grow into compassion. What an honor it was to do so.

I recalled that I spent the first part of my life being a drunk and addict. I was not very empathic or had much compassion. I look back and believe it was because I did not see these traits growing up, and so when I got sober, the first thing I had to learn was compassion and empathy for myself. I didn’t even know what those words meant. How could I learn about something if I did not have it? I began to understand that compassion is not something we’re either born with or not. It’s a skill that can be strengthened through exercise and practice.

Basically, it meant being able to understand and feel my own feelings and respond with kindness and support to my own self. Self-love? Me? Again, I never heard of that word till I got into recovery, and I was 32. When I was in college in my mid-thirties, I had the opportunity to discover, not learn, DISCOVER the meaning of compassion and empathy and to practice it in my own self. If you did not grow up with these traits, you just don't learn them; you discover them within yourself. I was a student of self and ready to learn.

I discovered it by placing myself in another person's shoes. We did these exercises in college that showed us how to understand another person's experience by walking in their shoes.  Basically, it helped me see and feel someone else’s perspective and suffering. I was learning how to have empathy for others by seeing how it made me feel. I learned that empathy is a component of compassion, and when my empathy is extended into action, I feel compassion.

Yikes, it was a new feeling for me, and I began to have compassion and empathy for myself. It was like the universe was embracing me, telling me I was love and light and that I was good in all I did. I had to begin to live life, breaking through the lens of my own experiences growing up. Through self-compassion, I was able to let go and live in the very moment. No, compassion and empathy were not a message that was clear to me growing up, and I learned how not to blame but to grow through loving and understanding myself so I could love others no matter what. Which has proven to be one of my greatest and most difficult accomplishments.

When you love yourself enough to have empathy and let go of the past, you suddenly realize all that matters is empathy and compassion. I realized that empathy and compassion are present when we do not judge. We understand things are what they are. When we put down the thick lenses we wear and really look into someone's eyes, we can see their sorrow, sadness, or confusion. We get a glimpse of how they are feeling and what they personally have been through. We let go of bias and just are present as if each day is the first day we met someone. We let go of judgment and hurt and just have empathy and compassion.

I love my friends and how they stimulate deep conversations about common, simple things like empathy and compassion, which are not simple for so many. I enjoy hearing the stories of utter compassion and loving-kindness. I don't think I will graduate with a degree of loving-kindness, empathy, and total compassion for all in this lifetime. Still, I am working diligently to do my very best every day in hopes of walking in peace with others as well as myself.

Calmness Is A Superpower

I have had so many situations these past few weeks where the only way through them was to remain level-headed and calm. It was vital for me to remain balanced, not overly reactive, and able to stay reasonable and rational. Very difficult in so many situations, especially if you are not surrounded by the same kind of calm and rational behavior. I believe it is important and vital to develop our mental faculties of perception so we can look at things from different points of view. I also get that having a healthy attitude and a positive mental state is scary for some people, and I have seen a few people get really upset when you try to keep calm and balanced; however, know that calmness is a superpower.

I was recently given several experiences where the only choices I had to get through a situation peacefully was to use my superpower of being calm, balanced and rational. I was not sure how I would get through several trying times in the past few weeks. I began to realize that if I took the time to practice quieting my mind and simply observing the sensations and feelings that I was experiencing, then I would be less reactive. I had to take a few breathes and understand other people, events, and situations are really beyond my control. At first this may seem to be an uncomfortable realization, but it is the foundation for calmness which truly is a superpower.

I get that as human beings, we will continuously face adversity, annoyances, anger and stress from a variety of sources. Get this, no matter what you do, where you go, or who you are with it's a fact of life. Here is the other important thing, though I can’t control what will happen, I fully understand that how I react to it is about who I am as a person. If I get angry inpatient, then that is feeding the source, if I am calm and get proactive, than that is who I am.

See over the years as I aged, I really began to understand calmness is like a get out of jail card or some sort of superpower. Calmness, oh indeed it is something I have had to teach myself. Seems like the calmer, positive attributes in my life had to be self-taught and what I have learned over the years is I am given the opportunity to recognize and appreciate the challenges and obstacles life presents to me as opportunities to strengthen my ability to stay calm and balanced. By being grateful for those experiences, they have become tools to help me rather than stress me and this gentle switch in perspective makes it easier to get through difficult times and people.

 For me, when things happen, people get angry, do not understand, become hard to deal with, or a situation goes astray or I am surround by negative attitudes, I see it as a wonderful opportunity to learn more about patience and tolerance and to realize it is not about me. When I let go of the me component, balance is achieved. I try to slow down my thinking and find calm in chaotic environments and situations. I like to slow myself down most of the time by breathing or creating mantras in my head. My favorite mantra is every little thing is going to be alright. I say it over and over until I cannot hear the external disruption. I believe this offers me time to step back and observe people, and believe me, I find this stillness can be in all that activity.

I have, at the age of 66, realized that people are people, they will be who they are, and I cannot change them. When someone upsets me, it is because they aren’t acting according to how I feel they “should” behave. You know, when they are unkind, dishonest, and unable to listen, it is not the behavior I would desire from a kind person. However, I also have to realize that it does not stem from their behavior but from how their behavior differs from my expectations. You know, be kind, honest, and listen. Over the years, I have slowly, and I emphasize slowly, learned to be calm and kind and use that as a superpower.

Yes, indeed, I believe that calmness is a wonderful superpower. Come on, the ability to not overreact, take things personally, keep yourself in now, and your heart walk in peace will almost always offer you the upper hand regardless of your circumstances. You are at your most creative when you are calm. You are more useful to the world and yourself if you can stay centered when everything and everyone around you is off-balance. Being still when all the world around you is racing. Being quiet when everyone is shouting. Being calm when others are anxious. Calm is your superpower. The Dalai Lama said that "the greater the level of calmness of our mind, the greater our peace of mind, the greater our ability to enjoy a happy and joyful life." So, how do we get to this state of calmness? Great questions, and the possibilities are endless.

You can meditate, "I can't you say I have tried over and over,” then simply breathe, just breathe in and out. Slowly and deliberately. I find that to be my number one source of being calm. Breathing in, I calm my body. Breathing out, I smile. Your breath sustains every cell in your body. Every time you inhale, you energize your body. Every time you exhale, you relax your body. It is what feeds your superpower of calmness. I am personally fond of Dr Andrew Weil's breathing exercise and I will quote him; " Inhale through your nose for 4 counts---Hold your breath for 7 counts--Exhale 8 counts." This will feed that calmness.

Now, don't get me wrong; calmness does not mean being in a place where there is no chaos, trouble, or intense reality to deal with.  Calmness means being in the middle of it all and remaining centered. How do you get that way? You can get that way by choosing to have positive energy. Try to find and fix the problem if you can. Now if you cannot fix it, why not accept it? Once you accept it, you might be able to change your thoughts. Whatever you do, try not to put too much energy in it rather, try to remember that most of your thoughts exists in your head. When you feel lost and worried I think people mistake their worries for reality.

Keep in mind, that you and you alone can make the choice of what matters to do and what does not matter to you. Remember that the choices you make for the meanings that you give it. There is an old saying that says, "everything in your life has precisely the meaning you give it. Really when you think of it, chances are the problem is not the problem. Pretty much it is simply over-thinking and over. Just pause, and feed your superpower by breathing and tell yourself that the happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts.  Keep in mind,  being positive doesn’t mean ignoring the negative, it means overcoming the negative. There’s a big difference between the two. Give yourself that power to focus and do so mindfully on what truly matters. Look, life is too short to argue, fight, and be uptight. Calmness among chaos is a human superpower.