Changing Your Life

‘Teachers open the door, you enter by yourself’

It takes little reflection to realize how true that Chinese proverb is! All the courses, workshops and books we are attracted to can be part of the pieces that help us, but only if we apply the knowledge, only if we act and do something different.

Change begins by noticing the pieces of your life you are unhappy with. It may be habitual thoughts that make you depressed, how you think you look, a job you don’t enjoy or doesn’t pay enough, it may be a relationship or a lack of one. The list is endless. While we tend to think any form of unhappiness is just the circumstances that happen to us, if you endure it for years and continue feeling the same dissatisfaction…..it comes back to you, how you feel about yourself and how you react to either change or ignore those circumstances. As they say, the only thing you are in control of is how you react.

Anything that takes us beyond our usual routine and expression will help us expand. Changing your life is a composite of acquiring information on how to do better or something diffferent and finding ways to gradually change the habits you have. While neither a practitioner or a friend can offer an solution, they may help us increase our awareness and options. It has been accurately said that we cannot do better until we know how to. This was true for our parents and our grandparents, but the advantage today is availability of more information and the means to help us make it happen.

It helps to view the chaos or dissatisfaction we sometimes feel as the agent that serves as a catalyst, forcing us to ‘find a better way’. Part of expanding our awareness entails accepting responsibility for our attitudes and habits as well as dissolving distorted perceptions we may have. If we hold resentments because life seemed unfair at times, or someone close to us seemed uncaring, therapies like polarity therapy, homeopathy, hypnotherapy, NLP, or psychotherapy are a few options that may provide a means to access and release resentments. Talking emotions out with an objective practitioner will often bring new awareness and allow release. Other therapies may serve to access and release the energetic charge associated with an unpleasant experience without detailed discussion. Awareness of the emotion and acknowledging our perceptions, true or false, is the first component. Choosing different approaches or combined approaches will depend on the strength of the experience you wish to dissolve and the therapy that attracts you. It is important to decide what that change is worth.

If we feel out of touch, bodywork may be the right place to start to help bring our body and mind into balance. It can help us notice the difference of being centered versus feeling scattered. Bodywork can be the initial step to get in touch with ‘the inner you’ to expand awareness and lead to healthier decisions. This may initially include massage therapy forms or polarity therapy, which combines bodywork with energy balancing on many levels, meaning physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. Our emotions can be locked in our tissues and cells to express as chronic pains that are not released with physical bodywork alone.  Experiencing polarity therapy, Brain Gym or One Brain, deep breathing exercises, meditation or affirmation exercises are but some of the ways that may provide a means to access locked emotion for release, helping to adjust your perceptions and to maintain a new focus to change your belief system.

Our belief system is key. While we may feel resistance to things like affirmations and visualization boards, once you are active in these new things it is surprising to notice the value you may find in them. This is because we are chipping away at our old belief system that judges the worth of something different. But, these activities can slow our mental process down, allowing new information to be absorbed to start changing ingrained habits that may be holding us back. To change something intangible like our thought process, our self-worth or belief system, it is necessary to translate the changes into a physical-mental process you can relate to. And that is part of the value in the therapist you choose.

Investing in yourself should not be considered pampering. It is a way to expand your consciousness and make higher choices for yourself that will reflect into all aspects of your life.  

No one has all the answers, but in the famous words of Socrates:

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” 

~  Socrates (appx 469 B.C. to 399 B.C.)

Said at his trial for heresy, where he was on trial for encouraging his students to challenge the accepted beliefs of the time and think for themselves. Are we there yet?