Pleasure or Pain

Pleasure or Pain

“To complain of the age we live in,

to murmur at the present possessors of power,

to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes for the future,

are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind.”

Edmund Burke 1729 – 1797

Most of us, are motivated to move away from pain and towards pleasure. This works on a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual level.

So – what’s wrong with that?

Nothing at all! We exist today as evidence that the system works – we always survive!

Now, the problem is, survival is part of our problem!

Survival is okay if you are stuck in a reality TV show with fifteen other aspirant millionaires all trying to outlast, outplay and out-scheme you, but where do you go from there?

Now that you are still here, what are you going to do to increase your wellness, your happiness?

Unfortunately most of us have be taught to move just far away from the pain to be tolerable and there we must stay, occasionally exciting ourselves with a material nick-nack, dreaming of where we would like to be, but never quite feeling enough pain to move into that dream.

Uninspired, we soon find ourselves surrounded by like minded pain avoiders with whom we communicate. (Like attracts like remember, so the people in your space are reflecting yourself back to you!) As you might imagine this communication remains limited to ‘victim-speak’ – whinging and whining and moaning and complaining. Instead of using these pain complaints as motivators for change, we perpetuate them. We don’t know any different!

The reason that we are often so out of touch with what we want is because we are not really sure who we are.

In our pain free world we have lost touch with what is real. We survive so well that we don’t often seek answers to potentially painful questions like; Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose? What do I stand for? What is really important to me? What do I want my life to be about? What do I want to leave behind?

We need to make the evolutionary quantum leap from being merely ‘survival’ oriented to being able to thrive!

This week, list you Pleasure and your Pain and see if you can answer some of those difficult questions!

Take that leap and start to thrive!

 

 

Cut the Clutter

“To thine own self be true”

William Shakespeare

How much of your dis-ease, unhappiness, worry, illness and other external manifestations of inner turmoil is created by your perceived need to respond to other peoples stuff?

Last night I was watching a series on my laptop. I started to feel depressed, insecure, and overwhelmed. I paused the video file and went to make a cup of tea, all the time wondering why I was feeling down. I had had a great day and was rewarding myself by watching a show, but I was now depressed, insecure, overwhelmed… WHY?

I was comparing myself and my hopes and dreams to the main character in the show, and in my estimation I was coming up very short!

How was it that a fictitious character, played by a very average actor caused me to doubt myself?

How much of that characters’ clutter was I subconsciously responding to in my life?

I picked up a pen and diary and started to take some of my own advice (that stuff I have been writing over the past few months!).

 I wrote down and answered some simple questions;

 What makes me uncomfortable when I watch that show?

Is that “stuff” important to me?

Why or why not?

What do I want?

How can I use that uncomfortable trigger to fine tune ME?

What action can I take and what goals can I re-enforce to get to where I want to be?

After an hour I was feeling empowered and confident. I had successfully made a big breakthrough in my personal self identity. I had cut out everybody else’s clutter and was now leaner and more efficient on my path to achieving my goals.

You can do it too – its easy!

The secrets to this process are;

Self awareness, honesty and the suspension of judgement.

Take a moment to accept yourself as you are right now in the moment. Dare to dream about who and where you would like to be, and take a single step in that direction. That is the most important step you will take on your path to personal health wellness and happiness!

What Matters to you?

What Matters to you?

“Would you tell me, please, which way to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to go,” said the Cat

“I don’t much care where…” said Alice

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat

LEWIS CARROLL – Alice in Wonderland

 

We have already dealt with that dreaded (for me anyway) concept of goal setting. To make this process easier, ask yourself why you have those specific goals?

There must be a reason why one person wants X and another wants Y!

Both X and Y are perfectly acceptable under the correct circumstances, but why differentiate between X and Y in the first place?

The only reasonable answer seems to be that either X or Y matters to the individual at that specific point in time and under those specific circumstances in that moment. The choice is dictated by the importance of the outcome.

Have you ever experienced the frustration of not achieving what you set out to achieve?

Look specifically at personal wellness goals – losing or gaining weight, smoking cessation, addiction issues, improving exercise patterns, managing stress better and all the other usual suspects!

Look back over the past few years and see where you started to implement changes, when the whole process fell apart and the old behaviour dominated again.

Now ask yourself what was the motivation for the change?

What was it in the expected outcome, the goal, that MATTERED to you.

Was this motivation actually important to YOU or not – did you try to give up smoking because your parent or spouse told you to, or because you saw a grizzly picture on a cigarette pack?

How more powerful would the motivation have been if the goal was actually important to YOU- if you were planing to hike in the Himalayas, or surf in Polynesia for example, the behaviour pattern change would be linked to your passion, to what matters to you!

 

Take a moment to decide what matters to you.

How are your current goals linked to this?

How can you use what matters to you to change and improve where you choose?

www.woadwellness.com

Your HERO

Who is YOUR Hero?

“Behaviour that is admired is the path to power among people everywhere”

Beowulf

“I am Ripper… Tearer… Slasher… Gouger. I am the teeth in the darkness, the talons in the night. Mine is strength… and lust… and power! I am Beowulf!”

Beowulf

Us Humans are strange and complex creatures yet we are also incredibly simple creatures.

We love, feel, invent, create, and philosophise, yet we all seem to be programmed to seek out and follow a hero – some mythical figure who embodies everything that we perceive as good, powerful and inimical to our fears and adversaries, yet that powerful saviour and protector is darkness its self. An interwoven paradox of right and wrong, light and dark. The strange thing about a hero is that it is irrelevant if you love or hate the character, that hero has your attention!

This aspiration to emulate greatness has been both the rise and downfall of many. We seem to engage in a self regulating, society induced balancing game as we ride the roller-coaster of life. We strive to better ourselves in relation to our en-cultured society, and in turn our en-culturation and social structure destroys its old and adapts to our achievements. A phoenix constantly rising.

Who is your Hero, your role model?

Who do look up to and admire?

What in them do you want to emulate and why?

What’s in it for you?

Imagine for a moment that you – yes YOU, the person looking back at you while you clean your teeth in the morning, were that person, that hero that you so admire!

How would that feel?

What emotion do you feel in the moment of allowing yourself to be you own hero?

That insecurity, doubt, pride or joy is either holding you back or is the path for you to follow to your own greatness.

Observe, change, adapt and go out into the world as your own hero!

It is that easy!

 

http://www.woadwellness.com

Attraction!

Attraction!

“The mind sees only what it looks for,

and looks only for what it has in mind”

Anonymous

According to Chaos Theorists, attraction is what influences any system towards order. All creation myths refer to an organizing power which acts upon the chaos then in existence and causes division and order to manifest there by creating the world or universe.

This same attraction principle is constantly at work in our lives. The ideas and beliefs that we have decided to accept about ourselves are attracting those conditions and things to us all the time – we are a constant self fulfilling prophecy!

This proves us right, our thoughts manifest, but does this get us to where we want to be?

When things don’t go according to plan, it is the thoughts and beliefs of others that, once vocalised to us act as friction to slow down and often stop our self-fulfilling prophecies. Sometimes this is good, most times it is bad!

Our lives seem to swing from order to chaos and back again in a constant evolutionary progression in what Carl Jung, the renowned psychologist, referred to as the pattern of life. This is a vital ingredient for our real purpose here on Earth – the evolution of our Soul through successive cycles of strain and ease. The quality of our thinking determines our level of development, and determines which lessons we most need to learn. The joys and problems, we attract into our lives are a direct result of what we are thinking. Once we understand the circumstance, we can change our thoughts and change our lives!

Wellness is a constant observation and editing of our thought process to keep our thoughts in line with our goals, and our goals in line with our intention. It is not the achievement of goals that is important, but rather what we experience and learn while achieving them!

Dream it, experience it, dream some more!

Take some this week to explore the patterns of your life:

 

What are the recurring problems you face?

What are the lessons behind these patterns?

What would your life be like if you had already learned these lessons?

What would you like to attract into your life?

http://www.woadwellness.com