Psychedelic drugs were banned in the US in the late 1960s, which ended the flourishing research into their potential for treating mental illness. Now a leading professor from Imperial College London is re-visiting the field. He’s convinced that psychedelic therapy offers a new paradigm for mental health. His other passion is treatment for addiction, and to discover why some of us are more vulnerable than others.
Equanimity balances the giving of your heart’s love with the recognition and acceptance that things are the way they are.
However much you may care for someone, however much you may do for others, however much you would like to control things (or wish that they were other than they are) equanimity is a reminder that all beings everywhere are responsible for their own actions, and for the consequences of their actions. Equanimity will allow you to open your heart and offer love, kindness, compassion, and joy, while letting go of your expectations and attachment to results. Equanimity gives you the energy to persist, regardless of the outcome, because you will be connected to the integrity of the effort itself.
Frank Jude Boccio, Calm Within
Wait, I’m sorry, did you want the recipe for these Keto Chocolate Chip Cookies? You sure did! Man you guys freaked out for this recipe and I love it! You guys are so my people. Sorry it took me forever to get these señioritas up on the blog. What can I say? I was busy. Shrugs. We finally finished up the house and I have this fancy new desk space to work from and it’s everything. It’s crazy how much more productive you can be when you have a great space.
So lets talk Keto and cookies for s second mmmkay?
I firmly believe that everyone should have at least one outfit that they feel absolutely amazing in, and a recipe for a fantastic batch of chocolate chip cookies. Chocolate chip cookies are the Little Black Dress of the culinary world.
If you’re doing Keto or Low-Carb and craving cookies, this is your recipe. According to my calculations these have 1g net carbs per cookie. I wouldn’t file this under “Things I’m Proud Of”, but I did eat 6 of these cookies in one day and still had a very dark ketosis test strip. I did Keto for 100 days at the beginning of the year as an experiment to see what all the fuss was about. My body has always done really well with lower-carb diets, which sucks because I sure love me some carbs. I did Atkins like 100 years ago and loved it, but eventually got bored and went back to darkness my old friend, ie. Carbs.
So what’s Keto you may ask? Keto is short for Ketosis or the process of your body burning fat for fuel instead of carbohydrates. Keto is a diet of very low carbohydrates (5%-10% of your daily macros), moderate protein, and high fat. I find for me, my sweet spot on Keto was about 30g-35g of carbs a day. I could still be in Ketosis and didn’t feel like I was low on energy or anything. Days where I had 20g or fewer, I was definitely dragging and exercise was a little challenging.
Since I normally eat relatively low carb, about 75-100g a day (what feels best for my body), I didn’t get any sort of Keto Flu when I started. Like at all. So that was awesome. I would say the only thing I really noticed while transitioning was just that exercise seemed harder than usual. Like it took more effort and I was tired quicker. That’s about it.
I think the thing I ended up liking the most about Keto was how full I stayed all day. I felt like I was never hungry and when I was hungry, I knew it was actual body hunger, not stress or emotional hunger. I think that’s a really good thing to learn about your body. Months later now, because of Keto, I’ve learned to identify what my body hunger feels like (my body telling me it needs food) vs. emotional eating (eating because I’m bored, or happy, or stressed). That is something I think is really important for everyone to learn to recognize. Usually when I’m eating because I’m bored, there is something else I could be doing to alleviate that symptom besides stuffing my face. As much as I love it, my pants don’t.
One side effect that I actually didn’t like with Keto was the sleep situation. Folks claim that their sleep improves on Keto. Mine didn’t. I was literally unable to sleep in and I’d constantly wake up before my alarm clock went off. I think this is due to the fact that I just had much more energy on Keto. If you know anything about me at all though, you know that I LOVE sleep, like probably as much as I love chocolate and that’s really saying something.
I don’t want to wake up early! Ever! Haha. So for me that was not ideal although for some of you I’m sure it will be. I love to sleep in on the weekends. So much so in fact, that it’s one of the main reasons I don’t have kids. I’m a night owl by nature. If I could create my ideal schedule, like if work and normal adult people stuff didn’t get in the way, it would be 2am-10am. Meaning I would go to sleep at 2am and wake up at 10am. I do my best and most clear thinking at night and it’s the only time of day that I feel actually awake, acute, insightful, and ready to take on the day. Which is kind of ironic since the day is over.
I know this about myself because every year during the Holidays, I take 2-3 weeks off for Christmas and this is the schedule my body naturally adapts to when I don’t have an alarm set. It’s what feels most natural to me and I can thrive in a state where I never feel tired or like I’m running on empty. Usually getting out of bed every morning feels like pure absolute torture to me on the daily. It has since I was a little kid and would have to go to school. Don’t even get me started on the Saturday morning screaming matches I’d have with my poor Mom who had to wake me up for soccer games. Sorry Mom. She says I love to sleep so much because I was born a month late. “You just didn’t want to get up.”
But I digress…with Keto I would just wake up and be up up. So actually maybe we should file that under ‘A Good Thing’. I started to miss those sleepy mornings though where you wake up, but sleep still has it’s grasp on you like a tender hug, not wanting to let you out of it’s arms. So you pull the blankets up a little tighter and then roll over on to your other side and quickly slip under again. I love that feeling. Keto doesn’t. It’s like a drill Sargent snapping you awake at dawn to go run laps.
So what happened after the 100 days? Am I still doing Keto? Simply put, No. Keto is not something that I would want to permanently maintain as a lifestyle. While I absolutely loved all the rich and delicious food I got to eat on Keto, (hello bacon-wrapped jalepeño cream cheese stuffed chicken, I’m talking to you) I really missed my favorite carbs (now I’m talking to you gluten-free chocolate chip pancakes!) and began to feel deprived. For me I have to find a balance with my diet. If I deprive myself of something for too long, I get binge tendencies. Meaning if I don’t allow myself a certain type of food whether it be sweets, carbs, alcohol, etc. the second I do allow it into my life again, I tend to binge on it.
I’ve been doing a lot of self-reflection on this topic lately, thinking about my diet as a whole, what works for me, what doesn’t. I also read this good book that really opened my eyes to some things, a book that I HIGHLY recommend. It’s called The Diet Fix: Why Diets Fail and How to Make Yours Work by Dr. Yoni Freedhoff. While I realize that this sounds like a super cheesy diet book from 1986, I promise you, it’s anything but that.
It’s basically a book about simple tips to maintain a healthy lifestyle and lose weight if that’s your goal. I mean, I have a few Lbs. I definitely wouldn’t mind saying goodbye to, ya feel me? I found this book to be full of really insightful suggestions that made so much sense I was like, “Why have I never thought of that before.” It also gets you in a different mindset about diets in general, which I think is something most of us will really benefit from. This book helped me realize that one of my big diet fails is that I restrict myself too much and then end up eating a ton of whatever that food is when I finally do let myself have it (binging tendencies). So my new mantra is “No Food is Off Limits”. I choose to stay away from gluten because it causes a ruckus if I eat it. I will eat it on occasion if it’s really worth it, but other than that I stay away from it by choice.
So let’s get back to cookies shall we! Twist my arm…so these Keto Chocolate Chip Cookies are perfection. They taste just like the real deal. I think I tested this recipe 3 times to get it just right. The first batch was…terrible, but by batch 3 we were good to go. I get my Swerve and Lily’s chocolate from Sprouts, but you can probably find them at any Whole Foods or local health food store. If not there is always the internet! What did we do without the internet? No seriously, what did we do?
Are you doing Keto right now? Or just looking for your one fabulous chocolate chip cookie recipe to have on hand?
The post Keto Chocolate Chip Cookies appeared first on Clean Eating with a Dirty Mind.
Having children can be wonderful but there’s no doubt that parenting can be challenging, especially for women with mental illness. We hear about the lives of mothers diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder—it’s a disorder defined by extreme emotional instability and is surrounded by stigma. The treatment can make a real difference to the wellbeing of families.
By Deepak Chopra, MD
More people than ever have undertaken a spiritual path of their own, independently of organized religion. “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual” has become a common expression, and I count myself among those who struck out on their own as a seeker. My search has covered a lot of ground over the years, from mind-body medicine to quantum physics, higher consciousness, the future of God, and personal transformation.
What all of these disparate topics have in common is reality, in the sense that everyday reality is hiding from view the “real” reality that needs to be unveiled. (Readers might want to look at last week’s post, “Unveiling Reality,” which details what it means to unveil reality.) There’s no question that the five senses detect the world in a very limited way, since they give no clue that molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles exist, not to mention genes and DNA. But unveiling a deeper physical reality is far from the whole story.
The physical sciences are about the external world, while another hidden reality, which is crucial to spiritual seeking, takes place “in here,” where the mind is the explorer and the territory being explored. This sounds like a contradiction, and so does the traditional way of reaching higher consciousness, which is called “the pathless path.” How can you unveil reality “in here” when the explorer—the mind—isn’t separate from the territory it wants to explore. The difficulty emerges clearly if you ask a question like “What do I think about thinking?” or “Am I aware of awareness?”
At best these questions sound circular, like a snake biting its tail. But the contradiction is straightened out, and the pathless path makes sense, when you realize one simple thing: The active mind isn’t the same as the still, quiet mind. Every method of spiritual seeking, if it is successful, goes beyond the active mind and its restless baggage of sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts, with the aim of settling down into pure, undisturbed awareness. By analogy, one dives below the churning surface of a raging river, moving through deeper waters where the currents are slower, until one reaches the bottom, where the river is almost motionless.
Here, however, the analogy breaks down, because meditation, which is like an inner dive, can reach the zero point of no motion or activity of any kind. At the source of your awareness you can encounter pure awareness. Why is this experience worthwhile? Because the field of pure awareness is the origin of traits that are innate in us: Intelligence, creativity, evolution, love, and self-awareness are chief among these.
The pathless path makes sense for that reason; it leads you, without going anywhere, to a deeper level of awareness. Once you experience the deeper level, you find that there’s a shift. You identify less with your everyday self, which is totally dependent on the active mind (along with the desires, hopes, wishes, and dreams it generates), and you start to identify more with the field of pure awareness.
In this way higher consciousness gets assimilated into who you are and how you live your life. The word “spiritual” isn’t mandatory to describe this shift; I prefer to describe the whole process in terms of awareness, which is a more neutral term. What baffles people is that the whole project of seeking gets tangled up in misguided ideas. Let me list the pitfalls one is most likely to encounter.
I doubt that anyone who has honestly undertaken an inner journey is immune to some or all of these pitfalls. There is an enormous gap between where you find yourself today (totally dependent on the active mind) and the reality yet to be unveiled. Nothing less than an all-encompassing illusion surrounds us, a construct of the human mind that conditions everything we think and feel.
When it is put that way, the pathless path seems impossible or at the very least difficult and probably painful. But what’s difficult and painful are the pitfalls I’ve listed. The illusion creates all the problems. It’s crucial to see this. The actual path is effortless and pain-free. The mind by its own nature can know its source in pure awareness. By analogy, you can go through troubles, worries, everyday crises, and arguments with your children, but without a doubt you know you love them. Love goes beyond the other stuff—that’s how transcendence, or going beyond, works.
The same holds true in the process of unveiling reality, which also goes by the simple name of waking up. The ancient Vedas declare that everyone is defined by their deepest desires. Desire leads to thoughts, thoughts to words and actions, actions to the fulfillment of desire. So in a very basic way, the pathless path is a path of desire. If your deepest desire is to wake up, to escape the illusion, to unveil reality, and in the end to know who you really are, the message gets through. Your deepest desire activates a level of awareness that will lead you to the goal.
As with raising kids, the everyday stuff rises and falls, but love, caring, attention, and devotion steadily work their way. The same is true of you the seeker, even though you are both parent and child to yourself, both teacher and student, healer and healed.Because these dual roles merge into one, the pathless path makes sense, and it works.
Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com
By Deepak Chopra, MD
For many decades It was assumed that the human brain must be special, as superior to the brains of other mammals as our minds are. This specialness was never seriously questioned, and even basic facts, like asserting that the human brain contains 100 billion neurons, were arrived at with surprising casualness.
In an interesting 2013 TED talk, the articulate Brazilian neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel offers clarity for the first time on several of the basic issues. After devising a way to dissolve brain cell membranes so that only the nuclei remained, and isolating them to be counted, she determined that the human brain contains 86 billion neurons, the most of any primate. Even though the human brain is a small fraction of our total weight, it uses 25% of a person’s daily calorie consumption.
That may seem like an incidental fact, but Herculano-Houzel makes it the cornerstone of her argument, which declares that the human brain isn’t special. We have primate brains, she says, that are in proportion to our primate relatives like chimpanzees and gorillas. But in an odd evolutionary twist, chimps and gorillas cannot sustain the calorie load of an immense brain by eating raw food. Typically, a great ape feeds for eight hours a day to sustain its large body, and over time a choice was made to prefer a very large body with a smaller number of neurons.
In Homo sapiens the reverse occurred. We chose a small body and a huge brain, particularly the higher brain responsible for our superior mind. According to Herculano-Houzel’s explanation, this choice was made possible by the invention of cooking. Cooking raw food is like pre-digesting it outside the body; cooked food is easier to digest, contains more nutrients by weight than raw food, and takes many fewer hours to eat. You can get an entire day’s calorie load with a 15-minute visit to a fast-food chain.
So there you have it: cooking led to the enormous number of neurons we possess, and they in turn allowed our huge cognitive capacity to evolve in a growth spurt that took the early hominid brain on a skyrocketing curve for the last 1.5 million years since the discovery of fire.
But as intriguing as this hypothesis is, and as essential as fire was to human evolution, the whole thing doesn’t hold water. To begin with, if we started out in our hominid ancestry with unevolved primate brains, how were such brains smart enough to discover fire? No other higher primate did, and they already possessed big brains on the mammalian ladder. Second, how does counting neurons have anything to do with the mental abilities that created civilization? Plenty of people possess the full complement of 86 billion neurons but who lead totally ordinary lives.
It does not occur to them to exploit our almost infinite capacity for creativity. They just live their lives by working and raising families. Primitive cultures faced enormous challenges simply to do the same, leaving almost no time for art, music, invention, discovery, philosophy, religion, and the other accoutrements of civilization. Why and how could a clump of brain cells, even a huge clump, decide to follow such a trajectory?
The earliest representations of a human figure in sculptural form date back not to early Homo sapiens but to Homo erectus, somewhere between 250,000 and 750,000 years ago. There is evidence that Neanderthals buried their dead in cave tombs, wore decorative jewelry, and perhaps performed religious ceremonies. If you stop to think about it, there was no pressing reason for the brain to need the wheel or pottery—Australian aborigines existed between 45,000 and 60,000 years, the longest continuous indigenous culture on earth, without either.
The problem with basing human achievements on our big brains is that at bottom, neuroscience assumes that we are brain puppets. It sounds almost ridiculously simple, but that’s like saying that without a radio you cannot explain music. Putting the apparatus first is such an obvious mistake, you wouldn’t think a science as advanced as brain science would make it—but it has. The equation of Brain = Mind puts the apparatus first. Either the brain created the mind or they developed in some mysterious relationship.
Since science is about clearing up mysteries, the inability to decide how brain relates to mind has been too frustrating. As a short cut, why not say that the brain created the mind? It cut through all the philosophical red tape. Yet for all the convenience that it brings to brain research, there is zero proof that the brain creates the mind. At no point can anyone show how cells that are constituted from the same DNA as heart, liver, and lung cells somehow learned to think. The very notion that the brain thinks is empty; it is like saying that a piano understands Mozart.
We will never get the brain right until we follow the second path and delve into the mystery of how the mind and brain relate to each other. It is false to assume that brain experts are also mind experts; they aren’t. By adopting the false assumption that the brain is the mind, for all practical purposes, neuroscience has left out the true nature of intelligence, creativity, love, art, compassion, spiritual experiences, and higher evolution. Those things belong to the evolution of the human mind and remain completely baffling if you only stare at neurons through a microscope.
Realizing this, there is a movement to confront the real mystery, which is consciousness itself. Consciousness cannot be shown to be a created thing. The brain is a created thing—we can follow its physical evolution with considerable accuracy now. But at no point does consciousness appear out of the physical “stuff” of creation. It may be, as some theorists argue, that consciousness is innate in creation. It has always been there. The irony is that once we pay serious attention to consciousness, which will unravel the mystery of being human, it will be consciousness that explains consciousness to itself.
Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com
This is a guest post by Ryan Rivera of www.calmclinic.com
Oh my god! It is almost 12 noon and I am still stuck with this report. What will I do? I must make haste! Will I make it? Working in this pace is going to make me lose my job. I’m running out of time! Me? Fired? Oh, no! Rent’s due this Friday. What am I going to do?”
If this is the beat constantly playing in your work life, then I guess it is only a matter of time until this tune will beat the goodness out of you. This melody of anxiety can be quite disgruntling. The stress of trying to finish work before the deadline, the pressure of improving your work performance and the strain of meeting obligations and other responsibilities can cause extreme problems to your nerves.
Mind you. Your nerves can only handle too much. When they get smashed and thrashed all over the place with all the adrenaline and relentless worrying that you do, they will lose their functionality. This, unfortunately, will lead to the development of anxiety disorders.
If you wish to avoid this fate, here are some of the best techniques to help you cope with all the stress and anxiety surrounding you.
At the first sign of anxiety, keep yourself calm. Your heart may beat so fast. Your breathing may turn difficult. Your muscles may grow tense. Your head may spin around. But never ever lose your composure. Get hold of yourself and try not to panic. The more you fret, the more you worry and the greater and more extreme the feelings of anxiety will become.
Deep breathing exercises are the easiest and fastest way of keeping yourself calm. When things go out of hand and time seems to be running out, pause for a while and do deep breathing. This simple exercise of filling up your lungs with air will help solve the oxygen-carbon dioxide imbalance that may cause the symptoms of anxiety.
Certain fragrances from your favorite scents such as lavender, chamomile, and jasmine trigger a relaxation response. Their calming whiff helps to lift your emotions. Hence, when you are feeling a little blue or tensed, light up a scented candle and fill your home with their aroma.
Songs as they say are “food for the soul.” They sate the pains, sorrows, anxieties, and worries that lie beneath the core. If you are feeling tensed, putting on your favorite cd and listening to the tunes being played will help soothe your aches and pains. You can try to play songs with lively or positive beat. But it is up to you. What is important is that you enjoy the music.
Strained muscles often need a little bit of stretching to loosen them up. Being slumped in work for hours can cause pressure in your back and muscles. This piled up tension can be annoying and painful at times. Practising some toe touches before you hit the sack for at least 5 minutes will help relieve those soreness and muscle cramps.
The mess and chaos of your surroundings greatly add to the anxiety you are experiencing. To trim them down, clearing the clutter from your home can essentially help to de-clutter your mind as well.
This step can be a tough one. But taking this can do wonders to alleviate your anxiety. As delicious as coffee can be, you have to ditch this addiction because the caffeine it contains makes your nerves jolt, leaving you anxious from morning till noon. So, wean yourself from coffee soon. Try drinking green tea instead.
Your imagination is a strong tool that can help you achieve clarity and relaxation. Closing your eyes when anxiety hits and picturing a serene setting where you can escape to and become completely immersed in are effective means of leaving your anxiety out of the picture.
A good body massage does not only promote relaxation but also healthy blood circulation. With every inch of your body receiving adequate supply of oxygenated blood, your cells and nerves will be in good working condition. When they are working properly, bouts of anxieties will be prevented. Moreover, massage therapy is proven to enhance EEG pattern of alertness and math computations. So, pamper yourself. Go to a spa and get your needed massage.
Chocolate acts like an amphetamine in the body. It helps to increase your mood leading to feelings of happiness, alertness and excitement.
Just take it in moderation. Eating more than enough is no longer good for the body.
To be anxiety-free takes dedication. You need to commit so that the process will be successful. You can follow these simple techniques to get started. They are proven to help resolve the worries and fears you are experiencing. Take your pick and see what works for you. The changes won’t be overnight though, but you’re on your way.
No one can cause you to feel substandard without having your agreement Are you affected by low self confidence or inferiority complex? I will share some self-help tips on tips on how to get over that will produce your self-confidence. Chances are you’ll have inferiority complicated simply because he or she considers that there’s a…
The theme of this post is don’t wait for a life changing event to kick start you into action. Apart from self confidence, living each day more deliberately can can infuse your life with more meaning and focus.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc?rel=0]
This “commencement address” is now well known. I want to focus near the end; At 9:10 Steve says:-
“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”
steve jobs – never forgotten
Steve, of course, has now had his last day at the age of 56. When I started to write this post the papers and internet are full of stories about the death, at 48 , of Whitney Houston. This final part of Steve’s speech hammers home the fact that we are all mortal; You need to have the confidence to live the life you want – not what someone else wants:-
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life… Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice… Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”
Reading, and responding to, comments is one of the joys of blogging. And I do now try to say thanks to genuine comments!
…pulled the trigger – click!
Quite often I have received comments that give a totally new angle on what I had originally written. Occasionally people share personal experiences related to the topic I have started.
But let me quote Bruce Blair commenting on People are Awesome :-
“I agree people are amazing and peak moments are something to contemplate. I was in a position once where a man pointed a pistol at me and pulled the trigger – click! A second click! He ran. I have had trouble getting excited about much ever since. I still had to function and found out I could with a clear head. Been in ER medicine ever since. My peak moment.”
Its not unusual when people have peak moments that are also death defying, such as Bruce’s, for them to be life changing events. You hear that when people survive car crashes or other accidents or incidents that could have turned out very differently.
As in the original post I’m going to quote again from the excellent Chris Guillebeau’s Art of Non-Conformity
“Instead of responding to trauma, therefore, it’s better if you can avoid a wake-up call like that to create change in your life. You don’t have to wait for a 9/11, a car crash, another near brush with death to think about what really matters. You can do so right now, today, no matter what else is happening in your life.”
Chris was reflecting on two books he had read which dealt with how people lived their lives when told of terminal illness and in effect given a date around which they would die. That can be even more of a wake-up call than surviving a near death experience.
In such circumstances many took the route of living each day more deliberately, making definite plans and choosing projects to do that were most important to them. The sad thing is waiting till we have such a jolt before switching from living each day passively, as if we had an infinite number.
I wrote a recent post around the regrets of the dying. I’m not generally morbid and this will be the last on this theme (for now!). But it does appear that death – either when we are reminded that we could go at any-time, or when its imminent – focusses the mind. Although Steve Jobs says he read and was affected by the quote above at the age of 17, I’m sure it was his first brush with cancer that inspired that speech.
So why does it have to happen this way? Do we need a life changing event to kick start us into action? And like Bruce, has something dramatic sparked your life? Do share your experiences and thoughts.
photos by blakespot and vectorportal.com on flickr
One of the major differences between people and their outlook on life is the questions that they consistently ask themselves. If this seems like a strange observation, it may be that you have been underestimating the power of questions to change your mindset.
Questions have the ability to change our focus in an instant. Asking the right questions can change our mindset from a limiting one to an empowering one. Our personal view of reality hinges on what we focus on and questions are one of the fastest ways to shift to a more empowering and resourceful mindset.
We are all in the habit of asking ourselves questions every day, most of the time were not even aware of their effect. Our minds love it when we ask ourselves questions. Questions provide the mind with incentive, direction and focus. As soon as we ask a question, our mind immediately begins searching for an answer. If we don’t like the answers that we are getting, it probably has a lot to do with the questions we are asking.
Questions have a dramatic effect on everything we do in life. They determine our abilities, the quality of our relationships and our income. By asking the right questions we can shift to a more empowering mindset and find the answers needed to change any aspect of our life.
Questions that cause us to focus on possibilities and solutions are the ones that empower us by shifting our mindset. The problem is, we can easily slip into the habit of asking ourselves questions that are limiting, or even mentally and emotionally disabling.
Whatever we focus on the most will eventually become our reality. By training ourselves to consciously ask empowering questions, regardless of our circumstances, we will direct our mindset to continually focus on new possibilities and solutions. This is exactly the kind of focus that enhances our personal growth and development.
Now let’s look at a couple of situations that could arise and notice how asking different types of questions can radically alter our mental disposition and mindset.
Let’s say it’s Wednesday morning and the alarm just went off, what’s the first question you ask yourself? If you say, “Why do I have to go to work today?” how is that going to affect your attitude? If you say “Why do I feel so tired and run down?” how is that going to affect your energy levels? With those two simple questions you have set yourself up for a disappointing day. Why? Because now your mind is focused on finding reasons why you’re tired and have to do something you don’t want to do like go to work.
What if the first two questions you asked yourself were, “What do I have to look forward to today, and what am I most grateful for right now?” Even if you don’t have the immediate answers to those questions, this positive mindset will focus your attention on finding the answers. Ask yourself those questions a few times and notice how the answers make you feel. All of a sudden you have something to look forward to and something to be grateful for. How will that kind of mindset affect your day?
If someone makes a thoughtless comment to you, what’s the first question you ask yourself? If you ask, “Why don’t they like me?” how will that make you feel? Probably pretty bad, because now your mindset is looking for reasons why people don’t like you and the answers aren’t likely to be very encouraging.
But what if your response was, “I wonder what I can do to help them feel better?” As your mind searches for the answers to that question you’re going to be focused on positive things, because you’re looking for a way to help someone else.
As you can plainly see, asking the right questions can quickly shift your mindset in a very positive direction. The challenge is that most of us are on automatic pilot. Most of the time we fail to take conscious control of the questions we ask ourselves. As a result, we can inadvertently adopt a less than empowering mindset.
In the next article we will look at some exercises we can do to train ourselves to consistently ask empowering questions. For now, try working with your morning questions and notice how it affects the rest of your day.
Do you think your questions have power?
Do you agree with the question-mindset connection?
Share your thoughts on facebook or google+
This is part 1 in a series of 3 articles about Using Questions to Change Your Mindset.
For the rest of the story visit…
Use questions to Change your Mindset – Part 2
Use questions to Change your Mindset – Part 3
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The post Use Questions to Change Your Mindset – Part 1 appeared first on Advanced Life Skills.
