If your heart is calling you to dive in and experience how the Miracle Of Gratitude could change your life – fast and forever – then you won’t want to miss this! Last chance!
[Read more…] about Last Call For Miracle Of Gratitude – Inner Circle!
Video – What Autumn Leaves Can Teach Us About Change
In this month’s Soul-Sized Living magazine, I have been focussing on how to handle change.
How To Handle Change
What autumn leaves can teach us
With the change of season, it’s a natural time to pause and reflect. And we often feel the seasonal shift at a very deep level. This month I want to share with you a short video, which talks about the life lessons that autumn leaves can teach us – and how they can help us more easily handle change.
Here’s where to watch the video: [Read more…] about Video – What Autumn Leaves Can Teach Us About Change
Could You Choose To Change Your Life This World Gratitude Day? September 21st 2013
We tend to be stuck living in a world that was created by our Monkey Minds, stuck with its old fears, worries, habits, baggage and projections. This leads to stress, unhappiness, ‘dis-ease’, anxiety and broken relationships. 🙁
But the solution to all of this is there, waiting for you – in your heart. 🙂
Is it time to move from living in your head, to living from your heart?
As soon as you move from your head to your heart:
- your thinking calms
- your breathing slows
- your body’s stress / relaxation systems move back towards balance
- stress starts to fade
- tension – physical and mental – starts to release
- it’s easier to smile
- it’s easier to think about more positive, happy things
… and that’s just the beginning.
Gratitude is the single, most effective way to shift from living in your Monkey Mind to living in your heart.
How about trying it, right now?
Imagine you are bringing your awareness from your head and firmly guiding it to sit in your heart.
Let it settle here for a few moments, while you breathe in and out of your heart.
Notice what you notice.
Did you feel the shifts?
Weaving gratitude into your daily life is perhaps the most potent thing you could do this year, to change your life (apart from chewing properly, but that’s another article :-)).
So I’m inviting you – this World Gratitude Day – to finally take the step towards shifting your experience of life to move closer to the one you have been dreaming of.
Gratitude is a way of experiencing life from the perspective of love, rather than fear.
Having a daily gratitude habit can:
- shift the way you experience life – fast and forever (in a good way!)
- help you to see the positives in events that would previously have bugged you
- help you to feel more at peace and generally happier and less stressed
- give you a deeper perspective on life’s events, coming from your heart’s wisdom, rather than your monkey mind’s drama
- provide a ‘safety net’ for you, if life throws you lemons
- get you smiling, for no particular reason, as you go through your day
- help you to better handle difficult emotional situations
- more easily give you compassion for those who behave unkindly
Not sure where to start?
Here are 10 things you could do today, to spread a wave of gratitude around your world.
How about using this year’s World Gratitude Day as an excuse to get started?
Get Your Gratitude On Facebook!
We run a Facebook page that’s all about gratitude – it’s called the Miracle Of Gratitude.
If you pop by and ‘like’ the page, then you’ll get daily gratitude goodies in your news feed – and you can also ‘join’ the World Gratitude Event, to connect with others who will also be celebrating this year.
Get Monday Morning Gratitude Inspiration – Each Week
Did you know that you can get a weekly gratitude round-up – straight to your inbox, each Monday Morning, and it’s absolutely free? To start your week with the latest gratitude articles, insider secrets and resources, here’s where to register: Please send me weekly gratitude emails!
Change Your Life With Daily Gratitude minutes
This is the core technique for my gratitude journal and my gratitude kick start course – spending a minute or two really letting gratitude into your life.
It’s a great way to start your day – or to turn things around when the lemons arrive 😉
Here’s a link to a video to take you through it – if you enjoy it, please share it with your friends!
Change Your Life Now With Gratitude Minutes.
Say Thank You To As Many People As You Can
… and mean it!
We’re not talking cursory half-mumbled ‘thank yous’ here – we’re talking about proper, heart-felt gratitude.
Who could you say ‘thank you’ to today?
Look In The Mirror
When did you last say ‘thank you’ to yourself? We tend to be about 100 times more likely to criticise ourselves than to acknowledge the good in who we are and what we do. How about taking a moment to look in the mirror and say ‘thank you’ to yourself? Want to go for the max? Say ‘thank you’ for at least 3 things!
Do A Gratitude Meditation
Do one of your own – or there’s one that comes with my gratitude journal, for the readers’ club members.
Write A Thank You Note
Remember the ‘olden days’ when it used to feel lovely to get a letter or a card? Somehow an email or text just doesn’t create the same heart-lifting feeling.
There’s bound to be someone in your life today who would appreciate a ‘thank you’ note – it doesn’t have to be elaborate or on a beautiful notecard – simply grab a pen and some paper and write a note from your heart. It might just make their day.
Start A Daily Gratitude Journal
Start a journal! Choose a special notebook and write in it – each day – about things you feel grateful for.
Psychology researchers have shown that doing this for as little as 3 weeks can have a measurable positive impact on your experience of life.
If you want to take things to the next level and be inspired to really make gratitude part of your every-day life – easily – then Gratitude: A Daily Journal might be just what you’re looking for.
Of course, in true BBC style: “other gratitude journals are available!” 😉
And here are some articles to give you inspiration about how to do it, what to write and how to avoid the usual mistakes that can put people off! Gratitude journals: top tips and insider secrets.
Give Your Gratitude A Kick Start
If you’d like to spend the next seven days making a fast-acting start to your gratitude habit, then you’ll enjoy my Gratitude Kick Start programme.
To celebrate World Gratitude Day, I am waiving the usual donation for this course for everyone who signs up by September 22nd – it’s yours, as my gift.
Take Gratitude To The Next Level
If your heart is calling you to really dive in deeply and make a commitment to gratitude becoming part of your experience of life, then you might want to join my Miracle Of Gratitude – Inner Circle group mentoring programme. I won’t go into details here – if it’s calling to you, you can find out how to apply at the above link.
Which of these could you choose – right now – to help you take that first step on your journey?
It doesn’t have to be a huge leap – but setting your intention to move towards living from your heart, with gratitude, will open the door for miracles to arrive in your life!
What are you going to do, to celebrate World Gratitude Day, this year?
I’d love to hear from you, via the comments box!
Namaste,
Want To Change Your Life? What If You Did Absolutely Nothing?
I was thinking back over my personal journey recently and realised that I spent the first 20 years of my ‘seeking’, trying to find ways to change my life. I went on every course and seminar I could find. I read every book. I did every technique. I recited every mantra.
Always doing. Doing. Doing.
If I had a change I wanted to make, I became fixated with the ‘how’.
I wouldn’t even glance at the ‘where do you want to be?’ – I would wash over my destination ideas and dive into “How? How? How?”
I would sit in that horrendously expensive, packed seminar and not hear a word that was being said, because a little knot of anger was building up inside:
“But your’re not telling me HOW?”
“Let go of old hurts!”
HOW?
“Stop thinking negative thoughts!”
HOW?
“Stop telling yourself those painful old stories!”
HOW?
It screamed from every pore of my being.
It became my fixation.
It drove my development. I trained as a certified NLP Trainer, as a hypnotherapist, as a Reiki Master Teacher, I dived into EFT, I wallowed in Journey Processes, I devoured courses from Wayne Dyer and Abraham Hicks, I studied spiritual texts, I practised yoga and energy release techniques, I became a student of homeopathy and aromatherapy and herbalism and nutrition, I qualified as a Meditation Teacher, all the while looking for the HOW.
It was an awful lot of effort to put into HOW.
And, because I wasn’t finding that HOW, I felt like a failure, most of the time.
“But I shouldn’t feel like this, I’m an NLP Trainer.”
“But my life shouldn’t be falling apart, I’m a Meditation Teacher / Abundance Mentor.”
“But I should have more energy than this, I know all about nutrition / natural health.”
The list went on…
Anyone else with me on this one? Can you see this pattern reflected in your own journey?
Then, one day, something shifted.
I didn’t realise it at the time, but looking back I can see it clearly now.
I had a simple yet profoundly life-changing insight. I asked myself a question that blew away decades of ‘self-work’.
What if there is no ‘how’?
Yikes!
After decades of building my identity around trying to find the elusive HOW, to even consider asking myself that question was scary beyond measure.
But if there were no ‘how?’, then what was there?
Firstly, I grudingly had to accept that my ‘HOW’ had been an excuse; a massively effective delaying tactic.
If I didn’t know ‘how’, then I couldn’t change.
Woo hoo! Off the hook! Stay stuck for a lifetime.
Ouch.
Then, once I let that settle, I realised that I had been running from the secret of how to change my life, the whole time.
The feeling of relief as I released my relentless search for ‘HOW’ was immense. It set me free.
I had discovered a secret truth that set me free.
I’d like to spare you the decades I took to realise this one, so I’m guessing (if you’re still reading by this point!) that you might like to know what that secret is?
I’m going to break it down into sections, to help your mind accept it more easily.
The life-changing secret it took me 20 years to learn:
- There is no ‘how’.
If you want to change your life, you need to change the thoughts you are thinking and the things you are doing. No change can happen without this.
You don’t need ‘special’ thoughts.
You don’t need a ‘process’.
You just need to choose, moment-to-moment, one thought at a time, whether or not to feed the thoguht you’re currently thinking.
That’s it.
There is no ‘how’.
Shift your thoughts, shift your life.
Everything else is just fluff. - The ‘how’ is an invention of your Monkey Mind, to avoid change.
Change can feel scary (because of the stories we tell ourselves about it!).
‘How’ – waiting for that single magic wand that will painlessly take all of our old ‘stuff’ away – is one of the best excuses around for not being able to change. - You don’t need to change; you just need to choose.
There is nothing wrong with you.
There’s nothing to ‘fix’.
You’re not broken.
Your thoughts and actions might be leaving you feeling a bit rubbish, but you don’t need to ‘undo’ or ‘get rid’ or ‘change’ or ‘repair’ anything about you.
The essence of you, deep down inside, is beautiful and shining and whole.
The only thing you need to do is to choose:- Who do I want to be? (I’m talking at a soul level, here, not profession!)
- How do I want life to feel?
- How do I want my relationships to feel?
- What am I here to give?
- What can I do, think and say today that will make my heart sing and my soul smile?
Then simply choose to feed the thoughts, the words, the deeds that move you in that direction.
In each and every moment, you can choose.
You don’t need to ‘do’ anything.
You just need to choose.
And choosing is within your power, right now.
You don’t have to wait until that seminar you’re going on later in the year – or until you have finished reading the book – or until you’re an expert at a particular yoga posture.
Sure, all of that can help.
But the bottom line is that you have the power to choose to ‘do’ nothing; simply to allow yourself to melt into ‘being’ who it is you want to be – right here in this moment. Yes, right now. No, not ‘then’ or ‘when’ or ‘sometime’.
RIGHT NOW!
LET GO!!!!!! 🙂
When you know how you want your experience of life (the inside job bit!) to feel, then you can choose, right here in this moment, to live your life from that feeling.
One thought at a time, you can choose to feed the thoughts that move you closer to that feeling and to gently accept and release the thoughts that move you away from it.
One thought at a time.
That really is it.
There’s nothing to ‘do’.
There is no ‘how’.
Yes, you can wrap all of this up in processes and procedures and ceremonies and rituals, if that’s floating your boat.
Or you could choose to keep it simple.
I know which I’m choosing.
Care to join me? 🙂
With love,
Namaste,
P.S. If this resonated for you, and you want to dive in more deeply, here are some ideas for how we could work together.
A Secret Truth Your Unconscious Mind Needs You To Know (And My Favourite Magic Question)
There’s a truth about your unconscious mind, which could be keeping you stuck where you don’t want to be, if you don’t know it yet.
And most people don’t. It’s a trap that most of us fall into.
It keeps you thinking about what you don’t want; it keeps you looking for signs and experiencing life through the filters of what you don’t want; it stops you from moving forwards and can keep you feeling miserable.
Want to know what it is – and what mindfulness can help you do about it? [Read more…] about A Secret Truth Your Unconscious Mind Needs You To Know (And My Favourite Magic Question)
3 Surefire Ways To Let Go Of Negative Self-Talk
Have You Had Enough Of Your Inner Critic Yet? (3 Things You’ll Want To Start Today!)
We’ve all got one – that critic on your shoulder who makes sure you know exactly how rubbish you are in life, just when you most need to find your cheerleader-in-a-closet. And we do everything we can to eliminate that inner loudspeaker of negative self talk. But what if there were a way to sort your inner critic, once and for all? And what if you could get started – and make a noticeable difference – in the next five minutes? [Read more…] about 3 Surefire Ways To Let Go Of Negative Self-Talk