meditation Tag

Posts tagged 'meditation'

Happy, Healthy, Successful Life Formula: Knowing vs. Doing

Person holding hands up at the top of a mountain

Everyone wants the formula for a happy, healthy, successful life. In fact, most of us spend enormous energy to find that formula, and we do it all our life. Recently, I had talks with many clients and friends and realized that the problem is not finding the formula but implementing it.

Most people say they know what to do but they just can’t do it. When I teach them something and they have an awakening or awareness or realization, most of the time, it is not because they don’t know what to do but because they found a way to implement something they already knew.

Did it happen to you that you read a book, went to a seminar, heard a podcast, and said, “I knew that”, but still you don’t do what you know?

Well, it happens to all of us.

This post is part 48 of 49 in the series Make a List

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How to Be Happy: 36 Habits of Happy People

This week, on the 20th of March, is the international day of happiness. I thought a good way to celebrating it would be to learn how to be happy by looking at the habits of happy people.

We all want to be happy and the search for happiness is gaining serious momentum in the last decade. I’m sure people searched for happiness way before that, but advanced digital technology has made it easier to learn more about happiness.

Happiness is now a science. I focus on happiness in my and help my clients become happier coaching. That’s why I call my business Be Happy in LIFE.

Simply put, happy people have habits that promote happiness. So, develop the habits of happy people, and you will be happy too.

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How to Inspire Your Kids’ Natural Kindness

Toddles showing natural kindness to baby

Humans are kind in nature. Just watch young children. They are born with natural kindness. This is the main reason it’s so wonderful to be around children. They constantly give and engage in a way that makes you want to give in return.

Research has found that kindness is contagious. If you want to see it in action, try smiling at people as you pass them on the street. Smiling is an act of kindness! And when you smile, people smile back.

When babies see a puppet show with kind and affectionate characters, followed by rude and mean ones, they prefer the kind puppets. Yes, they were just babies. But they have an innate ability to mirror their surroundings. They can notice the tone of the voice and actions.

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Stop Verbalizing and Justifying Your Negative Feelings

As a life coach, I teach mindfulness. To me, mindfulness is observation of sensations, thoughts and emotions without judgment. Our conscious mind is in charge of 10% of our actions and our subconscious mind is in charge of 90%. Therefore, mindfulness is a simple and highly effective way to increase our awareness, overcome negative feelings and gain more control over our actions.

One basic tools used to reach high EQ is “Name the feeling”. Researchers have found that when people give a name to a hard feeling they have, their brain decreases the intensity of the feeling. Matthew D. Lieberman, professor of psychology and director of the UCLA Social Cognitive Neuroscience lab, has shown that simply labeling emotions reduced the activity of the amygdala, the brain’s center of emotional responses, which reduced fear. Naming emotions also increased activity in the pre-frontal cortex, the mind’s regulator.

Many people know this concept, but some of them take it too far, because not all verbalizing is healthy for us. Many people believe that if we name the “problem”, we are half-way into solving it. After working with many clients, I can tell you that almost 90% of them know what their problems are, but they are far from solving them.

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The Expectations Paradox: Mindfulness is the Cure

In the last two posts about the expectations paradox, I explained how expectations from others and ourselves can cause us lots of pain and why respect and acceptance are the keys to overcoming them. It is much better to be prepared for the future than to try to control a specific outcome. Today, I will describe how to develop respect and acceptance with mindfulness.

Mindfulness is a state of reflection with no judgment. This state is similar to mediation. We observe and do not let the ego interfere with our observation and tempt us to label and judge what we experience. In a mindfulness state, we do not give a rating to the event, thought or feeling. We only name it. In a higher state of mindfulness, even naming it is not necessary. We just notice.

I remember the first time I mediated. Gal and I were in California at a meditation course. Every week, we learned a different kind of meditation. We did walking, eating, light, mantra and visualizing meditations and we were very confused. Millions of thoughts ran through our minds and we had no control over them. When we got home, we went to sleep and felt overwhelmed.

This post is part 3 of 3 in the series The Expectations Paradox

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How to Release Negative Emotions: 10 Constructive and Healthy Ways

Sad mask with bad feeling words and happy mask with good feeling words

Most people think that emotions are not controlled. They come and go from somewhere in the brain or the body, and we have no control over them. In my coaching, I come across this misconception with every new client. Usually, they are not happy about something in their life and they come to me because they do not think they can change it on their own.

In general, emotions are not a problem. If they are happy emotions and if we feel good about them, we do not want to change them. But if they are painful and make us uncomfortable, then we want them out of our system and fast – and usually for the right reason. Feelings manifest into our physical world. If you think of emotions as vibrations, then we feel their vibration in our body as a physical reaction.

When I was young, my younger sister and I were fans of Louise Hay’s book You Can Heal Your Life.

We borrowed it from the local library and she bought it for me as a birthday gift. In the book, Louise Hay describes the connection between body and mind and explains how every thought, feeling, idea and action has a physical manifestation.

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3 Emotional Painkillers

Man holding his face in his hands in pain

In Holistic Approach to Emotional Pain, I explained why pain is not a punishment and we do not need to fight it. I also explained how the use of physical or emotional “substances” only makes us feel the pain longer and disrupts the function of the natural pharmacy we have in our body, which is in charge of flooding our system with “painkillers”.

In this post, I will share 3 “emotional painkillers” that will make pain go away faster.

1. The Rating Technique

The first emotional painkiller is used frequently by nurses and doctors. When you are in a hospital, before giving you your painkillers, the nurse will ask you to rate your pain from 1 to 10 and use this as a guide to determine your dosage.

This makes you develop an awareness of your feeling. If you say that the pain is a 9, the nurse will give you more painkillers and you will feel a bigger relief from them. If you say the pain is 3, the nurse may ask if you can wait a little longer and give you nothing for an hour.

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How to Simplify Your Life and Reduce Stress and Overwhelm

Sign saying Good morning, let the stress begin

Life seems to be stressful and overwhelming to most people. The more we are on “automatic pilot”, the more we feel out of control. When people are stressed, they think life is very complicated, so it is easy to see that simplifying life can reduce stress and overwhelm.

All around the world, stress is increasing. It affects mental and physical health, with severe challenges to cognitive abilities, behavior, sleep, academic achievement and health. Some say it is the number one cause of illness and death in our society. Unfortunately, the magnitude of stress is increasing as our lifestyle is not simple and more and more children are affected by it, directly or indirectly.

The Catch 22 of stress

The Australian Psychological Society 2014 Stress & Wellbeing Survey found that the main causes of stress are finances, health, family, the desire to be healthy and the health of loved ones. You can see the results in this infographic, which shows how the Australian society reacts to stress.

When you see the causes of stress, you can realize how we create a loop, a Catch 22, in our mind, which leads to stress. For example, financial problems causes stress and stress causes more financial problems. It is a never-ending cycle, which we must stop.

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Anger Management: What NOT to do when you are angry

Anger is a state of mind that prevents us from thinking clearly. When people are angry, they do and say things they regret later on. Anger is an emotional state that brings hostility with it.

I once saw a quote that says that anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. That helped me rethink my own anger. The problem with anger is the side effect of what we do when we are angry, so this post tells you what not to do when you are angry.

The secret to anger management is preparing in advance. If you pay attention and avoid the things listed below, you will be in a better place.

This post is part 3 of 3 in the series Anger Management

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Be Positive! Why? Because you worth it!

Think Do Be Positive written on a blackboard

In recent years, we hear about being positive as a major aspect of happiness and success. Most people want to be positive, but don’t know how. When I talk to people about being positive, they say that they learned at school how to read and how to do basic math, they learned how to ride a bike and help at home, but no one ever taught them how to be positive. Therefore, it is one thing to understand why it is important to be positive, but another thing to actually be positive.

This is why I tell people that I should call my program Happy Being instead of Be Happy, because first we need to understand that happiness is important and then we need to learn how to be happy – how to make it a state of being.

Research done in North Carolina by psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has found out that being positive is important not only for our immediate success but also for long-term happiness.

Lions and snakes

When we have negative thoughts, we activate the primitive brain. Over there, all we see are lions and snakes that are a threat. Our body goes into a “fight or flight” mode and shuts all other thinking mechanisms in order to focus on the threat in front of us. Thinking, analyzing, evaluating, prioritizing, connecting, thinking creatively and considering efficiency are all luxuries that the brain is unable to do while under threat.

Happiness does not reside in the primitive brain, so it is important to notice when you go there. If you are scared, angry, aggressive, withdrawn, anxious, worried or upset, you are in the primitive brain. Your body has taken over your mind and you are out of control.

Take a deep breath! Try to think of something good and happy. Go to a happy place in your imagination. You need to convince your brain that what is happening to you is not a real lion and not a real snake. Only after you do that, you can change your emotional state and start thinking clearly.

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