Ringing The Changes

This year, I don’t think just wishing the new year will be better is going to cut it. Something more is being demanded of us, so a few half-hearted resolutions aren’t going to do the trick if we want real change. 2008 has been a wake-up call for all of us, but the question now is what are we going to do now that we’ve woken up?

I’d hazard a guess that getting clear on your intention of who you want to be this year will get you further than deciding what you want to do. There’s not a lot of power in a random list of stuff to do. The juice is in the strong centre of beingness from which you decide which actions to take in the world.

Browsing the shelves in a local bookshop today, I came across a book by Robin Sharma – I think called Leadership Wisdom. Flipping the pages, I saw a line – heavily paraphrased here – about how success really gets activated when your approach moves from achievement to service.

For many of us, service is a charged word, conjuring up images of servitude and little reward. Yet if we see that shift for what it truly is – shifting focus from a self-centred attitude of getting what you want to a more spiritually generous approach of offering what you came here to give for the benefit of others – then we can really see the power of that statement. You can make big waves when you’re coming from a place of enthusiasm about offering your gifts and talents for the good of the whole.

Then there’s the added magic of how the universe conspires to make things happen when there’s a positive intent behind something. Don’t be surprised if things take on a life of their own when you align your purpose with an attitude of service.

So, this week, I think that’s about all you need to know to start making your own inner shift. What kind of person do you want to be in the world in the coming year? What really are the gifts you came here to give? Is there anything really standing in your way or is it just a fear that you might not be good enough? If you’re feeling blocked, remember this is about expressing your talents and bringing something into the world that only you can offer. There’s no need for performance anxiety and you don’t even have to have a master plan. Just start doing it on whatever scale feels comfortable for you. Who knows where that might lead …

As a parting gift of inspiration from 2008, here are a couple of Chinese proverbs that have popped up in my inbox most fortuitously today:

A man’s fortune must first be changed from within.

If there is light in the soul, there will be beauty in the person.
If there is beauty in the person, there will be harmony in the house.
If there is harmony in the house, there will be order in the nation.
If there is order in the nation, there will be peace in the world.

Have a fabulous New Year! May you be all you wish to be and live passionately on purpose in 2009.

Click through to the Coach Fabulous advice column archive by going to http://coachfabulous.blogspot.com/. For alert emails on new postings, email subscribe@iamfabulous.co.uk. The I Am Fabulous archives can now be found at http://fabcentral.blogspot.com/. All material ©2008 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author.

Clean Pain, Dirty Pain

If ever there’s a time to learn that most of the emotional pain we experience is self-inflicted, it’s Christmas. This is the time of year when we bump up against the ancient pain of dysfunctional family dynamics in technicolour, so it helps to have a reminder that we’re at choice about exactly how much suffering we experience in these encounters. We all know that it’s not what happens, but the story that you tell yourself about what happens, that determines how you feel about it.

That’s why one person can say something insulting to you and you’ll laugh it off, but when someone else does it, it activates an old dynamic and releases that charge of ancient pain that sends you spinning off into an abyss of self-attack. It pops the lid off the Pandora’s Box of stories we tell ourselves about why things happen to us. Let’s take the classic of any form of rejection as an example – maybe you didn’t get a job or you just got dumped. You are at choice. You can decide to observe that the job or the person wasn’t right for you and motor on regardless, or you can dust off an old story about how unworthy or unloveable you are and use it to sink yourself into a downward spiral of depression and self-recrimination. The choice is yours.

Psychologist Dr Steven Harvey has - through Acceptance & Commitment Therapy – defined ‘clean pain’ as the emotion we feel when something happens to us. It’s the direct experience of pain in the moment. ‘Dirty pain’, however is the result of the thoughts we have about that pain and what it means about us. It’s the story we tell ourselves about what that pain means – and this is where we endure our greatest suffering.

Coach Martha Beck notes that “The two kinds of suffering occupy different sections of the brain: one part simply registers events, while another creates a continuous stream of thoughts about those events. The vast majority of our unhappiness comes from this secondary response—not from painful reality but from painful thoughts about reality. Western psychology is just accepting something saints and mystics have taught for centuries: that this suffering ends only when we learn to detach from the thinking mind.”

She adds, “Learning to detach starts with simply noticing our own judgmental thoughts. When we find ourselves using words like should or ought, we're courting dirty pain. Obsessing about what should be rather than accepting what is, we may try to control other people in useless, dysfunctional ways. We may impotently rage against nature itself, even—perhaps especially—when that nature is our own. This amounts to mental suicide. Resisting what we can't control removes us from reality, rendering our emotions, circumstances and loved ones inaccessible. The result is a terrible emptiness, which we usually blame on our failure to get what we want. Actually, it comes from refusing to accept what we have.”

This is not a new concept for the Eastern mind, as Lama Surya Das, of the Dzogchen Tibetan tradition makes clear. He writes, “One old Buddhist saying tells us that pain is inevitable in life – but suffering, on the other hand, is optional. How much we suffer depends on us, our internal development and our spiritual understanding and realization. Our pain and suffering point out to us where we are most attached, and what we're holding onto the most; likewise, they point out how free we are. By recognizing this, we can learn to use loss and suffering in ways that help us to grow wiser and become more at peace with ourselves and the universe. Through meditation practice, we come to see that the necessary losses in life - aging, separation, sorrow and death -are inevitable. And when we learn to accept the inevitable changes, through a more graceful letting go called the wisdom of allowing, we will tremendously lessen our suffering and leave room for happiness to arise.”

This Christmas, give yourself the gift of awareness and allow yourself to only experience ‘clean’ pain, if it occurs. Give ‘dirty’ pain the week off. Pay attention to your thoughts and notice if you’re getting into ‘dirty pain’ territory. Watch the thoughts that come up when you’re dealing with old family patterns and indulge only the ones that deal realistically with the present moment. Notice where you’re reacting from old pain and projecting it into your current experience (and the future). When you see that happening, observe it and let it go. Acceptance is the key. If you can laugh at your own mental patterning, you’re heading away from suffering into the direction of acceptance, where you notice the old story but don’t give it airtime. Keep your mind as tidy as you would your house – no room for old clutter.

As an illustration of a clean mindset, here’s an extract from an interview with the musician and designer, Lenny Kravitz, from Elle Decoration. The dude has a pretty good take on life, if the answers to these questions are any indication …

What is your greatest fear?
Not fulfilling the purpose that God put me here for.

What is your greatest regret?
I don’t have any regrets. It’s all part of the journey.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
I honestly don’t think I would. Not because I think I’m great, it’s just that it wouldn’t be me.

What is the quality you most admire in a person?
Soul. It sounds a bit vague, but I mean inner strength and integrity.

What’s your guilty pleasure?
If it pleases me, I don’t feel guilty about it.

How do you define style?
It comes from within. It’s someone being themselves.

And here’s a final treat to get you through the Christmas period – a slideshow of Simple Serenity tips from Oprah.com. They’re basic, but they do work - the oldies are the goodies ...

http://www.oprah.com/slideshow/spirit/emotionalhealth/slideshow2_ss_personal

Happy Christmas, Joyeux Noel and Feliz Navidad!

Click through to the Coach Fabulous advice column archive by going to http://coachfabulous.blogspot.com/. For alert emails on new postings, email subscribe@iamfabulous.co.uk. The I Am Fabulous archives can now be found at http://fabcentral.blogspot.com/. All material ©2008 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author.

Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves

It’s official – women’s happiness is more recession-proof than men’s. The recent Nielsen Global Happiness Survey found that men are happier with money, while women are happier with friendships and relationships with their children, co-workers and bosses. Nielsen’s Consumer Research VP, Bruce Paul, notes “Because they are happier with non-economic factors, women’s happiness is more recession-proof, which might explain why women around the world are happier in general than men are.”

Of the 51 countries surveyed worldwide, women are happier than men in 48 of them. Only in Brazil, South Africa and Vietnam were men happier than women. Women are also more optimistic about the future, scoring higher than men on predictions of their happiness in the next six months.

According to the survey, the three main drivers of happiness globally are personal financial situation, mental health and job/career. Being happy with your partner is also important for happiness in many nations.

Interestingly, many of the world’s poorer and developing countries outranked developed countries for happiness and satisfaction levels in nearly all aspects of their lives. Nielsen analysed the survey results to find out if a nation’s happiness level was influenced by low income equality, low corruption or peace. Surprisingly, places which performed poorly on these factors were in many cases the happiest countries.

Here comes another science bit … in another study published by the British Medical Journal, an individual’s happiness was found to be related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends and their friends’ friends’ friends, ie three degrees (rather than six) of separation. The study also found that happy people were most likely to be the centre of their social networks and that each additional happy friend increases the probability of being happy by about 9%. In contrast, having an increase in income of $5,000 only raised the probable happiness by 2%.

The same authors – Christakis and Folwer – also undertook a Facebook study where they found that “people who smile tend to have more friends (smiling gets you an average of one extra friend, which is pretty good considering that people only have about six close friends). Not only that, but the statistical analyses confirm that those who smile are measurably more central to the network compared to those who do not smile. That is, if you smile, you are less likely to be on the periphery of the online world. It thus seems to be the case, online as well as offline, that when you smile, the world smiles with you.”

So, what have we learned? It’s not what you’ve got, but how much you appreciate it that determines how happy you’ll be. Valuing more things in life than just money gives you a more sustainable sense of happiness. Hanging out with positive people will improve your own happiness. Smiling makes you a more popular person and a happier one. If you’re happy today you’re more likely to be happy tomorrow, projecting your positive feelings out into the future.

It’s not exactly rocket science, is it? Still, it’s nice to have a survey or two to remind us that common sense still holds true.

This week, make an effort to up your smile ratio, be grateful for what you have and only spend time with upbeat people. Oh, and thank your lucky stars if you’re a girl – you’ve already got a head-start on the happiness biz thanks to your genetics.

Finally, here’s a freebie that’s a total treat. The authors of my favourite guided meditations of all time, Sanaya Roman and Orin, have released some new mp3s for free download to give us all some upliftment in these changing times and to help focus your vision for a positive personal future. You can find them at http://www.orindaben.com/home/wwmeditationpeace.php. There’s also a link on the same page to transcripts of Orin’s meditations, so you can read them beforehand to get a sense of which ones you might prefer before you download them. Enjoy!

Click through to the Coach Fabulous advice column archive by going to http://coachfabulous.blogspot.com/. For alert emails on new postings, email subscribe@iamfabulous.co.uk. The I Am Fabulous archives can now be found at http://fabcentral.blogspot.com/. All material ©2008 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author.

The Good You Already Know

If you want to have enough juice to get the new year off to a rocking start, you’re going to have to take very, very good care of yourself over the next few weeks. This Christmas season seems to have an even more manic air than usual – if that’s at all possible – so keeping your own energy serene is probably going to be a bit more of a challenge than you might previously have expected.

Normally you might expect me to throw a few coping strategies your way, but when times are tough it’s best to rest yourself deeply in what you already know works for you. Ask yourself this question from the spiritual leader Michael Beckwith – “How have I practised the good I already know?”

We know what to do. The problem is we just don’t do it.

You know you have to take time out to refresh yourself. You know things turn out better when you listen to your intuition. You know doing stuff for others out of sacrifice drains you. You know when you’re taking on too much and your health will probably suffer. You know why your heart sinks when you say ‘yes’ when you really mean ‘no’. When are you going to draw the line and take care of yourself?

Start right now as you mean to go on into the new year. Before you frazzle yourself with over-commitment and busyness that you could actually avoid, start working on your ‘no’ muscle. Give it some exercise. It can’t get strong unless you work it out. Yep, the first time might be hard, but after that it does get easier. Don’t bother justifying why you can’t do things – just say no and leave it at that. Confidence is key. If you’re apologising madly, people are more likely to try to push you into doing things. Be straightforward and matter-of-fact and they’re unlikely to challenge your decision.

We really are in a time where we have to practise what we preach. It’s no good wanting things to change if we never do. It’s about aligning our whole selves with the vision of what we want for our lives and taking the steps we need to take to make that happen. As Beckwith says “For me it always comes back to practice. The beliefs that we hold become a basis for spiritual practice. And the practice becomes a basis for insight and revelation, embodiment of the truth that makes us free. Just merely having a belief about these principles is not good enough any more. We want to do away with believers and we want people to step into a greater embodiment through practice.”

He adds, “The idea is to say to yourself at the end of the day, ‘How have I practiced the good that I already know?’ If I throw myself into practice, now I'm making myself available – a candidate for greater insight, greater embodiment – and I continue to become more and never less than my true self, living up to the true meaning of my incarnation, which is to release life energy, to release sacred gifts and talents and capacities that I chose to release before I came here (which is another conversation). So the tip would be: find a spiritual practice that fits you and absolutely practise it, and then you will notice that you'll move from being merely a believer into actually having some real knowledge through the activity of your awareness.”

What goes for spiritual practice goes for any other practice that supports your physical, emotional or mental well-being. We know what works. We just need to practise it.

This week, think carefully about the things that you know to be true for you. What activities help you stay well physically? What practices keep you feeling centred and emotionally-balanced? What techniques do you know that help you to calm down your mind and give you clarity? What is it that makes you feel spiritually connected? Go with the tried and true and make life a little easier for yourself.

Finally, here’s a funky little graphic to propel you out of inertia and remind you to take care of yourself and put energy into creating the life you want to live. There’s probably nothing in there you don’t already know, but we can all do with a bit of a refresher on basic truths every now and then.

http://www.eightprinciples.com/

Click through to the Coach Fabulous advice column archive by going to http://coachfabulous.blogspot.com/. For alert emails on new postings, email subscribe@iamfabulous.co.uk. The I Am Fabulous archives can now be found at http://fabcentral.blogspot.com/. All material ©2008 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author.

Mystic Vision

May you live in interesting times.” Apparently that’s an old Chinese curse. If the current socio-economic climate is anything to go by, it’s bang up to date. Which of course leads me to the question on everybody’s lips – what the hell is going on? If anyone tells you they have an absolute answer, I’d avoid them like the plague. This one’s too tough for anyone to call. We are in the uncharted waters of a massive transformation of all the structures in our outer world and the old ways (and certainties) no longer apply.

What the situation does require, however, is a flexibility and willingness to embrace change without assuming it’s going to be pejorative. One of the most potentially destructive human characteristics is to assume that change is necessarily bad. It stops us from taking a chance, being our authentic selves and fully experiencing life. Yes, change is difficult for us all, but at the other end of that tunnel lies greater possibility if you’re willing to go with the flow, rather than fight against it.

In these uncertain times, your greatest success skills will be learning to turn inward for guidance, staying flexible and aware, and having the willingness to believe in a positive outcome, regardless of the general consensus. Independence of thought is vital when structures are decaying. You’re certainly not going to thrive in changing circumstances by doing things the way you’ve always done them.

As the author Caroline Myss emphasises, “The turning of the tides is done from above and from within. It is you who must learn to work with the power of your interior forces, to scaffold your inner consciousness and build a soul with stamina, so that when chaos abounds around you, you can see through it rather than be consumed by it.”

She adds, “We can look at this time as a nightmare of chaos or we can look at this time as that which we have prepared ourselves for during these past many years, working on our health and on becoming more conscious individuals. If this isn’t the time to put all that you’ve learned about being a conscious person into action, then when would be that time? Ask yourself, ‘Why have I worked so hard on myself?’ Was it just to process the wounds from your childhood? Well, if it was, be done with that and get on with the business of thinking, living, acting, and perceiving the world around you through the lens of a mystic. This is the time to apply all the laws of the cosmos to every one of your challenges, to approach every problem through mystical reasoning and not that of ordinary reasoning, which will draw you backwards and into your history. Looking backwards at what you used to do or how you used to do something will not work anymore.”

To truly have mystical vision, you’ll need to focus on the opportunity presented to you, not dwell on the chaos or the loss. Myss notes “To me, this is a time of great hope, because when chaos abounds, so does opportunity. It can look as if the field of opportunity is bleak, but that is simply not true … you must keep your attention in the present in order to ‘perceive’ intuitive instructions. These will rarely speak of what you have already done. Rather you have to be prepared to do what you have not done before, as your intuition will always direct you to draw on new inner resources, as opposed to relying on the old and familiar … Wisdom teaches us, for example, that if all we thought was stable evaporated so easily, it can all be replaced just as quickly. Chaos is as much an illusion as stability. What is not an illusion is truth. Truth is the one constant. Look at whatever is happening in your life and remind yourself that if it is chaotic, there is something old that must be surrendered. Look to your interior and listen for guidance. Remind yourself that you are alive at this time because you are meant to manoeuvre through these changes. Move forward, ever forward. And think like a mystic!”

This week, calm down your fearful emotions and pay more attention to what’s going on inside rather than outside. Be willing to stay aware of how you’re being triggered by outside events and to choose to listen more closely to your inner promptings. Put yourself on a news diet and keep away from those who are all doom and gloom. Hang out with positive people who are also willing to look for opportunity and growth in crisis. Stick to the facts and keep any temptation to panic under control. Keep a cool head and an intuitive heart. That’s how you’ll find your way through tough times in a manner that’s meaningful to you and that brings more growth and purpose. Stay visionary, get comfortable with uncertainty and let your mystic vision lead the way.

Click through to the Coach Fabulous advice column archive by going to http://coachfabulous.blogspot.com. For alert emails on new postings, email subscribe@iamfabulous.co.uk. The I Am Fabulous archives can now be found at http://fabcentral.blogspot.com. All material ©2008 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author.