"Be content with what you have, rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you." -- Lao Tzu

Sometimes the road gets bumpy. It's surprising how little it can take to get us off track or out of balance. It's a tight rope and for the most part we do great at dealing with the wobbles that happen.

But every now and then life can throw us a curved ball and put us on the back foot and cause us to revert to patterns of response that are unhealthy.

Here are a few things to be mindful about during those ugly times:

1. Nobody does to you more than you do to yourself. If someone puts you down or is critical they've done you a favour by doing on the outside what you are doing on the inside. Don't run and blame. Instead thank and grow (grow means to dig in a work out why you are doing on the inside what somebody is doing to you on the outside) - don't run, evolve.

2. Ugly things don't signal you are on the wrong track - often they mean you are on the right track but you are growing through a self set limitation. So, again, don't blame and run, stop, evolve and grow.

3. Time and space - have you noticed that the further you get away from a problem the closer you get to a solution. The more instantaneous your choices, the more likely it is that you are acting habitually and potentially in a repeat cycle. So, avoid making big decisions when you are in reaction, blame or anger mode, because the likelihood is, you are not thinking in a healthy way, long term.

4. Watch your diet. During ugly times and when we are in repeat cycles of stress or reaction, we revert to food and substances as a mechanism for self medication, whether it is good diet or bad a sudden over emphasis on food - too much or too little can be a big sign that we are in reaction ( includes alcohol and coffee). Such signals are warnings that our choices are not coming from a good place.

5. Go back to purpose - the difference between living from ego reaction and living from your true self, your heart, is the amount of emphasis you place on feelings. It's hard but feelings are driven by ego and ego will make decisions based on pieces of incomplete data. Do you know your purpose? How does this ugly period like back to your purpose - Do you know your values? How does this ugly period demonstrate that you are not living according to your true values? Remember, nature destroys anything that is not fulfilling its purpose so the ugly time might just reveal that you were off not linking what you were doing to your purpose and values. This can be a great and positive way to approach any healing.

With spirit

Chris

The Back on Track - 30 day challenge is a city retreat designed to work you through any ugly patch in your life, resolve it and teach you the process of getting Back on Track quickly for the next time.

I love this article from Joshi's clinic... so I've reproduced it for you. 

When you say you love somebody, there should a much greater motivation than simply those spoken words.

Try to be constant so that they will understand the core of your personality and from that understanding gain strength and security that you are acting as you. You may falter with your moods. You may project, at times, a strangeness that is alien to them which may bewilder or frighten them. There will be times when they question your motives. But because people are never constant and are as changeable as the seasons, you should try to build up within them a faith in your fundamental attitude and show that your inconsistency is only for the moment and not a lasting part of you. Show your love now. Each and every day, for each day is a lifetime. Every day we live, we learn more how to love. Do not defer your love nor neglect it, for if you wait until tomorrow, tomorrow never comes. It is like a cloud in the sky, passing by.

If you give kindness and understanding, then you will receive faith. If you give hate and dishonesty, you will receive distrust. If you give fear and are afraid, they will become afraid and fear you. You need give out what you need to receive.

The degree of love you give is determined by your own capability. My capability is determined by the environment of my past existence and my understanding of love, truth and God. My understanding is determined by my parents, friends, places I have lived and been. Each experience is fed into my mind from living.

Love is universal. Love is the movement of life. You can love a boy, a girl, your family, friends, art, nature.   All things in life are beautiful. No human being or society has the right to condemn any kind of love you feel or your way of expressing it, especially if you are sincere; sincerity being the honest realization of yourself, without hurt or pain for your life, or any life your life touches.

Become a truly loving spirit.  Let my words, if I must speak, become the restoration of your soul.  But when speech is silent, don’t you still project the great depth of your sensitivity.

When you touch them, or kiss them, or hold them, you are saying a thousand words.

Original article here

The lovely Lorna Patten, founder of Open Up Communication shares with us a beautiful article on why we are not our emotions. I had never heard a message quite like Lorna’s. Her writing style is poetic and her tenderness will permeate your heart. My favorite teaching is to ‘let emotion move through you.’ Ninety seconds is all it has to take! Enjoy and leave your comments below.

You Are Not Your Feelings by Lorna Patten

No you are not.
And you are not your story or your suffering or your triumphs or your transformation…

You are not your ideas or your beliefs or your learnings or your failings or your mistakes or your successes…

And you certainly are not your feelings….
Who you are is the stuff of heaven, the magical, mystical, is-ness of the all of the all:

Who you are is LOVE…

Pure, simple, boundless, limitless, joyous, expansive, creative, powerful…LOVE
No matter what has happened, no matter how awful the particular stuff, no matter what you think or or feel and certainly no matter what others think or feel…

You are perfect love – you are.

And that can and will never change.

Simple truth.

Hard to live in this polarizing reality because you have mostly forgotten who you are and have spent a lot of your life fearing and feeling you are a great deal less than perfect anything, let alone perfect love.

And the truth is that is how you have felt….and the truth also is…you are not your feelings…feelings are not facts and none of what you think and what you feel is WHO YOU ARE…none of it, nada nothing at all.

Let me say it again: Who you are is perfect LOVE.

What you feel often is anything but that. And you are not your feelings…you are the one who chooses to feel the way you feel. Jill Bolte-Taylor made the observation that emotion (energy-in-motion) takes 90 seconds to complete it’s journey though you and be done. If any feelings lasts longer than 90 seconds…you must be doing something to make them stay…you start to feel something, then you agree with whatever meaning you make out of the feeling then you feel it even more and on it goes…sometimes for a lifetime!

Yes, you do choose your feelings.
Now you may not like this or understand it…in fact I can hear the silver-tongued fearful ego voice in your head saying…”this is nuts, I don’t choose all my feelings, sometimes other people just make me feel stuff”.

No they don’t. No one can make you do anything you do not choose to do. You always have a choice even when you feel you do not. The truth about ‘I didn’t have a choice” is actually: “I did not like any of the other options so I chose the least painful/awful of what was available to me at the time”.

No matter what has happened in your life to date, the key to healing and restoring wholeness is how you deal with your feelings.

Who taught you how to feel your feelings?
Where did you learn how to respond to what you are feeling rather than react?
My guess is…no one did.

In fact, you have probably had no education or training in what feelings are, what they mean and how to use them as a resource for change rather than as a reason to stay wounded and suffering.
Consider this: How much of your life have you spent feeling that you are not good enough – not worth enough, or deserving enough or pretty enough or smart enough or successful enough or strong enough or brave enough or lucky enough or quick enough or calm enough or …just not enough?

Enough I say. Enough of feeling not ok, enough of doubting your own loving heart, enough of choosing the illusion of fear when only love is real. Enough of pretending to be who you are not when the truth about who you really are is magnificent.

Time to step-up, show up and start accepting the fundamental truth about yourself and what’s possible for you right now!

Step One: Choose to accept you are ok, lovable, valuable, powerful and unlimited
EVEN WHEN you don’t feel it. Let go of needing to figure it all out rationally and just accept that you are LOVE and let yourself BE.

Step Two: When you start to feel anything at all…pause for a moment, take a breath, get present in your own body, breathe, and let the feeling (energy-in-motion) move through you – remember 90 seconds and the energy will shift.

If you find yourself getting involved with your fearful thinking mind, tell yourself “this is just a feeling, it’s not a fact… just because I feel X doesn’t X is true, it’s just true that I am feeling X” and breathe…
Step Three: Choose how you want to feel, what you want to do next and how you want to
show up - then BE and DO what you have chosen. Revisit Step One often and Step Two as needed!

Top Tips:
Make colorful reminder cards and stick them up where you will see them every day e.g.:

I am OK, I am lovable and I am valuable
LOVE is always the answer
BE Here Now
Feelings are not facts!
Breathe

Practice allowing your feelings to move through you rather than suppressing, depressing or denying them. Avoid direct dumping of feelings on living things…go outside and tell the dirt how you feel… it doesn’t care.

Keep a journal/feelings diary and regularly dump them out on paper and leave them there.

Remember to pause regularly throughout the day and breathe….and BE here now and breathe…

Whatever your story, wherever you are now, whatever has been before…you are OK, you are perfect LOVE and you can experience this if you are willing to accept your magnificence and choose to live into WHO you are moment by moment, one loving breath at a time.

PS It’s really very simple…but don’t mistake simple for easy. Sometimes simple is the hardest to do and yet, when you accept, surrender your resistance and simply choose to accept LOVE rather than fear…well it starts to get pretty simple!

Lorna Patten
Dynamic. Passionate. Loving.
Recognized as an expert coach, facilitator and mentor, Lorna rigorously questions the way things are, and challenges you to think differently about everything. She will confront you with breathtaking truths that truly are life changing.

I'd like to share 10 good reasons why you might consider the tenacity and diligence involved in keeping your heart open in everyday life worth while.

1. It's leadership - There are no half hearted success stories.

There are more than 200,000 books listed on the web on the topic of leadership. My book, "Innerwealth, putting the heart and soul back into work and life" is one of a very small number of those books that drill down through the surface games of human tricks and motivational games to understand the real core of a leader... heart and soul. 

2. It's intuitive  - “The quieter you become, the more you can hear.” 

Although it is possible to enter a temple and find solace, or do a meditation and find quiet, the real measure of our inner state is a stillness that travels with us through all the trials and challenges of life. An open heart is the root source of stillness. It is a dynamic of thankfulness, mixed with desirelessness. A complete contentment for what is, rather than what could be. 


3. It's Unconditional Love - “It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.” 

Romance comes to the heart but unconditional love sits there already. This state of unconditional love is most often seen in the affection and loyalty a pet has for an owner. The dog might be punished but its enthusiasm and generosity of spirit is relentless. This is the core of an Open heart and a great necessity in any sustainable relationship. “I'm not interested in being a "lover." I'm interested in only being love.” 

4. It's Youth - "The heart surrenders everything to the moment. The mind judges and holds back.”

You will see the look on a person's face move between childish exhuberance and aged exhaustion. It's is not just about sleep or diet or age or workload... more, it's a sign of an open heart. The younger a person looks, the more open their heart. The enemy of an open heart is therefore worry, pragmatism and stress that causes the joy and enthusiasm for the gift of the day to be replaced by uncertainty, doubt and the ensuing fatigue.

5. It's Bulletproof - “Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.” 

With an Open heart you will treat everyone you meet like God in drag. The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can't be organized or regulated. It isn't true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth. And to hear it, you will need the previously mentioned stillness. You won't find your heart in a temple until you find the temple in your heart. So, the heart will close if it is left unattended, to keep it open simply remember that what you meet in another being is the projection of your own level of evolution. You can always evolve just a little more each day.

5 More Tomorrow.........

a broken heart brings us back to the reality that we were not happy as an individual and were depending on a relationship to create happiness in our life.

Nature destroys anything that doesn't fulfil its purpose and when we get off track by infatuating the benefit of a relationship we can easily end up heart broken when that relationship fails.

What makes us unhappy as an individual is usually a sense of failure. 

When we have not achieved what we set out to achieve, we can easily start to diminish ourselves and feel that we have not done well, and hence are unworthy of love. This isn't true but it's easy to believe.

So, the cure for heart break is three fold:

1. Spend time in love with nature again... you have probably lost that independent feeling that you and nature are in harmony and may have started to feel that nature and you and your partner were the only experience of harmony. You'll need to re-connect to nature as an individual again. SImply go out and try to witness as much of the beauty of nature as possible.

2. Process the proposition that is causing your heartbreak by examining the illusion that your partner was bringing you something that you don't already have. This is a key because, for example, if you feel tired and your partner is energetic, you can start to think that you can't live without them. The real story is that you have energy, just the exact same as your partner, but in a different form.... maybe in your vision, your love or your compassion. In this way, you take the power back.

3. Finally, and most importantly, you need to stop playing victim stories. Nobody does to you more than you do to yourself, Hence, there will be some debate as to who left who, The key to this is to find the benefit to your life vision that you are not with them, and the drawbacks to your life vision if you stayed with them and if you do this thoroughly you will find that there are good wonderful results from the trigger that caused your heart to be broken. Remember here, that if you have no vision, then the reason you broke up with your partner is to get you one....

Personal Rescue consultations are available to help you process and clear your heart break - just as nature intended and get you back on track with a vision, inspiration and purpose in life. THis is the key to healing heartbreak. It doesn't take very long but it is a little confronting as it addresses your old mindset. Healing fast is far better than healing slow.

Regret is a terrible feeling. It leads to depressions and frustrations. 

To overcome hurt one must deal with regret.

Regret is the root of doubt. If we regret a decision we've made in the past, we will have doubt that where we are in our business or personal life is on track.

To feel off track is toxic. Off track means the future isn't positive. The more off track we feel, the less we feel secure about the future. This is not healthy, in fact, insecurity about the future is exhausting.

Ultimately it all leads back to regret.

If we say we made a bad decision, we must automatically feel regret. And that's the beginning of a downhill slide.

To arrest the slide we need to find out why that past choice is good. Yes, it may have caused some discomfort, but it can't be all bad. In fact it must, according to universal law, be half good.

It's this "other half" that I help you find. Why are you where you are right now and what amazing outcome is it leading to? This is visionary thinking and it is vital thinking.

The greatest fight you will have in life is between you and your expectations. When life doesn't go as planned, you are really only dealing with what you expected to happen and what did happen. But say your expectations are wrong... what then? 

We align people with nature. Nature's law creates realistic expectations. That means that what is actually happening and what we expected to happen are one in the same. Could you benefit from that.

What if false expectations actually drive your life and you are continually wrestling with work, relationships, career, financial and social/health issues because your expectations are false? Wouldn't it be a better way to live? In harmony with nature's law?

Stop the hurt means open your heart and this simply means line up your expectations with nature's law.

This is what we help you do in a business off-site or one on one coaching programme.

Contact us here if you'd like more information

Motivation is an old, clumsy, emotional roller coaster of a process to cause you to do what you love to do, or even do what you hate to do. Motivation is the modern day equivalent to slavery. In motivation, which is what advertisers, marketers and self help guru's use to cause you to act on things that may or may not be in your best interest. Do you want to live that way or do you want to take the power  back from Motivation?

Motivation relies on three things:

1. Motivation relies on the fact that you value pleasure over pain and believe that there is some person, place, thing, lifestyle, religion, environment that will give that result to you and therefore you seek things that offer or promote that outcome. Did you know that this is a myth, because the more pleasure you pursue the more pain (in balance and possibly in another area of your life) you will experience? This creates anger and frustration, depression and emotional turbulence, it's a roller coaster of emotion. Do you want to live like that? I don't, and that's why I value Inspiration. Inspiration has a higher motive and therefore does not have those side effects.

2. Motivation relies on the fact that you value being right all the time and believe that if you obey, conform, follow, mimic, do what people suggest, behave in a certain way, you will be more approved of than rejected in life. In other words, your ego wants to be right and this is a motivating force. Did you know that in life there is a balance of acceptance and rejection? That if you get acceptance from one area of your life you will attract rejection in another? Do you want to live seeking approval from others and embrased about yourself and unable to follow your own path because you value other's opinions about you more than your own? I don't and that's why I value Inspiration. Inspiration has a higher motive and therefore takes the power back from myths like this one.

3. Motivation relies on the fact that you think you are different to others. To use motivation you either have to want to be superiour to others or feel that others are superior to you. If this is the case you will hear yourself saying "I should" allot or hear and listen to others saying "You Should" allot. When we are Motivated in life we use these comparisons all the time in order to determine our actions and ambitions and as a result end up angry, envious, imitating or jealous of others. It's very disempowering. Do you want to live like that? I don't - that's why I value Inspiration.

Motivation to work, build a business, create wealth, have a relationships creates a topsy turvy, unsustainable, emotional, short term roller coaster that costs more than the benefits it derives. It does achieve results, obviously, because many people do it, but the costs are huge in lifestyle and energy and love of life. Inspiration, on the other hand, is a joy to do, and rewards are less costly.

To move from being Motivated to being Inspired is a shift from being run by your work, to doing what you love and being paid extremely well for it. It is profound. 

Over the past 20 years I've helped around 3,500 individuals do this, and it is incredible every time. When people run their work, take power back from motivation and use inspiration instead, their family life benefits, their health benefits, their heart expands, depressions and stress go away. They find their joy. So, it's a critical part of getting a business or career on track.

My favourite quote is one I saw on a bank manager's wall... "Ideas are ideas, thoughts are thoughts, hard work is hard work, but results are the only reality" For me, setting the expectation of what is going to be defined as "great results" - the vision - of any enterprise, whether it's a an art show or a new airline is the key starting point. Then, we work backward to find what is going to generate that result and how long it might take.

There is no way to formularise this process of turning work into what you love to do and get paid for. It really depends on the starting point. So, I give new clients free first up consultations in order to explore what we can do together. Once up and running I remain a loyal fan, an advisor and sounding board. A responsibility I take as being extremely important.

Costs range from a few hundred dollars to thousands depending on the business and of course, means.

So, when the time is right and you feel that it's time for a shift from the topsy turvy world of motivation and move to Inspiration as the driving force of your life, give me a call or email to arrange a chat.

Cheers

Chris

In 1984, my business life went to the dogs, and took me with it. If there were not signs that I needed to create change in my life before that, there were certainly signs after it. This course, is the result of a quest to explore better, more authentic ways of being in life and at work. An awakened way of being in the world.

Actually, there were signs before the journey began to this new awakened way of work and life. I blamed the world for my stresses, I had anger that I couldn’t process and I was achieving great states of mediocrity in my work
and relationship. Step by step, through trail and error, and taking some massive diversions, I found better ways to be happier, do better and achieve it faster. This is the foundation of this training program.

Ultimately, this Path is about more choices. Better choices in how a person deals with everyday work, life and relationship. It’s about balance and personal strength, a realisation that, with certain choices we can find inner calm, be resilient to the challenges that come our way and give more of ourself.

This is not the only Path to awakened work life. But, I think you will find it is the most natural, direct, rhetoric free and shortest Path. I’m an Aussie, we believe in Quiet Achievement. That’s the essence you’ll find in this work.