Tag: Self Improvement

A Step-By-Step Guide To Shedding Your Emotional Baggage And Living Your Best Life

Categories UncategorizedLeave a Comment on A Step-By-Step Guide To Shedding Your Emotional Baggage And Living Your Best Life

What is it with us and that enormous emotional baggage that we tend to carry around? For a second, imagine yourself standing in the heavy pouring rain with an empty bucket. The longer you stand there holding the bucket, the heavier it gets. It gets heavier rather quickly, doesn’t it? How long can we hold it for? There comes a moment when we need to release it before it gets too much…

Sometimes we think that what happens to us and what goes to our emotional baggage is what defines us.

We have our bag of sorrows about the past and this striving desire to go back in time and change a few things for the better. Why? Because reality looks nothing like we have imagined. We have this image in our mind of the way things should be and it’s daunting us down. Some of us have trouble accepting what happened in the past and how things turned out because of that. And our emotional baggage grows with new sorrows.

So what hides in our emotional baggage? Isn’t it all about fear?
Isn’t about the fear of getting hurt again? Or making the same mistakes and going through disappointments and betrayals? And we then find ourselves trapped in that damaging and “protective” mechanism that keeps us away from living our lives free from used patterns.

How Much of Emotional Baggage Do We Carry Around?

We all have emotional baggage. Some of us have 3 suitcases of heavy things, some of us have just a tiny bag… Everyone has them. Sometimes we feel as if we were carrying a lifetime’s heaviness of sorrows, pain, and anger.

Painful emotions tend to shape us and the way we see others. Those memories and emotions influence what we seek and draw to our life and the way we interact with people. Painful memories from the past create a blueprint for the subconscious mind, which prevents us from fully taking part in new situations and relationships. Meaning that we might treat people we’ve just met as the “guilty” ones whom we feel anger towards because of the past. Or we recreate look-alike experiences to relieve and work out the past. 

Memories are just thoughts that have a tendency to rise like dough when it gets hot, but they aren’t real. It just happened and your past has no effect on you in the NOW. We can release ourselves from the tight grip of worrying by focusing on being present.

We don’t have to be tortured by guilt and things that happened in the past. We couldn’t comprehend back then how to handle things better. We tried our best at that time because no one can act beyond their level of consciousness. There is nothing worse than being tremendously upset with ourselves all the time.

We can’t change the past. There is no future in the past anyway. What we can do is to define our sorrows, release the pain and clear space for better things that life has in store for us.

Spotting Emotional Baggage

1. Endless Comparing Cycle – How often do you compare yourself and your life with others? Do you worry that you are not good enough?

2. Utter Deficiency  – It’s sharply experienced when we pay too much attention to our faults, shortcomings, and weaknesses feeling inadequate compared to the others. It turns into a habit and even obsession. We tend to go on a quest and dig up something new that we think is “wrong” about us. I certainly know the feeling…

3. Swinging Swords of Bad Moods – it happens when we feel contempt towards new situations, uncertainty about the future, people, and negative outlook on life as a whole.

4. Relocating Emotions and Feelings – Have you ever flipped out at someone because of something when you felt annoyed about something completely different? If we feel angry or annoyed with something or someone, we tend to transfer those emotions to someone else.

5. Terrified of Being Alone –  when we are uncomfortable in the company of ourselves, we jump into relationships we don’t care about, we work till we burn out completely, we even exercise extensively, we do-do-do… whatever it takes to distract ourselves from our thoughts. We run the race against ourselves and feel busted when we learn that there is no escape from our thoughts. And we need to learn to deal with them and that emotional baggage that we carry.

How to Deal With Emotional Baggage Effectively

1. Identify The Triggers & Acknowledge Your Emotions

Now. Imagine a crochet hook. Think about the hooks that yank unpleasant emotions. Make a list of all the things you could think of that weight you down. Think about your limiting beliefs and what caused them. Look for the similarities and the patterns. Then pay attention to your emotions.

The more we pay attention to the way we react to things and why the more we control our reaction and what triggers it. Identify the reality which is a direct reflection of your thoughts. And then, think about your new behavior that would enable you to live more freely from the sorrows of the past.

Emotional baggage is often framed as a “story” we tell ourselves. The more you challenge those stories, the faster you accept that you don’t have to carry that heaviness. The more you understand that you can leave that unnecessary heaviness out there on the carousel of the baggage claim and away from you and your life.

2. Do You Have a Desire to Heal and Be Free?

Our conscious desire to heal and be free from emotional baggage is crucial. We cannot heal unless we know what healing should feel like.

Ask yourself this: What will it feel like when I let go of the heaviness and leave my emotional baggage behind? How would I act and think since I don’t have to carry it with me anymore? How would my relationships with people look like?

Take your time to think and reflect on those questions.

Have your desire to heal and to be free at all times in your mind.

3. Forgiveness is Vital

Make it your goal to release yourself from all the weight of the emotional baggage. If you refuse to let go then all you do is sniff rotten milk you should have thrown away ages ago… 

Tap into your awareness and stay vigilant of your thinking process. Be aware of what exactly goes into your bucket and make sure you release it on time.

Bless your past, wish it well, forgive and let go…

When you forgive, you in no way change the past,
but you sure do change the future. – Bernard Meltzer

4. What Did You Take From The Experience?

Let’s take a look at our past experiences. What did you take from them? What lessons did they bring you?

It’s up to us how we choose to see the world: through the glasses of fear and contempt towards the future… or we can choose to embrace it with all the hope and forgiveness of the past.

The process of letting go and healing takes time. Change doesn’t happen overnight, and it takes a lot of courage and dedication to face the fears and sorrows. But it’s worth it. The moment we start shaping our decisions – our destiny changes.

Emotional baggage is all about fear. But remember that on the other side of fear your freedom is patiently waiting for you to come and claim it. 

The Psychology Of A Daily Routine

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The most successful people in history – the ones many refer to as ‘geniuses’ in their fields, masters of their crafts – had one thing in common, other than talent: most adhered to rigid (and specific) routines.

Routines seem boring, and the antithesis to what you’re told a “good life” is made of. Happiness, we infer, comes from the perpetual seeking of “more,” regardless what it’s “more” of. Yet what we don’t realize is that having a routine doesn’t mean you sit in the same office every day for the same number of hours. Your routine could be traveling to a different country every month. It could be being routinely un-routine. The point is not what the routine consists of, but how steady and safe your subconscious mind is made through repetitive motions and expected outcomes.

Whatever you want your day-to-day life to consist of doesn’t matter, the point is that you decide and then stick to it. In short, routine is important because habitualness creates mood and mood creates the “nurture” aspect of your personality, not to mention that letting yourself be jerked around by impulsiveness is a breeding ground for everything you essentially do not want.

Most things that bring genuine happiness are not just temporary, immediate gratifications, and those things also come with resistance and require sacrifice. Yet, there is a way to nullify the feeling of “sacrifice” when you integrate a task into the “norm,” or push through resistance with regulation. These, and all the other reasons why routine is so important (and happy people tend to follow them more).

1. Your habits create your mood, and your mood is a filter through which you experience your life.

It would make sense to assume that moods are created from thoughts or stressors, things that crop up during the day and knock us off-kilter. This isn’t so. Psychologist Robert Thayer argues that moods are created by our habitualness: how much we sleep, how frequently we move, what we think, how often we think it, and so on. The point is that it’s not one thought that throws us into a tizzy: it’s the pattern of continually experiencing that thought that compounds its effect and makes it seem valid.

2. You must learn to let your conscious decisions dictate your day – not your fears or impulses.

An untamed mind is a minefield. With no regulation, focus, base or self-control, anything can persuade you into thinking you want something that you don’t actually. “I want to go out for drinks tonight, not prepare for that presentation tomorrow” seems valid in the short-term, but in the long-term is disastrous. Going out for drinks one night probably isn’t worth bombing a super important meeting. Learning to craft routine is the equivalent of learning to let your conscious choices about what your day will be about guide you, letting all the other, temporary crap fall to the wayside.

3. Happiness is not how many things you do, but how well you do them.

More is not better. Happiness is not experiencing something else, it’s continually experiencing what you already have in new and different ways. Unfortunately as we’re taught that passion should drive our every thought move and decision, we’re basically impaled with the fear that we’re unhappy because we’re not doing “enough.”

4. When you regulate your daily actions, you deactivate your “fight or flight” instincts because you’re no longer confronting the unknown.

This is why people have such a difficult time with change, and why people who are constant in their habits experience so much joy: simply, their fear instincts are turned off long enough for them to actually enjoy something.

5. As children, routine gives us a feeling of safety. As adults, it gives us a feeling of purpose.

Interestingly enough, those two feelings are more similar than you’d think (at least, their origin is the same). It’s the same thing as the fear of the unknown: as children, we don’t know which way is left, let alone why we’re alive or whether or not a particular activity we’ve never done before is going to be scary or harmful. When we’re adults engaging with routineness, we can comfort ourselves with the simple idea of “I know how to do this, I’ve done it before.”

6. You feel content because routine consistently reaffirms a decision you already made.

If said decision is that you want to write a book – and you commit to doing three pages each night for however long it takes to complete it – you affirm not only your choice to begin, but your ability to do it. It’s honestly the healthiest way to feel validated.

7. As your body self-regulates, routine becomes the pathway to “flow.”

“Flow” (in case you don’t know – you probably do) is essentially what happens when we become so completely engaged with what we’re doing, all ideas or worries dissolve, and we’re just completely present in the task. The more you train your body to respond to different cues: 7 a.m. is when you wake up, 2 p.m. is when you start writing, and so on, you naturally fall into flow with a lot more ease, just out of habit.

8. When we don’t settle into routine, we teach ourselves that “fear” is an indicator that we’re doing the wrong thing, rather than just being very invested in the outcome.

A lack of routine is just a breeding ground for perpetual procrastination. It gives us gaps and spaces in which our subconscious minds can say: “well, you can take a break now,” when in fact, you have a deadline. But if you’re used to taking a break at that point in time, you’ll allow it simply because “you always do.”

7 Ways To Practice Self-Care And Fall Crazy In Love With Yourself

Categories Self LoveLeave a Comment on 7 Ways To Practice Self-Care And Fall Crazy In Love With Yourself

“Falling in love” usually involves another person. Someone to snuggle with, shower with affection, and treat with serious respect. The idea of falling in love with ourselves–that’s usually hard to wrap our heads around. We think, “why the heck would I want to fall in love with me?”

The truth is, your relationship with yourself is the most important. Not in a selfish way, but in a healthy way. Too often, we look at who we are and pick ourselves apart.

“My waist isn’t thin enough.”
“I’m a failure for not making 6 figures.”
“Being single means I’m 100% undesirable.”

Holy inner mean girl!

It’s time to change all of this and start recognizing why you are awesome and worthy of your own approval and love. Developing a practice around this will not only make you feel amazing, but empower you to recover from low points in life with clarity and ease.

I’ve found that when I feel like crap, when my body has been the most sick and when I am bombarded with the most self-deprecating thoughts, the only thing to pull me up and out is drenching myself in self-love.

If you still feel confused or lost on where to start with your own self-love conversation, don’t worry; I’ve put together a list to help you get started.

1. Create a self-love ritual.

Turn off the TV and unplug from social media for 15 minutes to get centered while self-pampering. My favorite way to do this is to moisturize my skin with intention. As I massage my feet I thank them for getting me to where I need to go; as I moisturize my hands I love them for all the transactions and introductions they’ve helped me with throughout my life.

2. Build a precious community.

As much as we would like to think we can, we can’t do everything ourselves. You need the support and love from people around you to stay motivated and on track–something I like to call a Love Entourage. Positive energy is contagious, so whether you’re building a network or planning to go to a fun event, it’s always important to have a community you value around you regularly.

3. Know that your body is a loving vessel.

Treating your body like a loving vessel will not only boost your self-love, but also your energy. Be intentional about what you put into your body, not only because you want to look good but because you want to feel good. Feeding your body nutrient-rich foods will have you oozing love out of every pore.

4. Explore your spirituality.

Faith is the foundation for self-love, no matter what you believe. Believing in something opens up your soul to the beauty of belief and trust. It will build your intuition and help you make decisions based on your gut. When you explore your spirituality it will also take you on a journey to learning things about yourself and those new thoughts, feelings, passions, and raw emotions will make you appreciate yourself for being authentically you.

5. Do something you’re good at.

If this isn’t the ultimate self-esteem booster, I don’t know what is! Self-esteem and self-love often go hand in hand, and participating in a hobby you’re good at will not only boost your endorphins, but will bring out the best version of you. If you love to cook, then cook! If you love to run, then grab those sneakers, head outside and run for your life.

6. Find your happy place.

Think of a place that makes it simple to just be. That means being able to sit quietly and embrace the here and now. Not thinking about what’s due at work or what bills need to be paid, you owe this happy place to yourself. Self-love is all about connecting with yourself, and one of the easiest places to do that is your happy place.

7. Build your letting go muscle.

We’re constantly holding on to things in our past, and it can tend to weigh heavy on our souls and even give us low self-esteem. The more blocks we clear, the more we can really live big in the area of self-love. Although we may do this as a way to protect ourselves from hurting, it’s really only holding us back from moving forward to reaching optimal self-acceptance and loving who we are.

These 7 practices have literally saved me from countless downward spirals and I know they will do the same for you.