We have made it over the hump for our 31 day life liberated challenge. How are you feeling?
I want to encourage you to take a few deep breaths and take in the fact that you are here reading this. How does it feel in your chest to know that you are taking time from your life to love more authentically you.
How does it feel that you are actually spending time on your brain than buffering with ‘other’ activities?
How does it feel that you are finding more peace in who you are by allowing yourself the opportunity to learn how to connect your brain to your body?
You probably have a variety of feelings coming up. Slow down your thoughts. It helps to do this bu slowing your breathing into deeper breaths. If your mind is starting to wander off, bring it back to the questions I am ask. Keep yourself focused.
When we find our brain jumping around with different thoughts we give ourselves a disservice because we are disallowing ourselves the opportunity to enjoy the present. If our minds are always jumping back to the past or or jumping forward to the future, we never really enjoy the present.
When the lower brain is in charge it wants us to save energy and stay safe. So if we are not operating out of our higher brain we can go a whole day or week and when someone asks us about our day and what we did, we aren’t really sure, because we weren’t in charge.
So today we are going to talk about living a more meaningful life and allowing ourselves to experience all of it. I call his living through the messy middle.
When you think of almost every plot of every story ever written, how does it go?
Beginning- intro to characters and plot
Middle- the characters try to solve the problem several times and fail until they finally…
End-solve the problem and everything gets all tied up nicely in a bow, the end.
So think about this for our lives.
Think about the last time you tried to accomplish a goal. How did you do? Did you achieve it without any problems? In your workbook write down the last time you struggled with accomplishing a goal. How did it work out for you? Were you able to solve it in the end? How many times did you have to try before it worked out? Did the end result happen as you had thought?
Why do we think that we should be able to do everything perfectly the first time we try?
Why do we think that everything should be happily ever after?
Where did we get the notion that if there are problems than we should probably give up because its so hard. Things shouldn’t be so hard…why is that the thought?
I want to encourage you to question all of these? Remember we have 60 000 to 90 000 thoughts a day. They can’t all possibly be true. We actually get to decide what thoughts we want to keep and which thoughts we want to let go.
Where do the thoughts come from? I am going to list a few thoughts and I want you to think where this thought originated from:
-I need to be extremely thin to have real joy
-wrinkles are unattractive and I am worth less because I am old and wrinkly
-having over 10000 followers on Instagram means I am a very important person
-I am a good mom when I take my kids on expensive vacations?
Do you know how many dollars and hours are spent on advertising? Do you know how many people have studied for years conducting 1000’s of hours of research to affect our brains. Facebook and Instagram alone are sending billions of dollars into our brain so they can keep us on our screens longer and longer so they can have more and more influence on our thoughts.
Awareness is the first key here.
Do you feel more empowered now about your ability to choose the thoughts that serve you when you find yourself in situations that aren’t easy? So many people think that something has gone wrong and they give up.
Take yourself to your favourite Disney movie. Think of the main character. What problem do they have to solve? What do they try to resolve the problem? How many times do they fail? What does the character learn from their failure? How did these lessons help them to finally resolve the problem?
Let’s do one here:
Main Character: Cinderella
Problem: left with evil step mother and sister and can’t go to the ball
FIrst attempt: works extra hard to get all her jobs done hard work
Second attempt: tries to make her own dress resourcefulness
Third attempt: royal servant comes with shoe and she cooperation
is shut out
Resolution: able to stand up for herself with her newly developed skills.
Think about the most recent struggle you have had in trying to accomplish a goal. Could you plug in your attempts and the character strengthening lessons you learned from them? Then what is the resolution?
So another way to look at the messy middle comes from one of my favourite episodes of Jody Moore called the River of Misery. I will share about it in today’s video. If you are into podcasts, this one is worth listening to for sure it is episode #199.
Writing Time
*Remember that when you slow down to write you are helping to rewire your brain. This is worth it, I promise.
- So what do you want in your life?
In one year?
In 5 years?
In 10 years?
2. What is your life legacy? Write down your contributions. What would be different on this world because you lived?
3. Now think about the things you are doing every day. Are these daily acts helping you to achieve your legacy goals?
4. In order to not overwhelm, select one goal that will help achieve your legacy.
5. What are three things that you are already doing that bring your closer to your goal?
As always I love to hear from all of you what is coming up for you as you dive deep into this work.
https://zoom.us/rec/share/-9NbAYHwpmFOe4Xr9kDuRqcMAo3Heaa8gCAXr_ANmhpqzJfnfOEVytuUgoqcKmty
