Celebrate your Life--Breaking the Cycle of Distress

Lots of things get us down...upsetting relationships, job stress, personal image, parents, parenting, self esteem issues, insecurities, envy, jealousy, loneliness and more. Sometimes these issues become chronic and we become anxious, depressed, or angry and hopeless. We may become moody and increasingly unsatisfied with ourselves and the life we lead.

We may seek to fill our increasing dissatisfaction by associating with others who will agree with us, or do our bidding, or take our abuse or give us abuse, but none of that will ever work. In this case "work" means, bring us happiness and well being. We may isolate, or descend into our own pity party, or talk endlessly about, "what's wrong". We may manipulate others to feel sorry for us, or make others feel worse than we do; but again NONE OF THAT WILL WORK.

If you are unhappy, or dissatisfied, or bored, or miserable, or scared, or upset with yourself and/or your life, too much of the time; it's well past time to get over it! And the grand news is, YOU CAN!

Your misery, no matter what form that comes in, is only possible because you are a self conscious being...it is only possible because you have a self conscious, fight/flight persona we call the auto/protector self. If you exit your fear driven conscious mind you exit your dissatisfaction with yourself and your life.

"Fine, Larry, how do I do that?"

Glad you asked. A long time ago psychiatrists discovered that if you gave a depressed patient a big enough jolt of electricity they often stopped being depressed. They didn't know why it worked, but they knew it did...Why do you suppose it worked? The simple answer is that the patient forgot what it was they were thinking about that they felt the need to depress...in other words they shocked them right out of their fight/flight mentality.

You don't have to stick your finger in a light socket in order to improve the quality of your life. You don't have to take pills or go through endless psycho-analysis. What you do need to do is reawaken your Authentic Self consciousness and the easiest way I know to do that is to celebrate what ever it is that has got you going. Start your day with a self assessment and no matter what you find celebrate it.

"I am fat and ugly! I hate that! No one likes me because I am so fat and ugly! My kids do drugs, my mom died and my boss just told me I'm going to be fired tomorrow...what the hell is there to celebrate?"

Just that! Celebrate it..."I am fat...look at these rolls of blubber and while beauty is in the eye of the beholder, in my eyes I'm uglier than sin. Whoopee...I hate everything about myself and so does everyone else...okay, I'm great at hating, lucky me...I'm the best hater in the world...I am scared and sad; scared for my child and sad that my mother died let me celebrate my fear and sadness...let me feel it fully and not flinch...let me love it for allowing me to be alive...and the terror I feel at soon being out of a job?...well hallelujah...I am exactly where I am, feeling exactly what I am feeling and I embrace these feelings knowing with absolute certainty that these too shall pass."

I know completely unrealistic...except for the people I have coached that have done just that. Find your own life coach, and ask them to help you celebrate your life just as it is. You can celebrate your life, feelings, and experiences, no matter what they are. A celebration of life is not always happy but it is always generated from your Authentic Self. From the frontal lobes of your creative imaginative consciousness. It is something you are capable of 'doing'. You can embrace and celebrate the fullness of your feelings, and experiences; and if you do, just like shock therapy, you will release from the rigid grip of your fear based conscious mind.

Be in love with YOU. Let yourself have exactly what you have without complaint and with the fullness that will inevitably allow it to past into antiquity. Embrace your experiences and share them with gusto and pride of ownership...love the ones you're with, especially yourself...until next time, I remain...Respectfully Yours, Larry

A Thought for Today: To celebrate sadness is to be profoundly sad, to celebrate fear is to be free to feel stark terror, to celebrate anything is to be fully engulfed in the experience so that it might be free to move on...and move on it will when you have experienced it fully.

An Action you can Take...the next time you feel stuck in some emotion or some situation that just keeps persisting...stop right in the middle of how you typically handle it and ask yourself what you are feeling (if it is anger dig deeper) then own those feelings as your reaction to the situation and stop whatever you were going to do and fully experience the feelings. Say, "I accept that this is what it is and I have exactly these feelings about it...It is okay for things to be as they are (even if I can't stand that) and for me to feel as I do...I want them to change and that is okay as well and if I can do anything to effect that change I will, so long as it will lead to greater peace and harmony for all." Do this a few times until you begin to experience a shift in how you experience your own life.

Go to http://www.lifeaftersurvival.com/ and buy the book; or peruse http://www.perspectiveson.com/ for more information on life coaching.