So Much Happier Blog
Living Your Best Life
“To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.”
One of the reasons why sometimes people new to Tapping have trouble getting results is that they have trouble identifying their emotions and noticing what’s going on with their bodies. For numerous reasons, in many cultures, we’re taught to deny the importance of signals from our bodies just as we’re taught that emotions are mostly useless and best ignored; often we’re encouraged to place the value of intellectual learning and displays of mental ability above all else. The body may be seen as just a sensory apparatus and a vehicle for moving the brain around in space. Only athletes are generally exhorted to pay more attention to their bodies because this is necessary to gain competitive advantage. Even then, they’re often told that they should push through pain without considering any more sophisticated methods for understanding an unthinkably complex body-mind system. The upshot is that most of us have no experience with tuning in receptively to what the body might be trying to tell us, particularly when doing so means feeling discomfort. Not only are most of us profoundly uncomfortable with feeling discomfort, but we also may not even have the language to describe physical sensations, because we’ve spent a lifetime running from them. Add in the very common knee-jerk fear reaction so many of us have about what pain might MEAN to us and our lives, and we have a tangled, heavy ball of obstructive habits that can be hard to contend with. It can also prevent our learning to build bridges to understanding our bodies’ signals in ways that only we can, and then taking appropriate action.
If you want to enjoy the best possible experience of life, here are some ideas on how to unwind this unfortunate tangle and free up energy for the creation of more synergy with your body and its innate intelligence:
Consider what an incredible thing your body is, and how much it does for you every day. It allows you to perceive the vast and varied world around you with your senses; it processes all the air and fuel you feed it and turns that into energy; it allows you to think, feel, and move around at will, and it maintains a million delicately balanced processes that allow you to all of this at all times, throughout thousands of changing internal and external conditions both seen and unseen. Do you think, just maybe, it might be possible for it to communicate something of value to you here and there if you were willing to listen?
Last week we looked at a few ways to get started with meditation. One of the reasons why it can be such an advantage to learn to work constructively with your mind rather than just letting it run wild is that when your mind is not always screaming like a banshee, you have some space to notice what’s actually happening—including with your body—at any given moment. Until you can create such space, you are at the mercy of a mind that will always try to distract you from anything it’s not creating, such as the other parts of your self, as well as opportunities being offered to you by others and the world around you
Practice challenging yourself so that you can become more comfortable with remaining calm in the face of discomfort. Just to make things interesting, we live in a world that offers endless distractions from outside of us, in addition to those that our busy minds create. It’s so easy to seek comfort constantly through food, entertainment, other sensory pleasures, and busy-ness of all kinds that many of us convince ourselves that we’re keeping our discomfort at bay. Unfortunately, suppressed thoughts and emotions have a tendency to build pressure until they cause an explosion we can’t ignore. If you become used to the fact that some discomfort won’t kill you, it’s easier to make small choices every day that are better for your life in the long term. You build confidence in your ability to grow and make progress through small challenges, which then lead naturally to larger ones. If you’re afraid to feel anything unpleasant, you’ll probably always stay stuck right where you are. Conversely, a little courage put into action will multiply until you’re hard to stop
Work on handling your fearful reactions to noticing how you actually feel. Feeling, naming, and being willing to work with what’s true for you leads to awesome power, but it takes work to build these skills, and as you do so, you’ll discover a bunch of stuff that it’s not fun for you to look at. This is ok and completely normal! Trust me, everyone experiences stress and panic when faced with the idea of injury, illness, uncomfortable emotions, restrictions, and eventual death, but all of these are a normal part of the human experience, and finding peace with them is both possible and healthy. Too many of us live our lives in an almost-constant state of stress and panic about this, that, or the other thing, and this takes a major toll on our physical and mental resourcefulness, our capacity for enjoying life, and our long-term health. States of high stress can be useful when your life is at immediate risk, but if that’s not the case right now, that stress is killing you. When you have a high-stress reaction to something that is not life-threatening, in other words, an overreaction, it’s time to lovingly dial it down, and I know of no faster, easier, or simpler way to do this than through Tapping. Lots of other tools can help, like deep breathing, exercise/movement, talking or journaling, etc., but as you probably know, Tapping’s my favorite!
With practice, you become more able to patiently and receptively confront what’s going on in your internal world, identify it descriptively, and endure the initial discomfort of doing this until the Tapping begins to bring you relief. If you can’t allow yourself to notice your emotions and how they express themselves through your bodily sensations, you may not be able to get the results (the on-demand relief and clarity) you want, and that’s waiting for you once you create the space for it to emerge.
How 'Bout Now?
“Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.”
Those seeking to gain every possible advantage in maintaining the greatest possible levels of health and happiness may know that meditation (for instance) has been shown to improve quality of life in numerous ways, and understand that having a regular meditation practice is a great idea. Yet, as with other obvious areas in which change is far easier said than done (like diet and exercise), actually getting there can seem like a Herculean effort. Overall, solidifying new habits requires preparation, practice, and daily management of distractions and the thoughts and emotions that arise throughout the process of change. So many things can make the consistency required hard to achieve. Sometimes people decide that the whole thing is just too hard, and not worth it.
Now, there are times in everyone’s life when it really doesn’t make sense to tackle the creation of new habits, as in when you’re already dealing with a major life change, like the birth of a child. When you’re overwhelmed by high demands, the chances of succeeding with a new habit that’s also demanding are lower. Often we only contemplate taking one on in these situations in order to give ourselves the illusion of control, when the most loving thing would actually be to embrace the mess for a time, and refuse to push ourselves to beyond exhaustion until the critical need passes. Trying to do it all when we don’t have the capacity can end up just piling onto our feelings of incompetence and disappointment, which isn’t helpful in the long term.
On the other hand, obviously, claiming we’re too busy can also be a defense mechanism against making necessary changes. We’re all busy, and there’s never a perfect time to do the thing you’re resisting because you know it will be difficult. At some point, you’ll need to accept the discomfort and choose to start taking action anyway. We all have the ability to rise to a challenge when it’s important.
So, if you want to start up a helpful new habit, unless you’re maxed out by unusual circumstances, there’s no better time than now. You don’t need to choose goals and measures that are inhuman. The best way to get rolling is often with micro-steps toward your overall destination. If you want to get more exercise, for instance, you might choose to climb one more flight of stairs per day than you normally would, or park a little farther away from your errand than you could to get in some extra walking, and only build up to more activity in small increments. If it’s diet, go hunting for new recipes and just cook one new one per week. You get the picture.
If meditation is where you want to grow, here are a few ideas that don’t take much time at all, and aren’t as scary to try as some people fear:
Take a short walk somewhere pleasant and practice noticing how your feet feel on the ground, and all the data you’re taking in through your senses—temperature, breeze, scenery, scents, sounds, quality of the light, etc. When you notice your mind wandering, bring your awareness back to the here and now. This is a simple moving meditation that can help you get a break from the daily jumble of your thoughts and emotional reactions
In odd moments, imagine that every cell in your body is smiling. (This was recommended by a teacher Elizabeth Gilbert writes about working with in Eat, Pray, Love.) Even just a few moments of this feels pretty good!
Whether you’re walking or sitting, try repeating a word or phrase, commonly referred to as a mantra, over and over again. This keeps the mind occupied. It could be a single word like Love or Release, or a phrase like “I am blessed.” This keeps the mind occupied with something benign
Imagine that you’re in a beam of pure white light, and that it’s shining through every cell in your body. This one may seem less intuitive, but it can be powerful
Tap! Just sayin’. Also qualifies as moving meditation. It tunes you in to your body, mind, emotions and spirit, and helps you clear out old stuff and feel better.
People often think that meditation means only sitting quietly and clearing the mind of all thought. This may seem very difficult, since most of us have pretty busy minds, and the thought of sitting there trying to fight this fight may sound hellish. This type of meditation is quite difficult to master, but the point is not to be perfect. The point is to practice and get better at it over time. It may never be easy! However, it’s not the only option. There are other kinds of meditation practice that may be easier to start with, and still offer great benefits. It’s worth finding out what’s out there if the idea of building focus, calm, and better brain function appeals to you.
Starting small with changes you want to make can ease your transition into better habits, and help you build momentum toward, and consistent focus on, your goals so that working toward them becomes a normal part of your day. If grand gestures inspire you, by all means go for it, but if they overwhelm you, there’s no reason you can’t get moving anyway in smaller increments.
Believe You Can?
“Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.”
Last week we looked at the importance of changing beliefs in order to make better choices and foster balance in your life. Often, the reasons we don’t make good choices come down to either being unaware of our habits and where they come from (hint: Our beliefs!), or from failing to slow down long enough to make a new plan and take a few sane actions to get moving in the right direction. This week, we’ll explore how to do all of this using EFT, or Tapping.
We’re all so used to the idea that whenever there’s an issue confronting us, we need to “figure it out” with the mind; if we can’t, we may be tempted to give up in disgust and despair of solving the problem. What I’m about to offer is a non-linear approach that may stand usual assumptions on their heads. It may not seem like it could work because it doesn’t involve logical mental exertions. We will surely be using the mind, but in different ways than perhaps we usually do, and you may need to step aside from the mind sometimes as it flaps around in confusion and protest.
In order to find the causes of your behavior, we’re going to start with your body and your emotions. When you sit quietly and tune into these, what do you notice? What is bothering you? Particularly when you think about whatever is most uncomfortable, what emotions come up, and what sensations in your body seem connected to these emotions? Take a few deep breaths and be patient while you wait to see and feel what surfaces. Usually we exert so much pressure in trying to stay unaware of discomfort that this may seem like a pretty odd thing to do, but there’s a purpose here.
In the beginning, what you notice may be a confused jumble of a whole bunch of sensations, competing emotions, and related thoughts. When this is the case, I sometimes like to ask people to do a round or two of Tapping while “ranting,” basically just giving voice to everything that’s bothering them in no particular order, listing off everything that comes up without overthinking it. This allows us to tread the perimeter of the pile-up and get a general map of the landscape involved. It also helps with the “What do I say?” dilemma that sometimes stops people from actually beginning a Tapping practice, because you can’t do this wrong! Once the Tapping has helped to calm and focus you somewhat, it’s often easier to pick just one thing to work with. Tapping works best when we get very specific about something and focus on it singly until it shifts and changes, so this precess of getting specific is an important skill to build.
Once you have made a choice about one thing to target, you’ll want to describe the issue, write it down if you can, and note how intense the emotions are, as well as the sensations in your body, when you feel the emotion. Give the intensity a subjective number on a scale of 0-10 so you have a good sense of where you’re starting. Then, you’ll Tap around the points repeating a short reminder phrase that sums up or symbolizes the feelings for you. As you do this, you may notice that at some point, you have seemingly random thoughts that come up. Often, these are extremely relevant to what you’re focusing on, and can tell you more about your underlying beliefs and the life experiences when you took those on. If this happens, you can use one of the many Tapping techniques to work on the originating event and change how you feel about it. This does almost all of the work for you in changing a belief, though you may have to repeat it to address multiple experiences that have contributed to the belief.
Another tactic to try is to Tap on the statement of the problematic belief itself. For instance, Tap around the points while repeating, “There’s never enough time,” if that’s the belief you want to work on. When you give it a subjective intensity number, you’re rating it on a scale of 0-10 for how true it feels, where 10 is 100% true. As you do this, you may find that the number reduces, and/or you may find that, again, memories surface that will clarify where this came from. You can then work through those experiences to reduce their hold on you. Once you’ve done that, the belief change you want is often a natural byproduct of the work. Once the intensity of the belief is low, you can use Tapping to supercharge any affirmations you want to use around the issue going forward.
This is just a broad outline, but it should give you a good sense of a couple of useful approaches for working on limiting beliefs. As always with Tapping, you start with expressing what feels true, no matter how outrageously negative it may be, and you do not try to force a change. As you Tap and continue doing this, the change will begin to happen in its own timing, even if you don’t notice it right away. Take breaks if you need to and come back to it later. Try different approaches. Keep breathing. As long as you’re not taking on something that feels too big or otherwise overwhelming, just keep at it and eventually, there will be a shift. If you get stuck, find a practitioner and get some help. When you free yourself from limiting beliefs, great reserves of energy can be unleashed, and then your life can open up in ways you might never have imagined before. Take it from me that this is a triumphant experience, one that you can’t put a price on, and one that ripples through every area of your life adding joy and confidence that builds as you continue this kind of work.
Refocusing to Win
“It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.”
Since many people are working on new habits this month, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that starting a new habit, or ending and old one, is hard! There are degrees of difficulty, obviously, but usually the things we tackle at the beginning of the year are the bigger challenges that we didn't find the gumption to address throughout the previous year, so I'll assume that you might really be challenging yourself right now. In that case, it will behoove you to accept that you may need some extra support to keep yourself focused on and engaged with the task at hand. In order to help you see that need for yourself, consider:
- When you're stretching yourself beyond your comfort zone toward a new state of being, you are likely to have at least moments in which you feel confused and overwhelmed. You don't really feel like the self you've previously known yourself to be, but you also don't yet feel like the "new and improved" version of yourself for whom the new habit is no longer a challenge. In fact, sometimes the path to getting there looks long and treacherous, and highly uncertain, right about now
- To state the obvious, being outside your comfort zone is uncomfortable! No one likes constant discomfort, and it's tough to endure unless you can see the clear link between it and the rapid approach of something you deeply want. If you're not doing things to keep that focus, it's easy to get knocked off track by the loudness of the discomfort in the moment, and by how much you don't like it. Even if you stay on track, constant challenge without instant gratification can be pretty tiring. You may find that you have less energy, and therefore productive time, for other things until you get over the hump in solidifying your new habit
- Many people are exercising more right now. Even though this eventually creates more energy than it uses if you stick with it, in the beginning, it doesn't feel good at all. Until your muscles strengthen, they hurt and protest. Toxins and hormones stored in fat cells hit your bloodstream and change your chemistry until they're processed out of your body. You need more rest to recover and keep going, and you may feel weaker than before you started exercising. Unless you're careful, methodical, and quite physically self-aware, it's easy to injure yourself when starting a new exercise regimen.
So what can we do about all of this?
- Actually write out (or type up) a statement of your goal and why you want it, in other words, include all the great feelings you'll feel if you achieve it. Yes, you, and yes, on paper or a computer, so that you can review it every day and remind yourself what all the effort and discomfort is for when the going gets tough. This will get you up and going when you really want to go back to bed rather than face the work your goal requires. Reading it will send a wave of positive energy rippling across your day, as long as you don't spend any time worrying about how you haven't achieved your goal yet—those thoughts will do the opposite. If they come up, acknowledge them, but don't indulge them
- Write out your top personal values in as much or as little detail as you like so you can read those daily as well. This will help you to remember who you really are when the outer stuff is getting rearranged and you feel confused. This is powerful. Don't discount it
- Give some thought to a few things you can dial back so you have more energy for making change in the early stage of your project, when it's most challenging
- Tell the important people in your life what you're doing so they can support you where possible
- Consider specifically not telling people you know who will not be supportive (or might even try to derail your progress). You have no obligation to cater your life to people who try to wreck the best efforts of those around them
- Team up with someone else who you can talk to about the ups and downs of what you're doing. Just being able to share what you're experiencing with someone else who is working on their own projects helps you to feel understood and seen as you work
- Make sure you add opportunities for fun into your schedule. Taking on new things shouldn't mean that you have no time left to blow off steam, rest, and rejuvenate. Striking a healthy balance is important for the long-term viability of your projects, because if you become exhausted and demoralized, your projects will be dead in the water.
It's great to meet a new year with enthusiasm, just make sure you're allowing yourself a little time to plan for the support you'll need in seeing your projects through to the successful outcomes you want. A lot of good intentions will fall to the wayside by the end of this month. With some planning and reinforcements, yours need not be among them!
Slings and Arrows
“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”
It’s normal to experience disappointments in the course of your daily life. These can stop you short many times each day, if we’re talking about small disappointments such as just missing a green light, finding that your grocery store is out of one of your favorite items, or having a friend cancel an outing you had planned together. Now, while they might be jarring, most of these don’t make much of an impact on your overall picture—but larger disappointments certainly can. In fact, they can be the genesis of negative beliefs that don’t serve you at all, and that may run your behavior for decades after they’re created. An event that may have seemed insignificant to others can start you down a path of fear and limited thinking, whittling the cornucopia of possible choices you have in any given moment down to a handful of uninspiring options.
Let’s look at a few ways in which this can play out:
· Most of us have a memory of a parent, even the most excellent one, overreacting to something we did when we were relatively small. Perhaps we were playing happily and decided to add a work of art to the wall of the family home. There was a sense of excitement in the idea of making something beautiful (at least to us) and sharing that with a parent. When it came time for the big reveal, we displayed the opus proudly only to be faced with the fury of someone who now had to find a way to clean it up, and thought we should have known better. That feels like a slap in the face when our intentions are innocent and happy. An unfortunate memory like this can impress us in ways that last a lifetime. We may come away from it with beliefs such as, “I can’t do anything right,” “No one wants what I have to give,” or “My family doesn’t understand or appreciate me.” And such beliefs can corrode one’s enthusiasm, creativity, and confidence in subconscious ways that are powerful, but can remain mysterious, because you may not even remember the event as you get older.
· The first few years of school usually hold some difficult social situations. Kids start relating to each other in more complex ways, and experience the results of others learning through trial and error. Most of us experience at least a betrayal or two, fights, resentments, and competitions for attention. While everyone learns, so many disappointments and hurt feelings proceed from these social experiments. If patterns emerge, we may come away with beliefs like, “No one likes me,” “Everyone is mean and it’s not even worth trying,” or even just “I hate school.” There’s often little formal instruction at educational institutions on general communication, conflict resolution, negotiation, sharing, and other essential skills, and these beliefs can remain ingrained if we don’t figure out better ways of relating and coping on our own.
· In high school, most kids experience life with a high degree of angst in the areas of identity, social acceptance, and achievement, whether academic, athletic, or artistic. Popularity is often the coin of the realm, so everyone jostles for position both through both attempting to prove their own worth and attempting to disprove others’ worth in order to seem more important. It’s normal for kids to play with dominance tactics, including those designed to provoke or humiliate others. Less competitive, more naturally cooperative kids can have a hard time dealing with these status games, and end up feeling stung and embittered by confrontations. Most of us rack up more experiences of betrayal, embarrassment, and disappointment during these years; these memories can remain particularly painful because we’re experiencing many things for the first time. We may assume that this is how all such situations will go in the future. We don’t realize that our peers will continue to grow and mature, as well as gain experience, confidence and clarity, and so will we. A humiliation experienced at this time of heightened hormones and emotions can seem like death and destruction on a scale that adults find hard to understand. We may begin to believe that, “I’ll never get what I want,” “I’m not attractive,” or something general like “People are horrible.”
· As we enter adulthood, we understand that we are now more responsible for our own choices. We start having to sink or swim, making decisions independently about relationships and leisure time, life direction, health, diet and fitness, and financial matters, and bear the consequences. Mistakes made here can quickly color our faith in our own abilities, since we’re “supposed” to be able to handle ourselves by now, but in reality may still have many gaps in understanding of basic mechanics, and a lack of supportive habits, which must be built over time. Beliefs like, “I can’t keep up with everything I need to do,” “I’ll never be able to support myself financially,” or “I’ll never be able to get where I want to go in life” may result from early failures.
· At any time, we can experience life-changing disappointments such as the death of a loved one, the failure of a relationship, or the sudden loss of a job. Unfortunate beliefs like, “I’ll never recover,” “I’ll never find love again,” or “I’m a loser” may spring into being.
Did any of those beliefs sound familiar to you? Disappointments affect all of us, and yet there isn’t much help available for actually processing the often overwhelming emotions and the negative beliefs that result from them in everyday life. Most people either talk things through with family or friends, or see a psychological professional to gain perspective on the situation, but usually neither of these addresses the trauma we may be holding in the physical body or the emotional patterns that keep us limited. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know what I’m going to say here—techniques with a somatic (meaning involving the body) element seem to be the most helpful for supporting rapid change in these areas. In my world, there’s just nothing like EFT/Tapping for shaking limitations loose and helping us to shift our understanding of past events and their role in shaping who we are. Using it helps us to gently but effectively let go of the adverse effects of painful events that are now part of the distant past. Once you have a chance to lighten the emotional load you’ve been carrying from past disappointments, a new world of possibility opens, and that, to me, is one of the most exhilarating experiences there is.