There’s something about a new year that provides closure and allows you refreshed mental health. With a little intention, you can use this momentum to
This life can be difficult beyond belief. We cannot always understand the feelings of another and what leads an individual to take their life, but we can always let them know that we would like them to stay.
There’s incredible power in living in the present moment. It’s really hard to do though. But with all of life’s choices, some reminders can go
I watched this AGT audition and immediately went to my computer and wrote this poem. The way he was bullied and torn down by others really hit me. It’s sadly not a unique story. We, humans, are sometimes just not very nice to each other.
We have lost the capacity for patience. We have lost the need to analyze information because someone in front of our screen will do it for us. Our internal processing atrophies when we deny its use. Sometime it has never been learned. Due to the constant influx of information, we often revert to external sources in which we are told everything we should think, see and believe. If we are not careful we essentially become a robot, fed what the external world tells us and then acting accordingly.
Our culture has such unrealistic expectations for our men that rather than cry a tear over the heavy burdens they carry and tremendous pain they feel they turn to drugs, alcohol, high risk behaviors and suicide. Rather than encouraging men to embrace and talk about the pain, hardship and struggle of life, instead of seeing them weep, we send the message that we would rather they destroy themselves trying to be strong.
Emotions are powerful. While they sometimes seem beyond our control, as we begin to gain a greater awareness of our emotions, the events that lead to them, the thought process that is involved with them and the way they are elicited, we can begin to make changes to our environment and the way we think which will help us alter the automatic response that is associated with our emotional experience. While many emotional responses are a learned response from past experiences, we can change our learned response to be more inline with what we would like our emotions to be.
Where we once found joy and success, we now see only our failures and inadequacies as we compare ourselves and all the struggles and challenges which we know are present in our life to the perfection someone else is presenting to us. We are comparing our reality with someone’s cropped and filtered life–a view where all the mess, struggle and failure is carefully hidden away.