Lets not kid our selves, creating positive change isn’t easy; personal transformation isn’t easy. It’s not hard to feel stuck and powerless in changing things about your own behaviour. There is often a great weight or gravity to your own patterns and your own desires for things to be the same.
In essence, to change you must firstly want to change; there must be sufficient reason, creating sufficient desire. You must know the why, the reasons and want to change badly. You must build this ‘fire of desire’, this want for change by reflecting on the reasons regularly. Without doing so there will not be the energy required to overcome the barriers to change.
Then, you must identify the barriers and break them down. To do this, you must learn to watch yourself – you require self-awareness first.
You have to be able to watch yourself, watch your old patterns of eating poorly or ‘being lazy’ or not exercising, or stressing out about things unnecessarily.
You can cultivate the ability to watch yourself through meditation and self-reflection. If you don’t meditate already, learn to – an untrained mind is as useful at creating personal transformation as an untrained violinist is at playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Find a teacher or source instruction on the net. You can find my introduction to meditation at www.arisingself.com
The self-reflection part can take many forms. Personally, I think it’s nice to keep a journal, this really helps you to be accountable and to call into question what your perceptions, feelings and actions are. You might for instance keep a food diary and call into question why you have consumed in a day what you have. Did you eat because you were hungry? Was it a genuine hunger, or was it stress driven, boredom driven or because of an emotional feeling of emptiness? Are there poor eating patterns because of a fundamental lack of regard for self?
In asking these questions of yourself you find your barriers to change; stress, boredom or loneliness as examples. These are the things that need further work if you are to change your patterns.
Another very useful tool of self-reflection is watching back the movie of your day in your mind. Slowly. Observing yourself: the way you move and feel, your mood, your reactions, your patterns and so on. On the first run through, just watch and observe.
On the second run through ask yourself questions like, “Why did I act like that, feel that, respond like that? Could I slow down, be in the moment more, not rush so much? How often to I actually deeply experience something in the moment? What perceptions, stories or beliefs do I need to change in order to feel less stress and enjoy my day more? Can I accept the nature of my reality and the things I cannot change and pour my energy into changing those things that I can?
On the third run through, press the pause button as you go, and this time seek to guide yourself. Consider putting on a different set of glasses, metaphorically speaking as you step into your day. What if this set of glasses allowed you to enjoy everything in your day, allowed you to see meaning and purpose in everything, see the opportunities for learning and growing and the connections and the enjoyment? Can you watch the movie with this set of glasses?
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