Letting Go
To let go doesn’t mean to stop caring;
It means I can’t do it for someone else.
To let go is not to cut myself off…
It’s the realization that I can’t control another…
To let go is not to enable,
but to allow learning from natural consequences.
To let go is to admit powerlessness,
which means the outcome is not in my hands.
To let go is not to try and change or blame another, Read the rest of this entry »
The Eight Traits of Emotional Hungerby Doreen VirtueEmotional and physical hunger can feel identical, unless you’ve learned to identify their distinguishing characteristics. The next time you feel voraciously hungry, look for these signals that your appetite may be based on emotions rather than true physical need. This awareness may head off an emotional overeating episode.
|
|
|
Emotional Hunger |
Physical Hunger |
|
1. Is sudden. One minute you’re not thinking about food, the next minute you’re starving. Your hunger goes from 0-60 within a short period of time. |
1. Is gradual. Your stomach rumbles. One hour later, it growls. Physical hunger gives you steadily progressive clues that it’s time to eat.
|
|
2. Is for a specific food. Your cravings are for one specific type of food, such as chocolate, pasta, or a cheeseburger. With emotional eating, you feel you need to eat that particular food. No substitute will do! |
2. Is open to different foods. With physical hunger, you may have food preferences, but they are flexible. You are open to alternative choices. |
|
3. Is “above the neck.” An emotionally based craving begins in the mouth and mind. Your mouth wants to taste that pizza or chocolate doughnut. Your mind whirls with thoughts about your desired food. |
3. Is based in the stomach. Physical hunger is recognizable by stomach sensations. You feel gnawing, rumbling, emptiness, and even pain in your stomach with physical hunger. |
|
4. Is urgent. Emotional hunger urges you to eat NOW to instantly ease emotional pain with food. |
4. Is patient. Physical hunger would prefer that you ate soon, but doesn’t command you to eat at that instant. |
|
5. Is paired with an upsetting emotion. Your boss yelled at you. Your child is in trouble at school. Your spouse is in a bad mood. Emotional hunger occurs in conjunction with an upsetting situation. |
5. Occurs out of physical need. Physical hunger occurs because it has been four or five hours since your last meal. You may experience light-headedness or low energy if overly hungry. |
|
6. Involves automatic or absent-minded eating. Emotional eating can feel as if someone else’s hand is scooping up the ice cream and putting it into your mouth (”automatic eating”). You may not notice that you’ve eaten a bag of cookies (absent-mined eating). |
6. Involves deliberate choices and awareness of the eating. With physical hunger, you are aware of the food on your fork, in your mouth, and in your stomach. You consciously choose whether to eat half your sandwich or the whole thing. |
|
7. Does not notice or stop eating, in response to fullness. Emotional overeating stems from a desire to cover up painful feelings. The person stuffs herself to deaden her troubling emotions and will eat second and third helpings, even though her stomach may hurt from over-fullness. |
7. Stops when full. Physical hunger stems from a desire to fuel and nourish the body. As soon as that intention is fulfilled, the person stops eating. |
|
8. Feels guilty about eating. The paradox of emotional over eating is that the person eats to feel better and ends up berating herself for eating cookies, cakes, or cheeseburgers. She promises atonements to herself (”I’ll start my diet tomorrow.”) |
8. Realizes eating is necessary. When the intent behind eating is based in physical hunger, there¹s no guilt or shame. The person realizes that eating, like breathing oxygen, is a necessary behavior. |
Source: Virtue, Doreen. Constant Craving A-Z. (Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 1999).
We are all on a journey to connect and unify with Source, All That Is/ the Divine. What we discover as we progress, however, is that there is no real separation between our self and the Divine. We realize that our experience in this plane of existence as a separate individual has been an illusion, a dream. We come to understand and know that we are All That Is, but are simultaneously experiencing a collective dream with other divine fragments in which we are also separate ”selves.” What provides us with opportunities to awaken from this collective dream so that we may experience and express our Divine Self, are trials and difficulties. These periods of difficulty can initiate us into a higher level of wisdom, strength, joy, freedom and power if we see them for the amazing opportunities they are and make the changes we need to in order to reach this level.
One of our most challenging initiations is when we find we are suddenly being pushed to let go of our birth family or major support group. This happens when we find our self at odds with the accepted ideas, beliefs, ways of thinking, acting and behaving in our main support group. When this happens, don’t waste your energy trying to make the other people in your group change, concentrate on the fact that you have changed and are now ready to experience your life and relationships at a higher vibrational frequency, meaning, you want to experience a greater level of honesty, joy, freedom, independence, peace, love, fun, harmony, and/or equality, Read the rest of this entry »
How to Activate Abundance:
The Secret of “Doing Without Doing”
By Robert Anthony, Ph.D - Creator of Rich Mind Life Strategies
One of the mistaken certainties or misconceptions most people operate under is that you get what you want in life by what you DO, or through the actions you take. Most people believe that the DOING or action part is what makes things happen. However, this causes you to create in reverse.
Let me explain.
The reason we put a lot of emphasis on action is because we do not understand the power of our thought. If you analyze it, 90% of most people’s actions are spent trying to compensate for inappropriate thought.
The Chinese philosopher Lao-tsu said that, “In the practice of the Way, every day something is dropped. Less and less do you need to force things until finally you arrive at *non action* When nothing is done, nothing is left undone”. What he is talking about is *doing without doing* Read the rest of this entry »
|
