• • Take a few moments to imagine you are can be nourished by something larger than yourself. Nature, God, love, anything that is not you, breathe that force in, imagine it filling you up, like the most delish meal or warm golden sunshine. If your logical mind says, “Bull,” ask it, “Did I make gravity that is holding me to the earth? The oxygen I am breathing? I am part of the larger whole, I am always supported and I can consciously draw on that support to befriend myself.” Relax into life.

Embrace your Experience
Each time you deny what you are feeling or thinking or judge it as “bad,” you reinforce the idea you can’t be trusted, that you aren’t somehow good.

For example, I made a stupid business mistake recently, a mistake I have made many times before. I can grit my teeth, chastise myself and eat a bag of cookies or I can pause and be with what I am experiencing. Do it with me right now. Stop making anything about this moment, or you, wrong. Breathe in your feelings, any sensations in your body, your thoughts acknowledge them. Then exhale and create some spaciousness for your experience. Ahh….

Inspiration will flow from you like champagne at a wedding when you meet yourself as beloved. Let us befriend ourselves so we can befriend the world—and have a blast doing it.JENNIFER LOUDEN (:

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_{Jennifer Louden article}Life Organizer New Way to Flow With Time _article
So, you’ve made lists, prioritized your goals, prioritized your lists, and listed your goals. You’ve scheduled, compartmentalized, and tried to keep everything in its own little, neat box on the calendar. But despite all your color-coding and scheduling, “life” doesn’t always work.

The issue is that life isn’t something to get “done,” to check off a list. Life – especially as we have learned to live it in the past decade — has become much more fluid and complex. And, to be blunt, little in life gets done – nor should it.

Do you feel a pull to be present, to embrace what is and even to live like the poet Rilke: “Let what I do flow from me like a river/No forcing and no holding back?” If so, that means the old time management tools won’t work. In fact, the more traditional approaches to managing your life and structuring your days can hog-tie you, forcing you to relinquish the skills you most need in today’s world – like intuition, emotional intelligence, creativity, and big-picture thinking to read more _article
1. Connect: Move your body – breathe deeper, stretch your arms overhead, step outside and feel the breeze on your skin- anything that connects you with your life energy.

2. Feel: Tune into your heart, which can give you information your head can’t. Simply put your attention on your heart, perhaps by placing your hand there. Recall a time in which you felt loved and appreciated or loving and appreciative toward someone else. Linger there for a few seconds.

3. Inquire: Ask a mindful question. This opens up possibilities you literally couldn’t see before. My favorite mindful question: What do I need to know right now? (What if you really didn’t need to know more than the next immediate step?)

What do I want? (This is one of the most liberating questions — and one of the scariest. Remind yourself that you don’t have to act on what you want, that wanting doesn’t mean getting, and that the ultimate in creativity is being in touch with your undiluted desires.)

What don’t I want? (Sometimes using the process of elimination can be a less intimidating way to inch forward than naming your desires outright. Desire and yearning are powerful forces!)

How can I be gentle with myself in this situation? (We can all benefit from asking this many times a day)

4. Allow: To allow is simply trusting that, by connecting, feeling, and inquiring, you will hear or see or feel or sense what your next step is—and only your next step.. Allowing is not about belief: it’s about noticing your experience, and opening to your next step, allowing love, allowing inspiration, allowing knowing to come into your body and heart, to inform and direct you.

5. Apply: Action is how you taste the fruit of this path and where the practical and results-oriented parts of you get their due. Without action, without decision, you remain in possibility, which is safe and beautiful but eventually enervating and boring. That doesn’t mean eating the whole elephant in one bite; small steps aren’t just okay; they’re encouraged. Taking small actions of trust builds your “trust muscles.”

Every time you make a casual promise to yourself — without checking in first to see if you actually want to and are able to keep this promise — you erode your trust in yourself
_{Jennifer Louden}
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By Jennifer Louden Greatest fear dissolver : I never thought of myself as a fearful person — just the opposite, in fact. I was pretty fearless! After a few years of suffering, I realized that what had been shoving me into a smaller, narrower, far less rewarding life for years was actually fear. And I didn’t even know it. Anxiety, feelings of being overwhelmed, and even procrastination and self‐pity are often symptoms of fearfulness — fear of being fully alive, fear of death, fear of meaninglessness, fear of growing old. Once I saw the insidious ways that fear was ruling me, I began to learn about everything I could possibly do to dissolve it. I’m going to share one idea, an idea so small that it’s easy to overlook, yet can open the way to a far more courageous, alive life.
To thrive in the face of fear, uncertainty and even deep grief, you first need to acknowledge that you don’t want to do anything to make yourself feel better.

“What?! I don’t want to feel like my head is going to pop off. I want to feel good.”

The truth is, most of you wants to feel better. But parts of you don’t. Like all of us, you contain a multitude of selves, and some of those selves hate change, even if it’s shifting from “My head is going to pop off” to “I can handle what life brings my way. ” These aspects must be acknowledged or they can keep you stuck — for years.

“I don’t feel like doing anything” — and that’s OK

Have you ever seen a tired, fearful child trying to get her parent’s attention? Mom keeps putting off the child, and the child’s behavior keeps escalating until she gets undivided attention. Once the parent gives the child loving attention, the child, in most cases, calms down.

Parts of you and me are like that child. Before you can deal with your fear, before you can take action to create a life you love, you must acknowledge the resistance, the whiny voice that says, “I don’t want to do anything! I just want this all to go away!”

By simply acknowledging — without judgment — that you don’t want to do anything (even fun things like taking a bath or going to yoga), you extend mercy and compassion to yourself. In doing so, you calm the parts of you that are freaking out. You stop the inner rebellion that typically results in you not doing anything (that’s how procrastination starts) or nurturing yourself in ways that don’t truly nourish you, like watching hours of TV or eating a pint of ice cream.

Love = acknowledgment

This doesn’t mean you let yourself be ruled by the parts of you that don’t want to do anything to feel better. The parent does not give the child whatever she wants — even if the child is throwing a tantrum in the grocery store. Loving acknowledgment actually restores the wise you to the center of your life, freeing you to choose what you want to do and opening up to life instead of shutting yourself down.

So, when you’re feeling squirrelly, whiny or stuck, take yourself by the hand and say something like, “I don’t feel like doing anything, but I can acknowledge how I feel without being impressed by it. I can accept that I am feeling this way, even if only for a blink of an eye. And when this part of myself feels heard, I can ask, &;squo;What is one thing I can do to be kind to myself right now?’” Love, which is what acknowledgment really amounts to, is truly the great fear dissolver.

Acknowledge your resistance and watch yourself bloom

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