by Shikha Rastogi | Sep 2, 2016 | Beliefs, Perspective
Hi everyone, welcome back. Last week I examined ‘problems’ and how humans go about defining these problems and if these problems are actually ‘real’ the way our mind makes us believe they are. This week, I would like to continue on the topic of problems and would like to examine if ‘worrying’ about these problems actually helps us to stay safe from these problems.
Belief: If I don’t worry about these problems, I won’t be able to fix them and I won’t be safe anymore!
When a human mind identifies problems, worrying about these problems happens to be a natural response by our mind. And worrying really is the mind’s attempt to try to solve all these problems that it has identified in the first place. And the way our mind does that is by creating many fearful thoughts about the worst case scenarios that could be the outcomes of these problems. And because most human beings live unconscious lives, what they don’t realize is that all this fearful thinking is just that – fearful thinking and it has nothing to do with reality. It has nothing to do with reality because most times, maybe 99% of the times, when we are faced with a problem, it generally resolves itself over time because we may either change our perspective on it and don’t see it as a problem anymore or, we find creative ways to deal with it. But because we don’t know the fact about our minds which is that its real job is to create thoughts most of which are deep rooted in fear, we take these fearful thoughts very seriously and even though the problem that was identified by our mind was minuscule, it ends up becoming a mountain until our mind shifts attention to the next problem. And this cycle continues until you the owner of the mind really takes the time to learn and understand the true nature of mind and the way it functions in your own life. If you have gotten lost in this explanation, let me use a very simple yet very profound example to better explain.
Let’s imagine that your spouse comes home from work around a certain time every weekday. However, one day, he is late by an hour and even though you are trying your best to reach his cellphone, he is not picking up or maybe the call is being directly routed to his voicemail. So in this scenario, have you ever noticed that the first thoughts that your mind will almost instantly begin to create are completely rooted in fear. At this point, your very first thought may be that your husband is in a car accident and something bad has happened to him which is why he is not even answering his phone. And the reason why your mind creates this fearful thought is because of the underlying belief that when responsible people suddenly become unreachable, they must be in deep trouble. And your mind creates this belief because maybe you know a person who knows another person who was in a car accident and this is what unfolded for him and his wife. On the other hand, you may have received messages via advertising/marketing from the various media sources that when responsible people don’t respond timely, you should assume that they are in deep trouble. But when your husband finally arrives home safely, you realize that nothing bad ever happened to him. It was just that he was stuck in very bad traffic and the cellphone battery died on him or he put his phone on mute and saw your 100 missed calls as he was just entering the front door of your home! So, what was really just a technological glitch, became an amazing source of anxiety for you in just a matter of few minutes!! And your mind just took you on a very fearful ride which in reality may never ever become true for you in this life, yet, you already started to plan the rest of your life without your dear husband 🙂
And folks this is just one tiny example of how we live our lives most of the times. Lost in fearful thinking! All our mind thinks most of the times is what could go wrong, what is that bad thing that could happen next, which is that person who can say something bad to you and ruin your day etc. etc. But if you have ever paid close attention to your thinking, you will also realize another thing that the thoughts that your mind creates are almost always repetitive. What that means is that in a certain situation such as the one we looked at above, your mind will most definitely create the exact same thoughts each time you are faced with the exact same situation…until you begin to really understand this is how your mind works. And once you do, this provides you with an opportunity to shift your attention from your mind’s fearful thinking to the present moment. But keep in mind that even when you are aware of all the tricks your mind plays, its you who will have to make a choice to let go of the negative and fearful thinking and shift your attention. And yes its not easy and you need lots of practice and patience to be able to implement this in our own life, however, the very first step forward is realizing and understanding how your mind works. Also, be very kind to yourself and try not to judge yourself when you begin to realize the kind of crap that your mind generates because this is how most human minds operate although the degree by which a human mind creates this fearful thinking may vary from human to human. More on this next time 🙂
And as always, feel free to leave a comment, if you feel like leaving one. And until next Friday, live life 🙂
by Shikha Rastogi | Aug 26, 2016 | Beliefs, Perspective
Hi everyone, welcome back. A couple of weeks ago I examined the feeling of Love and how it gives meaning to our lives when we are feeling this feeling and makes life a little easier to live. This week I would like to examine ‘problems’, how humans define problems and if these problems are actually ‘real’, the way our mind makes us believe they are.
Belief: I have so many problems in my life. I don’t know how to get rid of them to become happy and peaceful.
Here is my understanding of how most humans define ‘problems’. But before I even try to define what a problem is, I would like to take you guys back to the very basics of how a human mind operates. Have you have ever noticed that a human mind maintains 2 columns in its mental notebook – one column is for things/people/events that the mind tags as ‘good’ and the other column is for things/people/events that are tagged as ‘bad’ by our mind. In addition to maintaining these 2 columns, our mind also has a layer of ‘expectations’ where it only expects to encounter the things/people/events that it has tagged as ‘good’ and any thing or person or event which does not fall within this category of ‘good’ is treated by the mind with suspicion and fear and is therefore called a ‘problem’ which needs to be fixed or solved. And because a human mind generally has a much longer list of ‘bad’ things/persons/events, therefore, the list of ‘problems’ that we have in our lives appear to be very long also. So, before I philosophize any further let’s look at this through an example.
Let’s take an example from our professional life. Let’s imagine that you are one of those folks who have been ambitious with regards to your career and wanted to rise in your career, however, you had a very rocky start to your career where you could hardly even manage to find ‘a job’ let alone a ‘good job’. So this was the first ‘problem’ that you encountered in your career which is that you were unable to find yourself ‘a good job’. But now that you have ‘a job’, you work very hard and hope that the executives in your department notice your hard work and promote you sooner rather than later and if that happens, you will be able to define your ‘job’ as a ‘good job’. However, this doesn’t happen either and your executives don’t notice your hard work and as a result don’t promote you. So this becomes the second ‘problem’. By this time you may be frustrated enough that you start looking for another job, however, since you didn’t get promoted, you are unable to secure that next level job that you think you absolutely deserve and this becomes the third ‘problem’. And honestly, I can go on and on and on here but the point I am trying to make is that because from the get-go you tagged each situation that you encountered as ‘bad’ and therefore a ‘problem’, your mind went into overdrive and started to find ways to fix and solve that problem. And on top of that because you continued to tag subsequent situations as ‘bad’ also, your mind just never lost track of the ‘problems’ that it needed to fix and solve. But have you ever thought may be (just may be) that on this journey which you defined as full of problems, the Universe was actually trying to help you see this another amazing opportunity or guide you towards using this other amazing skill that you have within you which you never paid attention to. But because you had a very specific plan in your mind about how your life should unfold, you never even entertained the idea that may be this is a signal from the Universe that you are supposed to do something else in your life instead of what you are trying so very hard to achieve and accomplish. I know all this very well folks because this example is very similar to my own story 🙂 and when I finally woke up to the fact that this Universe is actually asking me use the amazing skills I have within me is the day I started to write this blog! I don’t know if there is anything that comes out of this blog for me but what I know for sure is that because I think and feel everything so very deeply and have spent years paying attention to my thoughts and the beliefs behind those thoughts, I now have an amazing understanding of how human mind works and I love to share that understanding with other people because I have also come to understand that even though we are separate human beings living separate lives, our minds have very similar beliefs and thinking as a result of these beliefs. And this is the reason when I share anything in this blog, it comes directly from my heart to yours 🙂 with the hope that anyone who is reading can view their situation/life from another perspective. And honestly, as I too learn and create new beliefs, I read my own blog from time to time to remind myself of these different perspectives :-)..And I know very well that it’s not easy to un-learn old beliefs but I choose to live a life which is not full of fear and I commend anyone who tries to do the same thing.
You know folks we all create plans about how our lives should unfold and what should happen, when it should happen and how it should happen. And I don’t think there is anything wrong in creating those plans as long as we can remember that the plans we create are created by our very limited human mind and but when it comes to living life as a human on Earth, there is something far far greater than a human mind which some people call fate, some call destiny, others call it God, I call it Universe. But because we can’t see this God or Universe, we don’t completely trust in it. And because we don’t completely trust in it is the reason why our mind creates all these plans in the first place because if we actually trusted in the Universe or God we would know that we are already being helped and taken care of even when the things/persons/events appear to be ‘a problem’. And so if we can only learn to consciously ‘not tag’ everything that we didn’t expect to happen as a ‘problem’ and instead view it as an opportunity to learn and grow, life will become so much simpler. If we can only access all this wisdom while we are going through the ‘problems’ instead of looking back and realizing, our lives would be so much peaceful.
And as always, feel free to leave a comment, if you feel like leaving one. And until next Friday, live life 🙂
by Shikha Rastogi | Aug 12, 2016 | Beliefs, Perspective
Hi everyone, welcome back! Last week I examined what ‘Fear’ really is, what it feels like in the mind and body and the harm it can do in your life if you don’t take the time to identify, examine and learn to manage it. This week on the other hand, I want to talk about ‘Love’ because this is the feeling that gives meaning to our lives and makes it worth living!
Belief: Love can’t solve all the world problems. They are way too big for love’s reach!
Are you that person who thinks love is good and important but it can’t solve all the very complicated world problems? I am that person too to some extent, however, as I learn to love myself and everyone around me more and more each day, I am beginning to realize that maybe we can solve all world problems just through love. Let’s explore if/how we can actually apply the ‘love balm’ in any situation.
But before we begin, let’s first try to understand LOVE…what does this word mean to you? I want you to pay attention to the thoughts your mind creates when you think about love. Imagine what you feel in your body when you think about this beautiful feeling of love. Do certain people come to your mind? Are you imagining your parents, your spouse, your kids or other close family members and friends? Are you imagining being in certain serene locations that you think create the feeling of love in you? Are you imagining doing what you love to do – your passion? This is exactly what comes to my mind and maybe the minds of most or all humans when they try to imagine that feeling of love. But have you ever noticed that this feeling of love towards certain people, your passion, certain places; it’s all your choice! It’s you choice because you are consciously choosing to love all these people or things because you want to. You choose to love your parents because they gave birth to you. You choose to love your passion because that’s what makes you happy. You choose to love your spouse because you want to spend your life with them. You choose to love your kids because you brought them into this world. However sometimes, instead of choosing to love these people or things, some of us choose to ‘not love’ them and there could be a variety of reasons behind that. But the point that I am trying to make is that we always ‘choose’ love over any other negative emotion like fear and even though love may not come to us naturally in certain situations or around certain people but we always have a choice where we can choose love.
So if love really is a choice, then anyone can choose love in any situation? Right? So, let’s explore at least one of those situations that we encounter so very frequently in our personal lives. Let’s take an example which is so simple yet so very profound which will help illustrate that we can actually choose love over anger or fear or any other negative emotion in a difficult situation. And what could be a more difficult situation than the one where your kid is in the middle of a really bad tantrum. So, let’s imagine your kid just went into a massive tantrum over something. It doesn’t quite matter if this ‘something’ is trivial or much bigger than trivial. The point is that since your kid just went into a big tantrum mode where they are kicking and screaming and yelling and crying – all at the same time and God forbid if this happens at a public place, you as a parent is mortified!! You are mortified because your efforts to try to reason with your kid is going absolutely nowhere, yet, you are in the middle of this situation and each person passing by is looking at you like your kid is the only kid in the world who throws a tantrum :-). At this point, even though you are trying to show as much patience as possible and are trying to stay as calm as possible, chances are, in less than 5 minutes you will start to get very angry yourself and start your own tantrum. And if this happens, instead of getting better, the situation will actually get a lot worse because now there are 2 people throwing a tantrum :-). So this is that perfect time when you have an opportunity to choose love over fear. When you choose fear, as I already pointed above, you will get into that tantrum mode yourself. However, if you choose love, it will on the other hand allow you as a parent to view your child as a child who is trying to express themselves because they don’t quite know how to yet. It will help you remember that even though the situation looks bad, it quite isn’t that bad and so your own flight or fight mode is not triggered. Being able to choose love may help also to bring the intensity of the tantrum down and allow the kid to feel like they are not a bad person for not being able to control their own emotions and this love approach may end up being be a win-win for both parents and kids. And once the storm has passed, you can then talk some reason into your kid about what happened.
I know some of you may be rolling your eyes and making your faces right now because of this ‘love balm’ approach but you have to try it to believe it! Just reading my blog won’t do the trick :-). You may not be able to reach for that feeling of love every time but whenever you are actually able to choose love over fear, you will feel so good about yourself and your life!
Let’s take another example of people who commit crimes in this world. I know this could be a very sensitive topic for folks who themselves have fallen victims to various crimes committed by other humans. But have you guys ever wondered that with all the variety of punishments and jails and prisons and other equally bad things that we have created as part of our justice systems to prevent crime from happening, this crime should have been a thing of the past by now. But that is so far away from what reality today is. So, if fear and fearful techniques is not an incentive enough to stop a human being from committing this crime, I think maybe it’s time to now review our fearful techniques and update and upgrade them so that we look at the committers of crime from a perspective of love rather than fear. I know very well this is a very hard concept but don’t you think it’s worth looking into because of where the human race is headed?
And as always, feel free to leave a comment, if you feel like leaving one. And until next Friday, live life 🙂
by Shikha Rastogi | Aug 5, 2016 | Beliefs, Perspective
Hi everyone, welcome back! Last week I examined what ‘perfection’ really means and the beliefs and thinking that accompany the need to be perfect or have a perfect life. This week I would like to examine ‘Fear’, what it really is, what it feels like in the mind and body and the harm it can do in your life if you don’t take the time to identify, examine and learn to manage it.
Belief: If only I didn’t feel so much fear, I could do so much more with my life!
Not sure how many of you have noticed my url for this blog ‘loveyourfear.com’. The reason why I chose this name is because as a human race we suffer so much from fear. We suffer because fear diminishes our capacity to feel any other emotion, except fear itself! We are fearful of pretty much everything and everyone in this age of competition. We try so hard to prove our worth to everyone around us and to ourselves. And we try to prove our worth because deep inside we don’t feel worthy yet and we think if we do this and achieve that and accomplish that and make others happy and do some charity, we will be able to feel that elusive feeling of ‘being worthy’ in this world which is crowded with too many humans. And in this process of living, this fear that I am talking about may show up almost anywhere, anytime – as we try to accomplish all that I just mentioned or if we tried but failed or so many times we still keep feeling this fear even after we have accomplished and achieved because now we fear losing it all! And interestingly, this is how most humans have been living their lives in this new age! And this fear is not just restricted to adults anymore, it’s penetrated the lives of our kids as well. They learn to live in fear from us because fear has become part of our parenting style. And this is why as a society, we are more and more in need of psychologists and psycho-therapists. This is why, even though as a society we have achieved and accomplished so much more than all of our previous generations combined, we have amassed so much more wealth, we have become so much more technologically advanced, we have created products that can provide so much comfort and safety, science has advanced the life span of humans in so many part of the world, yet, we are not nearly as ‘fearless’ as we had hoped we would be when we started down this path. Fear ‘appears to be’ the biggest block in living and experiencing our lives fully while we are here on earth UNTIL we change our perspective on fear.
Personally, the biggest lesson I have learned from spending many years living a life of anxiety is that you have to view fear from another perspective – a perspective of love rather than fear. You have to learn to be fearless in the face of fear itself and instead view it as an opportunity to learn something more about your subconscious and therefore grow even more as a human being. You have to learn to identify whenever fear presents itself in your mind through negative thoughts, you have to learn to not just feel this fear but also have the courage to be at peace with the fact that you are feeling this fear. You have to learn to continue to do what you are very afraid of doing or trying or just being in this world even though you are feeling this enormous fear inside your mind and body. And when you are able to do all of this, listen closely, because fear will have a message for you. It will show you the mirror exactly where you need to grow in your life but are very afraid to. Folks, what I have learned and still continue to learn each day is that there is a very important reason for fear to be present in your life. Most importantly, fear tries to raise your consciousness level that you are currently at. It teaches you to believe in yourself, to never doubt yourself, to love and value yourself, to become the person you are meant to be in this lifetime!! I truly believe it!
Living in fear not only causes us emotional and physical pain and discomfort, it also robs a human from experiencing their own life! A human being who lives in a constant state of anxiety, experiences that state because of fear. And this fear comes from the thoughts that our minds create, although, there are some human beings who have developed the ability to see through the dark veil of fear. They can really tell the difference between when they are feeling ‘real’ fear and their bodies as a result should get into the fight or flight mode versus when that fear really is ‘false evidence appearing real’. If this is the kind of fear you feel in your own life, have you ever taken the time to wonder and ponder? I know it’s an amazingly difficult and uncomfortable thing to do. I know because I have done it and still do it when I feel my favorite friend fear and honestly yes it’s been so very painful and uncomfortable but it has taught me my biggest lesson in this life – there is no need to fear this fear. It’s just an emotion which needs your love and attention and once it has that, it will go back to where it came from. But in order to do what I and some of you who already do this in your own life, it requires amazing amounts of courage because this really is my own mess that I am trying to look at and not someone else’s which is so very easy to look at and judge and preach upon. But only when you gather the courage to finally start looking at your own mess is when you actually find that there is really a light at the end of a very dark tunnel. And you also realize that this light was there all along but instead of looking at this beautiful bright light, you had your eyes closed this entire time that you were moving through the tunnel that represents your life!! And you had your eyes closed this entire time because you didn’t really want to acknowledge that you and everyone around you is a part of this beautiful and powerful Universe! And because you are part of this Universe, you are already equipped with everything you need to live your best life this time around :)..You are just afraid to accept that…more on this sometime 🙂
There is a meditation that I frequently do to accept and let go of fear from my own life. Once I sit down to meditate, I imagine I am a small child, maybe 3-4 years old who is very scared. I imagine I am hugging this child and kissing it and telling it that it’s safe and it’s always going to be ok no matter what happens in life. And I just continue to sit and feel everything that is brought up for me in that moment…Make your own version and give it a try. It’s an amazingly powerful meditation.
And as always, feel free to leave a comment, if you feel like leaving one. And until next Friday, live life 🙂
by Shikha Rastogi | Jul 29, 2016 | Beliefs, Perspective
Hi everyone, welcome back! Last week I examined a belief about the importance of everything that happens around us and how the process of creating peace for ourselves is affected by these events. This week, I would like to examine what ‘perfection’ really means and what happens to life and living beings themselves when they get into the mode of chasing this perfection!
Belief: My life should be absolutely perfect! This is how I should look, this is how I should talk, walk, laugh, this is how my spouse should be, this is how my kids should be, this is what they should do etc.
I just can’t stop smiling as I am writing this post. I am smiling because I am a recovering perfectionist myself 🙂 so I understand exactly why a lot of people feel this overwhelming need to be perfect all the time. You know folks, just a few years back when I only allowed very close people to see the real person that I was and I didn’t have that kind of connection with everyone around me, I used to think that there are not many people who would fall in the category of perfectionists, however, as time went on and as I continued to open up to people (even strangers), I realized boy I was wrong!! I realized that almost everyone is a perfectionist just where they fall on the spectrum differs. And when I had this realization, I started to pay attention to my own thoughts to better understand my own beliefs and the thinking behind these beliefs that contribute towards this need to be perfect and have a perfect life. So, before we go any further, let’s first explore the kind of thinking a human experiences which results in this ‘perfection’ disease.
Did I just say disease? Yes, I absolutely did. You see the word disease can be broken down into dis-ease and that’s exactly what we call it when our physical bodies are sick and are not at ease. But when our thinking is sick as a result of beliefs which are either passed on to us by our parents or society or we create them ourselves in the process of living this life, we call them ‘mental health issues’. But have you ever noticed that these so called ‘mental health issues’ actually come to life because of the fact that your mind is not at ease with you and your life today. Hence I think it’s very appropriate to use the word dis-ease to describe our mental health issues as well. Let me explain further.
Before you go all crazy, I would like you to understand this first – I am in no way suggesting that when a person has mental health issues, they have a disease because if that’s true, then every human on this planet has a disease :). What I am really saying is that because you are not at ease with who you are and how your life is today is why you are a perfectionist. I know what I am saying is counter intuitive. So, let’s try to understand this through an example. If you are one of those women who try to look physically perfect all the time and can go to any length to look that way, there could be variety of thoughts going through your mind. One is you may think that you don’t look beautiful yet and therefore you ‘try’ to look the way you think you ‘should’ based on the image of perfection you have stored in your mind. Another thought may have something to do with other people’s or society’s expectations of how a perfectly beautiful woman should look like and knowingly or un- knowingly you try to fit that image of perfection so that you can be called ‘beautiful’. In this example, I would also like to point out, especially if you have not already realized yet that this kind of thinking is coming directly from a fearful place. Fear of not being called beautiful, fear of not getting that praise, fear of not getting those looks from strangers/friends/family members, fear of people finding out flaws in your physical beauty. This kind of thinking, it’s all rooted it fear. And because you are so fearful about not looking beautiful enough, you try to hide your fears and your imperfections behind the veil of ‘trying to be perfect’ so that people don’t find out exactly what’s going on inside you!
Let’s take another example and now that I am raising a daughter, this one is very close to my heart. Most parents or at least folks from my generation who have been raising kids appear to be a little more conscious than their own parents. And in in being conscious, we try to do the best job possible to raise our kids, however, sometimes or a lot of times, we cross that fine line where we start to obsess about whether what we do for our kids is right or not; if it’s enough or not. As an example, in my daughter’s pre-school, I see that some parents have enrolled their kids in various activities at the end of the school day. And because of these scheduled activities, many times as I wait for my daughter to wrap up what she is doing, I have watched these moms’ frustrated faces as they try to somehow persuade their little ones to hurry up to get to this next class but the kid on the other hand is crying and resisting to go because they are enjoying the activity at school. And the reason we try to fill up our kids schedules with too many activities even though they may not even be 3 years old yet is because we try very hard to create that perfect child so that we can make sure that when we go out in society, our child is not less than any other child out there and we can proudly rave about everything that our kid knows at this very young age and get intense satisfaction in knowing that none of our friends and family members kids can actually do that!! More on this topic next time 🙂
You know folks, the very simple yet very profound truth is that perfectionism or trying to be perfect is really a way for a human being to hide the fact that you are human, that you are far from perfect, that you make mistakes sometimes, that you think negative thoughts sometimes, that you get angry sometimes, that you get hurt in relationships sometimes, that you just want to be left alone sometimes…But what’s wrong with any of this? Isn’t this what being human really is? We have placed such high expectations from humans in this world and when a lot of us are unable to meet them, we fall prey to depression, anxiety and low self-esteem. But can you honestly answer one thing – do you really want to turn into a robot with no negative thoughts and feelings instead of just accepting the fact that you are human and this is what being human means? Really – is that what you want?
And as always, feel free to leave a comment, if you feel like leaving one. And until next Friday, live life 🙂
