4 Ideas to help trigger more "ah-ha" moments

We've all been there. You can hear a penny drop in the silence as you to realize something makes sense in your life that didn't before. The truth is passed on and grasped through life experience. You may describe personal revelations as "ah-ha" moments, those instances when you gain profound insight to raise your soul-level awareness.

Yet, how can you connect with your soul in ways that will generate more positive developments in your life? You may be eager to reframe unresolved feelings and confusing events. To become an astute witness, you must learn to step back from your conditioned mind.  Consider these ideas to help trigger more "ah-ha" moments:  

1) Choose to not to view yourself as 'victim.'  Its a reflex to attribute blame, to judge about what you perceive was wrong with a person or a situation, and to complain how you suffer.  This attitude diverts focus from growth, nurtures negative energy and further disillusions you from the truth. Choose instead to step outside a victim mentality. Imagine how others  may interpret your behavior outside your emotional reactions or assumptions. Transform your energy.  Focus on positives in the "big picture" and learn.

2) Train your instincts to detect substance. Sharpening intuition enables you to connect your feelings with meaning behind your actions. In order to discern underlying meanings for your choices, review your behavior from an outsider's view.  How compatible are your behaviors with your views of love and forgiveness? Do your choices bring you closer to or alientate you from unconditional self-acceptance, spontaneous self-expression, and honesty? Each time someone or something evokes discomfort, its a clue to issues of substance in need of your attention.  Although your instinct may be to defend your spirit as you sense it now, you can learn new ways to preserve and nurture it.

3) Recognize the value of people as mirrors. All your friends, family, lovers and strangers, are like mirrors. How you react to them and conditions reflects parts of your personality. Learning why people behave as they do toward you mirrors what you are hiding from your conscious self.  How people treat you reveals a lot about how you treat them.  If you aren't getting the treatment you desire or hope for, then reflect on the nature of your behavior.  Does history repeat? Have you done this before or has someone done this to you with similar results?  This is a conscious and unconscious process.

4) Determine 'the real you.'  As you discover your strengths, weaknesses, and patterns, this helps you figure out who you are beneath appearances.  It all shapes self-confidence, esteem, self-worth and to what degree you permit unconscious fears to control you. As you admit underlying motives or, why you act as you do, and discern if your action confirms your intent, you grow to get in touch with your authentic self.

5 Ways to live openly with apparent duality

To live without judgement is to allow apparent duality while sensing the value in everything.  Rearrange your thoughts so that the sharp edges of life go right through you.  Wisdom is knowing you are nothing.  Those who know keep quiet, live impartially, do not discriminate.  We can evolve to learn more about the unsentimental sort we are:

1) Live a unified life. Our standards of perception are grounded in the physical world.  Comtemplate that criticism isn't always necesary or helpful.  Choose to be at peace with what you observe.  Move freely without attachment to outcomes.  Forget ideas of where you think you should be.  Its all illusion. Trying itself only exists because of beliefs of not trying exist.   Decide to approach every situation with an unbiased attitude.

2) Choose not to explain yourself.  Sense the texture of misunderstanding that you create.  Don't get caught up in what you've conditioned to think is right or wrong.  Be in paradoxical unity.  Positive and negative are opposites that need each other to exist.  Practice being a living paradox.  Ignore how others might like to direct your life energy.  Your body is physical, apparently limited, and at the same time, you are invisible and limitless.  You can surrender to the energy within you.  Accept the duality of the material world while still feeling connecting to the completeness of yourself.  Release resistence to your natural talents.  Love is knowing you are everything.  You teach without words.

3) Practice not doing.  When action is pure and selfless, you are changing your thinking. Your world changes as the result.  Pursuit of status, power, objects, blinds ourself to stems on our ego's fixation of getting more.  refrain from focusing on this kind of discontented less. Practice gratitude. Ask how you can serve. This isn't suggesting to be lazy or inactive.  Choose to be directed by a higher intention than your ego-filled desire.

4) Accept happiness is.  Examine your state of happiness in this moment.  Desires can create competitiveness. Why expect external events to create your joy? The necessary factors will all come together. Everything you need now is here, accessible, along with your all-incompassing source of well-being.  No one is better than anyone else.  Those who refuse to change their lives elevate themselves above people they feel are less worthy. Stay centred and in harmony. Eliminate as many judgements as you can. See aspects of yourself in all others.  Work thourgh your issues. Your criticism will dissolve.

5) Trust the perfection of the infinite.  Connect yourself to the limitless source of energy that flows through you.  Allow the universe to flow through you. Spend each moment deliberately.  Imagine yourself guided by the infinite aspects of yourself.  Don't let your desires control you.  Watch for opportunities.  Be grateful for the ways that are revealed for you at that moment.  When action is pure and selfless, everything settles the way it should.  Watch how all that you give returns to you.  Stop the chase. Be an astute observer. The more you pursue ego desires, the more they will elude you.

Journey back to love

You may not realize you are on a healing journey back to experience unconditional love and compassion.  This process requires that you take steps to discover and come-to-terms with your inner wounds.  Didn't know you had any?

You are invited to explore everything about yourself, including the reasons behind your mindsets.  Certain aspects of yourself are imbalanced and would benefit from re-alignment.  Life offers opportunities to re-balance your perceptions and your self-view.

1) Teach yourself to discern emotional wounds.    As you discern reasons for your own discomfort, you evolve to a position where you can decide to take steps to heal yourself.  If you choose, you can also share your lessons learned and assist others to heal.

2) Develop your compassion.  The ability to develop a more positive attitude about your own life and conditions enables you to further your healing process and also to develop new insight into compasion for the suffering of others. 

3) Embrace everything.  The aim is not to deny or reject anything about your life, but to embrace all experiences and the benefits they bring.  What you perceive as positive or negative always has a polar opposite which contributes to balance.

4) Explore alternative therapies.  Techniques like Reiki, transference healing,  dream analysis, soul therapy, chiropractic and various approaches to healing with hands can be useful to your healing process.  Learn more about options that will help you achieve your own balance.   Its all about self-acceptance, reassureance and encouragement.

Allan and Barbara Pease &10 behavioral revelations

Allan and Barbara Pease are experts in human relations and body language.  They have sold over 20 million books including, Why Men Don't Listen and Why Women Don't Read Maps, Why Men Lie and Women Cry, Why Men Don't Have a Clue and Women Always Need More Shoes, and The Definitive Book of Body Language: how to read others' thoughts by their gestures.  They're also popular public speakers. I have had the pleasure of being in th audience of some of their events and always come away with gems of wisdom.  This has real relevance and staying power.

Even if you have never heard of these people, these 10 tips taken from their books will trigger your own "ah-ha" moments.  After all, as you dream, devise a plan and proceed unconsciously, its your underlying thoughts and emotions that determine how your vision or dream unfolds: 

1) Being perceptive means being able to spot contradictions between someone's words and their body language. (Being self-aware means discerning these things in yourself).

2) For a man, success in the mating game relies on his ability to read the signals being sent to him, as opposed to being able to initiate.  Women's difficulty in finding partners isn't about reading signals, its more about finding a partner who will match their criteria.

3) Modern humans are worse at reading body signals than their ancestors because we are now distracted by words.

4) When a person's words and body language are in conflict or contradict, women ignore what is said.  Men react differently.

5) Submissive dogs reveal their throats.  Humans reveal their palms.  The position of your hands on your arms, legs or in the air actually reveals if you're being honest with yourself.

6) A natural smile produces characteristic wrinkles around the eye--insincere people smile only with their mouth.

7) Science proves the more you smile, the more positive reactions others will give you. (Good advice is to smile constantly. Everyone will wonder what you're up to.)

8) The older human beings become, the more serious they become.  An adult laughs an average of 15x/ day while preschoolers laugh  more than 400x/day.

9) People drink alcohol and take drugs to try to feel how happy people feel normally.

10) When the mind closes, the physical body follows.  The question is, do you notice the real meaning behind gestures or choose to beat your head against the wall?

Buddha & 4 views to shatter false assumptions

Sometimes inspirational mentors can be well-known yet, rather obscure.  They can set an ideal or a standard which prompts you to reflect on how you view yourself.  For me, Buddha represents mystery and heightened awareness. The three phases of his life experience--Siddhartha the prince, Gautama the monk, and Buddha the Compassionate, enlightened one, all set examples that urge the rest of us to redefine our own awakening:

1) Discover the truth.  According to Buddha, the individual person or concrete sense of self are illusions.  He grew to sense how ignorance and attachment lead human beings to create false assumptions and misunderstandings, including getting stuck in a limited self-view, rather than embracing unconditional love and infinite potential.  He urges us to willingly rethink the meaning and temptations of ownership, possession and control.

2) Believe in karma.  This brings us to the principle of 'what goes around comes around.'  Emotional attachments can weigh heavily on the human soul.  If a soul is held back by a sense of failure, fear, pain or regret, then it may be reluctant to heal the past.  Your prior experiences influence your psyche.  Good karma, means acting well so to ensure a healthy psyche in years to come (fruit of karma).  Past lives also influence where you are.

3)  Review your patterns.  Buddha claimed we tend toward or away from anticipated suffering. Learn why you hate or fear not getting what you want, or not receiving.  Conditioning leads you to distinguish good feelings from bad. Buddha appeared to grow from the hardships and pain of reality that Prince Guatama knew of in this world.

4) Follow the Middle Path.  Eliminate your attachment to existence, desire, and prosperity, and a way to the Middle Path will be revealed. This is achieved through the Holy Eightfold Path which includes; Right Belief, Right Aspiration, Right Speech, Right Conduct, Right Means of Livelihood, Right Endeavor, Right Memory, and Right Meditation.

Building a mindset like Buddha leads to insight, then acquired wisdom, which yields calm, knowledge, and eventually, Nirvana. Buddha deduced all else was linked to some unnecessary suffering.  He felt true peace and happiness could only be experienced through your mind and true pain and suffering could be felt in reality.  Whether or not we agree, we're invited to explore new ways of being to overcome our resistence to change.