7 Ways to Flourish

The way to flourish is to go with the flow and embrace waves of change.  Yet, to embrace change, we also need to get to know ourselves intimately, know what feels right, have courage to do that.  We all need encouragement and down-to-Earth, practical ways to deal with what life throws us.  In this light, reflect on seven ways to flourish in your life, come what may;

1. Recognize your habits

Everyone has habits, or activities they engage in with regularity. For example, you may shower every few days, drink a hot beverage in the morning, eat certain foods through the day, engage in certain routines, like getting together with friends on friday or sharing rituals.  When you go through life performing or conforming to social conventions without question, your behaviour loses power to profoundly change you. Habits do not empower you to live Your Best Life Now.  Seeing habits for what they are, as expressions of the energies of joy, anger, grief, sadness, disgust or other emotions, changes everything. Teach yourself to feel your reasons for doing.

2. Be aware of your emotions

To be human is to feel and express emotions.  Physical existence is about reacting or responding to encounters.  You may not notice how often life elicits emotions and how they can become patterned habits. Reactions are unconscious ways the external world triggers certain emotions. The untrained mind reacts unconsciously.  The trained mind responds with deep understanding of what is happening. This is about cultivating emotions so we internalize more loving ways of responding to others and life experience.  We refine ritual with more clarity and consistency. 

3.  Awaken to contradictions 

Growing aware of what does not jive in your life is a kind of awakening.  As you sense conflicting emotions, turbulent energies, inconsistent choices, undesirable experiences, tense realtionships, you begin to see what is contributing to emotional highs and lows and the sense things are not working.  Every moment is an opportunity for revelations about the real source of resistence inside yourself.  When will you grow accountable? Take responsibility and stop denying your role? What are you ready and willing to see?

4. Be willing to break normal habits

In order to help ourselves change, it is useful to realize breaking normal habits is what enables us to develop different sides of ourselves. Stepping back and observing your habits helps you determine what is helping or hindering your health and well-being, relationships and situations.  

5.  Step outside the familliar

When we travel, visit a friend's home, break away from regular routines, we view life and ourselves differently.  This is why people take time off work to do a caravan tour of their own country, go on sabbatical, visit new places, even take a new route to work or exert effort to notice new things where they are.  Why do more people not do this more often? Fear, perhaps? Shifting roles, jobs, destinations, tasting new things, even moving house based on intuition, all have potential to break patterns develop new confidence and greater self- acceptance. The question is, do you desire change to escape or, for the love of spontaneity and embracing the unknown?

6. Be more flexible

By embracing patterns we see in ourselves, we allow them to harden and take root.  Labels we adopt can drive our behaviours and decisions, and become self-fulfilling prophecy.  As the result, many people perpetuate narrow views of themselves and what is possible.  In the West, true self is often assumed to be patterns of predictable responses to people and the world.  Yet, when you can continue to suprise people, you are actually closer to true being.  We are each complex arrays of emotions, dispositions, desires and different traits that often pull us in different directions.  What happens when you feel okay with diverging from your norm? 

7. Explore what evokes inner harmony

The key to everything is noticing your patterns and working actively to shift them.  Breaking our own patterns helps us realize other people are malleable too, that no relationship or situation is cut in stone.  Talking to yourself helps you work things ou in your life.  Wake up wanting to go to work or take the world by storm.  Feel better about yourself.  Know how you feel and what you experience begins and ends in you.  What ae you willing to do differenly today to see yourself and the world in new and exciting ways?

3 Signs is time to Re-define Success

Many people wonder how they can do what they love and get paid what they are worth.  This voice may echo inside you too. Ponder three signs its time to redefine success:

1) Something is shifting inside. You do the work you do and are not actively looking for a new role and yet, a quiet discomfort or restlessness is arising.     Stong feelings are bubbling up.  You are noticing sensations surfacing within that you have not noticed before. This is the moment to pay more attention to what makes you tick.

2)  Dialogue triggers it.  You may strike up a conversation with someone you know, a group or a complete stranger.  Whomever it is draws your attention to something you are unable to put into words. You do not know what you are looking for but it hits that part of you is indeed looking. Work and success do not relate at they did even moments ago. A different relationship is capturing your attention and shifting your priorities about which mountains to climb.

3) Opportunities are knocking. You may not yet get head-hunted for that dream job but emails are mysteriously showing up in your in-box. You know new opportunities are showing their heads.  New postions in different fields are also crossing your radar.  You even hear positions related to your own are offering higher salary than you currently earn. You feel increasingly open to offers. Why? No brainer! Something within is beginning to clarify a new version of success. 

6 Steps to greater clarity

It is always possible to open to see oneself and the world as never before. Everything you notice and create for yourself offers lessons for the soul.   Follow six steps to greater clarity:

1) Look for good in or love everything without holding judgement

2) Grow aware of critical opinions that remain in your thoughts

3) Fill consciousness with reverence and respect for all life to awaken dormant forces and access deeper insights within

4) Engage in selfless acts without thought of reciprocity

5) See fellow beings and creatures differently than before

6) Surrender less to impressions of the outer world & develop an active inner life

Focus is everything

Notice that focus is everything.  Your conditioned attention determines what you create and manifest.  It also determines what you notice and what you do not permit yourself to see or integrate into conscious awareness. Brace yourself.  The ego creates shutters with the mind.  It  prevents you from seeing with true clarity. Be aware the shutters are dissolving at your pace:

1) Notice what unfolds from the moment you only allow yourself to see blessings in everything.

2) Notice what unfolds from the moment you always take responsibility for your emotions.

3) Notic what unfolds from the moment you see wholeness and love speaking through all life.

4) Notice what unfolds as you recognize its not possible for anything to go wrong.

5) Notice what is arising in awareness as all your beliefs and judgements fall away.

Allow illusions to dissolve

Notice what happens as you begin to realize improvement is an illusion. That is, everything is unfolding perfectly already and nothing requires you to improve on it.  Be aware your life requires no improving.  Its how you think about it that creates a problem.  None exist. Cease telling yourself anything is wrong.  Perfection cannot be improved upon. This is what you are. Watch what happens as you stop denying it. Allow illusions to dissolve.  Clarity reveals itself.