6 Strategies to leave your comfort zone

Many people will speak about comfort zones, but that does not always mean they understand their own or how to get out of them. Comfort zones are situations that are familiar and often turn into habits. Who truly knows what is good for the self? You know what's best for you, but you do not always listen to what the heart knows.  Venturing beyond comfort zones enables you to grow.

When it comes to stepping outside a comfort zone, each person is capable, but that does not mean they are always willing or have the awareness to know how it helps.  To get the ball rolling, you benefit from learning to follow the thread back to understand your current mindset and the underlying reasons for it.  Consider these strategies to step outside your comfort zone;

1) Notice where you are.  Self-awareness has many levels. To recognize the obvious as well as subtle nuances helps you to clarify how and why you feel as you do where you are. This includes decriptive things like physical address, geography, conditions. How you describe this adds layers and labels to your perceived identity, that is, how you view yourself as a point of reference.

2) Pinpoint the why. Environments and self-image begin to feel comfortable due to mental conditioning.  This relates back to how you feel. Some part of you begins to believe it is good for you, desirable or helpful for you to stay where you are. Your perceptions may reflect elements of truth or illusions, but your action will align with beliefs. In essence, you imagine reasons for anxiety and insecurity with mental limits when none of these things exist.

3) Identify a sense of risk. A sense of risk triggers fear of threat or loss.  As you imagine new kinds of experiences, part of you may be receptive, but if a more dominant side resists changes, then you are less likely to do so.  The irony is that how you think and feel may not be grounded in reality.  You may assume making a certain choice will necessarily have negative repercussions when this is not the case.  All or none of your assumptions may be true. Yet, without further investigation, you may be permitting fear to control you.

4) Attune to energy. To become more self-aware of energy flow requires you to connect your actions and self-conscious awareness with what seems natural or going against the grain.  Review how a sense of time, perceived abilities and self-confidence, all play a role in your decision to perceive challenges and take steps to repond or not.  How you experience energy influences whether you take steps to exert control or respond differently.

5) Align the body & mind. Ever heard the phrase the mind is willing but the body is not or vice versa? Adjustments are required to coordinate the functioning of different parts of you.  The answers lie inside.  Sometimes guidance is helpful to navigate through obstacles. Getting back in touch with your natural state requires you work though conditioning on many levels to dissolve what no longer works.  No single recipe is the answer for all. Embracing change is a process.

6) Awaken to sources of joy. From the moment you choose to reframe struggle, you begin to realize the very experience itself is like powerful medicine.  To get this far helps you to realize you already access wisdom.  Make smooth transitions. Guide yourself to empowerment with love.  

"Comfort zones are most often expanded through discomfort." -Peter McWilliams

13 Illusions to shake up your awareness

Illusions are self-created obstacles to a clearer view of things. Illusions are destined to dissolve as part of learning and unlearning.  This is part of a personal journey that is guided, diverges and finds its way home. Each stage is ultimately a choice. You decide when and where to pause. Your unique view of life is yours alone. You are invited to shatter your own myths.

When a person is ready to question or explore his own deeply entrenched ideas, he may awaken to acknowledge the rigidity of ideas and also shift positions or attitudes. Consider these 13 concepts to ponder and reframe;

1) Ego. Part of the psyche experiences and reacts to the outside world and imagines your self-image into being. To separate yourself from the selves of others and from objects of ego, thought causes you to forget or repress the truth. From the moment ambition is born, you are prompted to quantify it.

2) Money. This takes shape as a piece of paper with random value linkedto numbers. Virtually everyone buys into that idea and allows it to control how they think: what is affordable, enough, desirable, feasible, doable, relative and inconceivable. Currency is a human invention that arose with human motives.

3) Duality. To separate concepts into two parts is a gradual denial of unity or oneness with everything. To envision poverty distracts you from wealth and abundance. Polarities of positive and negative such as good and evil fragment underlying wholeness. As one concept exists, the opposite also exists, even if you do no choose to acknowledge it at this moment.

4) Consolation. From birth, part of you is consoled when you are fed, clothed, and loved. When was the last time you fully trusted all of your needs are met from outside yourself? Faith becomes consolation during trouble. Yet, you imagine issues where none exist and imagine what you require to dissolve it.

5) Comfort. This zone is a view of a degree of tolerance for mediocrity, anxiety, worry, and stress. It also denies what soul whispers. Some people view this as an excuse to stay put, to continue fooling self and everyone of what you need. To lose what you thought you needed shifts focus to what matters. You move away from tangible things that are bought, sold, stolen, burned or bequeathed to uncover other priorities.

6) Form. Your view of the physicality of things is grounded in beliefs. You envision or hear about objects, infer about density, texture and viscosity, without necessarily touching or experiencing them. You visualize shape without seeing and create interpretations of your sense of reality.

7) Beliefs. The focus of your devotion is hidden. It has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness or, level of conscious awareness and deliberate intent. To work in the realms of expectation and assumption creates layers of illusions you come to accept.

8) Fear. There is nothing to fear except your ability to create it. What you anticipate you will gain or lose goes deeper than ideas you access in the mind. This invokes fundamental views about what makes you who you are.  What can you live without? Few people recognize your own misunderstandings.

9) Pride. A high opinion of one's own dignity, importance, merit, or superiority is a view that grows from fears like inadequacy and insecurity. What you think you have or not does not change who you are.  Thinking without complete awareness explains many human issues.  People reflect each others issues, differing only in degree and level of awareness.

10) Effects. Reality is something other than perceived effects, for it is part of the Cause. Beside, over and above, under and behind, all forms of Being, Matter, Energy, Force and Power, is the ever-calm, contentedness. Reconnect to inner knowing grows into absolute trust. This translates into confidence in the goodness and justice of the only Reality that exists.

11) Crisis. When old ways of thinking and doing fall short or no longer satisfy perceived needs, a person may imagine the self is threatened. Behaving as you have done is not necessarily aligned with the natural flow of energy to start with. If you take too much without giving back, this creates imbalance. A sense of urgency draws attention to issues of survival.

12) Armageddon.  It is said a final battle involving good and evil will occur before the end of the world. Another way to view significant energy movement and upheavals is to concede former consciousness is dissolving on a wide scale. Such a view helps explain geographic, environmental and climatic shifts that might otherwise be viewed as a domino effect toward catastrophe.  Life-changing transition is imminent. How you understand it is grounded in perception.

13) Perception. If you agree your outer reality reflects your level of inner understanding, then indecision or turbulance speaks volumes.  How you come to recognize and grasp each experience is based not on superficial human senses, but on deeper awareness.  Answers do not always emerge in the form of words.  Letting go of ways you sense the world is an act of growth that dissolves dogma and resistance and brings you face to face with something indescribable.

"If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating fundamentally the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction." -Eckhart Tolle

7 Reasons you distract yourself

Human beings distract themselves from what matters. They do so consciously and unconsciously, every single moment. 

You may ask yourself when you do this and why.  You may not even recognize you do this.  You may observe other people do this and wonder if you do, but choose to remain selectively ignorant.  Every level of awareness silently teaches you things. You are preparing to explore aspects of yourself in more detail.  Consider these 7 reasons why you distract yourself;

1) You lie to yourself.  Each person develops the idea that they lack something intrinsic to their lives.  From the moment this illusion is conceived, the mind begins to believe it.  Every thought, feeling and perception adjusts to rationalize and justify what has to be done to reverse the imagined lack.

2) You judge yourself. Each person goes through phases of defining mistakes in their lives. From the instant a mistake is detected, the inner judge is triggered or awakened to criticize, reprimand, and call the shots.  To have inner conviction does not relieve a person from the consequences of their actions.

3) You listen to media. Each person tends to be influenced in some way by social messages distributed through media.  This includes print, radio, internet and television broadcasts.  Where the motive or priority of media producers is financial profit, this does not mean they demonstrate any sense of social responsibility. When people do not take responsibility for their emotions or reasons they support media, then they do not take responsibility for raising self-awareness and reducing negative consequences of each situation they come to face.

4) You favor efficiency. Each person is mesmerized by the notion of productivity. This raises values about how to work faster, better, cheaper. These assertions translate into efficiency. And yet, people will rarely go steps further to ask questions such as, "efficient for whom?" and "at whose or what expense?"People do not always agree that everything is equal and nothing is better or worse. It is all in your perception.

5) You harbour opinions. Each person nurtures conscious beliefs about the truth. This flows into views on life and death, what is possible, provable, likely or inconceivable.  Beliefs evolve to become viewed as essential to mental stability and confirm personal reality.  In essence, people come to construct a sense of existence around experiences that are imagined or unfounded.  Opinions hide prejudice and misunderstanding.

6) You stray from basic qualities. Each person is basically energy grounded in love, compassion and kindness. Where the common thread is limitless compassion, respect for others would be automatic in thought, word and deed. 

7) You do not rely on yourself. Many people seek outside themselves for answers to everything.  They do not nurture faith inside and resist messages from their intuition.  Its always possible to be more open-minded, less sceptical and more confident.  This relates back to awareness and steps you can take to become more attuned to energy and your true self.

10 Ways to stretch your capacities

Whenever your mind imagines a problem, you give energy to manifest it. Ideas riccochet in the moment. They manifest tension and other forms of discomfort. Until you learn to sense energy for what it is and nip distractions in the bud, then you turn away from the parts of you that believe you are expanding.

As you grow to identifyyour capacities, you also realize you act in waysto limit them and stifle your potential growth. It is possible to devise ways to access knowledge you already have, but are not yet grasping or applying.This is part of the process of detaching from your anxieties. Stretch in new directions;

1) Give complete attention to what you do. If you focus on where you are not or speak only of what you will do when you reach a destination, then you overlookhow it feelsto exist now. Giving your full attention to what you do means learning to block out interpretations of the past, future visions and any perception or opinion that prevents you from being fully present. It requires you discipline the mind.

2) Allow your emotions to flow freely. To feel emotions as they are enables you to register their impact on you,retain key wisdom and dissolve what you no longer need or letenergy go. Free-flowing emotions come in waves yet dissipate. They make room for you to receive incoming energy and ideas.

3) Expect abundance. A person cannot grow and expand to new levels unless he learns to release old ways of thinking. Whenever you hope for just enough or expect to barely get by, this is the request you send out and what will be answered. Yet,as you enlarge your vision, you invite different degrees of growth, opportunities, healing or energy to boggle your mind.

4) Explore regenerative practices. To restore faith and trust in yourself, it helps to explore various options. You may wonder what would cause you to feel born again spiritually, to believe you have a new lease on or zest for life. Allow yourself to appreciate every thought and feeling as they flow. Rise to new levels of connection with what is yet to come. You alreadysense what is unfolding. Everything you do creates results. You shape your evolution with every force you exert.

5)Eat and hydrateproperly. Self-preservation or survival is abasic, universalmotivation. Change and fear of change exist in every mind. Your energy level affects your capacity to reactandthis comes back to diet. If you choose to eat nutritious food, and hydrate properly, you are in position to attune to your physcial bodyand to cope with what life throws.

6) Recognize travel can expand you. Whether you hitchhike alone with inexpensive detours, visit a nearby town or, explore parts of a foreign country in a couple or with a group, youhave abilities to takeinitiatives to step outside your comfort zone. Alternatively, just close your eyes and travel however and wherever you choose.  Discovering a new place nurtures the imagination, offers ways to develop life skills.

7) Be present.To close your eyes and listenwhere you are, enables you to explore the power ofyour perceived senses. You are reminded that you create a mental image of yourself where ideas have no reality other than what you give them. Discern a separateness between what you see, feel and observe from another vantage point. To realize involuntary and conditioned thinking for what they are teaches you new ways to gain insight into soul and evolving consciousness.

8) See through random impulses. As you become aware of doing things without thinking, you can gradually come to realize how and why you interact with people. This offers insight into your attitude, beliefs, self-imposed limitations, assumptions and misplaced perceptions.

9) Give yourself away with happiness and love. Nothing builds self-knowledge like giving parts of yourself away selflessly. Whether you volunteer your time, choose to give a homeless personyour lunch, stop to help victims of an accident or contribute your expertise to empower others, you are expanding your understanding of love and healing.

10) Share vulnerable parts of yourself. This is a way to gain insight into what it means to feel intimate with people. To choose to share challenging experiences, to speak openly about yourfears, is how you invite others to feel more comfortable to share intimate parts of themselves. To be willing to confide glimpses of your anxious moments is a way to earn the respect of others who find they can relate.

What you believe is not what you assume

Ram Dass said, "If you think you are so enlightened, go and spend a week with your parents."  Who do you know who recognizes the influence of this relationship on their dreams? To learn what it means to just be yourself is a journey you must take alone.  Reorient your focus with these questions;

1) What you believe is not always the truth.

2) Who defines your functions may not know you.

3) Which perspectives you adopt may be limited.

4) When do you learn what it means to simply be yourself?