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?