• A small story
• The law of attraction: is it a hoax?
• The reason why law of attraction is so appealing
• The flaw lies in the packaging
• Demystifying the law of attraction: how does it actually work?
• The law of attraction paradigm that actually works
• Mastering the law of attraction: The missing link
  • Acceptance is the key
• Opening up to opportunities
• You are always free to choose your attitude
• Summing up
• BONUS CONTENT: Using the Law of Attraction for weight loss

“The law of floatation was not discovered by the contemplation of the sinking of things.”
—Thomas Troward

A small story

Jack Jones was a frustrated man who had come to accept struggle as part and parcel of life. He believed that no matter what his goals, he must work hard and do everything possible to get there. But life had been difficult and success seemed to elude him in all areas. The more he tried, the more impossible it seemed. He was a chain smoker and had received warnings from his doctor to quit or else… but somehow he was unable to let go of this harmful habit. He had been struggling with his weight and his relationship with his wife was stressful. Over the past few years, his work too had left him feeling unfulfilled and unsuccessful. He was angry at his body, unhappy with his marriage and frustrated with his work; and yet all his attempts to change his life yielded no result. He wondered why his sincere efforts and resolve were not working.

Then one day, a friend introduced him to the law of attraction [LoA]. Jack suddenly found his answers. It seemed that LoA was the panacea he was waiting for—he was hooked. Over the next few months, Jack read every book he could on the subject. He attended workshops and seminars and was even beginning to see some positive results—which, unfortunately, didn’t last. A year later, Jack Jones was still struggling, feeling hopeless about his life, more frustrated than ever, and angry that LoA had failed him.

The law of attraction: is it a hoax?

“Thoughts become things,” said Mike Dooley, a former PricewaterhouseCoopers consultant, in the 2006 hit docufilm The Secret. Such clever phrases, sprinkled throughout the film, played a big part in making law of attraction one of the biggest trends in the last decade or so. Millions excitedly jumped onto the bandwagon, only to be disappointed when they realised that it doesn’t work—at least not for them. Many [like Jack in the story above] excitedly embraced the law of attraction only to throw up their hands in disgust, and return to their old work-hard-to-make-money mindset. Because they could not produce consistent results with LoA, they felt that it was unreliable. There were those who, after their initial enthusiasm waned, allowed their rationalisation to take over and ended up attributing their successes to sheer coincidence. Then there were people who reported losing their sense of balance trying to control their incessant thoughts; these poor souls began to correlate everything that happened in their life with LoA in their attempts to ensure that they don’t inadvertently attract what they don’t want.

So is law of attraction a hoax? Is it a cunning ploy used by smart people to sell dreams to the vast majority of gullible people who are struggling to make their lives work?

In my experience, law of attraction is not a hoax; it is a sound concept that works for you always, but only if you really understand how it works. This article is my attempt to de-mystify law of attraction, so that it becomes accessible to everyone—including the sceptics. But before we understand how it works, let’s try and figure out what made the idea so alluring and how the ‘marketing’ of law of attraction took away from its real power.

The reason why law of attraction is so appealing

The law of attraction is a New Thought belief based on the notion that like attracts like. Positive thoughts attract positive situations and people; likewise, negative thoughts bring undesirable situations and people. In other words, our thoughts create our reality.

The fact that our thoughts are responsible for our life situation is an idea that resonates with most people. It makes them feel empowered and in control of their life. With LoA, their needs, wants and desires can easily fructify—all they have to do is visualise the outcome they desire, think repeatedly about it, and maintain a joyous emotional disposition at all times.

For many people, the appeal of LoA has been in its miraculous quality. The Secret and many other subsequent films, books and articles have packaged it in a way that lead you to believe that all you need is to ‘think’ what you want and then wait for it to materialise. Simply visualise the outcome you desire, impress it upon your subconscious and the Universe makes it happen. LoA has even been likened to a genie that fulfils your every demand. And who can resist the idea of his own personal genie?

The flaw lies in the packaging

I think the biggest flaw that most law of attraction “experts” have been making is marketing it as a magic wand to attract goodies into our lives. Such an approach both mystifies and trivialises the phenomenon.

The underlying premise of the law of attraction is that everything is made up of energy including our thoughts; hence, our thoughts manifest our reality. Proponents of LoA use this logic to explain how the law works. Many of them try to lend it further credibility by throwing science into their explanations for good measure. For example, some mention legitimate quantum physics concepts like the observer effect.^[1]

Demystifying the law of attraction: how does it actually work?

In its bare bones, the law states that whatever we focus upon expands. When we give our full attention to something—anything—its influence on our lives grows. As an example, if you have two saplings, and choose to water only one of them, guess which one will grow to become a fruit-bearing tree? Thoughts too are like saplings—those that you nourish are the only ones that flourish.

Seen from this perspective, Mike Dooley is right; thoughts do become things. In her classic book The Game of Life, Florence Scovel Shinn gives an example of this: A poor man was walking along a road when he met a traveller, who stopped him and said: “My good friend, I see you are poor. Take this gold nugget, sell it, and you will be rich all your days.” The man was overjoyed at his good fortune, and took the nugget home. He immediately found work and became so prosperous that he did not sell the nugget. Years passed, and he became a very rich man. One day he met a poor man on the road. He stopped him and said: “My good friend, I will give you this gold nugget, which, if you sell, will make you rich for life.” The mendicant took the nugget, had it valued, and found it was only brass. So we see, the first man became rich through feeling rich, thinking the nugget was gold.

“Every man has within himself a gold nugget; it is his consciousness of gold, of opulence, which brings riches into his life,” Shinn concludes.

The law of attraction paradigm that actually works

At its core, the law of attraction—which is always working whether we realise it or not—is really about how we react to our life situation. I like to think of it as a mindset, an attitude of always being for a solution instead of against your problem. Whether it is a self-defeating habit you wish to conquer, bring happiness into your relationships, get rid of debt or achieve professional success, your life will be more fulfilling if you cultivate an attitude of always being for what you want, instead of being against what you don’t want.

What’s the difference, you ask. The difference is that when we’re against something, we try to fight that instead of working towards what we desire. It is like trying to remove darkness—no matter how hard you try, you will not succeed. The only sensible option is to accept the reality of darkness, and then think of how you can light a candle.

You may think that we’re only indulging in some form of mental acrobatics and may doubt the efficacy of this subtle shift. You may even feel tempted to equate this with mere positive thinking. But ‘being for’ is more than that. Before I explain the difference, I must tell you about the missing piece, without which LoA is incomplete and ineffective.

Mastering the law of attraction: The missing link

Let’s do an experiment. Close your eyes for about 30 seconds. During this time, don’t think of a white bear. You can think of anything else except a white bear. Open your eyes only after 30 seconds.

What happened? It’s a good bet that no matter how hard you tried, you saw a white bear in your mind’s eye. This phenomenon is known as the ironic process theory in psychology whereby deliberate attempts to suppress certain thoughts make them more likely to surface in one’s thoughts.^[2]

That’s the problem of being against something. It’s impossible to not think of what is. How can you be against reality—it’s compelling and forceful. But there’s something that can help you deal with this. This is the big piece of the LoA puzzle that most of its proponents seem to have missed. It’s called acceptance, and it enables you to take the law from theory to practice. Without acceptance, you cannot turn your attention away from what you don’t want to what you want, which—as the law states—is necessary in order to manifest your desires.

Let me explain this with the help of a simple example:

Let’s say I’m experiencing poverty; what I want is, of course, wealth. So, LoA states that I should stop thinking poverty-oriented thoughts and instead dwell on abundance. To do so, I start visualising wealth in different ways. I wake up in the morning and deliberately put my attention on attracting lots of money. I make affirmation cards, carry them in my wallet and read them often. I even create a vision board with beautiful pictures of the stuff that I am dreaming about. I express gratitude for the blessings in my life. In short, I do my best to imagine abundance. However, the fact is that till abundance actually begins manifesting for me, I will keep coming back to the present reality of my poverty. I can blank it out for a while, or if I am a really good daydreamer, even for extended periods of time. But no matter how much I escape to my fantasy world, sooner or later I will wake up from my dream world and notice that I am poor—and my attention will return to thoughts of poverty—something that I am against. So I am back to square one.

The fact is, it’s nearly impossible to take your focus off the present—after all, it’s right there, staring at you. That is why, no matter how hard we try, we still end up thinking about what we don’t want, and continue to resist and resent it.

Acceptance is the key

This is where acceptance comes in. You see, our only power is in the now. Regardless of how challenging our present, if we resist it, we give up our power. But when we accept our present reality, we make peace with it. In other words, we no longer argue with it, or resist it. But that doesn’t mean we start liking or wanting it. No, it simply means we stop being against it.

In the above example, if I make peace with reality i.e. my poverty, I stop resisting it. So now, though I still prefer abundance, noticing my poverty no longer produces unhappiness in me in the present. This means, I can daydream and visualise all I want and when I come back, I can face my present reality without any feelings of frustration. Acceptance has removed the sting from my poverty. Now I don’t use it as an excuse for resentment and anger. The energy I was using in opposing what is becomes available to me, and I begin doing whatever I can to attract abundance.

In The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle explains such acceptance with the help of an analogy. He says, “If you were stuck in the mud somewhere, you wouldn’t say: ‘Okay, I resign myself to being stuck in the mud.’ You don’t need to accept an undesirable or unpleasant life situation. Nor do you need to deceive yourself and say that there is nothing wrong with being stuck in the mud. No. You recognise fully that you want to get out of it. You then narrow your attention down to the present moment without mentally labelling it in any way. This means that there is no judgment of the Now. Therefore, there is no resistance, no emotional negativity. You accept the ‘isness’ of this moment. Then you take action and do all that you can to get out of the mud. Such action I call positive action. It is far more effective than negative action, which arises out of anger, despair, or frustration.”

To reiterate, acceptance is not a prescription for inaction. If anything, it frees up your energy and brings much greater clarity in the present that you no longer resist. From this non-resistant space you can manifest whatever you want.

Opening up to opportunities

Once you’ve made peace with your problem, ideas and opportunities begin to show up, or should we say, you begin to notice them. When we’re not spending our time cursing our luck and resisting our current circumstances, our intuitive abilities are at peak, guiding us to do whatever is necessary.

Many great scientists, artists, and businessmen have credited their intuition for solving many of their problems. These include Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Isaac Newton—they received their insights when they were relaxed. Many of them have shared how a solution came to them when they weren’t even thinking about the problem.

When we are against our problem, which is the reality, we too inadvertently become part of the problem. And nothing great can be achieved by being against reality—it’s futile. Is it any wonder then that we miss the opportunities that we could’ve noticed had we been looking for solutions?

Here’s how Mother Teresa demonstrated the ‘for not against’ paradigm. When an activist group asked her if she would join them in their march against the Vietnam War, Mother Teresa replied: “No, I won’t march against the war with you. But if you have a march for peace, I’ll be there.” Mother Teresa knew that being against anything means becoming part of the problem; she preferred to be part of the solution.

If you want to become more effective in attaining your goals, cultivate an attitude that Mother Teresa advocated and practised. It means the next time you find yourself ‘pitched’ against, say, illiteracy, accept the present situation as it is, and then shift your focus in favour of literacy. You will find that instead of blaming the society or the government or the education policy, you will look for ways to spread literacy in your own way—maybe you will sponsor a child’s education, volunteer to teach part-time or even donate money to charitable schools run by selfless NGOs.

You are always free to choose your attitude

Although apocryphal, the following story elucidates how accepting your circumstances, instead of being against them, frees you up to manifest your dreams.

A middle-aged man named Bill Fross lived in Chicago with his family. Bill was a drunkard, swindler, petty thief and wife-beater, who had been in and out of jail more times than he could remember. His wife died while giving birth to his twin sons, Peter and James. As the boys grew up, they suffered many terrible beatings and great poverty as their father’s alcoholism spiralled out of control.

They observed, with their impressionable eyes and minds, as their dad wasted his life, and finally died in prison during one of his numerous trips there, while the boys were in their teens.

Thirty years later, Peter was just like his dad—a drunkard, swindler, petty thief, and wife-beater, who served time in jail. James, on the other hand, became a respected US senator, happy husband and proud father of three. Peter and James grew up in the same domestic environment but their worlds couldn’t be further apart.

A psychologist who observed contrasting lives of the twins became curious: why would two kids, who were born on the same day, to the same parents, and growing up in the same set of circumstances, end up so differently? His curiosity got the better of him and he decided to get to the root of the matter by interviewing the two brothers separately—without one knowing the other would be interviewed.

He first approached Peter in prison and asked him why he ended up the way he did. Peter, not surprisingly, replied, “With a father like mine, what else did you expect?” The psychologist then travelled to Washington DC and asked the same question to Senator James, who, not having the slightest hint that his brother had been interviewed, said, “With a father like mine, what else did you expect?”

One son used his father as an excuse to fail in life, and the other son used the same father as a reason to succeed. Different interpretations of the same circumstances made all the difference. Unlike Peter, James chose to be for life, and not against the difficult circumstances he was born and brought up in.

In the classic book Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl recounts the extremely torturous treatment he and his fellow inmates suffered at the hands of the Nazis, as prisoners in the concentration camps. An Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, Frankl spent his time as a hostage studying human behaviour and concluded thus: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Adversities often become stepping stones for people who refuse to be victims of their circumstances. Blaming other people or situation/events for your miseries and misfortunes usually keeps you from transcending them. If you wish to bring about a positive change, stop thinking about what’s wrong or missing from your life. Accept your present life situation wholeheartedly and then think about what you want—without resistance to what is, you’ll find yourself acting in ways that bring your desires to you.

Summing up

The ‘be for, not against’ paradigm is not some unverifiable mumbo-jumbo; instead, it is rooted in sound logic. Therefore, even if you don’t believe in the supernatural quality of the popular idea of LoA, it will still work for you. The key, as we have learned, is to accept our problems with grace. May I suggest that you consider replacing the word ‘attraction’ with ‘acceptance’ in the phrase, and then see the difference? When you think of LoA as the Law of Acceptance, it will gently remind to make peace with your present reality—with all its problems and challenges. And once you accept you present reality, there will be nothing to resist—and you will be free to manifest your heart’s desire. The best part is that your journey from here to there will be joyous and fulfilling.

Bonus Content: Using the Law of Attraction for weight loss

Weight loss is a goal that drives millions of people around the world to sign up to gyms, health clubs and fitness programmes. Overweight individuals hate the surplus flab enveloping what they reckon to be their ‘lean and beautiful body’. They try everything—exercise routines, crash diet plans, gadgets and as-shown-on-TV quick-fixes that promise them the moon—but, what they get is miracles that don’t work. That slim and sexy figure stays illusive. Worse, even if they succeed in losing weight, most are unable to maintain it. According to studies, 85 to 90 per cent people regain any weight they’ve lost within three to five years.

Have you ever wondered why weight loss is such a difficult proposition for most people? Think about it, and you will realise that almost all weight-loss candidates are exclusively against their excess weight, instead of being in favour of a healthy, fitter self. In the process of trying to lose weight, they are dwelling constantly on what they don’t want [excess fat], and this is exactly what they get.

Many years ago I had the opportunity to interview [Read here] singer-composer Adnan Sami. This was soon after he had lost a massive amount of weight—130 kg to be precise—in a span of one year. Before he started on his weight loss programme, he was morbidly obese and was given a few months to live by his doctors. During our conversation Adnan confessed to me that even after the doctor’s ultimatum he kept “hogging”—he believed there was no way out for him. Thanks largely to his father’s counsel, Adnan switched from being against his obesity to becoming for his life, lost enormous amounts of weight and, most importantly, survived to tell the tale.

Overweight individuals would do well to apply the Law of Attraction paradigm—by thinking and acting towards their healthier and fitter selves instead of being against their excess weight. Here is how it works: stop being against your current weight—make peace with the reality of it, then resolve to work towards being fitter and healthier with love and joy. When you demonstrate love instead of hatred for your body, you act in loving ways. Love provides you with all the energy you need. It also automatically motivates you to give up nutritionally empty foods, laziness, procrastination, and all the self-defeating habits that come in your way of becoming fitter and slimmer.

^{[1] The observer effect that states that the act of observing affects what is being observed↩}

^{[2] It seems that many of us are drawn into what seems a simple task, to stop a thought, when we want to stop thinking of something because it is frightening, disgusting, odd, inconvenient, or just annoying. And when we succumb to that initial impulse to stop, the snowballing begins. We try and fail, and try again, and find that the thought is ever more insistent for all our trying. Many studies reveal that suppression may be the starting point for obsession, rather than the other way around. As a result, we end up thinking all too often about the doubts, worries, fears, and alarms that we have tried to erase from mind.
— Daniel M Wegner, author of White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts:Suppression, Obsession, and the Psychology of Mental Control.↩}

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Desire, like sex, is something people make themselves uncomfortable over. Many people are scared of their feelings—of what’s going on just under the surface. We tremble a bit—such is the power of our desire.

Epstein describes Buddhism’s ‘right hand path’ as the path of the ascetic — on this path, the solution to life’s drama is renunciation. This is the idea that desire leads to trouble, and the only way to avoid trouble is to repress it, fight it, ignore it, or meditate it to death.

Buddhism’s ‘left-hand path’ is Tantra — on this path, the things our bodies experience become the tools of awakening. Desire becomes the energy for action leading to transformation.

If you think about it, that’s how we actually use the word.

Desire is the feeling that lies in the gap between what we have and what we want. Desire is the emotional or vibrational pull toward change. Desire is the burning drive to bring something new into being.

Desire is dynamic

The problems come when we forget that desire is dynamic. It’s a driving force.

As we desire, we are driven to make, to create, to merge, to enact. In other words, desire at its best causes us to move forward; it empowers new realities.

Things go off the rails when we attempt to possess [cling to] what we desire. To lock it down, own it, marry it, make it “ours”.

The paradox is that desire want us to get turned on enough that we actually do something with our lives, but the feeling of desire is chargy, and therefore addicting. So, rather than acting and moving on, many attempt to maintain the feeling of desire by possessing the “object of desire”. It’s confusing the feeling with the external object.

Clinging is all about trying to freeze something dynamic — trying to make it “hold still.”

Epstein writes:

“But this kind of satisfaction is impossible because the qualities that we project onto the desired object—of permanence, stability or “thingness”—do not really exist… The disparity between the way we perceive things and the way they actually are is at the root of our struggle with desire. Once we learn to make that disparity part of our experience, however, desire can be a teacher rather than an affliction.” [p 69]

Plagued by clinging

Most of the people I work with are plagued by their clinging.

They are looking for the perfect partner. They are looking for the perfect life, the perfect career, the perfect mind-set. But perfect is a static list of characteristics, and ignores the dynamic nature of life.

My clients tell me they want to be happy. As if there is a permanent state called happiness that someone, with effort, could cling to all the time, despite the reality that all of life is change.

I want to loosen their fingers from the death-grip they have on the object[s] of their desire, so that they can accept the paradox of their desire—you can never hold on to anything, including your illusions.

Buddha on desires

The Buddha said, in the first of the Four Noble Ideas, that “life is dukkha.” Epstein writes that the Sanskrit dukkha, [the word usually translated suffering] actually means something closer to “pervasive unsatisfactoriness.”

An example of dukkha is a potter’s wheel that is off-balance, and therefore always squeaks, annoyingly. Neat, eh? When you are miserable, isn’t that what life feels like? It’s not quite right, annoying, irritating, anger-provoking.

And then, the Buddha said [The Second Noble Idea] that the cause of dukkha was attachment to desire, which is better defined as grasping or clinging to desire. Thus, it is not the desire—the feeling—that gets us. It’s our endless demands for more of what we want, less of what we don’t want. It’s our ignorance—our clinging to our confused mental picture of the object of our desire.

This confusion is captured in the song title, “Hooked on a Feeling.” [B J THOMAS]

Note the lyric, “I’m high on believing that you’re in love with me.” The person is hooked on the feeling of believing, and none of that is external—it’s not about the other person. It’s a mind game—the writer is turned on by his own feelings!

Why suffering happens

Suffering happens as we try to freeze reality.

We feel the heat of desire and passion, and addict ourselves to the feeling. We look at the object of our desire [person, place, or thing] and instead of interacting with “the dynamic reality,” we go into our heads and create a story.

Our suffering comes from our attachment to our stories—our fixation with how we think things ought to be.

We then attempt to make the other person into the thing that we desire—into our very own “it.” We turn a dynamic person, for example, into a category, like “My husband” or “My wife.” We then fixate on our story about “how a wife ought to be” [for example] and make ourselves miserable when the “object of our desire” doesn’t match the fixed story.

People do this to avoid the hard work of relating to an ever-changing reality. And they despair [or change partners] when they realise the futility of this form of clinging, which doesn’t stop them from playing the same game with the next desirable object! The only way out is to find a way to stop clinging.

The Two Paths

The ‘right hand path’ suggests dealing with this tension and pain by rejecting or renouncing desire.

The ‘left hand path,’ being open to desire, is to accept it, respect it, and use it to work with the reality of dynamic living.

Passion, without grasping, is a way to open ourselves to encountering the other person as a real, dynamic human being.

This type of relating is an internal decision to

• be passionately engaged in an exploration of the gap that exists between myself and another.
• explore the gap between another and my perception of another.
• acknowledge that I can only know “of” another—and that my knowing is more about me than about another.

So, how do we open up to desire, after all?

Oddly, it’s as simple as acceptance. I accept that nothing stays the same, and that there is always a gap [and therefore a tension] between what is and what I desire. I use this tension to relax into being comfortable with my discomfort.

As I find the comfort of desire, as opposed to the pain of clinging, I can choose, moment by moment, to be in an intimate, flowing relationship with all of life.

Meditate on this: I am who I am, and my desire is a part of that. If I observe my desire as opposed to clinging to it, the desire will lead me to notice what I am doing, and allow me to step away from clinging to simply ‘being in the moment.’

Life is an endless tension between what is and what we desire. That is the nature of life.

The way to work with the tension is to simply be present with it in a non-grasping way.

Once I see that life is as it is, I can learn to be in my life, as opposed to trying and failing endlessly, to fix it.

Once I stop playing god, in other words, I can simply be me.

Like I have another choice…

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But I have observed that sometimes life gives you rotten lemons so that all you can do is discard them. What do you do then?

All my life, I have been told by well meaning others that when things go wrong, the one thing that I should not let go of is hope; cling to it for dear life, because letting go of hope means giving up.

No one ever told me that sometimes there’s no scope of doing that. Yet there are times when life corners you in such a way that you have no room for escape.

I have come to realise that these times, when absolutely nothing is going right in your life and the world seems like a hostile place, when there’s simply no way out and you’re filled with feelings of hopelessness, that’s when the greatest opportunity for growth arises.

The Paradox of Hope

The exquisite paradox of life is that when I have nothing left, when I surrender and become open to total annihilation, that’s when, for the first time, I begin to live freely. Only when I lose everything, do I gain life. The irony is that once I accept total destruction, I stare at infinite possibilities. Then, suddenly, a different kind of peace descends and it dawns on me that only in total insecurity lies the opportunity to discover such peace.

This happens because, when there’s nothing more to lose, when nothing more is left in me to be destroyed, or taken away, I can relax—now there’s nothing to protect. No hopes to keep my attention fixed on some possibility in the future. When there’s nothing to look forward to, my attention comes back to where it belongs—on the present moment—and I begin to live and experience life as it is rather than trying to mould it according to my personal hopes and desires.

The Wisdom of No Escape

Pema Chödrön, Buddhist teacher and best-selling author of The Wisdom of No Escape explains, “When we commit ourselves to staying right where we are, then our experiences become very vivid. Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape.”

When there’s no escape possible, when not even a ray of hope can be seen, then—and only then—can I accept darkness, and even befriend it. When I accept darkness, I begin to develop the ability to see in the dark. What’s more, all my other dormant senses come alive too.

But hope and acceptance don’t go together. Hope is a crutch. Only when I’m totally free of hope, when the ground beneath me disappears, can I learn to fly. That’s why I say, there is value in your feelings of hopelessness.

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So what are expectations and why do we need them? Expectations are mental sets people create to help move through time [from now to later] and change [from old to new] with some sense of what reality they have to look forward to and what objectives they have to work for. People without expectations don’t know what will happen next and don’t know what to do with their lives. Expectations are a functional part of our lives.

Two sides of the same coin

Expectations are powerful. On the positive side, they can motivate performance when your child works to excel: “I have high expectations from myself.” On the negative side, however, these mental sets can have harmful emotional consequences when violated or unmet: “I failed to do as well as I expected!” So expectations can be tricky to manage.

You might think that having a super-achieving child will make parenting a walk in the park, but that isn’t always the case. What if your super-achieving child with high expectations of accomplishment is taking a major test? Consider three kinds of performance expectations that your child might bring to the exam: Predictions [how one thinks the experience will be], Ambitions [how one wants the experience to be] and Conditions [how one believes the experience should be].

Dealing with the outcomes of expectations

If your child has extremely high expectations, then in her mind the prediction would be: “I will be able to answer all the questions”; the ambition would be: “I want to get all the answers right”; and finally the condition will be: “I should make no mistakes”.

If the outcome your child expects fits the reality of what actually happens, then she will experience a sense of security from a prediction being met; a sense of satisfaction from an ambition being met; and a sense of rightness from a condition being met. The outcome is thus, emotionally affirming.

Suppose, however, your child ‘bombs’ the test [relatively speaking] and earns low marks. Now the unmet expectations create a dramatically different response. The prediction may result in anxiety: “I never thought this would happen”; the ambition may result in disappointment: “I really let myself and my parents down”; and the condition may result in guilt: “I have no one but myself to blame”. Here the outcome for your child is emotionally upsetting.

What you can do

• As parents, you could suggest that your super-achieving children adopt one expectation: they may not always be the best, or perform perfectly and operate error-free because having frailties and failures is part of being human.
• Another piece of advice parents can offer is: Beating yourself when you are down will not help you get back up; it will only inflict further damage, protract your misery and hold you back. Just like taking a bad shot in a sport you are good at, your job is to learn from any error of your ways. Let go of past performances and with a fresh resolve, focus on doing well in present and future assignments or tests.
• Finally, parents need to help their child understand that expectations of accomplishment are not the most important thing. A more fundamental and valuable set of expectations comes first, that of acceptance. Here the prediction is: “I will do what I can”; the ambition is: “I want what I have”; and the condition is: “I should be as I am.” Never let failure to accomplish cause loss of self-acceptance.

Final words to parents

No matter how ‘super’ an achiever you are, you need to live happily with yourself. In the long run, your expectation of acceptance matters more than your expectation of accomplishment—and this is something that you must convey to your child as well.

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A couple was going to visit a friend. They waited at the bus stop. Suddenly the husband realised that his wallet was missing. The wallet contained a good amount of money and naturally he was upset. He tried to search all his pockets. He was quite sure he had put it in his left pocket when he left home, but where had it gone? He called his son at home and asked him to check his drawers to confirm he had not left it there. He even re-traced a few steps to see whether he had accidentally dropped the wallet somewhere. But the wallet was nowhere to be found. Dejected and disheartened, he stood there wondering what to do. The bus which he had to board arrived. He wouldn’t get into the bus. Another one came but he still wouldn’t get into it. When the third bus came and he was not willing to board it, his wife asked him, “Are we going to sit and cry here all the time? Are we going to be here worrying about the lost wallet or are we going to move on? If so, what’s the use?” It’s as simple as that. What’s done is done. What’s gone is gone.

Close the door to the past

This is a lesson that each one of us has to learn. There are so many situations and circumstances in life that are not to our liking. But how long can we allow ourselves to wallow in sorrow and self-pity? The call of life is Onward, Forward, Godward! Close the door to the past, open the door to the future, take a deep breath, step on through and start a new chapter in your life.

The call of life is Onward, Forward, Godward!

Another example: when a very dear one passes away, suddenly, how long will we keep on weeping over it? There was a woman who came to me and said, “Three months ago I lost my husband and I have been weeping, shedding tears day and night.” And she said to me, “I am not exaggerating but I tell you literally during these three months I must have wept at least three buckets of tears.” Three buckets of tears, just imagine! I said to her, “You have wept three buckets of tears, has your husband come back?” She said, “How can my husband come back? They took him to the cremation ground, they burnt the body, all we got was a little ash.” Then I asked, “What is the use of shedding all those tears? Why don’t you put your feelings to some useful purpose?”

Her husband was a leader of his community and I told her, “There are so many things that you must be knowing about him that are not known to the people, why don’t you sit and write your reminiscences?” She liked the idea and started doing that. She came to me after a year, on the first anniversary of her husband’s death—she had that book published. And her face was wreathed in smiles. She said, “It was a wonderful suggestion, and I have been feeling so peaceful ever since I have followed it.”

They took him to the cremation ground, they burnt the body, all we got was a little ash

Do your best, forget the rest

True acceptance in the right spirit is a dynamic concept which encourages us to do our very best, to put forth our best efforts to achieve what we desire. But if we cannot achieve those results, you must accept it as the will of God, in the knowledge that there must be some good in it. As I always say, there is a meaning of mercy in all the incidents and accidents of life.

In one of his books, Joel Osteen says, “You must make a decision that you are going to move on. It won’t happen automatically. You will have to rise up and say, ‘I don’t care how hard this is, I don’t care how disappointed I am, I’m not going to let this get the best of me. I’m moving on with my life.”

I remember how one day Gurudev Sadhu Vaswani visited Manney’s Bookshop in Pune. As we were looking at the new arrivals, I came across a book titled My Philosophy. So I took this book to him and said, “This is a new arrival, may be you will be interested in it. This book contains philosophies of many great ones, but tell me what is your philosophy?” He answered, “My philosophy! The philosophy of acceptance, I know of nothing higher. Nothing outer can hurt you for the universe is not merely just, the universe is essentially good. The cosmic soul is love and humanity is his bride.”

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Because it is so painful to experience the judgements of others, you would think that we would not be judgmental ourselves. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. In fact, the more we are judged, especially as children and adolescents, the more we tend to judge others too.

Criticism—a family value

I was raised in a family of people who habitually judged and criticised others. They considered themselves experts on any given subject and were the first to state their opinion, to give advice, and to tell everyone and anyone what they should do to change.

In fact, I was so judged and criticised when growing up that I learned to become an expert at it myself. I learned to judge others before they had a chance to judge me. This is a common defensive strategy that far too many of us take on.

I became the expert, the authority, the person who looked down pompously at other people. I was wiser, more capable, more ‘right’ than anyone I knew. Few people argued with me and those who did had a major fight on their hands.

I believe we were all put on this earth to learn certain lessons and we are constantly being presented with opportunities to learn our lessons. When we don’t learn our lesson in one situation we can be assured that we will be presented another opportunity to learn it—and then another and another—until we finally learn it.

One of the most important lessons we are all learning is to be less judgmental of others. It certainly has been one of my strongest lessons. I have been blessed by being forced to learn this important lesson, a lesson that has changed my life. But I haven’t learned it easily. In fact, it has been a difficult and painful lesson, one that has often felt like it was thrust upon me without my consent.

Throughout the years this lesson has gradually been getting stronger and stronger, although looking back on my life I realise it has always been a driving force. Eventually I realised the following: Each and every time I judge another person negatively, I soon find myself in their shoes, experiencing the same things they experience, and now fully able to understand their perspective.

Other reasons for being judgmental

In addition to being judged yourself, you may have other reasons why you judge others. The following exercise will help you discover these reasons:

Exercise: discover why you tend to judge others

1] Ask yourself, “What do I get out of being judgmental or critical?” Write your answers down on a piece of paper.

If you find you are stuck for answers, the following possibilities may give you some ideas. You can use them as a checklist. I judge other people because:

• It makes me feel in control
• It keeps me separate from others
• It is a way of protecting myself from pain
• It is a way of protecting myself from intimacy
• It is a way of feeling superior
• It helps me hide my feelings of insecurity
• It makes me feel powerful.

2] Notice under what conditions you tend to be the most judgmental. The next time you catch yourself feeling judgmental, ask yourself the following questions:

• What emotions am I feeling?
• How secure am I feeling? Am I feeling threatened? Criticised? Rejected?
• Are there times or circumstances when I tend to be more critical or judgmental than at other times?
• What patterns do I notice [for example, do I tend to be more judgmental or critical when I am feeling tired, hurt, threatened, angry?].

3] Pay attention to how you behave with different people and ask yourself the following questions:

• Do I tend to be judgmental/critical of some people more than others?
• Do I tend to be more judgmental when I am around certain people? For example, when I am with my old friends from school? Or when I am around judgmental people?

Choose empathy over judgement

We tend to be critical and judgmental of others because we lack empathy for their position. When we judge another person, we are, in essence, putting ourselves in a position above them. When we have empathy however, we put ourselves in their place. Judging is a position of superiority, empathy is a position of equality.

Now that you have a better understanding of the reasons why you judge, the next step to overcoming your tendency to judge others is to make a conscious decision to choose empathy over judgment. Once this decision has been made you are on your way.

Choosing empathy over judgment helps you become fuller, deeper and more compassionate. Here are some of the personal benefits of empathy:

1. Judging makes us pompous, self-righteous, hard-hearted. Empathy softens us, makes us more open-hearted and wise. Judging causes us to contract, to become small and narrow-minded. Empathy causes us to expand into becoming more broadminded and open-minded.
2. Judging blinds us to others. Empathy helps us to see others far more clearly—both their positive and negative qualities. It’s like a magic telescope that helps us to see inside the other, to view their heart and soul.
3. Judging separates us from others, while empathy connects us, helps us to see our similarities, joining us in our humanity.
4. Last but certainly not least, it is important to realise that our relationship with others mirrors our relationship with ourselves. The way we treat others is the way we treat ourselves, and vice versa. If we judge others, we judge ourselves, and if we judge ourselves, we judge others.

Judging others is a trap. It is an easy and convenient way to avoid ourselves and our own lessons. It depletes us of our energy—energy that could be better spent focussing on improving ourselves.

We lose ourselves when we are busy judging someone else. Our energy is drawn outward instead of inward, where it belongs. We stop learning about ourselves and focussing on our own lessons when we get caught up in trying to teach someone else the lessons.

The post The judgement trap appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

I replied, “Do you really want to know how to relieve stress?”

“Yeah! Tell me, what should I do?”

I replied, “I think you should enjoy your yogurt.”

He didn’t like that answer, but it is the best answer and you’ll soon understand why.

Characteristics of the mind

I’d like to start with some principles of the mind, some truths about how you and I think. These truths will help you to understand why you experience stress all the time and will also guide you to function mindfully, so that you aren’t stressed. Let’s start with principle #1.

#1 The mind can only have a dominant focus on one thing at a time

You can never think specifically about two or more things simultaneously. You can observe several things, but you can’t focus directly on more than one thing.

It may seem like that is what you do when you observe your thoughts jumping from idea to idea so quickly. It seems like you are able to think of many things at the same time, but that’s not the case. It is not possible for your mind to dwell on two different dominant thoughts at exactly the same time.

Here’s an example: You’re driving and you get a text message on your cell phone. It’s shouting at you to read it. As you divert your attention to your phone, you can’t focus on your driving. You can bounce back and forth from one to the other, but you can’t focus directly on both things simultaneously [which is why you should never text while you’re driving].

Another example: If you are reading this article, you can’t, at the same time, watch that show on television. You can read, then watch, then read, and then watch—but the two can’t happen together.

A second important aspect of the mind is:

#2 You are always free to think anything you choose

There are no restrictions as to what your mind can think about. Some have called this our God-given quality of ‘free agency’. Ultimately, no one has control over your thoughts except you. What you choose to think about is entirely your decision. At any conscious moment, you can think about anything you want to, and your choices are unlimited. There may be consequences, benefits or rewards for thinking certain ways, but ultimately, what you think is up to you.

For example, if I asked you to think of dancing elephants on the rings of Saturn, you could put pictures in your mind of how that might look. At the same time, you have the power to think of anything else, perhaps dolphins with zebra stripes jumping over the Golden Gate Bridge. What you think is always your choice.

The Principle of Attrition

Associated with your ability to choose what you focus on is the Principle of Attrition. Not only do you have the power to choose where to focus your thoughts, you also have the power to choose where not to focus your thoughts.

And as you cease focusing your thoughts on people, situations and events that you would consider negative ones, the negative nature of those unpleasant conditions or ideas lose their power to control or influence you. Essentially, if you aren’t thinking about them consistently, they lose their negative impact.

This is not the same as avoiding or ignoring things that you find unpleasant. Ignoring or avoiding still involves thinking about them. Instead, you simply keep your attention focused on those areas of your life that you would consider positive, happy, and beneficial.

These first two principles are important to keep in mind so that you understand that your stress really does begin with your thoughts.

If you are free to choose any thought, and you can only have one dominant thought at a time, it is you that always decides exactly which thought is on the center stage of your mind. [Read What’s your spotlight on?]

Understanding these principles also helps you realize the freedom you have to change your thoughts at any moment.

Now for Truth #3.

#3 You can only directly experience this moment, right here, right now

I will ask you some questions that will lead you to understand what it means to be mindful.

• Where are you right now?

This same question can be asked in a different way:

• Where is the only place you can directly experience?

The only correct answer to this question, and it is the same answer every moment of your life, is HERE.

You cannot be anywhere else but HERE.

Certainly, you can think you are in other places, or simply think of other places, but you can’t directly experience any of those other places that aren’t where you are right now.

• Where are you not?

Anywhere else!

You can’t be at the store while you are driving to the store. While you are driving to the store, your ‘here’ is in the car and amidst the scenery on the way to the store. But you can’t directly experience the store until you are at the store. You can only directly experience where you are.

I know, this sounds strange, but hang in there. This will all make perfect sense in a moment.

The next couple of questions are similar to the previous ones.

• At what point in time are you always?

This question can also be asked in a different way:

• When is the only time that you can directly experience anything?

The only correct answer to this question, and it is always the same answer, is NOW.

You can’t be in your own future, nor can you be in your own past.

Certainly, you can think of these times; you can make up all kinds of things about the past and the future, but you can never directly experience them.

Imagine—if I could experience my own future, I’d transport myself to one year from now, find out which stock has done the best between now and then, come back to now and buy a truckload of that stock. If I could relive a past event, I would go back to a decision I made that didn’t turn out so well and make a different decision so things would turn out better.

These both sound absurd because you and I cannot directly experience the future or the past. We are all stuck firmly in this moment called NOW.

There is never a time, for you, me, and everyone else, when it is not right HERE, right NOW for us. This is our reality. It is what is. Always.

Try this

You can focus your thoughts directly on two places to discover what is happening here
and now.

The first place is from the information that comes from the outside world that reaches your brain by way of your senses. You hear something through your ears that is happening externally. The sound goes in your ears and you think about the nature of the sound. What you hear is reality. You directly experience the sound of the bird.

This works similarly with your other senses. You see a bird fly overhead, hear it chirping as it goes by, and you recognize that you are experiencing the bird—it is real.

The other place you can observe what is [happening] is internally. You have many sensations that are going on inside of you that are every bit as real as the things that happen outside of you. Perhaps you have a sore throat or a knot in your stomach. You may notice that gravity works when you drink some water. Unless you’re upside down, the water goes down into your stomach instead of up into your head. There are other internal sensations you can experience directly including a headache, arthritis, muscle tension, heartbeat, respiration or any other currently functioning physiological process.

I realize this might be a new concept for you. For most of us, we’ve been taught the value of looking to the future to see where we’re going, and recalling the past so that we can learn from our mistakes. I’m not suggesting that we stop using our mind in those useful ways.

Here’s the next powerful principle:

#4 HERE and NOW is free of stress

The next principle of the mind suggests that your HERE and NOW that I just described is a safe and stress-free place. There is no stress in this present moment except for very rare occasions—less than one per cent of the time.

How could that be possible, if stress seems to be such a constant concern in your life?

The only function of the stress response is to keep us safe in the presence of physical danger. If you accurately assess your experiences, you are in physical danger less than one per cent of the time. Your moment-to-moment experience is not a dangerous one.

If you take the time to really examine your thoughts that lead to activation of the stress response, they are focused on either the past or the future.

Examples of future or past threat thoughts:

• You stress about the upcoming speech that you have to give in front of a group of people [Future]
• You relive, in your mind, the argument you had with someone earlier in the day [Past]
• You feel anxious about calling the person who owes you money [Future]
• You feel embarrassed because you said something to some acquaintances that you think they took the wrong way [Past]

These future and past thoughts send a message to your hypothalamus and nervous system to activate the stress response if there happens to be any threat thoughts among those future and past thoughts. But none of those false emergencies are happening right now. What is happening right now is almost always free from any danger or any real threat.

This brings us to the final mindfulness principle. Notice the synergy.

#5 Whenever you bring your attention to the present moment—HERE and NOW—you feel relaxed

Once you understand that you are always free to choose any thought, that you can only think about one thing at a time, that HERE and NOW is your only reality, and that HERE and NOW is a safe place, you come to the final mindfulness principle that pulls each of these together.

Since HERE and NOW is safe, and you’re free to choose to focus on HERE and NOW by turning your focus to this present moment, you get relaxation.

Since you can only focus on one thing, and if it is focused on a safe, threat-free something, your body-mind will recognize the safety and NOT turn on the stress response.

Imagine that you’re driving your car and you find yourself in a traffic jam. You’re on your way to work and this traffic jam is causing you to be very late.

The reality is that you are HERE and NOW sitting in your car amongst a whole bunch of other cars. There is nothing inherently stressful about being in this situation. In other words, there is no reason for your body to turn on the stress response.

The stress comes in when you catapult your thoughts into your own future and make up all the horrible things that are likely to happen to you because you are late for work.

When this happens, your nervous system and hypothalamus—not being able to distinguish between thoughts about future events and thoughts about present moments—think you’re in trouble NOW.

Responding to the imaginary ‘threat’, your body turns on the automatic program for survival—the stress response.

How to reverse the stress response

When you bring your focus, your dominant thoughts, back to the reality of HERE and NOW, and keep your attention there [remember, you can only think of one thing at a time], your body systems won’t be hearing any threat thoughts, and as a result, you’ll not experience any stress.

Rather than dwell on the bad outcome—since you can’t do anything about the traffic jam anyway— you can put your total focus on things that are immediately available to your senses: What do you see, hear, smell, sense, etc., while you’re sitting there in the car.

I’m not saying that when you finally arrive at work you won’t have to handle the issue of being late with your boss. But while you’re in your car, you can either experience stress, or you can feel peaceful.

Consider this

In class, I ask my students about the upcoming tests they will be taking. I ask them if the tests are stressful. They respond that they definitely are. If we analyze this accurately however, we see how the tests themselves have nothing to do with their stress.

Which part of taking a test is threatening? [Remember that stress is the body’s response to prepare for or deal with a physical threat.]

• Is it the part when you walk into the room where you will take the test?
• How about when you put the pen in your hand and begin reading the questions on the test?
• Are you somehow in danger while you read the words on the page?
• Does the real danger occur when you write stuff on the paper with your pen? That must be the threatening part.
• Is it when you pick up your paper, walk over to the desk where all of the other tests are stacked and you lay yours on top? That must be the dangerous place.

At no time during the entire two hours of test taking were you in any sort of danger.

Why, then, would you feel stress?

Stress happens when your thoughts project into your future or past, and those thoughts include pain of any kind. It is rarely, if ever, the current experience or event that causes the threat.

Think about this

Consider this common scenario of a basketball player shooting a foul shot in an ‘important’ basketball game. Let’s say you are the coach of the opposing team. Your team is ahead by one point and there are two seconds left in the game. One of the other team’s players is at the foul line shooting two shots.

If you are a wise coach, what do you do in this situation?

The obvious answer is that you call a time-out. You do this because you want to make the player think about the shots.

What you are really hoping the player thinks about are all the painful consequences of missing the shot—the team will lose, people will be disappointed in him, the team won’t make it to the playoffs, etc.

If he thinks of these painful consequences that will happen in his future, he will unintentionally, but automatically, turn on the stress response. When that happens, many of his muscles—his fight-or-flight muscles—will tighten up or contract, causing him to shoot the ball differently than he normally would. He is much more likely to miss the shots.

Present moment

If he were shooting foul shots in his driveway at home, he could probably sink a hundred shots in a row because the only thing he is thinking about, while playing at home, is how much fun he is having in the present moment.

Future thoughts

However, during the time-out, when he thinks of all of the pain associated with missing the shot and losing the game, he ’tightens up’ or ’freezes’ and is less likely to sink the shot.

Again, thoughts that focus on the future have a likelihood of turning on the stress response. Thoughts that focus on the experiences of the present do not.

• Whenever your thoughts don’t focus directly on what is happening in the present moment, you increase the possibility of turning on the stress response.
• When you turn your focus to what is happening in the present moment, the stress response turns off, automatically.

Are you starting to sense how powerful this can be for you?

Wouldn’t it be better to live each moment peacefully rather than with stress?

Once you get the hang of this, and start applying it to all of your moments, the peaceful feeling that follows becomes addicting.

There are several steps that automatically bring your mind back to your HERE and NOW. They involve thinking about things in a certain way, a different way, that doesn’t involve thoughts about the future or the past.

But first, let’s get a good handle on what it means to be mindful.

What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness can be described as intentional, non-judgmental, moment-to-moment awareness of the HERE and NOW. It may be thought of not so much as a technique, but as a way of being.

Mindfulness is not considered a relaxation technique. Rather, it is a mental state that reduces susceptibility to future/past threat thoughts that turn on the stress response.

The result is that stress can be prevented through conscious living.

• Mindfulness is the process of learning how to be fully present in all experiences while being less judgmental and reactive.
• Mindfulness suggests being present in the here and now, attending to and observing whatever unfolds, and remaining focused and relaxed.

To understand what these definitions mean, let’s begin with a very common example, which you have probably experienced.

Consider how you function mentally when you drive your car and you notice that a police officer is driving directly behind you. There are no lights flashing. He is just following you. What happens to your level of present moment awareness?

When you drive with this level of alertness, you usually try to be as completely aware of everything that is going on as possible. You are aware of the distance between your car and the one in front of you. You are aware of how fast you drive. You are totally aware of all aspects of your driving such as how soon you will have to turn on the signal to indicate that you are making a turn, how quickly you shift lanes, and if your lights are on. In essence, you are completely tuned in to your immediate environment. This is mindfulness.

By contrast mindlessness is demonstrated when you drive along a stretch of road, and before you realise it, you have travelled 15 miles and have no idea about the stretch of road you have just driven on. You suddenly catch yourself and marvel that you didn’t have an accident for failing to pay attention.

Mindlessness occurs when your thoughts are not in the present moment and when you tune out what is happening. Your mental focus is on times and places other than here and now. You ignore the present moment because your attention is focused elsewhere.

How to be mindful

There are four primary mental characteristics that immediately move you into a state of mindful awareness. They are these:

• Stop
• Look
• Accept
• Savor

Let’s look at each of them individually.

Stop

The first thing that you can do to bring your focus more into the present is Stop. Stopping means turning off a lot of the mind chatter racing endlessly like bumblebees around a hive inside your mind. Much of your mental monologue consists of thoughts about things that aren’t happening HERE and NOW.

Stopping means consciously bringing control to those out-of-control thoughts. Remember, you have a choice about which thoughts you think. Stopping means taking responsibility and using your power to direct the parade of your thoughts. Once you’ve done that, the next thing you can do is Look.

Look

Looking involves paying attention to what is happening with all of your senses. It is almost a passive observing. You are getting in touch with what you are currently experiencing, right here, right now.

The easiest way to do this is by simply moving through your senses and asking yourself, “What am I noticing now?” Focus your thoughts, without making judgements, on what is happening:

• What do you see—right now?
• What can you taste—right now?
• What do you smell—right now?
• What do you hear—right now?
• What do you sense physically—right now?
• What internal sensations do you observe—right now?

To help you do this, you might think something like, I am noticing. . . and then let your senses bring to you whatever happens to be unfolding in the moment.

Not too long ago, I was talking with a good friend of mine, Kevin, whose son, Mathis, is a very good golfer. He plays for one of the local high school teams and consistently performs very well. However, when he plays in tournaments, there are times when he finds himself thinking too much about the outcome of the shot or the problems he encountered on the previous hole. When that happens, when his mind races into the future or in the past, his ability to hit shots well decreases dramatically. In a recent tournament, Mathis shot a 100 [a very poor score] on one day and shot an 80 [a significantly better score] on the next. It had taken him 20 more strokes to complete the same course on the first day. Obviously, his skill level hadn’t changed, but his thinking had.

Since Mathis’s golf swing mechanics are fine, he doesn’t need to worry about that part of his game. But he does need to correct what he focuses on mentally. I suggested that when he steps up to the ball and gets ready to hit it that he focus on things that are happening in his immediate environment—to just observe. For example, he could focus on the colour or even the little dimples of the golf ball. He could also focus on his breathing or on how it feels to swing the golf club or his hands as they gently grip the club. These are all things that are part of his HERE and NOW.

Why would I suggest that he simply observe things that are unfolding moment to moment?

You see, when the mind isn’t racing with thoughts of the future or the past, there will also be no thoughts of any kind of threat. When there is no threat, the body will not turn on the fight-or-flight response, which increases muscle contraction. In golf, tightening the muscles in the wrong way will invariably lead to poor hitting. Observing passively eliminates this possibility.

Instead, the body is left to do what it has been trained to do. In this case, hit a golf ball with perfect precision.

Accept

The third mental characteristic to move yourself into a more mindful state is to be accepting or eliminate your need to judge. When you simply observe, without adding the emotional analysis of the situation, you free yourself to see things more clearly. You do this by simply maintaining your observational state of mind.

This isn’t quite as easy as it sounds. Normally, we quickly attach ourselves emotionally to how we think things ought to be. And when things aren’t turning out the way we think they should, it upsets our mental and emotional equilibrium.

Inherent in accepting and not judging is mentally detaching from the way you think things “should” or “ought to” be. This is especially valuable for things, people or situations over which you have no direct control or influence.

It’s a windy rainy day outside and you had plans to have a picnic at the park with your family and friends. You can’t do anything about the fact that it is a stormy day, so when you detach from your emotional need for the day to be a certain way, it brings you to a more mindful state.

Savour

What you focus on expands. When you focus mindfully, it expands even more. Once you release your judgment of the thing you are focusing on, you immediately experience it with greater pleasure and happiness. I call this savouring, which simply means that you let the enjoyment of the thing that you’re focusing on expand.

Slow down.
Stop.
Appreciate.
Stop taking things for granted!
Seize the moment!

Consider a night when you’ve been in a place where you could see the stars far more clearly, such as in the mountains, the desert, or on the ocean. Being mindful, you stop—you cease thinking of things that aren’t going on; you look—you put your attention on the billions of stars above; you release your need to judge—you observe in a passive way; and then you savour the sky—you take it all in. The more you look, the more beauty you see. The more you see, the more magnificent it becomes. These are moments when time seems to stand still; it takes your breath away, and you are peaceful. That’s savouring.

Commonly, the feeling that accompanies savouring is gratitude. You begin to recognise that things are fine as they are, and the more you focus on them being fine, the more fine they get. You feel thankful, appreciative, blessed for the beauty of the moment.

Consider examples of holding a newborn baby, watching the unfolding of a beautiful sunset, climbing to the top of a mountain and taking in the view, or snorkelling amongst the variety of fish in the ocean. In these moments, we are awestruck by the beauty and richness of the moment. We feel thankful, satisfied, enriched.

And every moment can be like these if we pay attention. We don’t just ‘stop and smell the roses.’ Instead, we ‘stop to enjoy the wonderful smell of the roses.’ That’s savouring.

Take the extra time to deliberately focus on, and be thankful for the little things, the good things that are going well in your life, and in this moment. Those good things will expand. The more you focus on the satisfaction of things as they are right now, the more you’ll experience satisfaction.

Remember, what you focus on expands.

When you combine these four mental tools: stopping, looking, accepting things as they are, and savouring, you are in the perfect mental zone for mindfulness. Interestingly, the moment you move to a mindful state, everything that is happening gets better. It expands, it becomes more interesting, and your stress evaporates.

The post How Mindfulness Helps Reduce Stress appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

In couple’s therapy, we talk about change. However, I seldom hear, “I want to learn to do things differently.” Clients are often baffled as to why their partner won’t change — they say, “If you loved me you’d do this for me.” I ask them what they are willing to change, and hear, “I’m not doing that!”

They miss the irony. Each expects the other to change; neither thinks they need to change. The self-responsible person asks, “What can I do to act like the person I want my partner to be?”

I was walking through a mall, and saw a mom shaking her 8-year-old a few inches from her face and screaming, “How many times have I told you not to hit your sister?” Hmm… wonder where he learned to use physical force to make his point?

One of my clients hates it when her husband yells at her. So, she yells at him, “I hate it when you yell at me!” The woman yells at her husband because she thinks she has the right to do so, since he did. The odd part is, in a previous session, she said, “That’s it! I’m never going to yell at him again! It doesn’t work!” So I asked her about that promise.“Well, yes, I did promise, but really, anybody would have yelled over that!” Not much of a promise, eh?

The reason relationships get into trouble is often that one or both of the parties think their job is to ‘sort out’ their partner. One of my clients refers to her husband as her ‘fourth child.’ Nothing he does is right, and she endlessly tells him so.

I think the purpose of a relationship is to relate. And to do that, I have to meet my partner as my equal, not as someone I need to fix. Here’s the truth: Your partner isn’t broken, and your job is to work on yourself.

Here are five ideas to help you make that happen.

1. Honesty

Secrets have a way of circling back and biting us. People get into the “I have the right to my privacy!” stuff, but here’s a suggestion: if you want secrets, keep them. Just don’t be in a relationship. Most of the mess we find ourselves in has to do with not being truthful. We don’t talk about what we are thinking, what we are feeling. We even may assume that our partner ought to be a mind reader—ought to ‘just know.’ Honesty is about describing what you know about yourself. You can’t know a thing about another person [you make guesses, but if you pay attention, you’re mostly wrong] so all you really can talk about is your own behaviour, and internal theatre. Putting off talking about what is going on for you both delays the inevitable, and sets you up for fights, once the truth comes out. Better to tackle things head on.

2. Fair fighting

Fair fighting is an agreement to use self-responsible language, and to separate out angry emotions. For instance “I’m noticing that I am making myself angry about the story I’m telling myself about…[the problem] and I’m wondering what is going on for you?” In this example you’ll see you’re speaking only for yourself. “I am making myself angry” is true. No one “makes me” angry. In order to get angry, I have to tell myself a story. And stories are by definition fictional. Works for all emotions, not just anger.

There’s an exercise called a Vesuvius, designed by Joann Peterson of The Haven. There’s an area of floor, say 8 ft x 8 ft. The angry person stays in this area, perhaps with a pillow to hit. The person can say or do anything within the area, for five minutes, except break things, or touch people. What this accomplishes is upping everyone’s tolerance for angry sounds, while letting the person express the emotion safely. Fair fighting means sticking to the topic, stating your side, and listening to the other person, just like in the above example. It also means taking turns to express, aiming for solutions and not aiming to ‘be right’.

3. Treat your partner as you wish to be treated

Mostly, we’re sitting around, waiting for others to go first. “I’ll stop yelling when you do”, “I’ll speak for myself after you do.” We are excellent at putting the other to the test, and often fail at doing what we say we want to do. “Do unto others…” is a tenet in most religions. There’s nothing in it about waiting for the other person to go first. It’s about integrity: “If I say I will do something, I will do it. My behaviour is not contingent on another’s.” So, what kind of person do you want to be in relationship with? Be that person.

• If you want honesty, be honest.
• If you want good communication, take a course and learn how to be a good communicator.
• If you want to be listened to, stop talking and listen.
• If you don’t hear what you ‘want’ to hear, be quiet and listen some more.

Doing this is the only way to shift your relationship, as you are shifting the only thing you really can—your own behaviour.

4. No blame

Here’s a tricky one. Watch yourself, and listen to yourself. When something goes wrong, even little stuff, like getting cut off in traffic, we immediately blame the other person. They go from being wrong, to being bad, to being ‘out to get me, just like everyone else is.’ We learned as kids to point at other people, and to make it their fault. But nothing happens inside of you without you setting it up. It’s why two people have different reactions to the same situation. Situations don’t cause reactions. Things happen and we react. We might begin to feel uncomfortable, and our instinct is to blame someone. Our partners are typically around quite often, and therefore get a lot of blame. We need to learn to stop ourselves by repeating, “Things happen, and I choose my response.” I can use honest communication and then ask for change, such as: “I’m wondering if you would be willing to discuss how we could do this differently.” Blame games lead to going around in circles, and everyone is in pain. Not a good strategy!

5. Acceptance

In the end, here it is: You are who you are, and your partner is who s/he is. And who each of you are is captured ONLY in what you do. In other words, if I say I am a fair and compassionate person and act like Attila the Hun, the truth of me is ‘Attila.’ Words are cheap, actions priceless.

Acceptance is about waking up each morning, looking at your partner and saying ‘Reset to zero.’ The person opposite you, and all you know about that person, is who s/he is right now. If you can’t accept this person 100 per cent, you’re already in trouble. This ‘reset’ means that I put behind everything that has been discussed, and resolved, and now, we start the day afresh. My choice is to accept my partner just as she is today. I then begin again, with honesty, openness, dialogue, and self-responsibility. I treat my partner as I wish to be treated, day after day. In the end, the part we can fix in any relationship is our part. The best way to do so is to treat others with dignity, respect, compassion and heart. Anything else misses the point. I learn about me, as I relate with you.

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