It’s never the right time

“My dreams are huge so they will take time”

“Maybe someday, when I have saved up more money”

“After this happens or that…”

“This is so huge, nothing I do will make a difference”

Do your thoughts sound similar? Well, they used to be mine till I decided to change them. I used to wait for a particular outcome; I would yearn and pray for my life to improve. If only I wasn’t sick… it’ll be just another month till I get a salary hike… it’s holiday season now… I would make excuses. I’d get lost in my distractions and hope for a miracle, only to return to my reality of despair, heartbreak, divorce, guilt, shame, debt, pain, obesity and low self worth. I hit below rock bottom, in every area of my life. Physically, financially and emotionally, until I finally had an insight and saw the light! I realised that I chose my time.

Finding your message

What do you keep searching for? Is it a better relationship with your spouse, or being a better parent? Do you want to lose weight or do you want to live a more conscious life?

The truth is the truth, the recipe remains the same with a few modifications. That is why everyone is saying the same thing but in different ways. Think of it like a radio playing the same song but in different languages at different tempos by different artists. You can hear the song only if you tune into the station where the reception is most clear. Then it is up to you if you want to just listen, or sway with the music, or stand up and sing and dance with all your energy.

I have found that consuming more literature or attending seminars about the topic will not help you change your life. The message is the same. But you need to use it, practise it and make it a habit.

Decision-making doesn’t come easy

I was an obese child and never participated in any sports while growing up. I used various ruses to escape physical training sessions in school and never learnt to swim. I was always embarrassed of my fat thighs and wobbling belly so I did not want to be seen in shorts. It was only about five years ago that I decided to shed that extra weight and started exercising properly for the first time in my life.

I had to be willing to unlearn my old eating habits and defend my weight loss regime to people who were against it. Through the decades I had tried to lose weight many times and failed. But then I kept trying and finally, at 38, I succeeded. Had I allowed my previous attempts to hold me back, I wouldn’t be in shape to do the 200-hour Yoga Teacher’s training course I’m currently enrolled in. And I had never done yoga until six months ago. It is not easy and I am still learning. It requires great discipline, but I know that exercise, wellbeing and healing has become a vital part of my life and who I am, so I am giving it all I have.

Self-transformation starts with a decision

Think about which part of your life you want to change. Out of all the many things that come back, decide on any one thing that you would want to change in the immediate future. Only one thing.

If there is nothing you want to change, then this is the time for you to accept with gratitude the joyful life you already live. But if that were so, you would not be reading this.

From my experience, lack of clarity is the  biggest de-motivating factor on the planet. On the flip side, when you have a clear vision of what you want, you wake up feeling excited and enthusiastic, knowing exactly what to do.

Focus also comes from clarity. Often it takes just one area of your life to shift for your entire life to transform. The joy and excitement you feel after pursuing one of your big dreams will spread into all areas of your life. When you have a clear vision of what you want, you remain courageous in spite of fears and obstacles.

What postpones the completion of your goals is not lack of time, resources, the economy, luck, karma or any of that stuff—it is your own unwillingness to make the decision.

Jump off the fence

It does not take attending dozens of workshops, or reading scores of self-help books to transform your reality—it takes an instant. The time will never be just right, things will never line up perfectly. Take ownership and responsibility for your life. Remember every no is a yes to something else.

Think of the various small and big ways in which your life will change now that you have made this decision and start feeling it. Embody it, breathe it in and exude it in your energy and aura. Be the you after that decision.

Next comes a public declaration

The reason we do not declare our decisions is that we doubt whether we can actually accomplish them and are afraid of failing in front of others.

These are a few suggestions to make in your decision statements.

1. Decide to eliminate the word ‘try’ from your life, Say “I will” or “I won’t” [this will exercise your deciding muscles].
2. Also eliminate ‘shoulds’ from your life. We do things because we want to do them, because the consequences of not doing them are unbearable, so why not just rephrase it with “I want to”.
3. Since you already know your message, the most important thing you need to do for it to start working is for you to commit to a habit of growth.

Once you have done this, the only other thing to do is to trust and to allow the event to unfold.

This was first published in the November 2014 issue of Complete Wellbeing.

The post Self-transformation: Leap out of that door appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

As a life coach, and I coach only by phone, I have a small ritual before I start, where I Plug In [get connected with the Universe/source] and ask to be an instrument for my client, often on the call, I check in and trust my “gut-instinct” to say or ask what comes to me and almost always, it is relevant to my client. What is this magical inspiration?

Have you noticed that it is through our intuition and instincts that we stumble upon coincidences? How do we dispel this intuition?

Trust that we gather information and store it in our bank, but often it is like a bank account where you don’t know the balance. But when you go to withdraw from it, the funds are there. Trust that your intuition or your gut instinct comes to you from the innumerable things you know. You may not even know you know it, but you do.

The standard definition of intuition is “knowledge gained of something without the use of reasoning or the five basic senses”.

Many of the successful people I have spoken to share with me that they made their decisions based on their gut instincts. Honing this instinct and becoming open to receiving this invaluable channel for information is essential to manifesting.

Intuition sharpeners

Make it a frequent practice to sit in silence for a few moments every day, Plug In and be open to “listening” to anything that comes up, then go about your day welcoming these signs.

• Be open-minded—I use a trigger to remind me to be open-minded to another’s opinion or a concept. I would uncross my legs and arms, when I know I want to learn something or I think I may hear things that may be contradictory to what I already know and believe. Being open-minded helps you to absorb more information.
• Start playing with it in small ways to test your intuition. When in a room full of people, find the time and space to observe and feel who is in the room or on the Metro or bus with you. A game I play is to pick out 3 or more people, and see what my intuition says about them. I make mental notes about them, and then later I try to create the opportunity to see if I was right.

Intuition is a muscle that needs to be used in order to strengthen it. There is a bank of greater intelligence that is accessible to everyone. This intelligence exceeds far beyond our limited personal reasoning. I believe that as we go through our days we are gatherers of information that is being received from all our senses. Because the conscious mind cannot process that much information, most of it is absorbed into our subconscious.

A few years ago, I was celebrating New Years’ Eve in the Caribbean at a nightclub and during the night, I visited the ladies’ rest room. The place was packed and one had to squeeze through hundreds of people just to get out. Later, when I left at about 3 am, I touched my earlobe and noticed that I was missing one earring. I was wearing diamond hoops given to me by my mother. It was a valuable piece of jewellery and had huge sentimental value. Something in me told me to go back inside despite the odds. I did.

I retraced some of my steps, looked on the floor and under the sofas and even sent messages to some of my friends who were still in there to look out for it.

I finally retraced my steps back to the same rest room and there it was on the vanity next to the sinks, hours later. Coincidence or good luck or did I know? What is knowing?

Our conscious mind is selective of what it filters in. In NLP we refer to this selection as the information filtering process. This includes Deleting, Distortion and Generalisation. What gets through the filters is “knowing”.

How we filter

Filtering through deletion

We delete when we omit and do not even notice some information that is coming to us through our senses. We focus only on the ones we want to. A classic example of this is when you observe silence for a few moments and get your self to truly listen to the sounds in your space, suddenly some outside sounds become apparent, the cars, birds, even the hum of a fan or air-conditioner, which earlier were not even there. This is a self and sanity preservation filter, if we did not omit what our senses are receiving, then we would not be able to focus on anything.

Filtering through distortion

Distortions are a way of filtering our sensory information so that it fits with what we expect or believe. We are making misinterpretations of reality. When you have a misunderstanding, which you later clear with a friend, that is also distortion at work, where you have interpreted a meaning, which is not the reality. When you lose your keys and looked everywhere, and then someone else finds them exactly where you thought they were, but you didn’t see them. That’s also distortion at work, you believed they were lost.

Filtering through generalisation

This is where we come to our conclusions as we relate and connect the new piece of information with something we already know. We associate the new with past experiences. One old poem, which so aptly describes how we generalise is The Blind Men and the Elephant.

In NLP, we play a game, where you have to list 10 items in a particular category. For example, can you rattle off right now 10 different male pop singers? 10 different breakfast options? 10 different luxury car makes, 10 football players, 10 make-up brands? Did you notice that we can only list a few in the areas that are not of our interest? This is how we read the papers, watch TV and “listen” to conversations, lectures, how we read books. We only retain information that gets through our “Yes/No” filter. The rest is deleted, distorted or generalised.

Listening and noticing

If you start listening to the sounds around you and truly listen to every conversation you have, aside from making you a better and more compassionate communicator, it will help you absorb a lot more information. Often when talking to someone, we are either interrupting or we are thinking about what we want to say next; when you truly listen, you will get and give so much more to the conversation.

Be aware of your filters and your personal judgements. Just being aware as you listen will help you to learn and absorb so much more.

This is the same for what you see. Haven’t you noticed when someone says to you, “Did you see that BMW?”, and you didn’t. Or when you say, “Hey, I liked her dress,” and no one else notices it? We habitually only notice, see, hear parts of what is actually present, because of our filters…but we need to practice allowing more to get through.

Change your routines and do things you don’t normally do, go to new places and see around, even flipping through newspapers and magazines with the intention to find inspiration is a fabulous way to practice it.

Instead of looking at your phone when in a car, look outside the window and see, take your environment in, take in nature. Appreciating nature is one of the best ways to experience true gratitude as well. Think of intuition as tapping on the information that seeped through despite the filters.

Intuition to me is, knowing on some level.

I trust that when I am intuitive, it is a cocktail of all the information I have picked up along the way, which has come to me at the right time. When you are faced with a situation and you are in tune with your intuition, the answer will come to you, from that “bank”.

You will know when you need to call someone that you care for, exactly when they require your love the most. You will know the most appropriate thing to say to someone that you are talking to—even someone you just met. You can start to see the intensity of the intimacy that is achieved in a short period of time. This is called connection or rapport.

Trusting your intuition and noticing synchronicity in your life together with your values, your personal declaration and your clearly defined desires will together serve as a navigational compass for you. You will know when to say No, where to set boundaries and when to Go speeding ahead all signals.

Excerpted with permission from Don’t Think of a Blue Ball by Malti Bhojwani, published by Om Books International, INR295

The post Hone your intuition appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

I remember driving my daughter to school one morning, with my “feel-good” music playing and it had rained earlier but the sun was out, I was feeling happy and Plugged In and suddenly I sensed that there was a rainbow. I looked up in the sky and there it was. I love seeing rainbows and perhaps because it is a frequent phenomenon in Sydney skies, on some level, I knew that there would be a rainbow in the sky that morning. All the elements were there…so was it synchronicity, did I manifest it or was it nothing?

I was told by a friend to buy a pair of ceramic love-birds for good feng shui and keep them on my bedside to attract a romantic relationship. I haven’t found a pair yet, though lately, every morning when I go to turn my kettle on and I look out the kitchen window, I see love birds and I watch them going through their dance of intimacy. The female would bow and the male would peck at her feathers just around her neck and then he would bow and she would do the same with her beak. I see it every day now. Coincidence? Logical?

A sceptic would possibly call all this a post hoc fallacy. This is when people doubt the powers of manifesting, their personal power, and want to question the unseen energies.

What would it mean to you if you could use your intuition and were always accurate and guided? Even the wrong turns are the right ones, symbolically and physically. Every path introduces you to different experiences, lessons and people. Using your powers of intuition and synchronicity is just learning to read the sign-posts better, to notice the guidance that is coming from inside.

When I was not sure about a possible path to take, a business opportunity, a potential company or person to collaborate with, I went with my gut and I always saw numerous signs that led me towards following the path and going with the flow. The signs showed up everywhere—bumping into people randomly at airports who passed statements that affirmed that I was headed where I needed to go; the specific person I needed to get in touch with happened to be staying at the same hotel I was in; the book I wanted to reference almost fell on my head, off the bookshelf. There was significance at every step. Colours, music, lyrics…all in synch with what I was thinking and feeling in the moment. As if the whole world was my personal movie and every detail had been choreographed perfectly to appeal to my senses.

So what was different? I had decided what I wanted. The decision was made on all levels of my consciousness. Conscious, subconscious and super–conscious. The congruency is what turned me into a powerful magnet for all I wanted.

I was singing a song in the gym shower and as I was walking by the chicken shop on the way back home from the gym, the same old song was playing on their system. Almost like Déjà vu in reverse. Déjà vu is a sense you get of having been in exactly the same moment before while you are experiencing it for the first time and synchronicity is when you can see the thread that connects all your experiences leading up to the one you are in now. Notice the choreography of the course of events that need to take place in order for you to witness these signs.

I suggest that you write in your gratitude journal every night. A by-product of doing so is that when you look back through your journal after a few months, you will find that you have important and useful databases. One, that of people and events that you were grateful for—so you can connect the dots and see the synchronicity for yourself, and two, you will have a mind bank of things and people to be grateful for.

Synchronicity exercise: Look at your list of achievements, think of the big epic stories in your life, focus on some of your so-called regrets and list the signs and coincidences that weaved them all together. This can be a lot of fun, so take your time with it.

Excerpted with permission from Don’t Think of a Blue Ball by Malti Bhojwani, published by Om Books International, INR295. Buy from Flipkart.com

The post Coincidences or synchronicity? appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

Regret holds us back

The most useful perspective we can have about our regrets is to look at them as lessons and to trust that we always chose the best option available at that time.

When we start to doubt and question our decisions of the past, it’s a short step to second-guessing our present, and ultimately ourselves. By doing so, we may also end up labelling our present as a mistake. It is far more empowering to believe that where we are today is exactly where we need to be and all the past experiences were there to teach us some lessons. We need to develop the ability to let go of the past to move forward with confidence.

Here are some tips to help you move on.

1. Stop your regrets in the track. Catch yourself thinking of a particular regret, and get into the habit of always asking yourself, “What’s great about that situation?” This is a very empowering question, as it forces you to look at the positives and the lessons you learnt. There is always a lesson—even in pain and sadness. Look for the lesson and focus on it instead of what might have been.
2. Don’t whine. Stop telling people your sad-story. Instead tell people how great the situation was for you and all that you learnt from it, which will not let you repeat the mistake.
3. Forgive fully. We have to forgive ourselves fully and if there are other people involved, seek their forgiveness too. It is important to understand that we would never deliberately or unnecessarily choose a path that causes pain or suffering to anyone, including ourselves. What looks like a wrong decision now, was probably the best one back then in the light of all the factors involved.

How we make decisions

Being comfortable is a level of being alive, which stems from our basic survival instinct. We tend to choose the painless or easy option, even in cases when it would be the least uncomfortable option.

To illustrate this, imagine you are in a room, out of a James Bond or Mission Impossible movie. The walls are slowly closing in and you have one minute before you are squashed salami. You have to think fast and smart and make a choice. On the ground are three manholes. One is a smelly sewerage, which is shallow. The second is with white sharks and crocodiles and the third one has venomous snakes and scorpions. Time is running out and you have to choose, as not doing anything is not an option.

We always choose the best option

Our basic survival instinct always chooses life. In the above case, you do a quick mental analysis of your options and realise that the only way that would keep you alive is the smelly sewerage. So, you opt for it and are alive wading in smelly waters. Not a nice feeling, but you are alive.

As time goes by, you are grateful for being alive and then you forget the other alternatives that you had. You focus only on what is the present. In all probability, people around you may say, “Look at him/her swimming in that sewer.” But no one would know that this was the best option available for you to survive.

Thus, it is clear that we always choose the best option available us at any given time. We have to have faith in ourselves, that even the worse situations now, were the right choices at a particular time. And the fact that we acknowledge this is all that matters.

Move on…

Accepting our choices is the first step in moving on. And regrets, in most instances, are an absolute waste of energy that take keep us from appreciating what we have.

Even a moment spent in negative emotions about the past is a waste. So take a deep breath, let it go and pat yourself on your back for coming this far.

The post Moving on from regrets appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.