Tag: emotions

Law of Attraction #1

law-of-attraction-6

Over the past 6 months or so, I have been spending a good amount of time studying the Law of Attraction, including reading The Secret and watching countless Abraham Hicks videos on YouTube. I’m not sure why it took me so long to discover this theory, but it did. Put in the simplest of forms you can think of the law of attraction as:

What you think about you attract!

There is more to it than this, but let’s start here with whatever you are thinking about you are attracting. Maybe this is just simple psychology in the sense that if I am worried about something it is self-perpetuating and I worry about it more, or conversely if I am focused on something positive I become more positive. It is undeniable that if you are depressed you just get more of the same and if you are happy you feel this happiness, until you shift your emotions in another direction. According to the law of attraction that which I focus on is attracted to me.

Another way to look at the law of attraction is that if you want something, but wanting it may be the opposite of something you really dislike; you are in effect emitting both a positive and negative emotions. It is unlikely you will attract what you really want if you are focused on why you don’t want something else. You might view this as a one way street, your emotions and focus including how you feel must be on what you want, not on what you don’t want.

Have you ever had a job, where you are so focused on what you hate about it, that you can’t sleep at night, and you struggle to maintain any semblance of a positive attitude because you are so focused on what you dislike? This is the law of attraction working just as it should, giving you more of what you think about. I think the Buddha understood the law of attraction.

Buddha - What you think you become.png

In the next post, I would like to spend a little time talking about how you make the law of attraction work for you as it beginning to work for me.

Namaste

 

 

 

Are you introspective?

To me the word introspective means realizing your own behavior and actions, in essence analyzing them sometimes even in real-time. The definition of introspection from Merriam Webster is as follows:

“a reflective looking inward :  an examination of one’s own thoughts and feelings”

Here are a few synonyms for introspective that are related to this post:

  • inward looking
  • self analyzing
  • contemplative
  • thoughtful
  • meditative
  • reflective

True interpersonal growth is hard to come by without introspection. It is increasingly difficult to change behavior when you don’t even understand its existence. I often observe myself being critical, or engaging in some negative behavior either as it is occurring or immediately after it occurred. These are learning moments, and although it sometimes takes repeated observations, these observations almost always result in a change of behavior. Maybe the the introspection identifies a trigger that is creating the behavior. For instance every-time I come into contact with a particular person they talk about politics or religion and that in turn triggers a critical response from me and I become argumentative. Knowing the trigger that is causing my own undesirable behavior, I now have a choice to either avoid the individual or choose to react differently to them. If I choose not to analyze the behavior, I will repeat it again and again, always with the same result.

Dali Lama Everyone else

Next time you become critical, angry, abusive, judgmental, accusatory, or exhibit any other negative emotion, stop and think about why you feel this way. Analyze your thoughts and determine if these feelings are justified in any way, what is my perception of the events leading to these thoughts, what might be triggering them? If you cannot be introspective you will forever be repeating the undesirable behavior, making yourself and everyone around you miserable. I like the quote above by the Dali Lama as we often seek to blame others for the way we feel, when it is the way we perceive the events and interactions that brings us sorrow.

The question is can we change ourselves by controlling our emotions?

Can we be accountable for the way we feel?

Can we ultimately change our response, perception, and behavior?

Namaste