2013 Daily Encouragement Thread

[columbia]

2013 Daily Encouragement Thread

]STARS [S[/COLOR]IZE="3"]CANNOT SHINE WITHOUT DARKNESS[/SIZE]

LETS REACH FOR THE STARS TODAY...........

[columbia]

2013 Daily Encouragement Thread

The STARS cannot shine without DARKNESS........


LETS REACH OR THE STARS TODAY.........

[Slaythefear]

2013 Daily Encouragement Thread

March 8, 2013...Mindfulness

Benefits of Mindfulness
As therapists, cultivating mindfulness is perhaps the greatest gift we can offer
Published on March 6, 2013 by Lisa Firestone, Ph.D. in Compassion Matters

If asked to explain the value of mindfulness, you may want to consider the following question, can you sit for one minute and completely quiet your mind? Can you do this without feeling like you?re coming out of your skin? When Dr. Donna Rockwell first became interested in mindfulness, she discovered that this exercise proved quite a challenge. She found, like so many of us would, if we really took the time to try it out, meditating, or even just calming our mind, can be tough to do. It?s no wonder that in an age of high-speed this and digitized that, it?s even harder to slow down, to connect with ourselves, and to just be.

In February, I was fortunate to meet up with Dr. Donna Rockwell at the Society for Humanistic Psychology Conference in Santa Barbara, CA. In addition to being a clinical psychologist, a writer, and an international speaker, Donna is now a teacher of mindfulness meditation. On March 14, she and I will be presenting an online CE Webinar on ?Mindfulness in Everyday Life: Incorporating Mindfulness Techniques into Clinical Practice.? When I had the chance to interview Donna on this subject, she described the state that most people pass their time in, in which they are either ?bemoaning the past or catastrophizing the future.? We spend very little time in the present.


Mindfulness expert Jon Kabat-Zinn has described mindfulness as paying attention to the present moment with intention, while letting go of judgment, as if our life depends on it. The present is the only real moment we have. And, in fact, our life may actually depend on it. Among its many benefits, mindfulness meditation has actually been proven to increase telomerase, the ?caps? at the end of our genes, which, in turn, can reduce cell damage and lengthen our lives. In addition, research demonstrates that mindfulness bolsters our immune system, making us better able to fight off diseases, from the flu to cancer. Mindfulness helps improve our concentration and reduce ruminative thinking that contributes to the high levels of stress that is so prevalent in our society. Stress and ruminative thinking are not only mental health hazards, but they are, quite often, the very symptoms that lead people to seek out the help of a therapist. So why is mindfulness so helpful to mental health professionals?

Mindfulness is an incredible tool to help people understand, tolerate, and deal with their emotions in healthy ways. It helps us to alter our habitual responses by taking pause and choosing how we act. When we are mindful, we experience our life as we live it. We experience the world directly through our five senses. We taste the food we are eating. We recognize the thoughts we are having. In doing so, we learn how our minds work, and we are better able to label the thoughts and feelings we are having, instead of allowing them to overpower us and dictate our behavior.

Because mindfulness presents an effective method to get to know oneself, to reduce stress, and to live in the present moment, cultivating mindfulness is a powerful practice in therapy. For one thing, research has shown that therapists who practice mindfulness themselves have better outcomes with their patients, even when they don?t utilize mindfulness techniques in their therapy. Nevertheless, incorporating mindfulness into therapy has been effective in treating many common mental health struggles. Marsha Linehan was one of the first to integrate mindfulness practices into Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) with positive results. As it?s been applied more and more, mindfulness has further proven to help treat individuals suffering with personality disorders and bi-polar disorder. Mark Williams has written extensively on how mindfulness can lessen the likelihood of recurring depression. Having shown such positive results, mindfulness has been integrated into clinical practice, with many therapists incorporating techniques and meditation into their methods.

When you teach a person mindfulness techniques, you help them train their mind to observe their own thoughts, feelings, and sensations with an objective view. This must be done with compassion, as people tend to lose patience with themselves, particularly in the early stages of practicing mindfulness or trying out meditation. When we release judgment and learn to live in the moment, we increase our mental agility. We can also better regulate our emotions. As Williams wrote in his book The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness, ?Get out of our heads and learn to experience the world directly, experientially, without the relentless commentary of our thoughts. We might just open ourselves up to the limitless possibilities for happiness that life has to offer us.?

As human beings, we are often surprised to find that we can tolerate much more than we imagine. People who have anger problems fall victim to their emotional reactions when certain triggers set them off. By learning mindfulness, they are far better able to take pause and react in a more constructive way to conflict. A simple breathing exercise can interrupt their outburst and lead to a more favorable outcome. This is also true for parents who are struggling with their children and couples who are keying off each other based on destructive dynamics that have built up between them.

When we are reactive, falling victim to our immediate thoughts or emotions, we are not always acting in our own self-interest. Mindfulness provides a great tool for developing more self-acceptance, which helps us build our compassion for others. It allows us to take more power and be more strategic in terms of our goals. It can bring us closer to the people we care about and help us to interrupt self-sabotaging patterns we?ve adopted throughout our lives.

Teaching ourselves to calm down and to be more receptive than reactive is a practice made possible through mindfulness techniques. Whether learning to meditate or merely to tune in with ourselves at various times throughout our day, we are enhancing our ability to feel more integrated and to act with integrity. We improve our ability to focus our attention. We are better able to slow the racing thoughts that lead us to engage in limiting or self-sabotaging behaviors. We strengthen our resilience and enhance our capacity to experience the joys of everyday life. As therapists, cultivating mindfulness is perhaps the greatest gift we can offer our patients. In a sense, it is a gift of time, the permission to slow down and be present, to experience life as we live it and to discover who we really are in the process.

[Slaythefear]

2013 Daily Encouragement Thread

March 9, 2013...Fight for your life!

I just posted on the NN a message about fighting for your life and then did a google search with that message and this lyrics came up. I think it fits today's theme.

Fight For Your Life

Get a grip on the action
I'm moving heaven and earth
Don't let go of the action
Push for all that you're worth
No denying
It goes against the grain
So Defying
You're screaming again
Fight for your life
Fight for your money
Fight for your life
Fight for your money
Time for steel, stop at nothing
Looking fate in the face
We don't take no for an answer
Grab the lead in the race
Rock hard with a purpose
Got a mind that won't bend
A hard resolution
That is true to the end


If not you, then who?

[FallenAngel]

2013 Daily Encouragement Thread

An ancillary paradox is at work in the kinship between light and dark. We yearn so hard and long to be rid of darkness. Yet without dark, there is no shadow. And without shadow, there is no depth perception. Without any depth perception, we have no sense of direction, no sense of what is near or far. In our need to find our way, we are asked not to bypass darkness but to work with it and through it.

[FallenAngel]

2013 Daily Encouragement Thread

March 10th

Slaythefear wrote:
(If someone will post this in the 'Just Starting Out' Daily Encouragement thread for me, I'd appreciate it. I'm having those issues again today where my ISP or something won't let me into the Just Starting Out section. I posted and then bam, it struck again, so I couldn't finish up.) TIA



To Please Yourself,
Quit Being a People Pleaser

Have your say? leave a comment below after you read!

Pleasing Yourself Makes the World a Happier Place.

Find it hard to please yourself because you?re so busy trying to please everyone around you? This tendency, known as ?people pleasing? has also been called the ?disease to please.?

If you are so worried about trying to make everyone else happy that you neglect to make yourself happy, this can certainly be a problem.

People pleasing usually comes from a belief that other people?s happiness is more important than your own. This is a harmful belief, as it creates feelings of inferiority. Is there any good reason why you have any less right to be happy than anyone else?

You may believe that to please yourself is selfish, and to please others is good and noble. This is not true! You have every bit as much right to be happy as anyone else. There is also no great virtue in trying to please everyone.

Pleasing others is not the same as helping or loving them. Often things that are best for others are things that they don?t like. You could please your kids by feeding them candy, or you could do what?s right for them by feeding them a healthy diet. People often don?t like what is good for them!

It is also important to meet your own needs before you worry about other people?s needs. On an airplane, parents are told that in the event of an emergency, they should fasten their own oxygen mask before assisting their child. If you don't take care of yourself first, you will not be in a position to take care of others.

If you are so busy trying to please other people that you don?t fulfill your own needs, you will wind up running on empty. It's like trying to feed everyone around you, while you starve yourself. This is not only very bad for you, but you will not be much good to anyone else either if you are not strong and healthy.

People pleasing is often a way of trying to gain approval, and to be liked. Your subconscious mind tells you that if you try very hard to make others happy, and not to upset anyone, you will get the admiration you feel that you need.

Caring too much about being liked by others is usually a sign that you don?t really like yourself much. You feel that you are not good enough in some way, but believe that if everyone else thinks you are great, then you will feel better about yourself. This is a totally topsy-turvy way of thinking, and it doesn?t work.

Whether other people have a good or poor opinion of us does not improve our self image. Some of the most popular and beautiful people in the world are terribly insecure, despite being adored by many. Your self image comes from you- there are no short cuts, or ways to buy or earn self respect. You have to develop it from within.

It is also much more probable that you will be genuinely liked and respected by others if you like and respect yourself. Our self image sets a powerful example for those around us. If you feel good about yourself though, it won?t matter as greatly what other people think of you. You won?t need validation from the outside as much.

Trying to please others often fails at getting them to like you anyway. Some people are impossible to please. The harder you try, the pickier they get. It can become a power play, a way of getting you to jump through hoops by withholding the approval they know you want so much.

What?s more, by making yourself a doormat in your desire to please, you will more likely lose respect than gain it. We tend to respect someone who values themselves enough to stand up for what they want, and to please themselves. Trying to please everyone else, at the expense of your own happiness is not smart and it is not helpful.

It is impossible to please everyone anyway. Whether you cut your hair short, keep it long, dye it pink, or shave it off at the suggestion of your friends, there will always be someone who thinks it was much better the other way.

As the song goes, ?You can?t please everyone, so you?ve got to please yourself.? This is pretty good advice for people pleasers. However hard you try to please everyone, it is not going to succeed. It is also very unlikely that you will gain much by trying.

Get rid of those negative ideas that other people?s happiness is more important than yours, that you don?t deserve to be happy, or that it is selfish to please yourself.

Make it your priority to please yourself. If we all did this, the world would be a much happier place!

[NoSugar]

2013 Daily Encouragement Thread

I reposted this at what might be a better place for discussion since this Encouragement thread flows so nicely as it is: https://www.mywayout.org/community/f9...ml#post1476046
Anyway, I think this is a great topic -- so many people here seem to have this personality feature.
NS



Hello, Encouragers and :thanks: !

Just about everything in this post is what I have recently realized I need to be considering - thanks for the worksheet! You asked for comments but I have more of a question.

Until the right questions were asked of me in just the perfect way here on MWO, and I struggled to honestly answer them, I didn't even realize that perfectionism and the need to please others are core issues for me. It is a hard thing to suddenly see myself differently than before and I tried for awhile to rationalize away these uncomfortable truths but have decided to wrestle with them instead. I especially find it hard to reconcile what I considered a strong, confident self-image with these underlying personality traits.

For example, this part of the post struck me:

People pleasing usually comes from a belief that other people?s happiness is more important than your own. This is a harmful belief, as it creates feelings of inferiority. Is there any good reason why you have any less right to be happy than anyone else?

It didn't feel quite like this to me - not that other people are more important - but rather, I felt like I could handle not having things 'my way' better than those around me. I thought I was operating from a position of strength.

Any thoughts??

Thanks again, NS

[Blossoms]

2013 Daily Encouragement Thread

I was incredibly impressed with something Slaythefear wrote in another thread about feeling "boring". I could say "oh I'm not a people pleaser", but then read that and thought "ohhhhh"

"....... another thought...it's normal to have that feeling. I've had it; I've read plenty of others having it. It was ONE reason I didn't stop my behavior. If you haven't watched 'When A Man Loves A Woman' with Meg Ryan, do so. There is a scene that so resonated with me and stayed with me as a real concern of mine until now. She says to the woman helping her in detox that she is afraid she will not be any fun anymore. SHE (we) are afraid of rejection. Wow! People may not like us anymore if we are boring. Do you see the people pleasing in that? Do you see how you are living for others' approval and not your own? Isn't yours the most important of all? No way will you ever please everyone. One person will think you are fun because you will drink with them. Another will not approve because of some behavior you did while intoxicated. Some guy thinks your beautiful; another one doesn't. You'll never win that game. You can win pleasing yourself and being happy with who you are to YOU!"

A lot of food for thought.....

[FallenAngel]

2013 Daily Encouragement Thread

March 13th


You Can Handle It



Sometimes a breakthrough comes on its own. Most times, though, you experience a breakthrough when you have no other choice.

When your back is up against the wall, you?re going to find a way to get through that wall. Even if it once seemed solid and impermeable, when you must get through you?ll find a way through.

It?s good to get out in front of your challenges, and to plan in advance for what you think will happen. Yet even when the unexpected happens, and even when it feels completely overwhelming, you have what it takes to successfully make it through.

When you must, you will. Keeping that in mind will give you the confidence to step positively forward every day, in matters both large and small.

Though it?s smart to carefully plan, it is truly a waste of time to worry. For even if the worst does come to pass, you have what it takes to make the very best of it.

Take a rich, deep breath of fresh air, and feel your confidence grow. Jump joyfully and enthusiastically into life, knowing you can handle whatever may come.

? Ralph Marston

[FallenAngel]

2013 Daily Encouragement Thread

March 14th


Break The Pattern



Fighting against a sense of despair will only make it worse. Instead of letting despair feed on itself, do something positive and proactive to break the pattern.

When you become angry about being angry, that will only make your anger more destructive. The more intensely you feel your frustration, the more frustrated you will become.

The way out is to quickly and decisively break the pattern. Realize that the negative momentum is building and do something so completely unrelated that you knock it off track.

Don?t make your negativity stronger by fighting against it. Instead, make it irrelevant and powerless by turning your attention and putting your energy in a radically different direction.

Be outrageously and unreasonably positive. Be funny and creative and ridiculous and joyful all at the same time.

Smile, laugh and be enthusiastic about life even when you have no reason to be. By breaking the negative pattern, you?ll create many great reasons to smile.

? Ralph Marston

[NoSugar]

2013 Daily Encouragement Thread

FallenAngel;1477591 wrote:
Break The Pattern

...Fighting against a sense of despair
...When you become angry about being angry
...Don?t make your negativity stronger by fighting against it.

? Ralph Marston

Hi, FA

Just like I couldn't successfully control my drinking, I was getting frustrated that I couldn't control how I was feeling about getting over this alcohol addiction. I kept thinking that to succeed, I had to have a good attitude, a positive outlook, overbrimming enthusiasm, and all of that. I was trying to will myself to be happy about it. And in many ways I am but I also am sad, at loose ends, confused, worried, and all those negative things.

When I stopped trying to force myself NOT to feel negative or sad and stopped criticizing myself when I was, it really helped and I actually experienced more of the emotions I was trying to force.

Right now I'm sort of in a 'roll with it' frame of mind.

Hope it works !

NS

[rl]

2013 Daily Encouragement Thread

Good Times Ahead

Hello all, I just want to thank you all and the lord to guiding me tothis site. It has many great minds and inspiring stories. It has got me to day 5, by reading the posts and the toolbox. I know the weekend is almost here but I stay in the now. I know one trip to the store leads to another so I choose to let that urge just hover and be there.

Focus on what you are gaining. Be gratefulon for what you are you losing. Goodbye Bud and guilt. Hello cash and self esteem!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[birdseed]

2013 Daily Encouragement Thread

rl;1477807 wrote: Hello all, I just want to thank you all and the lord to guiding me tothis site. It has many great minds and inspiring stories. It has got me to day 5, by reading the posts and the toolbox. I know the weekend is almost here but I stay in the now. I know one trip to the store leads to another so I choose to let that urge just hover and be there.

Focus on what you are gaining. Be gratefulon for what you are you losing. Goodbye Bud and guilt. Hello cash and self esteem!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

:goodjob:

Two more days and you'll have a week, rl!

[FallenAngel]

2013 Daily Encouragement Thread

March 15th


You Could Or You Can


You could curse and complain about your feebleness, or you can get busy and make yourself stronger. You could seethe with resentment about the past, or you can make the choice to let go and move forward.

You could worry endlessly about what might or might not happen, or you can take steps to successfully prepare yourself for anything that comes along. You could make a long list of all the things that will perhaps go wrong, or you can accept the fact that there will be obstacles and decide to deal with them as they come.

You could hide away from the world inside the walls of your comfort zone where nothing challenges you. Or you can make use of every second of your precious time to explore and experience, to get cold, wet, and dirty, and to feel wonderfully alive.

You could let the smallest defeat turn into a big, imposing excuse for giving up. Or you can learn from what went wrong and then step enthusiastically forward with your newfound knowledge and determination.

You could smugly blame all your troubles on something or someone other than you. Or you can take a long, deep breath, then take full responsibility, and feel how empowering it is to be in total control.

There are lots of things you could have been, could have done, could have seen, could have known, and could have experienced. Yet nothing compares to the wondrous places you?ll go when you do what you know you can.

? Ralph Marston

[NoSugar]

2013 Daily Encouragement Thread

FA, Are you a mind-reader, or what? Or is there just so much I need to HEAR??? :h