Mind Over Mood: Change How You Feel by Changing the Way You Think

by Dan Joseph

There is a method of inner healing that’s very common in the field of cognitive therapy. I find it to be a powerful technique, and one that’s consistent with many spiritual paths.

In this article, I’d like to present a slightly modified version of this method, and illustrate how it can be used in daily life. I call it ‘The Matrix.’

In this practice, you create a set of columns and rows on a piece of paper - a matrix. I’ve outlined the format below. Then you use this matrix to reorient your thoughts and feelings.

Here is the format:

Let me fill that in with an example. A few seconds ago, I knocked a cup of coffee onto my computer. For me, that counts as a distressing situation. Therefore, it’s a good experience to plug into the matrix. Here is how I began to fill in the boxes:

In the first column, I simply described the situation. In the second column, I made a list of some of my feelings: in this case, frustration (with myself), guilt (about my mistake), and nervousness (about the repercussions of the situation).

I find it helpful to make this feeling-list. By naming our specific feelings, we bring them up into awareness. We take ourselves out of denial. We reduce the tendency to ’squash things down.’

However, in this practice, we don’t stop there. We use our feelings to move on to the underlying thoughts.

As I mentioned in my book Inner Healing, the relationship between feelings and thoughts is like the relationship between smoke and fire. Distressing feelings are the smoke. Distressing thoughts are the fires that give rise to the smoke. In this case, where there’s smoke, there is fire - where there are distressing feelings, there are distressing thoughts underneath.

In column three, we uncover the thoughts which are fueling the feelings. Here is what I came up with:

As you can see, I uncovered three sets of self-attacking thoughts in column three. I probably could have come up with many more - but these were a good start. Writing them out in the matrix was extremely helpful. To be honest, I wasn’t even aware of these thoughts until I wrote them out.

As I filled in this third column, the key was to realize that my feelings (in column two) were coming from my thoughts (in column three), not simply from the situation. You could say that the situation was a ‘trigger’ for the thoughts. I’m certainly not glad that I spilled coffee on my computer. But it was the thoughts that I needed to work on now.

Let me now move on to column four - the heart of this exercise. In the final column of the matrix, you substitute self-forgiving thoughts for each of the self-attacking thoughts in column three. This is the big step. This turns the mind from self-criticism to self-forgiveness; from distress to peace.

As you do this, you can focus on simply moving in the right direction. You don’t have to take a huge leap into complete forgiveness; you can take a series of little steps. Every bit of progress is helpful.

Here is what I came up with, as I made this substitution:

Those self-forgiving thoughts may not have been the ‘highest’ thoughts in the world, but they helped me to shift my mind toward a more self-forgiving space. As I did that, the feelings of frustration, guilt, and nervousness were replaced to some degree - by a greater sense of peace and self-acceptance. That is the goal of this practice.

find that this ‘cognitive restructuring’ work - replacing self-attacking thoughts with self-forgiving thoughts - is like priming a pump. We locate our self-attacking thoughts, and replace them with self-forgiving thoughts. We do this mechanical work over and over until the flow of loving, forgiving thoughts begins to run on its own. There is some work to do at the beginning. But we’re simply preparing our minds to receive the divine flow.

Dan Joseph is the author of Inner Healing and Inspired by Miracles, two books inspired by A Course in Miracles. Dan invites you to sign up for his free monthly newsletter at http://www.DanJoseph.com.

Health and Wellness

by: Wendy Betterini

Living a healthy lifestyle will not only make us feel better physically and mentally, but it can also greatly improve our productivity at home and work as well. Many people think they lack the time (or money) that it takes to lead a healthy lifestyle, but the fact is that it is far easier than one might think. Making small, simple changes that lead to a healthy lifestyle is as easy as taking a look at what we put in our bodies and how we treat ourselves on a day-to-day basis.

Eating properly is essential to providing our bodies with the proper fuel that is needed to get us through each day. Fueling our bodies with excess sugars and highly-processed foods increases the production of insulin in our systems, which eventually affects the sugar in our blood. This up and down in our blood sugar levels drain our energy and keep us from focusing on the tasks at hand.

Eating whole grains and complete proteins will level out the blood sugar and will also help decrease food cravings throughout the day. Our bodies are much better able to use the fuel supplied when the sources include lean proteins, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. The result is sustained energy and proper nutrition. Highly-processed foods do not provide the vitamins and minerals our bodies need, and may actually harm us with additives such as Trans fats and preservatives.

Even if we practice proper eating habits, we may not always get the nutrition we need. If our diets are lacking nutrition due to a hectic lifestyle, supplementing with vitamins, minerals, and/or herbs can help. Deficiencies in many vitamins and minerals can cause problems with digestion, eyesight, and even sleeping patterns. Keeping the proper level of nutrients in our blood gives our bodies the added fuel when our diets fail to provide it. A good multi-vitamin will include most of what is needed, but choose a chewable brand for maximum absorption.

Another important factor in healthy living is staying hydrated. Providing hydration for our bodies is crucial to keeping our systems working optimally. Our bodies are composed mostly of water, and require about two liters of water per day, not only to maintain the proper water level, but to also flush out the impurities that are created through the body’s daily processes. Proper hydration is necessary in sustaining our energy, and also aids in properly burning the fuel we have taken in by way of food.

To burn the extra fuel we taken in, we must exercise and burn calories. Without exercise, our bodies will only burn so many calories daily. Any excess fuel will turn into those ugly fat deposits so many of us wish we didn’t have. It is now suggested that to lead a healthy lifestyle, one must incorporate a half hour of exercise each day. This can be fulfilled by simply taking a pleasurable one-mile walk during lunch or after work. Speed and distance aren’t usually as important as keeping your body active on a daily basis. This alone should give you the pep and vitality needed to be more productive at home or work.

Finally, we should always listen to what our bodies are telling us when we are sick or feel “out of sorts.” This is the body’s way of telling us to recognize that we aren’t leading as healthy a lifestyle as we should. If we make some of the simple changes mentioned above, we will go a long way putting our mind and bodies back in shape.

Wendy Betterini is a freelance writer and web designer in New England. She is the owner of http://www.WorkatHomeBalance.com, which features work/life balance tips for entrepreneurs, home business owners, telecommuters and freelancers. Visit today for more tips on balancing work and family under one roof.

Remembering Wholeness: A Personal Handbook for Thriving in the 21st Century

by Carol Tuttle

Happiness is a choice. The more happiness you choose, the more life presents you with experiences to feel happy about. If you are feeling blue or even downright depressed, you must make the decision to “get happy.”

The following tips can help you; however, if you are seriously depressed, get some professional help. There are many new cutting-edge energy therapies that clear away negative emotions and negative thinking.

Find a professional who is more interested in giving you tools and guidance in generating more happiness than in trying to figure out why you feel the way you do. It is not necessary to find out why we feel sad or depressed to clear these feelings.

The bottom line is, if we give a lot of attention to what we don’t want, we create more of it. To learn more about energy therapies that are designed to work with the mind/body energy system, including thoughts and feelings, go to:
www.caroltuttle.com.

1. Choose to be happy rather than right.
2. Repeat aloud: “It doesn’t matter.”
3. Pay it forward. For every kind deed offered to you, do a kind deed for someone else.
4. Write thank-you notes frequently. The energy of gratitude feeds happiness.
5. Smile-even if you don’t feel like it. You eventually will!
6. “Tap-out” your sad feelings. Using your fingertips, tap all over the top of your head while repeating: “I am free of this sadness. I am now feeling happy.” Tapping on the nerve endings on the top of your head will start to lift this heavy, sad energy.
7. When you think a complimentary thought about someone-tell them.
8. Refrain from making judgments-think something positive instead.
9. Whistle.
10. Skip around your house.
11. Turn on your favorite upbeat song and sing along.
12. Ask your angels to flow to you the energy of happiness.
13. Patch your right eye if you are thinking negative thoughts. When you put an eye patch on your right eye, you quiet the left brain and its negative chatter.
14. Hug someone-tightly.
15. Ask your children to tuck you in bed and read you a story for a change.
16. Stay in the present. Let the future be just that: the future.
17. Hold a newborn baby and welcome them into the world.
18. Give some service to someone who is more needy than you.
19. Exercise regularly.
20. Pray and meditate.

And, just because I like to give a little extra, because it makes me happy,

21. Love yourself and make the choice to “BE HAPPY.”

*Carol Tuttle is a Master Energy Therapist and the author of the best-selling Remembering Wholeness: A Personal Handbook for Thriving in the 21st Century. She is a popular speaker and seminar leader with a series of best-selling CD’s on her seminars. Go to http://www.caroltuttle.com

I Never Knew I Had A Choice: Explorations in Personal Growth (with InfoTrac)

by: Dave Czach

Today’s society and your private world are the results of free will. We have arrived here today through intention, ignorance or abuse. Some people understand and use free will daily. Some people completely deny it. And other people simply mock it and complain it “doesn’t work.”

Free will gives you the power of choice. You always have a choice. You can choose the same behavior or path you usually select. Or you can create a new result. For example, if someone calls you a “loser,” do you have a knee-jerk reaction of anger? If so, your behavior was on auto-pilot allowing a pre-programmed, subconscious trigger to surface. Completely bypassing your consciousness.

Next time, practice conscious thinking and use your free will to choose your interpretation of the event and your subsequent action. Take a second to take a deep breath to help raise your consciousness. Then decide if the “loser” statement is valid or not. If invalid, let it roll off your back. Remembering that most negative opinions are simply people’s expressions of something they don’t like about themselves. If the “loser” statement holds some truth - or is dead-on accurate - control your emotions. Don’t become angry. Allow the trigger to surface. And release the trigger.

The rise of negative triggers is a blessing in disguise. By using your free will and taking a second to raise your consciousness, you can identify a mental or emotional block. By asking the right questions within, you will be able to release the emotions of the trigger and experience growth in your personal and/or spiritual journey.

In the end, the quality of your life depends on daily usage of your free will to raise your consciousness and positively control your life. In doing so, you can shine brightly as intended.

About The Author
Dave Czach is an “experiential” mind-body-spirit researcher since 1991. He is also the publisher of the free and insightful newsletter at http://iWantSelfHelp.com/news.

New Dimensions in Women\’s Health, Third Edition
by Carol Tuttle

Everything at its finest level of creation is energy. We are exchanging energy and silently communicating energetically with every person with whom we come into contact. Energy impressions are always our first impressions that influence what we think or feel about others.

Everyone has an invisible energy system that flows energy on pathways or meridians. These same meridians have multiple pressure points that have been a means of working with the energy to keep it flowing. Acupressure, acupuncture, and reflexology are the more common modalities we have in the Western world.

The Chinese term for energy is “chi” which means life force energy. When our energy is blocked, scrambled or leaking, we feel depleted and heavy. When you are energy-depleted, it is more difficult to manage your emotions, think positive thoughts and stay healthy.

In the field of holistic health, energy medicine and energy psychology are growing rapidly. As a practitioner of energy therapies, I have assisted numerous women who are energy challenged.

I recently assisted a woman who was bedridden due to a severe case of chronic fatigue. After eight weeks of working with her body’s energy system to restore it to good health and teaching her how to take care of her own energy health, she has had a miraculous recovery. She is out of bed and fully active. Her parents see it as a miracle. Our energy responds very quickly when we know what to do to correct it. After all, it’s just energy.

The following are some of the most common energy problems for women and their corrections:

1. Taking on other people’s emotional energy. Our energies are magnetic in nature. A common codependent pattern for women is< to play the role of a "pleaser." The primary dysfunction of this role is to always put others' needs before your own. Women that are pleasers tend to be very psychic in nature. This helps them know what others need without even having to ask. A common aspect of this role is to take on the negative emotion other people are feeling or processing.

Emotion is energy in motion. We can attract that energy to us when we are not safeguarded from it. It is possible to take on the energy of people you do not even know! It can even happen at the grocery store. All you want to do is go in and buy a gallon of milk, and you leave not only with the milk but also with the sadness and loneliness of ten other women in the store!

Children process a lot of negative energy for their parents. If you are stressed, your children intuitively are aware of that and can play the role of trying to "please" or "act-out" in response to the negative energy you are running.

In the early days of my studies of energy medicine, my daughter would come home from junior high school nearly every day with a headache. As I came to understand this dynamic of taking on other people's energies, I realized she was doing that sub-consciously at school. I helped her correct it, and the headaches eventually subsided.

Correction: Your central meridian is one of your primary energy pathways that runs from your pubic bone up to your bottom lip. It is like a radio receiver that channels other people's negative thoughts and emotions into you. Pretend you have a zipper running up your torso between these two points. "Zip up" your central meridian starting at your pubic bone and continuing until you reach your bottom lip. "Zipping up" your central meridian will "zip-up" your energy. You will feel more confident and positive about yourself and your world, think more clearly, and be able to protect yourself from the negative energies around you. "Zip up" your children before they go to school.

2. Leaking energy. We have another invisible energy system called chakras. Whereas meridians are an energy transportation system, chakras are energy stations. The word chakra means disk, vortex, or wheel. There are seven energy stations positioned from the base of your spine to the top of your head. In energy health, if you are losing or leaking energy at the base chakra located at the bottom of your spine, you may feel depression, anxiety and exhaustion.

Many women are energy depleted because they are not able to hold enough life force energy or chi. In this energy condition, you are flushing energy down and away from you, much like a toilet flushes water down. In order to maintain good energy health, you want energy spiraling up into your base chakra.

Correction: When there is a leak, you have to patch it. Close your eyes and imagine you can see the energy leaking out of your tailbone. Imagine a patch large enough to cover the leak. Place the patch over the leak. Imagine you can go beneath the energy and reverse the flow to spiral it up into your body through your tailbone.

3. Homolateral energy flow. The left hemisphere of the brain sends information to the right side of your body, and the right hemisphere sends information to the left side. This crossing of energy helps you feel more balanced, think more clearly, and improves your coordination. When your energies are not crossing, they are running a homolateral pattern-straight up and down the body. In this state you cannot access or utilize your brain's full capacity or your body's full intelligence.

Babies naturally have a homolateral flow. It is the function of crawling that initiates the energies flowing in a crossover pattern. Everyone that I have assisted with CFS and Epstein Barr has a homolateral energy flow. People who actively participate in a regular exercise program usually have healthy crossover patterns.

Correction: To cross your energies and keep them flowing in a healthy crossover flow, march in place lifting the opposite leg and arm simultaneously for about 20 steps. Or just get on the ground and start crawling! Encourage your baby to crawl and delay walking until they are 12 months old. Early walking interferes with their energy establishing a healthy crossover flow.

My oldest daughter walked at nine months as a result of eager parents! She was challenged all the way up through high school in math, reading and spelling. In grade school, she was tutored on a regular basis. When she was 16, I was introduced to this process. I showed her the correction, and she faithfully marched daily. By the end of her senior year in high school, she was awarded a scholarship to a local university and has been on the Dean's list ever since.

There is much to be learned about energy health and taking care of our own energies. Good resources are Carol Tuttle's book, Remembering Wholeness: A Personal Handbook for Thriving in the 21st Century, and Donna Eden's book, Energy Medicine, about how to boost your body's energy.

Carol Tuttle, author of Remembering Wholeness: A Personal Handbook for Thriving in the 21st Century, is a gifted energy health practitioner. She is board-certified as a master level rapid-eye therapist, a form of energy psychology. She has assisted hundreds of clients restore their physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health. For more information on her work and writings go to http://www.caroltuttle.com