It’s All To Do With The Way You Wake Up
Do you start your day with anger, frustration and annoyance at the alarm and the need to get up? Do you wake up hoping the day will go away and you can get back to sleep? Have you lost the fun? The confidence to have a go at things. Are you struggling along? Are you just going through the rituals of life? Are you just doing enough at work? Doing what is necessary because you think you ‘ought, should, must do this for the sake of others? Do you feel all washed up and no one is interested in you? Do you feel devoid of vibrancy, and sense of purpose, an aimless victim buffeted by the winds of change? It’s all to do with the way you wake up.
Success in life can be as simple as looking at the way you wake up. We all know that no other person, nothing external can enable you to be happy and successful. Neither can you find your destiny ,your potential, your happiness by leaving it to chance. By hoping for the best. So instead of looking outside yourself and blaming others for what is wrong in your life let’s spend a little time looking at the way you wake up.
If you can wake up in a happy, peaceful and dynamic frame of mind then you will reclaim your confidence, your love for life, your desire to succeed. Believe it or not the moods you start the day with can colour your day and affect the way you behave throughout the day. Therefore if you start the day angry, upset, annoyed and frustrated is there any surprise that things don’t work out for you during the day?
One way of ensuring that you wake up in a positive and powerful frame of mind is to change your ritual before you go to sleep. Either before you go to bed or when you are in bed look back over your day. Now, before you go any further, stop. How are you describing what happened to you today?
Are you focussing on those incidents that drained you or the actions, feedback, decisions and feelings that made you feel good? We want you to concentrate on issues that give you power. The things that occurred during the day that felt successful. What did you succeed at today. What gave you power. What made you feel good. You see, what you focus on is what you get. So if you continue to focus on the negative and the draining issues then you have no choice but to feel sluggish and drained all the time. If you can allow yourself to drift off to sleep whilst thinking positively of your successes then you have the opportunity of being recharged through sleep and waking in a dynamic frame of mind.
In our experience it is sometimes impossible to see the successes of the day. All you can see is the negative. The philosopher Nietzsche had a phrase for this, he called it “the love of your fate". He suggested that when all appears to be wrong you need to remind yourself “This is what I need". It doesn’t matter how bad the experience is he maintains that you need to work with it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. Do not just accept the draining incident and make yourself tired and discouraged but refocus your mind and make the effort to accept it as your fate and you will find that you are able to pull on some hidden strength. In other words whatever happens to you was meant to happen to you and coming through it can only improve you.
If you are unsure about this just take a moment and look back at your life. Can you see the times when you thought you couldn’t cope and yet now appear as turning moments in your life? Basically what we are suggesting is that, ‘nothing can happen to you that isn’t for your benefit’. Even though when it is happening it doesn’t feel like it.
If you are in this place and wake up feeling angry, upset, annoyed and despondent don’t worry. All is not lost. There is still something else you can do to enable you tap into your hidden strength.
Grab five minutes or so before the rest of the house wakes up. Or claim the bathroom for an extra five minutes and sit quietly and plant the seeds of peace and love in your mind. Just sit down or stand quietly in the shower and think of a peaceful place or scene and allow it to envelope you and become part of you. Or think of a loving tide washing over you. A feeling of warmth and peace. A feeling of love and acceptance. Just stay in that place for as long as you can. Enjoying the moment of being loved and at peace with the world. When you do this you are connecting with your natural strengths, your natural power of peace and love which naturally bring freedom and positivity to your life. The result is a feeling of harmony and contentment. Someone who is ready to face the world.
If you feel sceptical about what we have said and don’t believe that you can change yourself so easily, when you have time, have a go at the following exercise that we came upon several years ago.
Find a place, either a room or the garden, where you can be alone for a couple of minutes. Now imagine that your nose is really close to the ground. Got it. Now walk around for about three minutes imagining that your nose is really close to the ground.
When you have finished note or write down your experience.
If you can’t let go of the feeling shake your head like an animal shakes itself when wet to return to normal.
Now start again but this time imagine that your nose is close to the ceiling. Again walk around for three minutes with the thought that your nose is really close to the ceiling.
Write down your experience.,
Did you note any differences in your attitude in the exercises?
How was your breathing during these exercises?
What did you feel?
When did you walk slower/quicker?
Usually people say that there feelings were more open and aware when they were thinking that their noses were nearer the ceiling.
The point is that nothing changed in your life. We just asked you to change your awareness. It’s the same in life, if you change your awareness then you are able to change your opportunities. When your awareness is expanded you can only grow. If you are aware of yourself as a loving, peaceful, powerful, resourceful human being then the chances are that is what you become and therefore you change the way you wake up.
Good Luck
Graham and Julie
www.desktop-meditation.com
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