Thursday, January 17, 2013

Are You Swimming Upstream or Downstream?

Find thoughts that feel good, because it is inevitable that you are going to always be moving toward something. So why not be moving toward something that is pleasing? You can't cease to vibrate, and Law of Attraction will not stop responding to the vibration that you are offering. So, expansion is inevitable. You provide it, whether you know you do or not. The only question is, what is the standard of joy that you are demanding for yourself? ~ Esther Hicks

So ... tomorrow I start my Yoga teacher training. I'm both nervous and excited. But I also feel a deep sense of peace and "rightness" inside. Which I guess is my internal compass telling my I'm on the right track.

I've been doing a lot of reading lately on the Law of Attraction and just paying attention to emotions and what they tell us. The long short of it is, if you feel anxiety, depression, anger, frustration, stress, etc. — basically all the emotions we consider "negative" by the way they affect our bodies and minds — you're going "upstream" in your life or in that situation. You're fighting the tide rather than flowing downward.

The way you know when you're "on the right track" is when you feel relief and ease and peace. It's that simple. Your own barometer on life can really be THAT simple.

Stop and think about the last time you felt release ... the last time you felt ease and peace inside. Maybe it was just a few minutes ago as you sat with your cup of coffee and watched the birds at your bird feeder. Perhaps it was when you were driving and singing your favorite song, walking your dog and smelling the air ... when you were doing Yoga or meditating.

We are so often like robots on automatic ALL the time in our lives, we don't really pay much attention to what our moment-to-moment emotions are telling us. But our emotions, intuition and physical "feelings" are very much tied together. It's like when you walk into a very intensely charged room and you feel suddenly overwhelmed. Or when you encounter someone that just gives you that uneasy feeling inside. You are literally picking up on energy ... on vibrations.

Lets face it. We're earth-bound creatures and very much tied to nature more than most of us realize. So, if we pay more attention at what we're feeling, what our mind is focusing on and what our intuition is telling us, we break the robotic nature and patterns we're constantly, mindlessly walking through every day.

And once we do that, we are literally a stream of information at every moment, just waiting to be noticed and digested. It's truly amazing how much we can learn by just "looking in the mirror" so to speak.

With that, I implore you all to wake up tomorrow morning and start this experiment by being aware of what your mind is doing — even when you're doing something as simple as brushing your teeth — and what emotions you're feeling, how your thoughts and actions are tied into those emotions (pay attention to the cause and effect phenomenon). Next, recognize when you are floating "upstream" (basically, anytime you're feeling anxiety, unrest, anger, frustration, etc.) and adjust your thinking and actions to bringing yourself "downstream," (any thoughts that immediately bring relief). Then you move on to the next thing.

Sounds overly simplistic, but it really can be that miniscule as far as "action" on your part.

It's different for everyone. We all know the things that bring us peace if we really think about it. So access those things when you feel tightness in your chest or stomach, when you feel tension in your neck and back, when you feel your mind is going a mile a minute.

Because the more you actively turn yourself around and flow downstream ... the more you'll attract downstream people and situations in your life.

Don't believe me?

Just try it. 

~C~

1 comment:

  1. I love this analogy. Swimming downstream rather than upstream. I also like how you pointed out that we can recognize when our mind is floating upstream by recognizing the emotions associated with it (i.e. anxiety). I am very excited for you regarding your yoga teacher training. I know you've been looking forward to this :)

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