Browse Tag: positive psychology

How to heal your inner child?

Regardless of your age, you have experienced several problems and heartaches in the past.  Whether it is bullying, loneliness, insecurity or even lack of attention and affection from your family, all of these affect your current situation. These sufferings and heartaches are not easily healed. Like others, you will carry these feelings even at present days.

To take away bad memories and pains in the past, you need to understand the healing of your inner child.  Through this inner child medication, you can heal your mind and soul. You also have a chance to recover the self-confidence to forgive and forget the pain. As a result, you will live in a better and happy life.

To heal the inner child movement, most experts advise the expressive therapy. This includes the use of play, writing, music and non-judgmental mediums. With this process, you can easily release negative thoughts, sabotaging actions and depleting emotions. You can also express your desires and permit the demonstration of real abundance in your life. In addition, through the use of positive affirmations and mediums of inner child therapy, you can block out and alter the integrated beliefs of your outer parenting.  It is also easy for you to release all outside judgment and formation through the use of inner child therapy.

As time passes by, there are various procedures on how to heal your inner child. Apart from mediums and expressive methods, some experts offer a perfect guide like eBooks and programs. With these guides, they understand everything about inner child.  In addition, asking help from experts is also observed by various people. Whatever types of healing process you desire, it doesn’t matter at all. Just make sure that you follow its steps and your condition becomes even better and effective.   

6 Ways to Stay on Track with Your Goals

Easier said than done, the expression goes. But when it comes to not doing work toward your goals, falling back on this expression can have some serious consequences. Here are a few tips for staying on track.

1: Write it down. When it comes to keeping appointments and meeting deadlines, most people have to write them down—or else they somehow disappear until after they’ve passed. The same is true with goals. Without visually concretizing your aim in writing, your goal is likely to dissipate into thin air.

2. Set a schedule. If your goal doesn’t have a due date, then you can always keep putting it off if things get in the way, or even if you just feel lazy. Put the goal on your calendar. If it’s something big, don’t try to cram too many other things into the days before your deadline.

3. Break it down. Your goal will be easier to accomplish if you break it down into digestible steps. When architects plan a building, they don’t just put it up in one day: it’s built in parts, from the foundation up. The same is true with your goal. Break it down into weekly, monthly, or even yearly chunks, depending on how far out the deadline is.

4. Get Accountable. Studies have shown that when you have to report to someone else, you’re more likely to stay on track. Pick an accountability buddy—it could be someone working towards the same goal, like a gym partner, or perhaps just a friend or family member. Set up times when you’ll check in and notify them of your progress.

5. Be Positive. Remember the story of The Little Engine That Could—he was able to climb the hill because he kept on saying “I think I can, I think I can.” You should have the same reaction towards your goals: verbal and mental positivity. Use affirmations, positive thinking, and support from those around you to reach for the clouds.

6. Treat Yourself. When you hit a milestone, do something nice for yourself, whether it’s going out to lunch or buying a new article of clothing. Plan a special event or prepare to claim a prize when you reach your goal. Teachers are great at leveraging this tactic: when their class hits a behavioral or educational goal they throw a pizza party. Why not use the same strategy and celebrate with a nice treat when you reach the end of the road?

Mindfulness and mental well being

You may feel stressed-out when waiting in a line at the bank or the post office, when driving in traffic or along an unfamiliar route, when facing a deadline, or when having an uncomfortable conversation.

You can even experience stress reactions as a result of anticipating or remembering such events.

Though these stresses seem fairly minor, they can cause all sorts of symptoms, such as muscular tension, headaches, insomnia, gastrointestinal upset, and skin conditions. Long-term stress can also be a factor in serious diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and dementia, particularly if you rely on unhealthy strategies to cope with stress, such as smoking, substance abuse, overeating, or overworking.

One of the gifts that mindfulness offers is helping you recognize that there are choices in how you respond to any stressful situation.

Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist and holocaust survivor, describes this eloquently: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom” (Pattakos 2008, viii).

Even amidst Frankl’s imprisonment, he found ways to provide comfort and healing to those around him, underscoring that, with awareness, everyone has freedom of choice how to respond. The key is awareness.

Of course, conditioning is a powerful force that can make it difficult to change. Just as water finds the path of least resistance, you’ll tend to fall back on habits because in many ways this is the easiest course to follow. This includes habitual ways of seeing and reacting.

To help provide motivation for the challenging work of turning off your autopilot and resisting habitual reactions and behaviors, mindfulness activities such as Mandala art , meditation or breath awareness will help you explore how stress is impacting your life.

Becoming truly aware of the stress in your life and how you interact with it is a necessary first step in choosing new responses that will serve you better.

Let me ask you today – Are you aware in the present moment? And from a scale of 1-10 how aware are you?

(Adapted from the book- Mindfulness Stress Based Reduction workbook)