I recently returned from a family holiday. On the last day of our holiday everyone decided to go to the waterslide park. I put my swim suit under my clothes and agreed to go along and sit outside with the baby because he was too young to go in, with a view to possibly going in later. After about 10 minutes my sister and my husband came to see if I was Ok and ask if I wanted to go in. I wasn’t feeling that well, so as the baby was asleep I said I was happy to stay outside and have a rest which I did. After about an hour I woke up and decided that now I did actually feel like going in, so I did quick looks around inside to try and find everyone to no avail. Each time I went inside (abandoning my post) I got more and more into the thinking of how I wanted to go in and couldn’t someone else come and watch the baby. Then the baby woke up and I took him inside looking everywhere even the changing rooms for my son and husband but to no avail. By this point the baby was screaming and I had started to feel very angry. Continue reading
Wellbeing
Contemplating Lack Of Sleep – Is It A State Of Mind?
If you go to any classes about the 3 Principles you will often hear people talk a lot about ‘State of Mind’ and ‘Levels of Consciousness’. What they mean is that we are all going in out of moods all the time and this effects how we see the world and our lives, and this is completely natural. So to explain ‘Levels of Consciousness’: if you imagine a lift on the outside of a high storey building and on the bottom level all you can see is what’s directly in front of you, for example the grass and the trees surrounding the building. As the lift rises to different floors you begin to see more and more, so the tops of the buildings, the surrounding area etc, etc. This is similar to our state of mind. – At the bottom the lift you just see the crowded thoughts in front of you and they seem very real and very compelling. As you rise in the lift you see more and more of the bigger picture and thus gain more and more perspective, so that the thoughts from the bottom of the lift don’t seem so compelling any more. The lift can stay on a floor or move up and down. Sometimes you can be on the bottom floor for a while maybe a few days or longer. Sometimes you can be up and down the lift at different points in the day, depending on how much you are taking your thinking seriously at any given moment.
Someone once said to me ‘lack of sleep’ is a state of mind and I really didn’t get it because to me it seemed so real that it must be an exception to the rule. Now I’m not so sure… Continue reading
Learning To Go With The Feeling In Other Words Learning To Trust Yourself
In the 3 Principles world there is a lot of talk about going with the feeling rather than your intellect. In other words you could say going with your gut instinct, or intuition rather than your rational weighing up of situations.
As a professed Overthinker I have spent many years overthinking everything and going with the feeling is something I still struggle with as I’m so used to relying on my rational mind. People would often say to me ‘ George you need to learn to trust yourself’ and I guess what they mean is trust your feeling (or intuition) rather than asking everyone else’s opinion all the time. Continue reading
What We Can All Learn From Toddler Tantrums
My son is going through what some people call his ‘3nager’ stage. This translates to at times him refusing to do what he is told for no reason that we can gather other than that he doesn’t want to do it. When I say refusing I mean ‘shouting, sulking, crying, and being generally petulant.’ Occasionally this can make for fun and games when I’m trying to get him to nursery on time and have to take the baby too. When he is in this kind of low mood he simply refuses to do comply with what is asked. When you need to get him dressed he is very good at making himself into a dead weight so it’s almost impossible to make him and if you do you are in for quite a few kicks. What I’m learning is as, as quickly as these thoughts of ‘I don’t want to’ come they also pass, once his thoughts change to something else. So for 10 minutes he can be refusing to get dressed and you leave him in his room to sulk and suddenly he changes his mind. – Or he refuses to have his breakfast and while sulking he spots you eating yours and asks to try some and before you know it he has changed his mind and starts eating his. Continue reading
Can Being In A Bad Mood Lead To Inner-Peace?
Due to the pregnancy I’ve had quite a bit of insomnia which has helped me get this blog up before the baby comes so could be seen as a good thing. However the other weekend me and my husband were watching ‘The Voice’ to wind down and I decided to ask him to help me get my ipod working, even though I knew deep down this probably wasn’t the best timing. – I was right it pushed us both over the edge. This resulted in him getting in a huff with me, fair enough and me getting emotional – also fair enough. Because we now understand each others moods and realised it was better to do our own thing rather than aggravate each other further he went upstairs to read and I went downstairs – to watch TV/sulk.
When I was sulking in front of the TV it occurred to me that I could sulk just about what happened and leave it at that, or I could indulge my emotional mood and see where my thoughts went. Because I was in the mood for a good cry I thought I’m going to go with this and indulge myself and boy did I go for it! Continue reading
Decisions – Are They As Important As We Think They Are and Do They Deserve As Much Effort As We Put Into Them?
I am now a few weeks away from hopefully giving birth to our second child and have been given the choice whether to have a cesarean again or not, because last time despite my best efforts that’s the route we had to go down.
In the past I have made decisions by seeking lots of people’s opinions and analysing and re-analysing these opinions along with thoughts of my own, by myself and with other people, which is frankly exhausting for me and everyone else I involve!
This time I have consciously chosen to decide differently. – To wait for decision to come to me rather than to agonise over it.
Does Thinking Affect Our Sociability?
I recently joined a big crowd of our friends who were having lunch, and it struck me how much our thinking can influence our experience of any situation, moment to moment.
At times I was enjoying full conversations with friends, at times I felt overwhelmed by the number of people there and felt I couldn’t really properly talk to anyone. At other times I felt distracted by thinking of feeling self-conscious about things I had said or not said. At times I felt very connected with people at others I felt distant and not connected.
I wandered if everyone was having a similar experience but not realising it or acknowledging it?
Is Being Reactive Bad For Your Health?
We live in a world where we are constantly bombarded by requests on our time via our mobile phones, computers and other media. All this connectivity is incredible and helpful but it also makes increasing demands on our time and can lead us to feeling overwhelmed or under pressure to keep up.
In the past I’ve always believed that if people called you to ask you to do something or invite you to something you should get back to them straight away and always try to do the right thing by them… Now I’m not convinced…
Doing things because we feel we have to rather than we want to or if it’s true to who we are, is that healthy for us?
Is there a difference between being responsive and being reactive? I’m beginning to see that there is.
Where Does Fear Come From?
As someone who has entertained fearful thoughts from early on in life and believed them so much they have affected my life deeply in many ways; including keeping me single into my early 30s to staying in jobs until well past their sell by date when they were no longer healthy for me to be there. – This is something I am curious about.
Confessions of An Overthinker 