The Road to Integration: Self-Acceptance and Acknowledging your Shadow Self

The idea is to be integrated mind, body and soul.

Greetings, All!

I have been gone for a little over one month, and in the meantime I have been making some significant observations of things in my world and trying to make sense of it all. One of the things I have been introduced to – my older sister schooled me on this one – is the idea of my shadow self. My shadow self, as I understand it, consists of my darker self, the part of me I’m not particularly proud and fond of, that part of me that I perceive as repulsive to the world, or (with pinkies up and lips twisted) behavior unbecoming of a civilized human being. Hmph. My shadow self consists of repressed emotions that I choose to hide from myself and others because they’re uncomfortable. And when they do show up, I subconsciously project them onto others and then criticize these “others” because it’s easier for the ego to criticize others than to look critically at itself…

This week’s musings: Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness

Quantum mechanics is interested in studying physical phenomena occurring at microscopic levels.

Greetings everyone!

How has your week been? I hope it’s been fantastic, enlightening, and positive overall. Along my personal development journey I’ve been exploring quantum mechanics (of all things), and am mainly interested in this topic as it relates to the reality of things, personal development, and how we can all help others help themselves. Ultimately, that’s all I’m really interested in when I investigate these different scientific ideas. I’m interested in how scientific findings can help us navigate through our everyday lives, coupled with our spiritual practices, professional pursuits, or whatever else strikes our fancies. I’m interested in exploring new ideas that help people get where they want to go in life. So it seems that my interests and my curiosity have led me here to the unknown, for real! Please come along with me on this adventure, and all I ask is that you bring with you an open mind willing to be stretched…

An Analysis of Change: Learning to Let Go to Move Forward (Just Like You Do on Monkey Bars)

Image credit: Fotosearch.com

“Let go. Why do you cling to pain? There is nothing you can do about the wrongs of yesterday. It is not yours to judge. Why hold on to the very thing which keeps you from hope and love?” ~Leo Buscaglia

In my personal experiences with trying to change things about myself and my life that were no longer useful I came to realize that I was hindering my own growth and positive change by refusing to let go. It’s a weird paradox, you know, this business of letting go to move forward. I’ve always had this idea that I was obligated to remember things of my past, whatever was still accessible to my conscious mind, whatever was embedded deeply in my emotional memory because these things were there and wouldn’t go away, so they were supposed to be there, right? Even though many of these experiences, feelings, things of my past were uncomfortable to recall, scary, limiting, outdated, outgrown, painful, subjugating, I still believed that they were supposed to be there, supposed to be recalled, supposed to be relived, supposed to be held on to. After all, they made me who I am, right? I thought, These memories or ill-feelings will always be with me, I need these things to move forward because they are me and I am them, right? Absolutely WRONG.

Can’t See the Forest for the Trees: How to Take a Mental Break from Self-Improvement Overload!

Too much of anything is just not a good thing.

The past few weeks have been overwhelmingly amazing for me in the area of personal development. I have learned a lot about the brain, including the fact that we have “3 brains” with a myriad of different functions. I learned about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and how this can be self-induced. I’ve revisited a couple of the personal development “greats” such as M. Scott Peck and Stephen Covey, along with countless other “tasks” that I’ve imparted upon myself along my self-improvement journey. In all of my “getting,” though (getting all kinds of information), I’ve forgotten to just relax, to step away from the table, so to speak, to let the food digest before going in for more. As a result, I nearly lost my mind this week, and had to think of a remedy quickly in order for me to keep my head about things.

Self-Directed Neuroplasticity: My New Favorite Thing

A Balanced Mind is a Terrible Thing to Surrender

So, along my personal development journey I’ve recently been led to this discussion about the brain and how there is new evidence (at least 5 yrs. old) that suggests that the brain doesn’t stop expanding and changing after childhood, but that it’s ever-expanding. The implication is that you can teach an old dog new tricks if the old dog is a willing participant (woof! woof!). Therefore, the idea that behavior and ways of being in adulthood are fixed is a bunch of bologna. So much for the “that’s just how I am” argument…

Shifting from Survival to Abundance

For Emergencies ONLY

In the past few weeks there’s been a topic that’s been gnawing at me, ready to be explored, discussed, and, “attended to” in my own personal life. This topic is living in survival mode. For the past several weeks I’ve had discussions on the topic, I’ve read articles, and have even looked to psychological concepts to help me understand how one comes to live in survival mode, particularly in the land of “milk and honey” where, compared to other parts of the world, there is plenty. 

Abandonment Issues? How have these issues shown up in your life?

So, I was perusing the web trying to make sense of some of my personal issues because after all, if the world wide web can’t help me patch my life together to become some recognizable, attractive whole then what’s the use?

I found this website that discussed abandonment issues, and it discussed how these issues show up differently for different people in their lives. The site then asked “How do abandonment issues show up in your life?” And then, this blog post was born.

It Takes As Long As It Takes: BEing OK With the Adventurous Process of Getting Your Sh*t Together.

 

Greetings,

 

I am writing this blog entry nearly 6 months after I declared that I would add more blog entries to this site, get more consistent, stay focused on this project, and blah, blah, blah. Well, “being as though” (a term my mother said I used quite a bit as a teenager for whatever random reason) THAT hasn’t happened, and, in fact, the opposite has happened since it has been 6 months since my last entry, I decided that I would allow myself to be more accepting of my particular growth process.

Beware of DOGma…and its owners!

Retrieved from FFRF.org

I’ve always grappled with this idea of not really “feeling” religion like that (simply meaning that religion didn’t resonate with me), yet calling myself “spiritual.” I would listen to people’s interpretations of spirituality, and listen to religious people tell me that I can’t be spiritual without having God in my life, which meant reading my Bible, engaging in fellowship with other “believers,” which would, perhaps, have to take place in a church. I just wasn’t feeling it. And I had difficulty explaining why I wasn’t feeling it because religious factions had done such a phenomenal job of dissuading me from any religious involvement whatsoever, so much so that I didn’t even have much interest in reading much of the biblical scripture to gain my own personal understanding of spiritual truth.

How to recover from being “undercover” so long that you start to believe your cover.

Hello world! That’s a helluva title, isn’t it? LOL Reminds me of the film Unknown starring Liam Neeson. The film doesn’t really have that much to do with why I chose this title for this blog post or anything, though. I just realized there was a correlation between like this title, and the movie. I just was thinking about that as I was writing…and then decided to write what I was thinking, so…um…yeah…OK… *insert awkward throat-clearing sound here*

Moving on….