How to make Positive Internal Shifts for a happier, healthier life

Each day is a new opportunity.

Striving to live your life as fully as you can is an ongoing process that is alive and it grows with every passing day. It is not a destination you just reach and remain at. Living our best lives — living up to our true personal potential — requires courage, listening, discernment, and increasingly engaging our values and strengths, distinguishing our needs from our wants, so that we can discover and express our best selves within ourselves and to others. We can enhance this learning and growing process by employing a growth mindset, that is, believing our efforts and where we direct our energy empowers our capability to learn, grow, and change. 

Here’s some ways to be in your discernment process so that you can gain clarity, energize, and discover what’s next for you in your life and fulfillment journey:

1. Pause: Mindfully notice that you are here, that you are breathing. Notice that flow of your breath. Pause so that you can be here now.

2. Tune In: Tune into your inner guidance, your inner voice. Listen to the messages that come in, from your mind, body, and spirit.

3. Notice: Notice your feelings and identify the thoughts that come from those feelings. 

4. Discern: What do you want, truly desire? Be in awareness and tap into, and listen to your own intuitive wisdom. What is your intuition telling you in this moment? What are your true values?

5. Take Action: What action can you take now that is aligned with your values? What action steps will really move the needle for you, help you move forward in a meaningful way? Mindfully choose those next steps.

Sometimes we accept our inner emotional state as static, as inevitable. But we do have the power to shift our state, to move ourselves into positive emotions at will. We can choose again, choose the state that will help us move forward and not feel so stuck. Feeling an emotion such as appreciation or gratitude can create a more harmonious state often referred to as “flow”, or “the zone”.

When we get into a state of internal and external connectedness we move into “coherence”. This coherence is directly associated with improved health and cognitive functioning, and it helps us to better access our intuition. One of the most powerful benefits of this coherence state is in helping to build up our resilience to stress or adversity. A big piece of this practice is recognizing how we really feel, asking ourselves the question – what is the feeling here? Tuning into what exactly we are feeling, not thinking, but truly feeling. Recognizing our feelings, not labeling them good or bad, but merely acknowledging them, without judgment, is a powerful and necessary practice. We can simply accept these feelings and then ask ourselves: “How would I like to feel instead?” And taking action to enable us to shift into that desired state. Of course, there are many tools that we can use to make this shift.

The most powerful energy boosters are the feelings we all want more of: appreciation, gratitude, compassion, forgiveness, love, etc. These feelings regenerate and sustain us helping us create nourishment for our cells and reducing fatigue. We can use these feelings as tools to enable us to take action in the direction we want to go.

We can also take stock of what gives us energy and what takes it away. When we know which situations drain us, we can use tools beforehand or at exactly those times in order to get into our desired state. With more awareness of which kind of draining emotions we feel on a regular basis, comes a higher level of determination to choose again. We do not bypass these undesired feelings but by merely choosing another emotion, we just pause the undesired feeling state for later exploration. We do not bypass or ignore these “negative” feelings but merely just not allow them to strangle or paralyze our daily functioning by becoming consumed by their hold on us. We get to choose and choose again, in order to be free.

Try this: The heart’s electrical field has 40 to 60 times more amps of power than the brain, while the heart’s magnetic field is approximately five thousand times stronger than that of the brain. By choosing to generate a heartfelt emotion we have a way more powerful impact on our wellbeing than merely thinking a pleasant thought, or bypassing an unpleasant one.

How will you choose to feel today? You get to choose!

Be Well, Real Well,

Tracey xo