These 3 things will create the life you long for

I know.  Really Danielle, three things and that’s it?  What psychobabble nonsense is this?

Sigh.  I get it.  I hate those ‘click bait’ titles too.  You know the ones that have you think they have the answer to something you are deeply curious about.  And you open it and go, ‘For goodness sake, really?  There’s nothing new there for me’.

You swear to yourself you’ll  never open another one again and then someone else pops along and tempts you with the answer to a question you never knew you had.

And here I am, landing another one in your inbox.

Oops.

Except I have actually got three things that I truly believe change EVERYTHING.  So know that even if you read this and go, ‘For goodness sake, really?’ I am saying to you, LOOK AGAIN.  Go again.  Revisit every single word.  Because these three gems hold the key to the creation of an unimaginable life.

Here we go then.

1. Dedicate yourself to the Mastery of Your Thoughts

You know this one.  The Committee in your head starts its board meeting before you even open your eyes in the morning.  The alarm clock goes off and they’ve already started gathering their papers, clunking coffee cups and starting the day’s agenda.

Who knows what kind of mood they’re in?  They might be celebrating the successes of yesterday or grumpy that they had a terrible night’s sleep or they’re anxious about the day ahead and that meeting you are pretty much GUARANTEED to stuff up or a million other things in between.

They got a lot of stuff to talk about and ZERO time to waste.

And that Board Meeting, which started without any conscious intention from you, has the power to set your mood and attitude for the whole day.

If you let it.

Because here’s the thing you haven’t twigged yet.

Your thoughts are not the truth.  They don’t get everything right and lady, they love to chitter chatter on and on and on.

I know this is a hard one to get your head around, and you CAN have a different relationship with them.

You can learn to hold them more lightly and not take everything they say so seriously.  You can start to notice that when suffering enters your life it is created by your THOUGHTS and not the thing that is actually happening.

I know, you think I am actually INSANE right now and yet, yes.  Yes, yes, yes.  Truly.   Pain is something all humans encounter.  It’s part of our life experience, guaranteed.  Suffering?  Lady it’s another game entirely, and your thoughts are at the heart of it.

If there was such a thing as a blog that taught the entirety of Thought Mastery, I’d have at least eleventy billion pounds in the bank by now.  Bad luck on that one for both of us.

And for today this.

Start noticing how much your thoughts dictate what is going on in your world.  Your mood, your actions, your arguments, your joy.   Start to believe it could be possible to view them and respond to them differently. 

And then get out in the world and find your path to uncovering how to change your relationship with them.  You can start with these two blogs by the incredible Nic Devlin to get you going:

Would you just stop talking about meditation? I just CAN’T do it!

Make 2018 the year you establish your lifelong fundamentals

Before I go onto number two, imagine this for one moment.  That when you start to get stressed, you have the ability to turn it down faster than you turn it up.  That when you self attack, you get hurt but have no lasting sense of suffering.  That when you get anxious about the future, you immediately remember you are safe and all is well.

That’s what I’m talking about lady.  From here, everything changes.

Oh, and by the way, this one takes TIME and discipline and continued practice.  Notice that your thoughts are already telling you, you’ve tried this one and it doesn’t work and then have a good old laugh at yourself for thinking it’s some kind of magic wand.  It’s so much more rewarding than that.

2. Let go of your need to feel comfortable all the time

This one’s a doozy.

Your desire to feel comfortable has you do all kinds of things that you don’t like.  And once again, it’s all related to what’s going on in the mind.

Familiar with this scenario?  You get off the phone from a heated conversation.  Your heart is already pumping a little faster than you would like.  You want to STOP feeling like this right now thank you very much.

Ah, the fridge.  A great place to relieve feelings of discomfort.  Or a quick trip to the supermarket for some particularly poor food choices.  Better yet, a greasy takeaway.  Next, the wine bottle and the phone (especially good for furious texts looking for sympathy from friends or even better a good old post on Facebook calling for support), perhaps the cigarette packet or even a quick online shopping spree.

Anything to take away the feelings that you do not like experiencing.

Here’s the thing about discomfort.  It’s a bit like one of those tie pulls that you use to secure something firmly.  The more you resist it, the tighter it gets.  Food, drink and immediate releases of angry emotion give you a very quick burst of relief, but before you know it each one of them has escalated into guilt, shame or self attack.  The very discomfort you were sub consciously looking to remove, has just dialled itself up, BIG STYLE.

The alternative is surprising and it’s all back to thought mastery again (sorry, sneaky I know).

The key to making this whole thing slow down and pass through you with a whole tonne of less angst is to LET IT BE.

To simply say to yourself, ‘wow, I feel uncomfortable.  I don’t like it much.  It will pass if I just acknowledge it’.

It’s the difference between a bad hour and a bad day.  Or a bad day and a bad week.  Or a bad week and a bad month.  Discomfort gets worse because YOU dial it up.

Oh, and this one takes practice too.  Of course it does.  You’ve been using your discomfort reaction mechanisms for a LONG time lady.  Time to change the game.

Blowing your mind yet?  #sorrynotsorry.

Onwards…there’s one more.

3. Actively seek out every place in your life where you are holding fear

Pretty much every time in life that we are not creating the things we want, there’s fear behind it.

And fear is definitely in our Top 10 of irrational behaviours.

Take this one for example.

Last week, I locked myself out of my house.  Just me, Scruffy the dog and three poo bags (and no, there was nothing creative to be done with the poo bags like fashioning a rope, they were just for collecting poo).

I had no phone, nothing.  My husband was literally the other end of the country. 

I walked out into the street knowing that Nic (who lives a 40 minute walk away) had a spare key, but no idea whether she was in or not.  I was about to start walking when I realised I could ring my husband (the only mobile number I know) to get him to let Nic know I was coming in case she was about to go out.

So then I had to find someone to let me use their phone.   In the end I did this twice because I had a second idea that I also had an AirBNB lock box outside the flat that I didn’t know the number to and that could save me the long walk that might not result in keys anyway.

All simple enough then.  Except this.

It took only minutes for me to notice that I was pretty nervous about asking people for help. 

In fact I let several people walk by me because I didn’t think they looked like they would be that keen.  And when I did get the second person to help me use his internet, I gave him his phone back BEFORE I had the answer because I had decided that I had bothered him enough.

I walked FORTY FIVE minutes to Nic’s house to get keys when I could have asked at least FORTY people to help me and probably got into my house quicker.

That friends, is the genius of fear.

The absolute worst that could have happened to me is that someone looked at me like I was a bit crazy and carried on walking.

So what on earth was my mind up to telling me NOT to ask?  Not to bother people.  Not to interrupt their day.  BONKERS.

I loved this lesson.  Truly.  This is my year of fearlessness and it only took me about twenty minutes to notice what I was up to.   Because I have a great relationship with my thoughts these days, I was able to laugh at it and when I finally got home, I wrote a post to share my madness with others.

Fear crops up in the most surprising of places.

Get used to spotting it.

Commit to eliminating it.

I don’t mean leap off houses for the hell of it.   I mean notice where it features in your every day life.  Give your attention to noticing when the only thing creating difficulty for you is YOU.  And then make a commitment to moving through it, to letting it go.  At the very least to letting it make a decision and then not beating yourself up for it because it’s pretty funny how you do that sometimes.

That’s it friends.

• Hold your thoughts lightly.
• Let discomfort be.
• Uncover your daily fears and move through them.

With these three things comes freedom, presence, joy, magic and a whole bunch of other things you can’t even imagine yet.

And who doesn’t want a piece of that?

So, even if you don’t know HOW, just believe you can. 

Get yourself on the path to self-mastery.  You’ll be amazed at what you uncover.

Loving you,

​​​​​​​

Danielle x