Once you have decided to go for it, to really make the necessary changes in your life, you can then begin to deeply assess your situation.
For most, initially all the problems appear to be outside of self. Relationship problems, money problems, work and achievement issues, etc.... For some, everything seems to be related to some personal affliction like a physical ailment, an addiction, or a personal pattern of behavior or compulsion that is easy to identify. For others, there is a consistent mood, or emotion that is constantly being experienced and driving their reactivity and behavior.
In current popular treatment methods, medication is used to address mood regulation and the diagnosis of "bipolar" disorder has become very popular as a diagnosis that justifies medication. In addition, Mood Disorders include Anxiety and Depression and medication is provided to allieviate these disorders.
Prior to the major onslaught of medication based treatments, life was expected to involve anxiety and depression to some extent as reactions to challenges and losses. Only the most extreme mood instability and disorder would have been recommended for medication.
If you are really at the point where you want to engage your life consciously and proactively, no longer simply relying on the advice of others, you must begin to really educate yourself on the ways you can engage your healing and development. There are many ways to begin to strengthen yourself and make changes in your life.
First, take responsibility for every person in your life. They are your mirrors and they are reflecting something important to you. It may not be easy to discern what the meaning of this mirror is in your life, but they are there as a reflection of some aspect of you that you need to look at.
Second, give up playing the victim. You are a creator and you have within your CENTER OF RIGHT ENERGY tremendous power to achieve your own joy and creativity and to heal imbalances and distortions.
Identify your true strengths. Our strengths are frequently hidden under our short-comings and emerge as we transform and change them. If you think of all of our patterns as imbalances caused by distortions in the way the CENTER OF RIGHT ENERGY is reaching the surface or is powerfully hitting each of the planes of our being.
Planes of Being
Physical, Emotional, Mental and Spiritual
Physical Level
includes all the bodily ailments, tension, pain, limitation, and posturing that occurs in the body. It includes your energy system which includes your aura, or the way energy moves through and emanates from you.
Emotional
E-mote means Energy IN Motion. Perception occurs and creates Emotion. Perception is organized by the holding patterns in the body and by the associate memory systems which then create patterns. Therefore, usually for most, perception is repetitive and limited. It creates the same emotional experiences over and over again. Usually these emotions are painful and limiting. Emotions could be joyful, and motivating in a proactive way. Showing the person how to engage and move forward. Emotions occur as a result of Perception and they reflect underlying DESIRE. The stronger the DESIRE the more limited the range of perception. Said more simply, we see what we WANT to see! Each Emotion can lead to a PROACTIVE behavior rather that a REACTIVE behavior.
Emotional Code and the necessary Action To Engage
Joy: Desire to Live
Take full responsibility for who and what you are and Create!
Sadness: Desire to Change
Identify what must be let go of and what must be moved into and take responsiblity to move forward into the necessary changes
Anger: Desire to FIght
Identify what you are really fighting FOR and do so Constructively
Fear: Desire to Retreat
Is the Fear based on a real threat to your life? Usually NOT! Usually our fears are EGO based. How will this look to my parents, friends, strangers etc.... Will this proove how unworthy I am? Is this a mistake? etc...etc...
Step-back. Get Support. IDentify the PROACTIVE direction you want to go in and step into your challenge! As a deeply powerful and respected Naqual often said, "the only failure is a failure to fight!"and in this case you must fight for your SELF.
Usually the real battle is with our sense of unworthiness, self pity or some other shortcoming in our personality that must be transformed into a strength. The real fight is within and we are fighting for our SELF-RESPECT and true knowledge of our CENTER OF RIGHT ENERGY. From this center we can engage life with all of our challenges in creative and successful ways.
IF you are engaging therapy, understand at which level the method is working with you. Most methods today focus on the Cognitive Level (mental) and they are beginning to include the somatic level especially in working with anxiety, depression and Trauma related symptoms.
Body Work focuses on the physical and can be for relaxation or can go deeply into tissue and muscle in order to reogorganize and release holding patterns and posture.
Emotional Release usually utilizes recapitualtion of negative experiences and events attempting to support the processing and release of held hurt and pain and providing corrective emotional experience with a therapist.
Spiritual counseling often focuses on some accepted belief system that you then utilize to provide a sense of support coming from beyond the self. Sometimes this includes practices like prayer and meditation that are not religion based and open for you to create a connection beyond yourself or to your own personal guidance which is often ignored.
It is my belief that true Transformation involves all of these levels. We have learned to engage in repetitive negativity and negation in our thoughts and this has become a REALITY in our experience. As children we learn to be passive recipients of life. We learn others are responsible for us and for our happiness. We are small others are bigger. We must behave and follow. Sometimes we are rebellious, but this is also a pattern in adulthood that no longer serves.
So, whether we are deeply symptomatic and negative, experience negative moods and emotions, or whether we engage in maladaptive patterns of reactivity and response, we still basically need to find our TRUE NATURE OR STATE OF BEING in our CENTER OF RIGHT ENERGY and en-gage life from there. Learning to GROW UP and TAKE FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR OUR HEALING< OUR LEARNING<OUR SUCCESS AND MEETING OUR CHALLENGES.
We are MADE to do this, to evolve, and to become creators of a PROACTIVE changing life. I have gained this knowledge through my own experience and know this to be true. So don't give up on yourself, and then expect others to fix it. You can do this, And there are many who have succeeded at healing themselves on each of the levels and support you in doing this yourself and FOR your SELF.
Mentally we developed our patterns of thought as we developed language. Underneath the words were the patterns of feeling and emotion held in our body and emotional memory. We had a basic feeling for our life prior to language and this is carried into the way we begin organizing language and thought. As we continued to grow we copied patterns of thought from people in our enviornment as well as the way they organized emotionally. Therefore, much of our thought and our patterns of emotion in life are not original and are copied artifacts! YUK! So much negativity in life is just a pattern that creates our emotional reactivity. The emotions are not based on real reaction or real experienced events. The emotions are a bi-product of patterns of thought. So, stop trusting your negativity so much! Start to view your average thinking as adversarial and not true or even in your corner. Mostly it is like a program that has taken over. It is supposed to be a secretary program supporting you in organizing yourself and your tasks, it is not supposed to be DEFINING REALITY for you and it is NOT YOUR REAL SELF talking! Though awareness work, meditating, relaxing thought, challenging thoughts as they run through your head, etc...you begin to realize how out of control and distorted thinking really is!
Spiritually you may want to consider that you are in your life to something deeper and more profound than just to grow up, get a job, and then become deceased! Maybe you are here to learn and evolve a profound ability to resolve your distortions occurring in development, heal your wounds, and then engage in a great journey of creation, and co-creation of the life you really DO believe in and one that brings joy to your heart. I have found that many feel that no matter what bad things have happened to them, no matter what losses they have suffered or so called mistakes they may have made, they continue to find life a deep spiritual adventure of transformation until the end! I hope you will find this to be the case in your life.
If I can do it, so can you. NO DOUBT!