The Nourisher - Editor’s Blog

Ed Love, Author of The Love Diet, shares these thought provoking awareness exercises. Thanks Ed, we could all do with more of these tips. Re-membering who we really are, which is love.

1. Do what you love to do

Such a simple idea, but how often do we practice it? So often we get caught up in duty, or other people’s expectations. Don’t think that you have to keep doing things that you don’t enjoy. This is a guaranteed way to feel frustrated and resentful. Resistance is no path to love or peace of mind.

It might not happen overnight, but with persistence we can all gradually move towards doing what we love doing. This is especially important at work. Spending 40 hours or more each week doing something you don’t enjoy will ensure you are miserable, no matter how much money you earn. Not to mention the dreadful affect it has on your health and family life.

Yes, there may be doubts about your ability to find something you love doing for a living, but until you ask the question, you’ll never know. Have the courage to ask the question, to take the risk, to do what you love. Often, if you just ask, answers will come to you. It might take trying a few different things before you find the ideal vocation, but you’ll get there.

Each of us have special gifts, special skills, and the effort required to find a way to do what we love for a living is well worth it. After all, if you love your work, it’s not work anymore. It’s joy, and delight, and love. You’ll never work another day in your life. Isn’t that more appealing than enduring yet another dull endless working week praying for the weekend?

Exercise: sit down with a piece of paper and write down on the left hand side the various activities that you do during a typical week. Then mark on the right hand side whether you enjoy doing them or not. When you’re done, take a look to see whether you enjoy all, most of, about half of, some of, or hardly any of those activities. Just notice without judgement.

If there are less enjoyable activities than you’d like, think about how you can improve the balance. How can you do more of what you love during the week? Or maybe less of what you don’t love? Is there any way you could actually enjoy some of the tasks you currently dislike? Could you swap some tasks with somebody else who likes doing them? Hmmm …

2. Carefully choose the company you keep

How supportive are your friends and family? Do they encourage you? Love you? Accept you? Let you live your own life? Enjoy your successes? If not, why are you spending time with them? Surely not duty or obligation? Is it really worth it?

Who we spend our time with makes a huge difference in how we feel. If we are with a close friend who really supports us and enjoys our company, we feel great. If we spend time with negative people who constantly criticize us, then we’ll feel pretty bad much of the time. Why would we want to continue to do that?

There is no unwritten law that we must spend time with people just because we’ve done so in the past. People change, we change, things change, we always have the chance to choose differently. So consider very carefully. Your health, happiness and wealth depend upon it. Difficult to believe? Try making some changes and see how much better you feel.

Do you spend time with people who really do enjoy who you are, people with whom you have a wonderful time, people whom you look forward to seeing again? If so, great! Prioritise spending time with them. If not, consider spending less time, or even no time with them. Life’s too short to waste with people who consistently bring you down.

Exercise: sit down with another sheet of paper and write down on the left hand side a list of everybody that you spend time with during a typical week. Whether a minute or many hours, list them all. Then on the right hand side write down how much you enjoy the time that you spend with this person. Don’t sugar coat it, this is for your eyes only. Be totally honest.

Now take a look to see where you’re spending most of your time. Is it with loving, supportive, friendly people whose company you really enjoy? Do you feel uplifted after spending time with them? Or drained and depressed? Have a think about how you can spend more time in good company and less time with bad company. Your time is precious so think carefully.

If you spend time with draining people who are pretty much unavoidable in the short term, see if there’s a way you can make that time better. It might be speaking out to them about what is and isn’t acceptable behaviour. e.g. no complaining or whining. It might be explaining to them how depressing such behaviour is, probably to both of you. If this works, great. If it doesn’t, see if you can find a way to gradually sever contact with such draining people.

3. Let go of obligation and duty

So often we live our life by the things we think we should do, the things we believe we must do. Duty. Obligation. Unfortunately, this often produces tension, especially if we don’t want to do the thing we think we should. We rebel and struggle internally, which is stressful. Our health and happiness both suffer.

The way out of this is to realize that there is nothing that we have to do at all! No shoulds, no musts, no obligations at all in life. Certainly, there are consequences to our actions, and it’s good to be aware of these. But forcing ourselves to do things we don’t want to do is counterproductive. All we do is resist, procrastinate, feel guilty, and generally miserable.

What if you chose to only do the things you wanted to do? How would you feel? Happier, perhaps? Sometimes we might not want to do something right now, but if we look at the long term consequences, we can find a reason to do that thing. Think long term and not just short term, it helps you to find a reason to do things which might not make sense this minute.

But if you can’t find a good short term or long term reason to do something, other than you think that you ought to do it, perhaps you can let go of it. This will release much tension within you, free up lots of blocked energy, usually some time, will allow you to relax more and be happier in your life, and therefore more naturally loving.

Exercise: Take a piece of paper and write down on the left hand side a list of all the things that you do in a typical week that you want to do. Now write on the right hand side a list of all the things you do during the week that you only do because you think that you have to do them. Anything that you do from a sense of obligation or duty, put down.

Now take a look at the paper and see where the balance is: are there more items on the left hand side or the right hand side? How do you feel about that? See if there’s any way you can begin changing the balance by letting go of things you do out of obligation, and beginning to do more things that you really want to do. How does it feel to change that balance?

4. Forgive everybody and everything

Whenever we hold onto a past wrong that somebody has done to us, we are only hurting ourselves. Whenever we continue to blame ourselves for something we did in the past, we are only hurting ourselves. The past is over, and keeping count of and hanging onto old incidents that we judge can never help us in the present. The key to freedom is to forgive. Always.

This doesn’t mean we have to agree with what happened, only that we let it go. We cannot change the past. All we can do is forgive. This will free up enormous amounts of energy that we had invested in keeping track of who wronged us, how badly, and how dreadful it was for them to do that to us. It’s useful to learn from the past, but it doesn’t serve us to live there.

Even more important is that we learn to forgive ourselves. Just like everybody else, we’re doing the best that we can in each moment, and have no cause to judge ourselves if we fail to meet some standard. Judging ourselves only leads to low self esteem, to feeling badly about ourselves and a lack of self confidence. None of these outcomes are useful.

Even better than forgiving ourselves and others is not to judge in the first place. This might seem hard to do, but that’s only because we’ve been taught to judge all of our lives. We can create a new pattern if we choose, by learning not to judge ourselves or others. This leaves us freer in each moment to enjoy life, here and now.

Exercise: make a list of the people you still hold a grudge against. They may be still in your life, they may have moved on, they may be long dead. It doesn’t matter. You’re not hurting them by your grudge, you’re only hurting yourself. Then add to the list all the things that you judge yourself about: past, present and future. All of them, even the small things.

Now, take the smallest thing on your list, and see if you can forgive the person you blame, either yourself or another. Start with the smallest thing so that it doesn’t seem too difficult. What can you gain by hanging onto judgement? Would you rather be right (are you right?) or would you rather be happy? Once done, move up the list to bigger and bigger items.

Again, few of these ideas will be new to you, but you might not have applied them as much as you can in your life yet. I know that I haven’t, but the more I focus on these ideas, the better my life gets. Maybe you’ll find that’s the case for you as well. The more we can let go of binding rules and restrictions in our lives, the easier life becomes. The strange thing is that as well as improving our own lives, we become more helpful and attractive to others, so it’s a real win win situation.

5. Stay in the present moment

One thing we are very good at is thinking about the future or the past much of the time. The trouble with this is that we often end up stressing ourselves about things we can’t do much about. The past is already past, feeling guilty or ashamed about it doesn’t help. It only stops you from feeling good. Learn from the past, yes, but once that’s done, let it go.

Planning does have a role in life, but worrying about things you cannot change serves no purpose at all. Anxiety about future events doesn’t help us to prepare for them, it makes us think less clearly about them, and leaves us less able to prepare for them. It also stops us from enjoying the present. Worrying about the future is paying interest on a debt not yet due.

By remaining in the present, we are able to notice things in our life that often pass us by. How often do we miss the joys of sharing a moment with our partner, or watching the trees blow in the wind, or the sun set? Only by remaining present can we actually experience what’s happening now. Everything else is a dream of the future or a memory of the past.

Exercise: find ways to regularly check to see if you’re being present. Put up small Post-it notes saying: are you present? Or set your watch to chime every hour, and when it does, ask yourself the same question. If you weren’t being present, don’t judge or blame yourself, just refocus yourself to the here and now. You’ll find yourself becoming more and more present.

6. Observe your patterns of thinking

Part of the challenge is that we’ve picked up many habits of thinking and behaving over the years which aren’t helpful. e.g. getting upset whenever a particular person does something that annoys us. If we’re not aware of this habit, it’s not very easy to change our reaction. The first step to change is always becoming aware of something that’s not working for us.

That’s why observing ourselves is so useful. Not so that we can beat ourselves up whenever we find something negative, but so that we can notice our patterns and, if we wish, chose a new thought or action. Observing allows us to consciously choose a more useful response. Between action and reaction is always an opportunity to choose a different response.

Exercise: one of the best ways to do this is to meditate. This doesn’t have to be a strange religious experience from the East, it can be very simple. Just sit down for ten or twenty minutes each day and observe your thoughts, notice what flows through your mind, without judgement or condemnation. Don’t get caught up in your thoughts, just notice them.

Simply by observing yourself regularly, you will notice thoughts and beliefs which aren’t useful, which don’t serve you. You will notice fears and concerns which have no basis in reality. You will start to see how your expectations create your reality. By just noticing such things, you can start to change them. This will lead to more peace and more love in your life.

7. Accept yourself and others

Accepting who you are, how your life is, and how the world is, can really help you move towards love. So often we’re taught to judge ourselves, to harshly criticize ourselves, but this is never helpful if we want to change our lives for the better. Only acceptance allows for this. Besides, it feels much better to accept ourselves than to judge ourselves.

Acceptance isn’t an excuse not to grow or not to improve. It’s just noticing that things are the way they are right now. There’s no point struggling against how things are. That would be like being upset because the sun rises every day. As Byron Katie says: when I judge reality, I lose, but only all of the time.

Only from acceptance can we choose to make changes in our lives. If we refuse to admit that something is happening, then we have no power to change it. If we refuse to accept the world as it is, then we’re getting ourselves upset for no good reason. It doesn’t help. Certainly, change yourself and the world if you wish, but do so from a place of peace and acceptance.

The easiest way to accept yourself is to realize that you’re doing the best that you can. If you could do better, then you would! This doesn’t stop you from making changes if you want to, but it does allow you to stop judging yourself. Instantly you will feel better. This leads to more peace of mind, which leads to more love.

If you’re overweight, accepting yourself is even more important. If you continue to judge yourself for being overweight, then you will feel pretty bad much of the time. This will often lead to overeating to mask this bad feeling. This will lead to more weight, and more judgement: a vicious circle. The only way out is to accept yourself as you are right now.

Also, when you’re judging yourself for being overweight, then you are focusing on the extra weight. Whatever you focus upon tends to grow, which is another reason why judging yourself doesn’t work. Instead, focus on something about your body that you can appreciate, however small. Find a way of feeling good about your body, and that feeling will grow.

Exercise: at the end of your day, take a few moments to see how accepting you were of yourself and others. Think back to see if there were any times that you judged, either yourself or others. Again, don’t criticize yourself if there were, just notice them. Then see if you can let go of those judgements. Gradually you will find yourself judging less, and being happier.

An even better thing to do is to look at yourself daily in a full length mirror. Notice any judgements and just let them go, without arguing one way or another about them. Just be with yourself. See if there’s anything you can appreciate about your body. Tell yourself out loud. Tell yourself that you love and accept yourself. Repeat this regularly, and you will begin to.

It might be hard to do at first, but it’s worth it. Much research has demonstrated that it can take about a month to change an old habit. By looking at yourself in a mirror each day and speaking new thoughts and appreciation, you’re gradually changing how you think and feel about your body. Gradually, with persistence, the change will stick.

8. The attitude of gratitude

What we focus on determines to a large degree how we feel. If we spend all our time thinking about what we don’t have in our life, then we’ll feel a sense of lack, and often dwell on the unfairness of it all. In other words, we’ll feel unhappy if we focus on what’s not there. It’s the glass being half empty instead of half full. Sure, we’ve heard this before, but do we live it?

On the other hand, if we are grateful, if we focus on what we do have in our life that we appreciate, then we’ll feel pretty good. It doesn’t have to be anything huge, like a new car, we can just as easily appreciate our health, or a letter a friend sent us, or even the meal we are about to eat. Gratitude about things large and small feels really good, and it costs nothing.

In financial terms, to appreciate means to increase in value. When we appreciate the good things in our life, their value also increases. Without doing anything at all, we feel better about our life, and that will lead us to feeling happier and more loving. Not a bad return on investment for taking a moment to feel grateful!

Gratitude doesn’t mean that we can’t continue to work on improving our lives. Indeed, when we feel grateful and happy, we are far more likely to work effectively to improve our lives than when we feel upset and unhappy that we’re lacking something. The choice is ours always: which do you choose?

Exercise: 10×10: take ten minutes at the end of each day to write down ten things you’re grateful for. Don’t choose the same things each day, see if you can find different things to appreciate. Don’t just write them down, really feel grateful for these things. Without feeling the appreciation, this exercise doesn’t work. Choose small things as well as larger things.

10×10 take 2. If you live with others, here is an exercise which will transform your lives together. Take ten minutes at the start of the day, and sit down and share appreciation with each other for ten minutes. Take turns to tell each person what you appreciate about them. Be as specific as possible. e.g. I really loved it when you helped me with the cooking last night.

Watch their faces as they listen to this appreciation. It’s magic. We all love to be thanked and acknowledged, and it’s something we receive all too little of. All it takes is a commitment and a few minutes each day. You’ll be surprised at how everybody blossoms from such a seemingly small gesture. What a great way to start your day before going out into the world.

9. Don’t compare yourself to others

This is one area where it’s very easy to get into a downward spiral about our lives. We see somebody who is more successful than we are, and feel inferior or unworthy. We might even feel envy or jealousy. Either way, we feel pretty bad, and that doesn’t help us in any way at all. We can easily get stuck in a downward spiral of jealousy and resentment.

By choosing not to compare ourselves with others, we can bypass this whole area of upset, leaving us more able to remain in a place of peace and love. After all, isn’t that what we really want? Surely we’d prefer to feel good, rather than to compare ourselves unfavourably to others? The choice is always ours.

If you do notice people who have more than you, and you’d like to achieve similar success, a much better strategy is to work out how they managed to achieve their success, and then follow a similar path. Many (most?) successful people in the world became that way by studying other successful people and deciding to emulate them.

If you do find yourself comparing your situation to that of others, why not compare yourself to those who have it harder than you do? How well off are you if you have any kind of job, house and relationship, when there are countless others who don’t have these things? How do you feel when you consider how lucky you are compared to most people in the world?

We can always find evidence to back up whatever thought we want to hang onto. Feeling that you should have more or be doing better? You can always find those who have more or are doing better than you. Feeling blessed and grateful for your life? You can always find reasons to feel that way as well. As always, it’s up to us which attitude we wish to live.

Exercise: at the end of each day, review your day to see if you compared yourself unfavourably to others. If you did, don’t blame yourself, just notice, and let go. You could also compare yourself to somebody less fortunate than you are instead. Either way, you’ll be focusing more on what you have instead of what you lack. This leads to peace and happiness.

10 - Practice patience and persistence

This idea of focusing more on loving instead of being loved is probably a new idea for you. After a lifetime of looking for love outside yourself, it might not be so easy to change your way of thinking and behaving overnight. It might take a little while longer. Don’t criticize yourself if it takes a while to master this new way of being.

Patience and persistence are crucial to creating a new way of being in the world. Your old habit of looking to be loved took a long time to be formed, and so your new focus of looking firstly to love will also take some time to become a habit. Be gentle with yourself, and persist. Your reward is a life full of love and peace of mind.

If you notice that you’re again falling into the trap of looking for love outside of yourself, don’t blame or judge yourself. Just notice, and choose to focus on being more loving. Focus on giving love instead of receiving it. Focus on being the source of love instead of feeling that somebody else must give it to you. You’ll be more in control of the love in your life.

Exercise: Share these ideas with those who are close to you, and see if you can remind each other during the day, especially if you notice you’re getting distracted. At such times, a gentle nudge from somebody dear can remind you to return your focus to loving. It might take a while, but it’s worth it. When you learn to love, nobody can ever take that away from you.

There are more ideas in my book about how to help you master these ten steps to love. There’s no point in just reading about them if you’re unable to use them in your day to day life. Ideas which cannot be applied easily to your life are of very little value, so do persist in practicing them until they become second nature to you, and maybe those around you as well.

Please note: If you notice that many of these steps seem related, or the ideas seem to be repeated, you’re right! By revisiting these steps in different forms, we’re more able to understand them, master them, and integrate them into our lives. Practice makes perfect!

Bonus Step: Examine your beliefs

What do you believe about love? Do you believe that you deserve love? Do you believe that love is possible for you? Do you believe that it’s hard to love? Do you believe there are limits to how and to whom love should be expressed? All the beliefs that we have about ourselves, our worthiness, and about love greatly affect how much love we have in our lives.

The strange thing about beliefs is that we all have different ones, but we all think that our beliefs are true! What’s that all about? How can we all be right? Maybe it depends upon how we look at beliefs. e.g. whatever we believe we can usually find evidence to prove it. Even if we have a completely different belief to somebody else, we’re both sure that we’re right.

The world is a good place? We can find plenty of evidence to prove that. The world is a bad place? Again, there is plenty of evidence to back that belief up. So which one is true? Maybe neither! Maybe instead of exploring whether our beliefs are true or not, perhaps it would be more useful to ask whether they are useful or not.

What on earth does that mean? Let’s say you believe that people are generally honest and trustworthy. You’ll probably trust people in general and get on with most people. Your experience seems to prove your belief is true. If you believe the opposite, you’ll probably trust few people, and be cautious and reserved. Again, your evidence will prove your belief.

So again, which belief is true? Neither! Some people are honest and trustworthy, some aren’t. So which belief is more useful to you? Maybe the first one, as it seems to produce an easier life for you. Certainly be careful and notice how people behave, but starting from a position of mistrust and dislike is not going to be useful in the long term.

Exercise: Let’s look at some of your beliefs. Take a look at each of the following beliefs and see if you think it’s true or not. How do you know it’s true? Does it serve you to believe that? How do you feel when you believe this belief? Could the opposite belief perhaps be true? What if it was true? What if neither were true? This might sound very strange, but there are some very useful jewels to be found here.

Here are some beliefs about love you might have:

I am lovable
I deserve love
I like most people
People generally like me
Love is easy to find
Men/women are good company
There are plenty of good men/women out there
I enjoy my own company
Learning is fun and easy
My life is full of good things

Here are some others to consider:

I must stay in a bad relationship
Love hurts
My relationships never work
I’m too old for love
I can’t learn anything new
Love never lasts
I don’t have time to focus on love
People don’t like me
I’m better off by myself
I can’t love several people at once

Take a look at these beliefs. Which ones do you believe? Which ones don’t you believe? How does each belief affect your life? Do they help you live a life of love? If so, great, keep them. If not, consider the opposite belief as a possibility at least. Be open that it might be true. Consider how different your life would be if you believed the opposite.

This can strike directly at who you believe you are, so be gentle with yourself while exploring this process. There are no right or wrong beliefs *, only beliefs which serve us and those that don’t serve us. At any moment, if we identify a belief which we no longer wish to have, we can choose a different one. This will make a huge difference in our lives.

Now consider your beliefs around food and weight. Do they serve you? Are they true? How do you know? By exploring beliefs in any area you can make rapid improvement. The first step to change is to be aware of where we are right now, of what our current beliefs are.

Here are some beliefs about food that you might have:

I eat too much
Being healthy is enjoyable
Food nourishes me
I will always weigh too much
Dieting is no fun
It’s hard to know what to eat
It’s easy for me to eat well
Eating fat makes you fat
Exercise is boring
Thin people have an easy life

See which of these you believe and which you don’t believe. People used to believe smoking was healthy, and now they believe it’s very unhealthy. Sometimes the beliefs that society teaches change. That’s why it’s very important to look at your own beliefs and see if they really are useful. Some are, some aren’t. Don’t just assume that what you believe is true!

* what about the law of gravity, surely gravity is true? Well … probably, but be careful even with this one. e.g. hundreds of years ago people thought that gravity meant that human beings could never fly. Now thousands of people fly every day. Did the law of gravity change? Is it true? Maybe, maybe not, but don’t consider any belief to be fixed in stone.

About the Author...

Ed Love is a Life Coach who can help you sift through the conflicting information available on living well. Health? Fitness? Relationships? Contact him directly for a free chat on how life coaching can help you. His mobile number is 0411-111-816 or you can use Skype: aussielovecoach Discover the emotional secrets to weight loss that drive you to overeat. The new All You Can Eat Love Diet