
Emotional Health & Wellbeing

Assumptions can break up relationships
"Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once and a while, or the light won't come in."Alan Alda Actor, Writer and Director. It's one of the most dangerous things you can do in relationships - make assumptions. Assumptions can break up relationships, devastate your health, destroy your finances and wreak havoc in your life.
The dictionary defines the word assumption as being 'the act of asserting a claim, taking something for granted, arrogance, assuming of power or possession of something and finally, assuming facts without proof.'

Empowerment is a frequent topic these days and I think it is reflective of where we are in our evolutionary growth as humankind.
It seems pretty obvious to me that people are looking for answers other than business as usual.
One thing for sure is that we cannot solve some of our current challenges by looking in our current memory toolbox of how to solve problems. The consciousness or "mindset" that got us here will not be the same ways of thinking that help us to change the world.
I don't equate change with "bad". Why not just see things as evolving to the next level, especially when it comes to individual growth? Now here's the dilemma - the Universe is still expanding and unfolding, yet, because of the way that we have as a whole conditioned our brain we tend to fear change.
We are still "unfolding" just as the Universe is. While there is more to us than meets the eye, meaning at our core we have a spiritual essence, a "True Self", we still live and experience life as human beings living in a physical body.

Happiness and peace of mind seems to be on many people's minds.
After all, happiness and peace of mind are two elements that make for a life well lived.
The challenge though is being clear enough to stay focused on principles that allow us to avoid getting pulled into the trap of "common knowledge".
Common knowledge is often simply hand-me-down opinions that have been accepted as "just the way life is". There is not a way life is that is universally true. What determines how you see life is the filter that you see the facts around you through, known as perception.

Empowerment is so elusive for so many people because they do not understand principles are at work all the time - whether you believe it or not!
Take the Law of Gravity. You can say you do not believe in the Law, or that you think whatever it is that you think about the law - it does not matter because the bottom line is, if you jump off of your roof, you are going down!
I read an interesting discussion somewhere this week that discussed the issue of forgiveness. In summary, the author was asking the question about whether forgiving someone is necessary or really valid. On the table was also the issue of whether or not forgiveness is even possible. I had the sense that the perspective was, as it is so often, that forgiveness was for the perpetrator, versus the "victim".

If confidence and self-esteem does not come from the inside out, we are bound to seek it from outside in
This is a never-ending bottomless pit. Who cares, you may ask. Why even concern yourself with confidence or self-esteem issues?
Well, for one thing, what the French author Anais Nin said many years ago is true:
"We don't see things the way they are; we see them as we are".
You will not ever really rise above your own self-image. You may outwardly look pretty good, but inside, you won't have peace of mind if you are always comparing your sense of self-worth, or even your material possessions to someone else.
This behavior often also impacts your attitude and the altitude that you rise to in life. You will always find someone who has more or less than you in some area. This is true whether the comparison is love, money, beauty or intelligence.