Articles by JP Sears
I get scared everyday. My daily fears can be construed into stories such as, “What if I’m not good enough, what if people leave me, what if I never live up to expectations, what if people see through my façade, what if people knew that I don’t really know who I am, what if I run out of money, what if fail at something…?” I’ve come to believe that being scared is the scariest thing we can ever do! As my acknowledged fears reverberate within, I curiously notice that since I’ve learned to be scared, my life is expanding, more authentic satisfaction flows in, and I feel much more connected to myself. How can this be? Isn’t being scared supposed to be a bad thing, a paralyzer of growth, the enemy?
We take a large step for ourselves when we graduate from living to meet other people’s expectations and gaining their approval. We can then get in touch with our dream. It may be to travel the world, help the less fortunate, express art, learn and refine a new skill, have children, or start a business. We’ve broken out of slavery and now we’re living for our self! As we find our new home in the free world, what if we realized that even our apparent freedom becomes a new form of slavery? “Of course it isn’t slavery, I’ve broken out of the prison of living to be and do what others want of me! Now I’m living for me, I’m following my dream,” perhaps says the inner voice. While it seems counter logical that following our own dream could be a form of slavery, what if the reality of the mystery of our own self has it that if we don’t know the part of self that is dreaming our dream we are potentially misleading ourselves with our interpretation and pursuit of it?
We adopt an attitude of positive thinking so that we can see the bright side of life, propel us through hard times, and believe that we are creating the reality we want. But when does our optimism become an intangible substance of self-medication, numbing us to large aspects of life and self? How in the world could our positive thoughts become our worst enemy while, due to the nature of positive thinking, we see them as our ally? Is there a way to use positive thinking so that it creates genuine benefit, growth, and opportunity?
Where is your conscious attention focused? Are you living with your head in the clouds? Is your head burrowed into the ground? Do you know how to integrate these two extremes to realize a fully functional life? Living in one extreme or the other perhaps limits the spectrum of life that we can experience, as well as the parts of our own self that we can connect with. However, could it be that knowing how to step in and out of each extreme allows us to realize the elusive stillness and balance of the space in between?
What if you found out that your health goal was unconsciously established for the purpose of failing at it? While this agenda would carry a radical lack of logic, analogous perhaps to drinking in order to find sobriety, could it point to why 95% of all health and fitness goals never come to fruition?
With minds capable of inventing such ideas as skyscrapers, space shuttles, computers and the Internet, is their any doubt that we are equipped with the gift of creation? Whether you realize it or not, you are always creating. In fact, your degree of inner happiness and health, as well as your life circumstances are your very own creation. So if it is true that you and I are constantly creating, what would it mean to you if you became a conscious creator? Let’s explore how the conscious creator can exercise her power of creation for the purpose of self-growth.
Out of all the people you will ever know, is there anyone who you’ll spend more time with and live in closer proximity to than your self? What happens if we mindlessly ignore self? How would it feel to mindfully nurture self? For some of us, we tend to neglect the person who we are closest to – namely the person wearing our own skin. Like any relationship, whether with another person, a job, a business, or a hobby, the relationship with self is not likely to thrive without deliberate intent to create harmony and balance. It isn’t until we’ve invested in the discovery process that we can transition into a deepening and enriching of our relationship with self. In this article I would like to offer some insights to serve as reflective points for discovery about the relationship you have with your own self.
If we found out that it is our own judgment that creates inner turmoil and stress, is it possible that we could, paradoxically, use judgment to facilitate inner stillness? Below we will explore how we can intentionally elevate the level of consciousness that our judgments come from and learn how to use our judgments to construct an architecture that is supportive of an inner environment of stillness.
What is the difference between bringing up and dwelling on old painful memories versus processing the emotions associated with those memories for purposeful healing and self growth? Have you been aware that there is a difference? Many of us go through life strangulating our potential to achieve new levels of self acceptance and joy because we do not know how to differentiate emotional dwelling from emotional processing and we therefore rarely move into the realm of the latter.
Why do certain parts of our lives seem to be out of our control? For some of us perhaps a better question is, “Why does my entire life seem to be out of my control?” Or for those of us who think we are in control, we might ponder the question, “Why do I control my life in the manner that I do?” In short, most of us feel, at times, a lack of control about life or we wonder why we control it the way that we do. The sense of control we have or don’t have about our life has a direct impact on our peace of mind.
What change are you currently on a quest for? Are you looking for a small upgrade in your fitness? Or perhaps a whole new operating system in your vitality? How strongly do you desire the change that you seek? Oddly enough, would you believe a part of you may be carrying a proportional amount of fear of your desired change relative to the amount of excitement that you have about it? In terms of paving as smooth of a path as possible for making positive changes in your health, maybe it’s a worthy mission to learn how to consider why you can become afraid of the very change that you seek.
What would it mean to you if you learned how to keep yourself an open vessel for discovering new possibilities and experiences for an enriched life? At times when I find myself feeling like a closed vessel, it seems to me that the gifts that life offers to me just aren’t being received. One way that I catch myself closing off to the possibilities and discoveries that life has to offer is by standing in the realm of “I know”. Because one of life’s paradoxes is that in order to discover anything, we must first acknowledge that there are unknowns, I find that standing in the realm of “I don’t know” opens me up to receive what life is offering.
Have you ever flown off the handle at someone only to look back at the emotional carnage left in your wake to say, “How did that happen?” Have you ever noticed yourself directing your own emotional shrapnel inward rather than outward, hiding it from others with the veil of piercing silence? When you are emotionally charged, do you get bigger and aggressive by puffing up your chest or do you get smaller and passive hoping to go un-noticed?
When we experience anger we can feel as though we’re a small little boat being tossed around in a very turbulent and dark sea. The stressful movement of dropping from the crest of an enormous wave down into the trough below can make us feel very helpless. However this e-motional internal storm that we may feel powerless over is actually created by us. Therefore, with the light of our conscious awareness piercing through the stormy clouds, we can realize that we do in fact have the supremacy to determine our internal weather patterns.
With everything in life supposedly being purposeful, divine and in our highest good, what in the world is the purpose of my emotional pain? How could my experiences in life be helping me when, at times, they hurt so much? It can certainly be a frustrating experience to work through the painful issues in life, but it can be doubly so to wonder what their purpose might be. It is my belief that painful experiences in my life may be serving as part of a lesson for me – specific lessons that my soul desires to learn. With this in mind, the intention of this article is to invite you to discover a more insightful understanding of painful occurrences in your life.
“If healing emotional wounds and painful experiences is supposed to make me feel better, then why am I feeling worse than I did before I started this healing journey?” This is perhaps one of the most important questions to address that routinely arises during the processes of self-growth for many of us. The question specifically refers to the negative events in our lives we either thought had been resolved or did not believe to bother us to begin with. But then we begin a healing process and some of these events may come to our awareness as painful. Without an understanding of why they may do so, there might be a noticeable increase in emotional discomfort possibly prompting one to abandon their journey out of fear that it is doing more harm than good.
What would you be if you felt no power? How frightening is it to think about feeling powerless? Are you aware of the parts of you that are motivated to continually feed themselves with more and more power? What would it mean to you if you found out that the more power you seek to accumulate outside of self, the more powerless you ultimately become within?
When discussing your bothersome issues with others, how many times have you heard the common advice to “get over it” or “just let it go?” This advice often has wonderful intentions behind it. However, did you know that trying to follow this advice can leave us more lost than we were to begin with? The emotions and feelings that we’re told to “get over” actually have a valuable purpose in our self growth and it can be very important for us to let them serve their purpose.