Nonitage

I did it my way -Frank Sinatra

What is a successful life?

Success, I believe, is living your life in your own way. It
means doing what you love.

Money comes when you do what you love because you will do this
one thing with passion.

Your passion gives you courage and persistence in the face of
all obstacles.

Even if you lack the skills to do what you love, your passion
will drive you to learn those skills. And when you acquire them,
you’ll do them better than anyone else.

In Sanskrit, this pursuit of your right work is called “dharma.”

In fact, in the ancient holy books of India, it was advised that
it was better to do your own work poorly than to do the work of
another well.

When you come from a place of love, you create something of
beauty in the world. Your love expressed is passion.

Our souls crave beauty, for it is our truth; and in our truth,
we find our meaning.

A value that is derived from a concern other than our own is a
false value. It is false not because there is anything wrong
with it, but because it does not stir us. Eventually, we will
resent spending time on what we do not love.

Much of the unhappiness that I see in business is because people
do work that they do not love. They work for the money and
because they come from that place of self-denial, they never
make enough of it.

When you come from your own power, then everything flourishes.
Yet you can’t connect with that power unless you do what you
love.

How do you find the work that you love?

You go within and you dream, and if you are bold, your dream
will surface before you in brilliant colors like Aphrodite
rising from the sea.

How do you bring your dream to life?

By dreaming with open eyes in the bright light of day, you open
the way to miracles.

Everyone has days when they are down, worn out and just not feeling all that happy.

That’s OK, you need to have days like this, otherwise how would you know when you are happy. You need to have something to contrast your happiness with. What is black without white?

Even though you know that sadness is a part of life, let’s try to make it a small part of life.

With that said, here are a few tips to help you feel better when you are feeling down in the dumps. They are easy to do, easy to practice every day and they work!

1. Stand up straight, sit up straight. When your body is in alignment your energy can flow and when your energy is flowing freely, you can flow.

2. Smile! Yes, just smile. Easy to do and effective.

3. Repeat positive affirmations. Things like “I feel good”, “Positive energy flows through my body”, “I see the good in all”.

4. Listen to some music that you like. It doesn’t have to be anything specific, just something you enjoy. Certain types of music work better than others, but experiment and see what works for you. Studies have shown that Classical music and new age music work best.

5. Take some time out for yourself, relax and read a book, do something for yourself.

6. Meditate. Meditation is an excellent habit to develop. It will serve you in all that you do. If you are one who has a hard time sitting still, then try some special meditation CDs that coax your brain into the meditative state. Just search for “Meditation music” on Google or Yahoo and explore.

Our outside work is simply a reflection of our inside world. Remember there is no reality just your perception of it. Use this truth to your advantage. Whenever you are sad, realize that it is all in your mind and you do have the power to change your perception.

These tips will lift you up when you are down, but don’t just use them when you are sad. Try and practice them everyday, make them a habit. You will be surprised at how these simple exercises will keep the rainy days away.

On a final note, if you are in a deep depression that you can’t seem to shake, please go see a doctor. This is your life and don’t take any chances.

Dr. Isaac Schumann brings to you a life time of experience in the mental health field
www.depressionhelpguides.com

Pregnancy is a period in a woman’s life when needless to say, several internal and external changes are occurring on a daily basis. There is a life, a whole new person growing inside of you and when this person is born, he or she will be totally helpless and dependent on you. To some women, this is a source of joy and excitement as they anticipate the responsibility of motherhood-especially the first time, to others; it is a source of a particular type of depression: Pregnancy Depression.

Although pregnancy depression can be triggered by the pregnancy and associated factors itself, it may be as a result of a previous state of other forms of depression. This is why being depressed while being pregnant should be addressed and approached differently.

What must be of uttermost concern is : there is a life inside of you, consequently, extra care must be taken on how to treat pregnancy depression as anything you ingest does have the tendency of getting into your baby’s bloodstream.

To this effect some women, after discovering the side-effects of several of the so-called anti-depression drugs, make the decision to cease the use of some popular depression medications even as they may be going through pregnancy depression. Perhaps the fear of exposing their babies to the numerous side-effects of depression drugs may be the main concern. Well, it’s safe to say this may be a wise choice. However, what can one do as an alternative for treating depression during pregnancy?

There are other options.

Pregnancy Depression: Options for Natural Treatment

Based on research before even getting on the computer to type up this article, to confirm my convictions on drug-free healing for human ailments, the following three limbs of drug-less healing may be sufficient as pregnancy depression treatment options and I will have you know after the delivery of your child, they can still be used effectively in place of synthetic, side-effect laden depression drugs.

-Proper Exercise: This method exercises the motor centers of the brain, making the blood flow away from the emotional activity center; consequently one becomes more receptive to positive thoughts. Though I personally recommend yoga for its numerous therapeutic effects on depression, depending on the stage of your pregnancy, it may not be the safest choice, at least not while you’re pregnant. However, there are some poses you can use that alleviate pregnancy depression and actually will strengthen the lower body in preparation for childbirth. They include: The ‘corpse/relaxation pose’, the ‘Diamond/Vajrasana Pose’, The ‘Eagle Pose’, ‘Lord of the Dance Pose’, ‘Tree Pose’ and Simple ‘Yogic Square breathing exercises’. Of course, exercises of the western culture such as walking, use of treadmills, bikes and things of that nature can be incorporated as alternatives for exercise.

-Proper Diet:
Ladies (and expectant dads who may read this) think about this quote by the Father of Medicine, Hippocrates: “let your foods be your medicine and your medicine your foods…” Needless to say for your health and that of the baby’s, it will be essential that you eat properly. This includes knowing what, when and how to eat even the proper foods for nourishment.

-Positive Thinking:
“Be renewed by the transformation of your thoughts” (Rom 12:2)
That quote says it all. What and how you think plays a very important role on your life and how you view it. This also dictates your actions towards fixing the things that may be causing or aggravating your depression during pregnancy. Read up on self-help books, your religious books (if applicable) and helpful media sources that advocates and promotes positive thinking.

Pregnancy depression, like other forms of depression, can be controlled and ultimately overcome. Empower yourself with the necessary knowledge and tools needed to accomplish this. It is my hope that this article will be helpful in that regards.

Foras Aje is an independent researcher and author of Fitness: Inside and out, a book on improving physical and mental health naturally. For additional information on depression treatment go to www.bodyhealthsoul.com/depression.htm

I recently posted an article to my website about how certain beliefs underpin stress, depression and anxiety. One of the main beliefs I briefly introduced concerns helplessness. Helplessness is a major part of these illnesses so let’s look at how you can reduce the impact this flawed belief has.

Believing you are helpless in life is a truly terrible feeling and I write from personal experience here. For five years, a number of traumatic events led me to the point where I believed life held nothing but pain and anguish. I truly believed life would unfold in a way that would destroy me and there wasn’t a single thing I could do about it.

Perhaps you’ve felt this way too?

The underlying belief is the important factor here. It is a firm belief that life is something that happens to you and you have NO CONTROL over anything. In short, you are a powerless, passive recipient for whatever life decides to throw at you.

It is an awful state to be in. Furthermore, this belief simply isn’t true.

Let me give an example. Say you and your partner split up. Now, this can be one very traumatic experience, I’ve been through it, so have many others. You react in a highly negative and emotionally arousing way:

“I’m devastated. He/she was my whole world and now my world has fallen apart. Everything I do in life always goes wrong and this is another disaster. I’ll never be happy again.”

Wow. It’s a powerful reaction isn’t it? I’m sure you, like me, have either reacted this way to an event or you’ve heard someone react this way. It is a very damaging way to assign a meaning to an event you are confronted with.

The last two sentences reveal the belief in helplessness. The key words are: Everything always goes wrong and never be happy again. When you react in such a way, you are telling yourself that you are helpless because nothing has ever gone right for you and you’ll never be happy no matter what. You’re saying you cannot control anything and therefore, you truly believe you’re helpless.

How do you think you’ll feel when you react like this? Exactly. You’ll feel deeply unhappy, confused, frustrated and of course, helpless to change your life. Why would you feel anything else? Everything ALWAYS goes wrong and you’ll NEVER be happy again so what’s the point of doing anything to create change?

Do you see how helplessness works? But it simply isn’t true. Of course, there are many things in life that are entirely beyond your control. Other people and Mother Nature to name but two. There are things in life you have some control over - where you live and work for example. It is important to keep these facts about control firmly in mind.

Here’s the most important fact about helplessness: There is one thing you have full control over in your life and that is how you react and assign meanings to everything you are confronted with. In the example above, a better reaction would be:

“OK, my relationship hasn’t worked but other things in my life are going well and I’ll concentrate on them for a while as I come to terms with what’s happened. Just because this relationship hasn’t worked out, it doesn’t mean future relationships will fail and once I’ve got over this, I’ll get out there and find someone better.”

See the difference? You’re keeping control by assigning a less emotional meaning, a meaning more in keeping with reality. You’re acknowledging that you’re hurting, but that this is temporary and when you’re ready, you’ll try again. You know you have other things in your life that you can concentrate on and this reaction will prevent a feeling of helplessness arising.

See you soon.

Copyright 2006 Christopher Green

“Grief is healing: To take away our grief is to take away our healing. And learning about life after death helps us heal with greater hope, comfort and peace.” ~ Bob Olson

In approximately five years of investigating the possibility of life after death, I have discovered convincing evidence that there really is an afterlife, that we really do continue to exist after death, and that our loved ones continue to watch over us and guide us in the spirit world. But this is just the beginning of my discoveries.

More recently, after sharing this evidence with thousands of people around the world through my books, websites and articles, I have recognized a direct connection between one’s level of grief and one’s level of belief in an afterlife. I call it The Grief And Belief Connection.

I didn’t always believe in life after death. In the past, whenever I would lose a loved one to disease, tragedy or suicide, I would always wonder if an afterlife existed. But thinking about the possibility of life after death never eased my grief because I was a skeptic. In fact, I was the worst kind of skeptic a cynical one. This didn’t mean my mind was closed to the idea of life after death, but I needed evidence. Yet the intangible and mystical quality of the evidence for an afterlife only instigated my cynical skepticism even more.

As a private investigator with a degree in Criminology, evidence was my world. When I investigated murders, the courts only cared about the evidence I uncovered that proved or disproved the accused’s guilt. When I handled domestic investigations, clients hired me to obtain photographic and videographic evidence of their cheating spouses. And when I investigated personal injury cases, lawyers hired me to obtain witness statements, photographs and material evidence to present at trial. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I was suspicious, to say the least, of the vague metaphysical evidence that exists for an afterlife.

The strongest evidence for an afterlife consists of the following (all of which I found critically lacking in credibility): psychic mediums who claim to communicate with spirits, individuals who believe they had a near-death experience, hypnotic regressionists who declare a method for past-life travel, and individuals who believe to have experienced an after-death communication from a loved one in spirit. Such outrageous claims appeared less as evidence of life after death and more as nave nonsense from people who either need extra attention in their lives or need something supernatural to increase their faith. To this P.I. the evidence amounted to a bunch of hooey.

Then I visited a psychic medium who turned my life upside-down. My brother-in-law had insisted she was legitimate, so I became fixed on proving her a phony. I booked an appointment for a one-hour reading. The one hour turned into three, me sobbing like a lost child for half of it. The evidence was too overwhelming, the details too accurate. My belief that such evidence was unbelievable rapidly crumbled.

The spirit messenger delivered names, dates and memories about my life she could not possible have known: that I played a saxophone solo in my middle school band concert; that my birthday was in May and that my father died during that month, that my mother’s name was Carol, my sister’s name was Bonnie and my wife’s name was Melissa; that I was considering getting a dog, specifically a yellow lab; and that I had a brother named Brian who wasn’t really my brother (Brian was my cousin who moved in with my family when he was ten and I was thirteen because his parents died in a plane crash). And yes, she knew about the plane crash, too.

To this day, the medium still has no idea why she kept going that day beyond the normal one-hour reading. Yet by the end of the third hour, the evidence of an afterlife was stacked too high for me to remain in my skeptical denial. This stranger-medium could not possibly have guessed all these details about my life. She had to be getting her information from spirit. No, not just any spiritmy father. Only he knew the details of the messages she conveyed, or should I say, relayed. Not even Melissa, my wife whom I began dating when I was fifteen years old, knew all the details of these secret memories. They were private, sacred to me. I had not shared them with anyone, not even in a journal.

Having been a recently published author at the time, I decided to launch an investigation into life after death as the basis for my next book, beginning with mediumship. I wasn’t hasty. I spent four years researching and experiencing the metaphysical, always maintaining the healthy skepticism I had developed as a private eye. Over the course of those four years, I received over one hundred readings from some of the best psychic mediums in the world. I met credible people with believable stories of near-death experience, and learned there are thousands of documented cases that all tell similar accounts of their afterlife journey. I even had my own successful past-life regression, stupefying me with not just the unexplainable knowledge I had about that past lifetime but also the physical and emotional roller-coaster ride I suffered during that regression.

After four years of limitless interviews, research and personal experiences, I found myself asking, “What’s the purpose?” How does this evidence help people? The significance got lost in my hurry to find the answers. Now that I had them, I forgot the question. I even wondered if I was being irresponsible by exposing the public to my discoveries through my writing and speaking. Then, all at once, people started dyingnobody close to me, but rather, people I knew through other people. And the answer I sought hit me like machine gun fire over the course of about ten months.

First, my friend, Kelly, lost her husband, Rick, at the age of 35 when a truck hit his car. He had pulled over on the highway to answer his cell phone, ironically for safety’s sake. He left Kelly and two children under the age of five. After the funeral and burial, I saw Kelly at the restaurant. She came at me like a wave, embracing me like she had been eager to speak with me all day.

“Bob, you have no idea,” Kelly began with a peaceful glimmer, “I am so grateful for the reading I had with that psychic medium a month ago. It has helped me get through this, knowing that Rick is still here, that he is all right. I talk to him and he has given me strength to get through this,” she acknowledged.

A few weeks later my wife, Melissa, and I got an email from Kelly’s brother, Danny, and his wife, Caroline (my sister-in-law). They wanted to thank Melissa and I for the spiritual insights they had learned through us from our work with psychic mediums. Our influence had got them to watch John Edward’s TV show, Crossing Over With John Edward, quite regularly before the accident. They wrote that Rick’s death was somehow easier to deal with due to what they had learned.

The same year our friend, Mary, lost her sister, Dianne. Mary had been to see one of my recommended psychic mediums a few months prior. She hugged me tightly in the receiving line at the wake, declaring her knowing that her sister was not dead, but was alive in spirit. Knowing is level of belief that results from learning about the afterlife and seeing, hearing or experiencing the evidence personally until you “know” it is true… real. Mary looked forward to hearing from Dianne at her next reading.

A few months later my other sister-in-law, Jen, lost her grandmother. Nana was possibly her closest friend and mentor. At the funeral, Jen shared with me that she still talks with Nana all the timebecause of what she learned through my work. She knows Nana is still with her. Jen told me she is glad Nana had the opportunity to read my book and attend an event I gave with five psychic mediums. Jen believes these things helped Nana with her passing.

The testimonials of Kelly, Danny, Caroline, Mary and Jen had a message for me: Learning about the afterlife gives hope, comfort and peace to the grieving. I now recognized that people’s grief is affected by this evidence regardless of whether they learn about the afterlife before or after they lose someone close to them.

The coincidence of all these testimonials coming within such a short span of time was not lost on me. But just to be sure the message sunk into my thick skull, spirit orchestrated a grand-finale of messages from behind the ethereal veil. I received twenty-two rapid-fire emails from strangers all over the world with similar messages as those from Kelly, Danny, Caroline, Mary and Jen, thanking me for my book and articles on the afterlife. Okay, I got it; learning about life after death helps people with their grief.

With this I developed the premise that there is a direct connection between one’s level of belief (in an afterlife) and one’s level of grief. So I took surveys, interviewed experts, eavesdropped conversations and spied Internet chat-rooms. It was unanimous: belief and grief are connected. The evidence was extensive, though unscientific. I had learned to accept that about the spiritual. Proof is subjective. Some people need more evidence than others before they believe. I understand. I was once one of those people.

Hence, I discovered The Grief And Belief Connection. While spiritual insight about life after death will not eliminate your grief, it can change your grieving experience from one of hopelessness, distress and fear to one of hope, comfort and peace. It is the difference between wondering where your deceased loved has gone, feeling a loss of connection with them and worrying if they are still sufferingORknowing your loved one is safely surrounded by the light and love of God, understanding that they are watching over you and can hear you speak to them, and believing that they are not suffering, but rather, celebrating their homecoming with those who had crossed over before them.

After approximately five years of investigation, these are my conclusions. For me, it has made all the difference, which is why I have now shared them with you.

Warmly,

Bob Olson

Author / Editor
For more information and resources visit http://www.GriefandBelief.com

About The Author

BOB OLSON is a former skeptic and private investigator who has researched evidence of life after death for approximately five years. He now shares the spiritual insights, extraordinary experiences and gifted individuals he has met along his journey in order to bring hope, comfort and peace to the grieving. Bob is the author of Win The Battle, co-author of Understanding Spirit, Understanding Yourself and editor of GriefAndBelief.com, OfSpirit.com Magazine, & BestPsychicMediums.com

editor@ofspirit.com