Be careful what you wish for

Recently I've made a futures board, basically a draw and cut and paste of all current goals in bright colours, in a positive way. In mine I have an illustration of my dream home, car, a slender happy me, a picture of south east asia - where I have always wanted to go and a host of phrases and little gestures such as imagining loads of cheques zooming towards me.

This practice sits nicely with a lot of alternative therapy. In Feng Shui it is a concrete symbol of your desires. I place mine in the north east corner of my home knowledge and self development but place yours in which ever area sits most well with your desires e.g relationships, career etc. For cosmic ordering and other philosophies including those such as NLP and hypnosis it works as it is a constant trigger to your subconscious about what you want, so your brain is on constant look out for the types of opportunities that can lead to your dreams.

One thing to be wary of is that I've found in the many years of using symbolic images to bring about change, you really must be careful what you wish for as the world has a habit of taking these things literally. For example I absentmindly drew a picture of myself in the middle and then prompty started arguing with my boyfriend - I had begun to manifest a life of being alone. Another interesting on is that I am registered self employed under Kindred Gifts, the cheques of money coming towards me (that I had intended to represent the shop doing well) also took a literal turn where I came across several opportunities for freelance work which had nothing to do with the shop, but likely a cheque would bear its name as my registered trading name!

Part of the fun - and frustration - of Feng Shui is the sheer amount of fine tuning that needs to be done around this as it really isn't an easy cure and much more about learning what physical images and object best present and bring about the changes which are right for you. And on another note, before you go wishing away be prepared for the changes, they may happen sooner than you think.

So, we are mid January already..how many of us have relinquished our New Years Resolutions?

The trick is - I think - to choose positive resolutions. So not so much about loosing weight and spending less which all have connotations of denial and more about making positive choices.

For example this years is my year of eating healthier meals and moving my body more. As I've not specified that I will only eat healthy and exercise every other day it's been pretty easy to feel as though I have been successful. In fact by walking to work instead of taking the bus and just trying to make consciously healthy choices (and I've even had a couple of bottles of wine, leftover christmas chocolates and a takeaway) I've managed to lose 6 pounds since New Years Day.

Another weight-loss (let's keep it positive and say Slenderising) technique is a visualisation. I've come across this in several self help books but most recently in Cosmic Ordering for Beginners which was suprisingly not New Age at all and packed with scientific research to back the basic principles.

Tips for Creating a Slenderising Visualisation

• It is important - in order for your subconscious to accept the changes - not to present any images negatively.
• Try and visualise when you are most relaxed so as you are dropping off to sleep at night and when you first wake up are good times, as it is in these periods our subconscious is at its most responsive.
• I visualise lots of tiny men - like Bob the Builder and I imagine myself briefing them that they need to go into my body and tell my fat cells 'thank you for keeping me nice and warm but they you longer needed and need to leave now.' Then I imagine hundreds of the these men filtering out my body and pulling fat cells away like miners, placing them in a wheel barrow and taking them away. You don't have to do this exact version, whatever works for you but the idea is that you use your imagination to tell your subconscious what you want by using images.

www.kindredgifts.co.uk
http://shop.kindredgifts.co.uk

It’s been a few days since I have updated the blog and much has happened. I’m realising the more the process goes on that my version of ‘green living’ splits roughly into three areas.

Frugality – The pursuit of not being wasteful, which means consuming less, buying less and recycling despite de-cluttering.

Eating and Living – Being aware of what we eat, how we move out bodies and staying away from laziness.

Fostering Positivity and Gratititude – Needed for the initial stages in lifestyle change and for generally feeling good.

So I will consequently title blog entries on these categories.

New Years Day

What a lovely day we had on New Years Day. I was very proud of myself to have done several things on my new lifestyle list. We spent it with some friends in Mirfield, a typical Yorkshire small town surrounded in fields and extremely hilly.

We started eating local produce by Sausages from award winning Mirfield Buther I only know as Shaun. Very good and followed by a brisk winters walk by the canal, there is a very quaint and cosy canal boat mooring area we passed by with the steam coming from the chimneys against the snow. We stopped at a pub called the Navigation on the canal which is known for its Beer Festival - there is one at the last weekend in Jan. Then home to Jacket potatos.

This morning it has been snowing thick like handfuls of candy floss and it has settled now. Its been a bad winter for snow, although still pretty magical having a white christmas, I'm growing weary of it taking three times as long to get to the shop to buy milk due to the olympic ice dodging on the paths.

Felt a apprehensive last night, as if the task of opening a shop is larger than me. Still I will move forward with small, manageable steps and that should shrug it off. Perhaps it is because of the New Year I am putting pressure on myself. If you don't already know about it can I suggest a little website called read it, swap it its a great site where you can swap books you have read with other people for free, except of course the price of postage. I've just swapped a ew old novels for Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, and the old classic,'Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway' so Iwill let you know my findings and a bit of a review when I get them through.

www.kindredgifts.co.uk

http://shop.kindredgifts.co.uk

To Dream an Impossible Dream

So here is my dream on a plate and if you share bits of it wonderful, you can suceed through avoiding my mistakes and if you don't then maybe you will enjoy the ride anyway.

1. To be slender and healthy by eating healthy organic foods and local produce and moving my body.

2. To be well on my way to being a entrepreneur, running a successful holistic gifts company http://www.kindredgifts.co.uk/

3. To live in a large and sunny Victorian/Geogian House with a garden and patio and home office/library.

4. To have paid all my debts and be earning a comfortable living where I don't want for anything and am financially stable.

5. To be a published writer

6. To have a cat.

7. To have a healthy social life with a small group of close friends.

8. To be able to cook - well

Day 1

'If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got.' source unknown.

I won't be the first nor the last to start writing a blog about lifestyle change in the New Year. Nor will I be the first women to look in the mirror and say I want to live and feel healthy, get in touch with nature, feel happy and live my dreams. This is a blog with two points one as it says on the tin is an account of my findings of how to live harmoniously with nature and also to mark the accomplishments of my pursuit of life goals, whilst hopefully inspiring readers to do the same.

But before we get to that, a bit of backstory to put it all into context....

I have spent 2009 going through a period of reflection 2010 must now we a period of action. To put it another way I honestly believe that man's only barrier is himself, having energy, perseverance, pushing past fear are stumbling blocks we all fall down on at some point and for me the significant changes of 2009 were not personal achievements but positive mental shift. For example ...

I spent whole evenings in 2009 talking the ear of my partner of possibilities, and it wasn't until I was sat in the bath one night with a glass of red wine that it occured to me. I work for an international creativity company, innovating businesses and boosting the creative economy as well as supporting individual artists in every field imaginable. Musing on the prospect of telling my dream- specifically the 'If I won the lottery I would ... ' one - to my employers it amused me to think of how small and insignificant it would seem from their perspective. It was a moment of freedom to imagine their response and it was then that I asked myself, why is opening a holistic and sensual gift shop in any way something which can only be achieved with the help of those big money balls?

Tip 1: Pour your worries into someone else's shoes -or at least look at you life from another perspective. Think of the most positive and successful people you know and as yourself how they would react to it?

I had a lot of the skills I needed, I'd worked in business support for 18 months, taking a backstage role yet picking up a lot along the way. I realised I lacked self-confidence, -perhaps not obvious on the surface but always bubbling beneath - so I booked myself an appointment with a local hypnotherapist who was very good and one of the best things hat came from that is she distanced me emotionally from any bad experience's I'd had in the past.

Talking about hypnotherapist I would highly recommend Paul McKenna's, Change your life in 7 Days. I can't tell you if he did change my life in that time especially as I read it in two days, but its very motivational and very good for finding out exactly what you do really want from life without what I like to call practicality filters. I've done this all my life, people have asked me what I want to do and I've thought about it and given answers according to 'what I believe is realistically possible to do' which is a completely different question and an act of sabotaging yourself before you've even started.

I've been lucky I suppose in that from an early age I have been a writer and chose to study writing at Degree and Masters level - much to the bewilderment of many family members and the Yorkshire community. I knew then and know now that writing novels was never going to be a full time pursuit, not because I don't enjoy it, I do immensely, but because of the isolation a writer faces, hours alone with your characters on your lap-top. However I am in a stronger position that many of you who may be stepping out into daring to believe in their dreams because I have become a connoisseur in 'but that's not going to get you a proper job' looks or, 'young and naive.' looks or just 'why?'. I've discovered over the years there are a few remedies to this.

1. Realise they just don't get it, more fool them, you're not going to let the odd few narrow minded people get in the way of living your dreams.

2. Speak confidently, assertively and intelligently on your subject. Its the Susan Boyle effect, sound like you know what you're talking about with passion and the hardest critics will warm to you.

3. Involve them, bring them into your world, ask questions and advice from them and from engaging comes understanding.

4. Ignore them and remember people's actions don't neccesarilly reflect thier true opinions, they may be showing bravado to friends, or worried and don't want you to fail, feel vulnerable because it is an area they don't know very well and therefore are out of thier comfort zone. Or thousands of other reasons which don't revolve around thinking less of you.

Or you may not care what others think, in which case wonderful but don't forget you'll need other people to help you along the way.

to be continued.