WHAT ARE WE CAPABLE OF?
What is your human potential and how far can you go? Is it possible to transcend limited thinking and move into a new life and create a new self? Can we expand our consciousness toward more clarity, wisdom, creativity, and ability to generate amazing solutions and live in joy, peace and inner contentment.
It turns out that every person has enormous capabilities but most don’t discover these.
So what holds us back from moving into what we could become?
The obstacles could be called our Habits of Discontent.
Rumination, practicing the worst possible future, wishing you lived somewhere else, thinking others have better lives are all habitual movies you may run from morning until night.
Discontent comes from the mind – swinging from judgement to judgement and running an inner movie focusing on what is missing. As a result of this unseen habit, the mind is constantly in moderate unhappiness. Your mind tells you that you need to do something else or acquire something that will make you feel amazing. As you chase these goals, you find yourself unhappier than before. These mental habits can become a habit- practice that leads to anxiety and depression.
So how do we interrupt these habitual movies and mental states and remember the original states we practiced as children: joy and curiosity.
You fall in love with life when you locate your passion and immense curiosity. What are you the most curious about that drives your life?
An inner yearning invites us to live deliberately in alignment with who we are, and from that process comes joy. If you are in love with life and you live often in states of contentment, when someone offends you, you let it go more easily.
The brain produces wonderful feel-good chemicals of dopamine and norepinephrine. In fact your brain releases dopamine whenever you catch a green light. Or when you go to dinner in a new restaurant, or accomplish a goal by yourself or in a team. But dopamine and norepinephrine only lasts about 20 minutes.
We have the technology within ourselves to find extreme contentment and live more from love. Research into brain training and practicing certain mental processes has found that old habits of discontent will shift to a default state of contentment and everyday personal ease where the inner critic disappears within two weeks(Jeffrey Martin, The Finders, 2019). One of these processes from positive psychology is the daily practice of gratitude coupled with a meditation practice that fits for you.
By practicing a meditation process, when there are upsetting events, you can return to a default state of calm peace much more easily. You find yourself being less reactive and judgmental in your outer life. This experience doesn’t come from a magic moment where every negative emotion suddenly disappears in a “poof” but there is a felt sense of calm peacefulness that comes over you. At times the sense of well-being occurs in passing moments and at other times calm clarity and peacefulness lasts longer. Eventually this mental state becomes your default state. The right tools teach the brain to condition certain mental states leading to compassion, clarity, peace, and joy. The result is fundamental well-being.
This shift does not mean you suddenly want to place yourself in in toxic experiences or with people who don’t want the best for you. But you seem fundamentally well and complete, and the frequency of negative thoughts and feelings decreases substantially. You end up in flow experiences accompanied by synchronicities. These are amazing moments where your life flow of awareness seems to occur with meaningful coincidences.
What are the best methods based in science to live in contentment? There are several meditative approaches that you may want to try for a week at a time 30 minutes to 1 hour a day. The key is to find one method that works for you and to spend enough time with it until you notice a shift. Usually this entails 30 minutes a day for 2 weeks or 1 hour a day for 1 week. And then the method may need to be changed after a couple of weeks of trying it. Fit is important.
One standard tool that has been used for centuries is to sit and watch your breath come in and go out. The mind will chatter and you can allow the thoughts to come and go and refocus on your breath. Then you may want to focus on the space in your right and left nostrils as the breath comes in and goes out. This focus deepens the meditation process.
Watch our next newsletter for the next best meditative approach you may want to try.
When the right method clicks for you, you transition to living in a different awareness and a different state where you are living the most powerful and purposeful life possible.