Tag Archives: joy

You Have a Knowingness: Empowered Unrealized Knowledge

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1197205_spanish_margueriteHave you ever looked at your pet and knew exactly what he wanted to “say” to you? Have you ever noticed someone’s body language that communicated something contrary to what they were saying? Have you ever had a gut feeling that something you were about to do wouldn’t result in a good outcome? Have you ever had a hunch that turned out to be right?

If your answer is yes then you are familiar with examples of your innate knowingness. You are able to sense the truth without explanation. When this knowledge presents itself “out of the blue” it feels a little a magical. This empowered unrealized knowledge is delivered to you through your Inner Wizard, the voice of your intuition and inspiration.

I once showed up at the airport three hours early to pick up my sister who was returning home from a business trip. I don’t know why I showed up early. All I know is that I felt a sudden strong urge to get in the car and head to the airport long before her scheduled arrival. The urge was undeniable so I got in the car and headed for the airport. I got there just in time to see her come out of baggage claim and park herself on the bench. As she was pulling her cell phone out of her purse to call me, I drove up to the curb in front of her and opened the door. We both just looked at each other for a stunned moment and then laughed.

I can’t explain it. I had no way of knowing that my sister caught an earlier flight at the last minute. I just had a knowingness that I had to get to the airport early.

Someone once asked rocker Tom Petty how he wrote hit song after hit song after hit song. He paused for what seemed like an eternity and responded that he really didn’t know how. Didn’t want to know how as the knowing might ‘jinx it’. He just sits down and the music spills through him. Not out of him, through him.

These are just a few examples of this powerful magical internal resource at work.

Your Inner Wizard operates beyond time and space and is sometimes called your higher self, your soul or your spirit. It is the playful child within you that knows your truth, your passions and your desires. When problems surface your intuition provides quick and efficient answers to your problems letting you know what the best course of action to take to overcome the issue at hand.

A life lead by this Inner Wizard, this empowered knowingness, gives you boundless energy and joy.

However, your Inner Wizard is often lost in the “noise” of other thoughts and physical feelings voiced by another part of you, your Inner Critic. Your Inner Critic serves up self-doubt and fear to hold you back, limit you to keep you safe from what it fears. Your Inner Critic fears the unknown so it doesn’t like to venture beyond right where it is – in its comfort zone, even if you don’t like being there. You’ve heard this voice. It is the voice that says you can’t or aren’t (good, rich, smart, worthy, etc.) enough to be, do or have what you want in life.

There’s an easy way to tell which part of you is empowered. If it’s your Inner Wizard then you feel good, if not great! If it’s your Inner Critic, then you don’t feel so good. You lack energy. You’re swimming upstream instead of with the flow of life.

The only thing stopping you from being, doing and having what you want in life is – you! It is that part of you, the Inner Critic, that stops you through self-doubt and fear. The good news is you can easily learn how to recognize the difference between your Inner Wizard and your Inner Critic. You can learn how to tame your Inner Critic and empower your Inner Wizard. It takes a willingness to change and a commitment to the work. And the work can be a joy ride!

People believe things can be serious, important or useful or they can be fun, enjoyable or pleasing. But they can’t be both. This belief is just that – a belief, not a truth. The journey of self-awareness and transformation to empower your Inner Wizard is serious, important and very definitely useful AND a heck of a lot of fun. The result of the work is a rich delicious life – and that’s certainly an enjoyable and pleasing experience!

Tap into the creative and magical power of your Inner Wizard today and turn your dreams into reality.

Copyright © 2009 Valery Satterwhite; Valery is the Founder of the International Association for Inner Wizards. Learn how to tame your Inner Critic (self-doubt and fear), empower your Inner Wizard (intuition and inspiration) to turn your dreams into reality. Your Inner Wizard is your best Coach, Guru and Teacher. Everything you need to be, do and have what you want in life is already within you. Tap into this power and live a rich delicious life. More at http://www.InnerWizard.com

Emotional Competence

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1080093_yellow_flower_against_yellow_backgroundEmotional Competence is a learnable competence. My domestic violence mentor, Tony Kubicki, long ago taught me that awareness gives me choice, and that awareness is the key component to emotional competence.

Personally, I like emotions, all of them. Anxiety, fear, sadness, melancholy, nostalgia, joy, excitement, contentment, desire, and all the other subtle nuances of the root emotions of mad, sad, glad, fear, and I add in shame, are what gives life its ‘juice’ as far as I am concerned and I want to feel them all, and I have come to understand there are some very important components to managing the intensity of those feelings.

Remember, awareness gives me choice over intensity.

If you are a student of Czikszentmihalyi’s work on FLOW, then you will remember that he says our Central Nervous System processes sensory input; sound waves, photons for vision, pressure for touch, smell, taste, at the rate of seven bits of data every 1/18th second, which is about twice as fast as you can blink your eyes. Pretty quick.

And then you will be creating thoughts or words which interpret those sensations darn near as fast, and those thoughts will be what brings your feelings, and those feelings will be linked to hormonal and neurotransmitter changes in your brain and body, so you might go from joy at level 10 intensity to anger at a level 10 intensity (10 point scale) which is a 20 point switch from one pole of emotion to another in 1/18th second based on changing thoughts. Not much time to manage your emotions, right?

The good news is that you have done this hundreds of thousands of times, the bad news is that when you do not switch thoughts or ‘break the chain” of negative thoughts, your behaviors will be pushed by intense feelings which are demanding an expression.

If you are a guy, and find yourself experiencing this kind of intensity, give yourself 20 minutes minimum to clear the neurotransmitters and stress hormones from your body.

So emotional competence demands an awareness of your inner experience so that you can change thoughts or breathing patterns, even brain wave patterns, or heart rate variability, for example, and change the intensity of your emotions. That is emotional intelligence to me.

I liken it to how you drive your car. As you drive, you are constantly adjusting the position of the vehicle on the road, its speed, ect. with minor adjustments according to constantly changing traffic variables.

Those minor adjustments are what keep you safe on almost all your automotive adventures, whether its from the inconsiderate road hog, or the trucker needing to make a wide right turn, and that mindful attention is what keeps you prepared to respond to a sudden emergency.

I want to drive my body the same way, with mindful awareness, so that I can make quick decisions about emotions and their intensity and the thoughts I might have about those inner experiences. Paul Ekman and Facial Expressions I have been fascinated by non-verbal communication since I was a kid, and was truely delighted to come across the work of Paul Ekman, who has been studying facial expressions and attempting to catalog or categorize them for a long time.

Some of his work has been across cultures, and he has discovered that humans respond very strongly to some expressions across cultures. In other words, if a person from another culture looks at me with an expression of contempt, I will respond emotionally just as fast as if my own kids had looked at me with “that look.”

So another factor for us to be aware of is facial expressions and our response to them. Ekman says that facial expressions can play across our face in 1/25th second, so fast that I do not register it like I normally would register an expression.

For me, it is just another reason to pay close attention to my insides, my emotions will tell me something about what another individual is experiencing, and I will get a chance to dispute any thought I have of my being the cause of that individuals feelings.

My favorite tool for regulating my inner experience is heart rate variability biofeedback, which is an easily learned method for controlling the time between my heart beats. I like it because it feels good, and once I have learned it, in 5-10 practices using a program on my PC or the hand held version, I can cue the pleasant feeling on demand. I can even begin to change my inner thermostat so that I am cooler all the time.

Heart rate variability biofeedback is based on research about the heart’s own nervous system, and the ability of that brain in the heart to learn and make decisions independently of my cranial brain.

It turns out that the heart plays a key role in emotional regulation, mostly in the affiliative and cooperative range. So if I am operating from my heart intelligence, I am typically cooperative and affiliative, offering choice in conversation, playful, and able to make quick changes in my inner experience, even if the other person is sending me messages about anger and aggression. I call that mindfulness.

Other very important tools for me in my emotional competance tool box are deep breathing, frequent internal expressions of gratitude, because I could be in some other persons shoes, physical exercise, decent nutrition, lots of affirmational thoughts, and study.

Technology is making new information about the human experience available almost by the second it seems, and I want to keep up with it.

Besides heart rate variability coherence, which was unknown not too many years ago,brand new information is available about something called brain fitness, and there are some great tools available for us to use which makes our brains more plastic, which means they can rewire in minutes, based on what we are paying attention to. Brain fitness tools then make the brain flexible, especially when that brain is nourished well, meaning get all the omega 3 fatty acid you need, among other things. (Makes your neurons supple and soft, very good).

Brain fitness means encouraging the growth of neurogenesis also, which is the growth of new brain cells, which migrate to the hippocampus where memories are stored.

A healthy brain will be a valuable ally in the inner attention work involved in emotional competence.

Michael S. Logan is a brain fitness expert, a counselor, a student of Chi Gong, and licensed one on one HeartMath provider. I enjoy the spiritual, the mythological, and psychological, and I am a late life father to Shane, 10, and Hannah Marie, 4, whose brains are so amazing. http://www.askmikethecounselor2.com

Sense and Smell

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1152194_orange_isolated_on_white_backgroundAll scent originates as a chemical. Without chemicals, our brain would not be able to perceive, or “read” a scent. All around us are currents of air which are in constant motion. These currents contain myriads of complex combinations of odours that only trigger our attention when they irritate or please us.

Every time we breathe, our noses take in these chemicals, which pass over two small patch-like areas the size of a penny that contains five to six million tiny yellow receptor cells called the olfactory epithelium. Located on these receptor cells are microscopic filaments called cilia that extend into a watery mucous that surrounds the epithelium. On the cilia are proteins that respond to specific molecules. Like a key in a lock, when these proteins come into contact with its corresponding odorant molecule, a series of biological interactions are initiated.

First, there is an immediate rush of electrical activity as one experiences the perception of an odour. Our sensory nerves have long filaments, or axons, that are located on the opposite end of our olfactory nerves. The axons send messages to nerves located in the olfactory bulb which is shaped like a protracted balloon. The millions of axons that line its circumference transmit a pattern of activity that is specific to the individual cilia that come into contact with their corresponding molecules. Just as our brains are able to store and recognize complex notes from a symphony, it is also able to store and recognize complex combinations of fragrance notes that make up our favourite perfume.

How strong is our sense of smell?

Compared to a dog that has two hundred twenty million olfactory sensors, humans have only five or six million. While it may seem that humans have been short-changed where noses are concerned, we still can nevertheless, recognize thousands of different scents. Though we may not have a piranha-sharp sense of smell, we can, for instance, detect some substances in dilutions of less than one part per several billion parts air.

How sharp is our sense of smell at birth?

Unlike our other senses, our sense of smell is fully mature at birth and is one of the first senses that newborns experience. Their sense of smell helps them to locate their mother and her source of food. Without this functioning sense, baby animals would not be able to locate their mothers’ milk.

Studies indicate that a newborn can recognize his or her mother’s nipple simply by its scent. In one study, mothers washed one of their breasts while leaving the other left unwashed. Over two-thirds of the babies tested chose the unwashed breast.

Research conducted by Dr. Ira Lott reveals that when a baby is introduced to a fragrance while being stroked—much like a mother would do while nursing—his or her ability to remember that scent is increased. The results of her study suggest a connection between a baby’s sense of smell and the ability to learn at an early age. Dr. Lott suggests that touching a baby increases his or her ability to remember a scent and may help to explain why a newborn readily recognizes his or her mother by her scent.

Other studies suggest that babies are most responsive to body odours but by the age of three they essentially have the same odour likes and dislike as adults. Newborns subjected to pleasant odours reacted positively while those subjected to unpleasant odours responded with “screwed up faces.” Studies within the womb reveal that foetuses react to fragrances introduced through their mother while newborns are able to recognize her scent in as little as forty-eight hours after their birth.

Children’s sense of smell—their odour likes and dislikes—do not parallel those of adults until the onset of puberty. A study conducted in 1976 and repeated in 1994 indicates that nine-year olds apparently do not have sensitivity to certain musk odours. However, their ability to detect particular odours is the same as both adults and young adults.

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Luke Vorstermans is the founder of The Sense of Smell Lab, a world leader in the development of innovative products that use our sense of smell to influence behavior, trigger memories, manage cravings, enhance moods and improve sexual health. To learn more about enhancing your sex drive with Scentuelle patch go to http://www.scentuellepatch.com