Experiencing Our Feelings

This past full moon and lunar eclipse were very powerful for me. I experienced the energies quite intensely. The night before and after the full moon I couldn't sleep at all. I experienced all the pent up emotions I carried within me. A major illumination finally occurred to me concerning a situation I repeatedly attract in my life. I realized I attract people that will tell or show me in various ways that I am not good enough. I have struggled with low self esteem throughout my life. I receive this message from people that I care about and it hurts me so deeply. I saw that the reason I keep getting this message that I am not worthy of being treated good is because I don't value myself enough or feel I am worthy.

In that moment I was able to reclaim my inner power and truly know that I am worthy of love. I must once and for all stop allowing people, even those I care about, to treat me poorly. It is time for me to stand up for my needs and set boundaries. The messages I have been receiving where others have told me or done things to show me I'm not good enough, have been there to show me that this is not true. When I can really love and value myself, no matter what others say or do, they will no longer effect me in the same way because I won't own it.

I sense that because I haven't truly felt that I deserve love, respect and kindness that when someone would say or do something to hurt me it would penetrate my being and I would feel the pain and affirm that somehow I don't deserve to be valued. Once I completely realize that I no longer wish to experience this mirroring effect in the way that I am treated that I will never attract situations and people that will treat me in this way.

The thing is, so many people show me so much love, kindness and respect. I am learning how to accept love and truly believe that I am worthy of it. I feel with this awareness I can really see that when those I care for do and say things that send me the wrong message, I don't need to own it. In essence they are actually not feeling good about themselves and projecting it onto me. It doesn't mean that I have to believe it or accept the message.

The solar eclipse on January 26, followed two weeks later with the intense full moon energies and lunar eclipse has magnified our issues and brought them to the forefront for us to see and heal them. We are being challenged to go to the next level of conscious awareness so we can clear the issues that have been holding us back from experiencing love and intimacy.

It takes a brave person to face their shadow side and come to terms with patterns that don't belong in the new energy. The message I am getting is that we need to feel our feelings and express ourselves. Upon that realization I cried. I hadn't cried in probably over a year or more. No matter how much I have wanted to cry it has been bottled up inside of me. The tears were a release. We have been suppressing and not feeling what is inside of us. We can't move forward if we are stuck in the past or continuing a pattern that doesn't serve us.

In many instances we have been denying our feelings. We don't want to deal with the fear, anger, resentment, sadness, loneliness, or anxiety we've been feeling. Rather than acknowledging that it is there we pretend it isn't, this way if it is out of sight, it is out of mind. Many think it is not spiritual to feel these emotions so they will pretend they are not there. We are humans for goodness sakes! We are spiritual beings having a human experience and we are being shown that now is the time to feel what is inside of us.

In the moment that I really understood what has been happening with me, I really saw what I have allowed to occur in my life, and experienced the feelings, I was able to transmute it and move past it. I am understanding that when I get these negative messages about myself I can recognize it for what it is and not own it.

We are meant to feel. Our society has become about doing and not feeling. It is time to change that. We need to learn to be in the present moment and allow ourselves to experience pleasure, happiness and love. If we want to fix what is wrong in our lives and world we must realize we have strayed away from feeling.

It can be scary to feel. I think we may wonder if we start feeling our emotions we might go crazy and go on some rampage since they've been bottled up for so long! If we express our anger or fear it might overwhelm and consume us. I truly believe it is safe to show whatever emotion we are experiencing as long as it is in a healthy and productive way. Holding it in is much more dangerous. It leads to illness, anger and imbalance.

In order to experience true intimacy in our relationships we need to allow our emotions to be expressed. When we take a chance to express love to another we risk opening up and revealing our vulnerable and tender side. We must take a risk of getting hurt and rejected. Without opening up we never get the opportunity to experience love, affection, pleasure and true intimacy.

We are being challenged to look deep within ourselves and confront what is there. I had to face my low self esteem issues, feeling not good enough or worthy of love. As we heal our shadow side, we transmute the lower energies that hold us back from loving. We are being guided into the new energy by metamorphizing into who we really are, so we may experience what we really want in our lives. The tears I cried were not only those of sadness and frustration, what I was experiencing is a realization, hey, I am worthy, just because I carried around these feelings since childhood I've outgrown them.

As we acknowledge and accept our shadow side, experience the pent up feelings, and process the awareness, we can then release the issues and let go of those feelings once and for all, and move on to opportunities to give and receive all the wonderful things meant for us.

By Stefanie Miller

Over 40 and Laid Off?

By Craig Nathanson

The 5 most important steps you must take now...

Do nothing
Probably not the first piece of advice you would expect to get! When you are laid off, the range of emotions you feel can be overwhelming. You become your own worst critic, and you start coming up with all the reasons why you lost the job. At home, you hear more of this from your family members, although maybe not so directly.

You feel like a failure. Your self-esteem has taken a hit, and you feel depressed and a little lost. You feel angry and you're not sure what to do about it. You rush forward into a new job search, and related frantic activity....

Stop -- wrong approach.
Instead, take some time for reflection. Chances are you didn't even like this job or the work itself. Privately, you are a little excited to be free of this job prison, although you would not admit this to anyone right now.

This is the time to get away. It may be for a few days, or maybe a few weeks. Do nothing during this time except think deeply about what you want out of your life and what activities bring you the most joy. This is a rare space of time to think seriously about who you are, and where you want to make a contribution. Don't lose this opportunity.

Forget about money
Sure, your immediate concerns probably revolve around how to pay next month's bills. Ideally, you tap into other resources to buy time. After 40, we need more time than money. There is probably nothing you can do in the next two weeks that will make a difference in the short term. Instead of working on your resume, make a money plan to get you through the next 1-3 months.

This is a rare opportunity in your life to really invest the time to think. What work MUST emerge through you now? No external job description will ever get this right for you. This must come from you. Where do you most want to make a contribution in the world right now? Why is this important to you? This is the MOST important question you must answer about your life and the reason you are here.

Get educated
Once you have defined what you are really passionate about, it's time to get educated. Who is doing the work you most want to do? Read everything you can. The more you read, the more inspired you will get. Eventually, you may choose to embark on some formal education, but for now simply gather enough data to help you feel good about your choice of work.

When you are working at and learning about what you love, and what really interests you, you won't be able to tell the difference between work and play. Soon, your vocation will become a lifelong vacation. Instead, most of us just work at jobs. The difference between our jobs and the rest of our lives is very clear. Your life can be better than this!

Brand yourself
Whether you decide to work for yourself or others, the process should be the same. What are exactly your best gifts, and what do you enjoy most? What kind of services or products can you create and sell to others using your unique gifts? What are the features and benefits of what you will offer? What is the perfect niche audience for you and your products and services?

Let's say, for example, that you like to design art work. You think, "Who would buy what I love to do most?" You think a little deeper, and realize that you could design cost-effective restaurant menus that would draw people to the restaurants. Your menus would feature specials, ingredients, and customer reviews. Restaurant owners would benefit as customers would learn more about their eateries, and what they have to offer. Then another thought hits: you could write a newsletter, displaying your brand, targeted at restaurant owners giving advice on how to brand their restaurants!

You decide to call this business "Creative menus". You are off and running. This same logic works whether you love to help animals or design software. The reason we are seeing so many layoffs today in corporate America is that most organizations don't know how to develop entrepreneurial thinking or entice creativity inside their businesses.

Make a plan
Write down your vision of your perfect vocational day. Without this vision, you will have no motivation to move forward. Most people don't change anything in their lives until the pain of not changing becomes greater than the initial discomfort associated with changing.

Most people look for jobs in an illogical way. They look for them! Most jobs were not designed for you in the first place. You spend days and months networking, hoping a Job will come to you. The job probably will come to you eventually, but it will quickly look like the last job prison you were in. There is a strong tendency to go back to what we did before, ONLY because it was familiar and we were good at it. After 40, it becomes critical to avoid this trap.

First define a plan, and steps to create for what you want. Then you will know where to look, and how to start building exactly what would be perfect for you.

Laid off recently?
Congratulations! You have a unique, perhaps once in a lifetime, opportunity to get to know yourself better and to ask better questions of yourself. Be careful what you ask, because the work you choose to do can determine the kind of person you become.

Take that pink slip and run to the nearest beach for reflection and peace. This is the best gift you can give yourself now. I'll be cheering you on as you go!

Craig Nathanson is a coaching expert

Women talk three times as much as men, says study

It is something one half of the population has long suspected - and the other half always vocally denied. Women really do talk more than men. In fact, women talk almost three times as much as men, with the average woman chalking up 20,000 words in a day - 13,000 more than the average man.

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Character- Jakie Robinson

It requires incredible foresight to remain faithful to an idea. To ignore what your eyes and ears tell you and imagine better. One individual - Jack Roosevelt "Jackie" Robinson imagined better and ended eighty years of baseball segregation. He crossed the color line and made his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 as the first African American in major league baseball.

One of five, born on January 31, 1919 in Cairo, GA, Robinson was raised in relative poverty by a single mother. Even though he wasn't born into a privileged environment, Jackie was destined for something infinitely larger. His professional baseball career, which spanned from 1947 to 1957, is the quintessential story of an All American Baseball hero.

Despite unmitigated racial discrimination from baseball's management, teammates and fans, Robinson possessed the courage to defy retaliation and was the consummate athletic professional. He was an outstanding base runner, stealing home 19 times in his career more than any ball player since World War I. As a disciplined hitter, a versatile fielder and an outstanding defensive player Robinson won Rookie of the Year in 1947 and Most Valuable Player in 1949 for the National League. He was the first African American inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and became a member of the All-Century Team. He received a championship ring when he led the Dodgers to a 1955 World Series victory over the New York Yankees.

Major League Baseball retired Robinson's number 42 - never to be worn by another ball player - in recognition of his accomplishments on and off the field in a ceremony at Shea Stadium.

Robinson's historic achievements in baseball were but one aspect of his life and legacy. Quoted as saying, "I'm not concerned with your liking or disliking me - all I ask is that you respect me as a human being" he was a champion of civil and human rights. He was a staunch supporter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Anti Defamation League of B'nai Brith. He founded the Jackie Robinson Construction Corporation to improve living conditions of Black Americans in metropolitan areas and he served as Vice President of Chock Full O' Nuts.

Robinson was a significant fundraiser for the NAACP and a major figure in national politics influencing leaders such as Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Nixon; Hubert Humphrey and Nelson Rockefeller. As a syndicated columnist, he was a civil rights movement forerunner. One of only two players in baseball Jackie received the Congressional Gold Medal and President Ronald Regan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Stress May Cause The Brain To Become Disconnected

Does stress damage the brain? In the March 1st issue of Biological Psychiatry a paper by Tibor Hajszan and colleagues provides an important new chapter to this question.

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People with higher IQs live longer

The discovery was made after researchers looked into the medical records of one million Swedish army conscripts. After taking into account whether they had grown up in a safer, more affluent environment, they established the connection between IQ and mortality.

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6 Year Old Boy with 176 IQ

"Pranav Veera, 6, can recite the names of the U.S. presidents in the order they served in office. He can say the alphabet backward. Give him a date back to 2000, and he'll tell you the day of the week . . ."

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Working Long Hours Linked to Mental Decline

In a recent study, working long hours was associated with decreased cognitive function in middle-aged adults.

The study examined 2,214 middle-aged British civil servants who were working full-time. The researchers performed various tests to measure the participants' cognitive function at the time of study enrollment (1997-1999) and again at follow up (2002-2004).

According to the authors, working more than 55 hours a week was linked with poorer mental skills, including impaired short-term memory and recall, compared to those who worked a standard 40 hours. Individuals who worked the most hours experienced the greatest decline in cognitive function.

These results were similar after adjusting for potential confounding factors, including age, gender, marital status, education, occupation, income, physical diseases, psychosocial factors, sleep disturbances and health-risk behaviors.

In addition, participants who worked overtime slept fewer hours, reported more symptoms of depression and drank more alcohol than those who worked just 40 hours.

The potential mechanism for these negative effects remains unknown. It is also unclear if the effects may be long-term. Additional research is warranted in this area.

For more information about cognitive decline, please visit Natural Standard's Medical Conditions database.