Taking control: Are you assessing your upward mobility?

Upward mobility pertains to personal growth as a result of successful achievement of goals. It could also refer to identifying and mobilizing resources for your vision.  Assessing your progress is mandatory and will enable you to measure your commitment towards a desired change.

The process of taking control of your life is a life-long exercise, which transcends the grave.  This means as long as you are alive, you will encounter challenges and daily learn from them as you become successful in maintaining a cleaner inner space and acquire skills to manage your personal blemishes.  It is important to identify and unlearn bad habits. If this includes bad influence from your friends, move away from them!  Find those who are moving upwards! Learn how they achieved those things that are similar to your plans. 

Assessing progress should be part of the growth strategy.  If the important step to take control of your life is letting go of your anger because you are divorced, you need to replace angry thoughts and emotions with positive and empowering thoughts as follows:

1.    Am I benefiting to think of the failed relationship? The answer is no; and you cannot reverse the time invested in that relationship.  Each day you allow your mind to drift towards the cause and whether or not you contributed, you are actually harming yourself.  You are opening the wound every time; and it is up to you to choose to move towards healing.

2.    Is this the only issues that has angered me or was there other dormant experiences? While it may seem irrelevant to consider the real source of your anger, it will help you to see how you contributed to the failed relationship.  For an example, if you are living with disappointments because your parents separated or were divorced, you are likely to be carrying:

i)            Fear: If you brought fear into the relationship, you probably contributed negative energy because you could not trust your spouse.

ii)           Insecurity: In such a case a failed relationship was a confirmation of what you felt unconsciously and such toxic energy would not have allowed you to love unreservedly.  Insecure person wants to be perfect and demands the same from others.  Such a person therefore has a controlling behavior.  Remember! You can only control you and nobody else. 

iii)          Easily angered: If you find you are always picking hurtful words when communicating with others, it is likely that you have negative emotions and it is extremely challenging to positively interact with other people.

Moving from these incapacitating emotional issues requires that you pay attention on how often in a day you catch yourself brooding over the past argument; anticipating offense from colleagues or other people; recalling and dwelling on how you were unjustly treated at a meeting because someone’s s suggestion was noted as ideal compared to yours.  When you are able to note these negative thoughts and attitude, know that you have become conscious of the condition of your inner space.  You are making progress in refining the quality of your emotions and you will find it easy to discard anything that derails you or will distance yourself from those who are not taking upward mobility.    

Taking control: The meaning and analysis of apathy and sorrow!

Apathy is a feeling of hopelessness or exploitation. It is an emotional emptiness which robs a victim of motivation to change the situation for better. Sorrow is a deep emotional pain for loss of a loved person or to a lesser extent, a valuable property like a home. It is a state of mourning which cuts deep and in most cases produce depression. It is a state of ceaseless sadness.   

Apathy is common on those who are divorced because there is always a sense of loss of resources even though emotionally one may feel relief for moving from unhealthy relationship.  There is also a loss of self-worth because good marriage symbolizes social success for finding a common ground to live with a total stranger in peace.  A failed marriage therefore is seen as inability to manage relationships which is a primary need because humans are social beings as well as spiritual. The worst feeling is that of being exploited. In marriage you give yourself unreservedly and divorce is a revelation of exploitation of the most treasured resource – self.

Sorrow is an emotional feeling that reflects the negative thoughts concerning unproductive period in life which in reality says you are a failure.  Great harm occurs when you dwell in this state because you would likely resort to some form of substance abuse to numb the pain and create a false joy and peace.   

The most effective approach of dealing with sorrow is focusing on you as a spiritual being and not a social self.  From the spiritual perspective, apathy and sorrow denotes that you have moved from the Creator.  It says you are cut-off from life and this revelation will enable you to realize that you must immediately seek Him and reconnect.  Without the Creator, you are like a branch cut off from the tree and therefore dying.  Spiritually you will see yourself as intact because no one can reach you unless you are ignorant of self in this realm.  As a spiritual being you are always above physical circumstances; and a winner as long as you (a spiritual self) stay connected to your Creator by faith.  Your Creator is therefore not moved by your tearful kicking and screaming; only your faith in His ability to carry you over all storms will move Him never to let go of your hand.

Practically you who have just lost a husband or a fiance for an example, you need to shake off all self-pity because is the ego stuff that will take you deeper into remorse.  You must focus in the now.  In this state you will realize that the only thing that is in your power to change is you.  When this truth sets in, you will chart your new course and move on from the crossroads.  Clothes change how you feel; so go shopping and change your look.  Remember that each day is an opportunity to affirm your power and ability to start over.  

Taking control: Regrets are fruits of quit!

Guilt is a function of a conscience. It is a negative assessment of actions or experiences that are regarded as not appropriate according to established social or spiritual standards.  It is a perpetual deep judgmental analysis of the past events which reflect negatively to self and cause you to lower your self-worth.

Self judgment is negative while self-evaluation is a positive analysis of activities and experiences which are meant to enable you to improve your knowledge or skills. It is acceptable to evaluate your actions so that you could weed-out those blemishes that do not support our goals, but should always seek to build a better you. The following are examples of destructive self-talk messages which end up with guilty conscience:

1.    I did not try harder to safe the situation!

2.    I am sloppy to maintain a desirable home for my husband; no one would have tolerated such disorganized environment!

3.    I was not empathetic to my spouse, remember he was abused and I could have been more forgiving for the assault I experienced.

4.    Marriage is sacred; I should have stayed and prayed more rather than left.

5.    I did not demonstrated love towards in-laws; I created a difficult situation for my spouse.

6.    I did not comply with the spiritual law which required that I love other people unconditionally.    

7.    I lost control over my own anger! It is my fault that my fiance broke the engagement.

8.    I am too clingy and called too often; I chased my fiance away. I overwhelmed him!  

9.    I am too independent; no man would like such a woman!

10. I was not careful about selecting a safe route; this is why I was ambushed and raped.

The list is endless. The point is; none of these should dwell in your mind as debilitating thoughts.  Yes it is natural to analyze actions that contributed to your situation; but you must learn to be objective so that such experiences would be positive learning points rather than the source of the feeling of condemnation.  For you to effectively cope with guilt you must establish what was really right and what was really wrong.   If somehow you felt you could have done better to defuse the situation or made better choices, it is a revelation experience which says you have learned from your mistakes and you to do better on similar cases in the future.  On reaching this conclusion, move from it! Let it be a positive point of reference a not a reminder of your inadequacy.

Let your conscience be a helpful mechanism that enables you to assess your teachable experiences and not a mean watchful pointer of your blemishes.  Guilty conscience can cause so much pain and stress to the point of blocking your ability to make decisions because you no longer trust yourself.  As soon as you discover that you are harboring guilt, you must stop immediately; if you cannot, get professional help!

Taking control: Meaning and analysis of the feeling of disgrace

Disgrace is a general deep feeling of the sense of humiliation. It denotes not fitting the worthiness that qualifies normal people. It manifests in total low self esteem which drives the host to act outside love due to the absence of positive energy.

Disgrace is better understood from the spiritual point of view.  Let me explain disgrace from the positive perspective: Grace is unmerited favor from your Creator.  It explains the nature and the magnitude of given positive natural and spiritual environment created for your general wellness.  Look at planet earth; it is the only one which has water, air, plants, minerals and all things you need to sustain your life.   Being aware of grace is the basic awareness of who you are and how you came to be.  It is a revelation that you are created by God and goodness is your nature.  Disgrace is the absence of this goodness and connection with the positive energy which means not experiencing the given good things that make you to want to operate from and stay connected in this life giving energy.

Disgrace is caused by living with condemnation due to something that happened and did not fit the societal moral code and or spiritual norm and therefore fall outside the guiding principles in the spiritual realm.  You are also a social being and anything that is not praiseworthy in terms of the community and societal standards is shameful.  For an example, a male child who is born outside marriage is not accepted to perform certain traditional rituals and this is a public rejection which cuts deep.   Such humiliation could take a nasty turn by way of making such a male person hate women to the point of becoming a serial killer of women.  Those who feel the pain of disgrace are not motivated to engage in good activities because they simply do not have that kind of energy.  Since they have very low self-worth; they are perpetually unhappy and generally shun good environment.

The effective remedial action for disgrace is finding spiritual connection with the Creator.  It is having a revelation and understanding that your parents and the community what judge you have very little to do with your existence.  Your are not an accident.  You are part of the Creator; this is why He knew you before you were conceived.  This fact enables you to realize that your parents are like a transport that brought you to plant earth and hence you were given their identity.  When you discover that you are a spiritual being like your Creator, you will stop seeing yourself in others.  You will realize that you are priceless in the eyes of your Creator; and defining who you are from any point of view would indicate serious ignorance of your identity.  You will actually perish if your see yourself as anything other than a spiritually being because you will seek to fall within the man-make definition other than the Creator who knows the number of your hair; and declared you His child and ambassador of His kingdom in this life.

Disgrace is living without the positive love-supporting energy of the Creator whose nature is life.  It therefore describes the general lack of spiritual fulfillment and existing in the dark world of life without the favor of the Creator.  

Taking control: The light of consciousness breaks the burden of unconsciousness

Consciousness is being fully present, aware of your body processes. It is noticing the slight reactions of the impact of the environment especially when it shifts from positive to negative emotion. Unconsciousness is not being aware of your thoughts, their impact on your behavior and your response to your environment. 

Unconsciousness is not easy to detect because it is common to most people and therefore regarded as normal.  It is usually labeled by its visible impact commonly referred to people as cruel and unpleasant.  You may from this point on, notice how people react rather than respond to the issues at hand: Unconscious people are defensive and they are not even aware because they cannot pay attention to underlying motivation of their behavior.  They expect and see wrong things in others, and therefore are argumentative, judgmental, and not easy to please.  When you are in the company of an unconscious person, you are likely to experience general lack of positive emotion.  Because at sub-atomic level human beings are energy, you will catch this negative energy and it could stay with you until you consciously shake it off by engaging in something that you enjoy.

If you indulge in your past painful experiences, you will not be able to forgive those who caused or contributed to your pain. If you love to elaborate on your private thoughts of how you will fix your enemies, you will surely exude negative energy. The sad truth is that it is like drinking a poison yourself because your hurtful feelings will harm you and not the person you regard as an enemy.

The remedial action to snap out of unconsciousness is shutting the door of the past because you cannot undo any of the injustice.  It is a matter of making a decision because you can only control you and nobody else even if you have been truly treaded badly.  For your own sake, chose to forgive and move on.  The reality is that, when you bring your attention to now, you will experience general peace and love and deep feeling of satisfaction that you have power to transform your life.  When you stay in the past, you give your enemy power over your life and you are inflicting pain on you all by yourself by playing hurtful thoughts continuously in your mind.  Your life is now because you do not have anything other than the present; the future is unknown and is also out of your control.

   

The healthy approach to life is deciding to take control over your life.  You are a project in progress; and only your Creator knows the period within which you will cease to be.  When you are conscious of your own imperfection, is it wise to point a finger of blame at those who inflicted pain during your socialization?  No! This is why love and peace can only be lived now and be a torch that lightens the burden of your unconscious world. 

Taking control: Identify and address emotional pain

Emotional pain is accumulated negative experiences that live in your body and create a negative energy.  It thrives on perpetual negative thinking which affects the host’s perception about life, and manifest in general unpleasant behavior.  Unchecked, it leads the host to self-destruct.

From the day you were born you surely experienced some unpleasant things which have been archived in you unconscious mind.  As an adult it is your responsibility to audit your emotions.  There are only two types – good and bad emotions. You may think that you are a happy people-loving person until someone strikes a nerve and arouse shocking response which even you will be surprised. When that happens you must know that there is a dormant destructive emotional pain that lives with you.

Always remember that you cannot change anything you have not identified. The first step therefore is to pin-point your pain which could be one or a few of the following: Anger, resentment, hatred, guilt, jealousy, depression, self-pity; and others.  If you want to discover why you got it, you must be prepared to spend a very long time suffering because that is the function of mental profession.  I suggest you focus you attention in how you can heal your emotional pain.  Sometimes the answer is easy because you can remember the unfinished business that you swept under the carpet hoping that it will go away. The challenge is when the experience is locked in your unconscious mind and therefore not accessible for you to identify it. 

Healing an emotional pain requires you to engage your thoughts and desire to be happy in the present.  This means being aware that you are hurting.  For an example, if you generally find faults in people it could mean that you are harboring resentment because in childhood, you were not appreciated like other siblings and therefore you hated them or your parents.  It could be that you have been tolerating them and not celebrating anyone of them. The cover-up will blow if anyone of them or any person would dare point at any little flaw you have.  The bottled emotion will erupt in the form of exaggerated real negative response which will shock them, or any victim, even you; showing you that you must be aware that you are hurting.  When this happens, do not condemn yourself.  Regard that emotion as a foreign object that has occupied your body and can no longer live there.  This discovery will give your authority to watch this emotion without labeling or engaging in another pain such as self-pity or condemnation.  It will then be time to decide to forgive your parents and move on with your life.

Prolonged negative energy is the source of physical body pain such as cancer, high blood pressure and others.  You are a positive being because your Creator is Love and created you to function on positive energy.  Emotional pain therefore is like rust, which will sever the object to the point of breaking.  Be aware that you cannot move when you have this invisible anchor occupying your body.  It is your responsibility to identify and destroy your emotional pain if you are to move from the crossroads. 

Taking control: How often do you appreciate yourself?

The greatest achievement towards success is training your mind to appreciate you and your achievements. It is being pleased of your ability and discipline to undertake planned activities effectively within a set target period. It is admiring your inner motive which fuels you to perform to your best standards. Appreciating yourself is cheering every successful step towards shaping the new you. It is having faith and ensuring that you bring a disciplined new you as a supervisor of all planned activities. It denotes rebuking your old habits such as procrastination or not paying attention to details. Change is only permanent when you do not let your guard down. It is about undertaking your strategy seriously, noting the weak moments and avoiding half-heartedness. It is making sure that the initial criterion on your ability and skills you set maintains the upward mobility. Engage your imagination to maintain the high level of motivation. To achieve this you need to visualize a new you: An organized, powerful and highly motivated player of your own game. The good thing is that the mind is very good in creating reality out of nothing. I mean what you picture become real and will attract positive circumstances that accelerate your competence. When you applaud yourself, you become so full of positive energy that you have no choice but to succeed in all what you are doing. You become aligned to the law of harmonious attraction. Imagination is a function of the mind which aids your body to secrete the right hormones which increase the level of performance. In other words, when you visualize on the finished goal, you body acts as if you have already achieved the goal and create real positive energy. Speaking motivating words that complement your daily successes will positively persuade your unconscious mind to put your plan into action, thus helping you to reach your goal.