On our next CHI FOR YOURSELF we visit the world of Ayahuasca. What’s that you ask? Ayahuasca is a psychedelic brew from the Amazon rainforest. It’s considered a medicine and it has great therapeutic potential that’s just beginning to be studied.

Our guest will be Dr. Rachel Harris. Rachel was inspired to research how this medicine was being used in North America. She’ll talk about her findings, including miracle cures of depression and addiction, therapeutic breakthroughs, spiritual revelations, and challenging or bad trips- including her own!

Dr.Rachel Harris is the author of Listening to Ayahuasca: New Hope for Depression, Addiction, PTSD, and Anxiety

Rachel Harris PhD

Be here when we fire up the interview this Thursday May 11th and 5 pm Eastern time, 2 pm Pacific at chiforyourself.com

JohnK 5-8-2017

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We want to make positive strides in our lives. But sometimes things seem to hold us back- like low self-esteem. It might be time to take a look at how we feel about ourselves. 

This article invites you to look at your everyday life in an unusual way. I think you’ll find it a good way to examine your self-esteem and stay on a sound footing toward genuine living. 

Build Self-Esteem: The First Step Toward Self Development

If you are interested in self-development but have low self-esteem, you’ll want to put your attention on that. Until you do, it will be much harder to accurately assess what you need to learn and change in order to achieve your goals. In fact, if you have low self-esteem it can be difficult to even see what your goals are.

Imagine yourself as a dart board. Everything and everyone else around you have the potential to become a damaging dart pin, at one point or another. These dart pins will destroy your self-esteem and pull you down in ways you may not even be conscious of. It’s important not to let them destroy you, or get the best of you. So what are the dart pins to avoid, and how can you keep them from hurting you?

Dart Pin #1: Negative Work Environment

Beware of “dog eat dog” theory where everyone else is fighting just to get ahead. This is where non-appreciative people usually thrive. No one will appreciate your contributions even if you miss lunch and dinner, and stay up late. You may find you are working harder and harder for less and less return.

Stay away from this, it will damage your self-esteem. Find ways to manage your work within the majority of the normal working day. If you have to compete with others, compete on your own terms. Don’t be drawn into power games or negative behavior that will bring on negative feelings about yourself.

Dart Pin #2: Other People’s Behavior

Bulldozers, brown nosers, gossipmongers, whiners, backstabbers, snipers, the walking wounded, controllers, naggers, complainers, exploders, patronizers, sluffers … all these negative behaviors in others will damage your self-esteem, as well as to your self-development program. But remember, it is not the person that is the problem: it is their behavior.

Dart Pin #3: Changing Environment

You can’t be a green bug on a brown field. Changes challenge our paradigms. They test your flexibility, adaptability and alter the way you think. Changes will make life difficult for a while and often cause stress, but when you look back you’ll see that change is often the catalyst or cause of self -development. Try not to resist it.

Dart Pin #4: Past Experience

It’s okay to cry and say “ouch!” when you experience pain. But don’t let pain transform itself into fear by constantly thinking of the bad things that have happened to you or others in the past. It’s easy to wreck a relationship by bringing with you the issues you had in your last relationship and expecting your new partner to be like your previous one. Treat each failure and mistake as a lesson, and move on.

Dart Pin #5: Negative World View

Look at what you’re looking at. Don’t wrap yourself up with all the negativities of the world. In building self-esteem, we must learn how to make the best out of worst situations.

Dart Pin #6: Determination Theory

The way you are and your behavioral traits are said to be a mixed end product of your inherited traits, your upbringing, and your current environment such as your friends, your work situation, the economy and even the climate of the country that you live in.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that your genetics or upbringing will determine how your life goes. You have your own identity. If your father feels like a failure, it doesn’t mean you have to be a failure too. Learn from other people’s experience, so you’ll never have to encounter the same mistakes.

In life, it can be tough to stay firm, especially when things and people around you seem to keep pulling you down. However, building self-esteem will eventually lead to self-development if you start to become responsible for who you are, what you have and what you do.

When you develop self-esteem, you take control of your mission, values, and discipline. Self-esteem brings about self-improvement, true assessment, and determination. So how do you start putting up the building blocks of self-esteem? Be positive. Be contented and happy. Be appreciative. Never miss an opportunity to compliment. A positive way of living will help you build self-esteem and set you on the path to positive self-development.

JohnK 5-1-2017

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GenuLines has been quiet of late. And there’s a reason. Several in fact. I was called away from the keyboard to take care of some important family business.

As I write this I’m still on the East Coast of the U.S. dealing with things like elder care, finances, and even leaking water pipes!

Things are quieting down now but I got to thinking. Stress often comes in bunches, and if you deal with it in unhealthy ways it can turn your life upside down. 

So here are some points to remember to keep stressful situations manageable and to get you back to your “happy place” ASAP!

Peace

Article

Tricky thing about stress. It sets off a vicious cycle where each incident causes more stress that makes you more prone to make mistakes. So, more things go wrong. It can make you feel you are losing control of your life and even your mind. But don’t lose hope because there is a way out.

In fact, there are many solutions to the problem of stress in our lives. Here are 7 tips to help you find your way out of the vicious cycle.

1. Recognize that stress has a place in your life

Make stress your friend! Stress has a genuine biological function that can be used to good effect. Based on the body’s natural “fight or flight” response, that burst of energy will enhance your performance if focused at the right moment. I’ve yet to see a top sportsman totally relaxed before a big competition. Use stress wisely to push yourself that little bit harder when it counts most.

2. Avoid catching the stress ‘virus’

Stress can be infectious. A stressed person tends to make life difficult for others in various ways, so those people become stressed too. To protect yourself, either give them space and keep away or practice relaxation techniques to ward off the infection. You may even be able to help them to relax – but the way to do that is to stay relaxed when you are around them, not add to their problems by handing out advice.

3. Learn from the best

If you are not yet able to be the person who keeps calm when everyone else is losing their head, then look for that person and learn from him or her. What are they doing differently? What is their attitude? What language do they use? Are they trained and experienced? Figure it out from afar or sit them down for a chat. Learn from the best stress managers and copy what they do.

4. Use your breathing

You can trick your body into relaxing by using deep and slow breathing. Breathe in slowly for a count of 7 then breathe out for a count of 11. Repeat the 7-11 breathing until your heart rate slows down, your sweaty palms dry off and things start to feel more normal.

5. Give stressy thoughts the red light

It is possible to tangle yourself up in a stress knot all by yourself. “If this happens, then that might happen and then that might happen and then there’s no hope for any of us!” Most of these things never happen, so why waste all that energy worrying needlessly? Give stress thought-trains the red light and stop them in their tracks.

Instead of indulging your imagination by figuring out all the worst-case scenarios, take the attitude that for every problem, there is a solution. Okay so that first thing on your list might go wrong – but how likely is that, and what can you do to prevent it?

6. Know your trigger points and hot spots

Presentations, interviews, meetings, giving difficult feedback, tight deadlines, background noise, travel, criticism from others … there are many causes of stress and they are not the same for everybody.

Make your own list of stress trigger points or hot spots. Be specific. Is it only presentations to a certain audience that get you worked up? Does one type of project cause more stress than another? Did you drink too much coffee?

Knowing what causes you stress is powerful information, as you can take action to make it less stressful. Do you need to learn some new skills? Do you need extra resources? Do you need to switch to decaf?

7. Burn the candle at one end only

Lack of sleep, poor diet, and minimal exercise wreaks havoc on our body and mind. Kind of obvious, but worth mentioning as it’s often ignored as a stress management technique. Listen to your mother and don’t burn the candle at both ends! Make sure you get plenty of rest … and if you find you lie awake worrying, learn to switch your thought patterns with relaxation techniques.

JohnK 4-24-2017

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