Anxiety

Being open to who we are, exactly as we are in this moment, requires a stance of gentleness toward ourselves. This is what it means to befriend the self. We treat ourselves with the same sweetness we would a friend.

Loving-kindness meditation is a technique used to condition one’s habitual responses, emotions and mind states toward greater warmth and caring for self and others. What we feed grows. By increasing our daily diet of love, compassion, and other positive emotions we nourish character development and psychological growth.

Here are some of the most common anxiety-fueled thought patterns, plus some specific ways you can recognize and dispute them. If some of these sound familiar to you, put them in your mental tool kit so you can take them out when you need them.

The one size fits all approach to managing emotional life is misguided.  There is good to be found in unlikely places. 

Few now accept the tabula rasa view of human psychology. Within each infant is a life force, innate aspects, that guide motives and meaning making. Carl Jung called our innate guiding systems archetypes. Archetypes influence the unfolding of develop

Feeling cared for, accepted and having a sense of belonging and affiliation with others is fundamental to our well-being. Unfortunately, not everyone was raised in such an environment.

The key to lessoning the impact of hard, difficult moments in life is to watch our reaction. In Buddhism, suffering is likened to an arrow. The first arrow is painful. Normal. Our fighting against the pain is like a second arrow being shot. Except this time, we are the one’s doing the aiming.

At the core of everyone is a Self which is the seat of consciousness. This is our source of empowerment. From birth, this Self has all the necessary qualities of compassion, perspective, curiosity, acceptance and confidence to lead through life.

Nothing about human life is simple.  Our character styles, or ways of being, are influenced by many factors that are embodied, being shaped by, and in turn shaping the body structure.

Meditation might be your prescription for a happier mind and kinder heart, a new University of Wisconsin-Madison study shows. Scientists worked with 16 Tibetan monks and 16 meditation novices, giving the beginners lessons on compassion meditation two weeks prior to a series of brain scan experiments.