As I write this, we are in the thick of the COVID 19 quarantine. It is affecting people differently across the country, and although we are having a shared experience, we are also having our own individual experience.
Someone chastised me the other day for not talking more, on social media, blogs, etc. about how to manage during this time. For a second I felt guilty like I wasn’t doing my part, but then I realized, wait a minute, yes I am.
The biggest thing I share with others is how to cultivate a mindset that serves you in loving yourself. That’s the basis of everything I talk about. Everything I teach, coach, and share. Why? Because our self-love is the basis of everything we do. It is our point of reference, attraction, and experience.
I teach this because no matter what the external situation is, you are always with you internally. How you think, feel, believe about YOU, is the deciding factor in all your experiences. So it doesn’t matter if we are experiencing COVID 19, a hurricane, the holiday season, or a lazy Saturday afternoon. Your internal environment dictates your external experience.
It is true. You do not have control over:
- other people
- the weather
- mother nature
The list of what you don’t have control over is endless.
Here is what you do have control over:
- YOU
- your thoughts
- your feelings
- your mindset
That’s a short list and easy to remember. You only ever have control over yourself. So although you can’t change what’s happening around most of the time, you can always decide how you are being, doing, thinking, believing in the current experience you are in.
So I ask you, what are you doing with your time?
How are you cultivating a mindset that serves you?
Most of us have trained ourselves into panic, fear, guilt, doubt, worry as our initial response. And we think, we can’t help it, we that’s just our human nature. But we can help it. It may take a little time, but just as we have trained ourselves into automatically responding negatively, we can shift our perspective and retrain ourselves to respond with a more positive outlook.
I’m not talking about being totally Pollyanna and disregarding what is going on or how you feel. I am talking about: 
- being aware of your initial response
- honoring the feeling
- choosing to see it differently
You see, you can choose to see it differently. There are as many perspectives as there are stars in the Universe and then some. Self-judgment keeps us locked into thinking we don’t have a choice to change how we think or feel. That’s why creating a mindset of self-love is so important to your life experience. And it should be a priority in how you spend your time.
Think of how different your life would be if your natural response was towards love instead of fear. What if you weren’t waiting for the other shoe to drop but instead believed that every “bad” experience was Source leading you towards something better? What if you believed that you were so loved that everything was happening for your highest good?
I’ll give you an example from my own life. People often tell me I’m too happy. I seriously can’t stop laughing right now, because that is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. But I wasn’t always that way. I trained myself to be the love I wish to see in the world.
When I was young, I was shy and hid behind my mother and I didn’t trust anyone.
When I was a teenager and young adult, I had massive anger issues. I’d be calm and then all of a sudden, one small thing would set me off. It was always the straw that broke the camels back with me. I also had massive anxiety and full-body panic attacks that would leave me frozen and unable to move. (I learned later that the anger was my refusal to fall into the depression that plagued my family. I’d rather be mad than sad.)
By the time I was in my 30’s I was sick of feeling that way. My true point of center was joy and love. And most people would have told you this is how I was. But my initial reaction was always guilt, shame, blame, FEAR. No one ever showed me how to gravitate towards those feelings of LOVE first. No one role modeled for me what loving yourself and being happy looked like. So I set out to figure it out for myself. I knew that I could train myself towards a positive, joyful, loving outlook on life and dagnabit, I was going to figure out how to do it.
I went back to a book I had read in my 20’s but wasn’t ready to fully embrace at the time. “The Art Of Happiness” by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. This book was a simple, beautiful reminder of my natural state as a human being was to be love. Yes, suffering and its accompanying lot were all a part of being human, but it wasn’t the only part. This is where I first realized, I want to live in love and vacation in fear. Fear plays its role but we were never meant to hang out there for too long.
So my journey started. I started spending my time:
- rewriting my subconscious mind – I did this by consciously choosing the thoughts I wanted to think.
- retraining my default emotional set point – I did this by allowing myself to experience every emotion and not being afraid of being stuck there.
- actively finding the beauty and love in the world first – I did this by choosing to see the good in the world first. Yes, I stopped watching the news ASAP.
These are all things you can do on your own. I also teach these 3 important steps in my monthly membership community, Energy of LOVE
What I was doing with my time, dramatically shifted. My outside life didn’t look so different. I still went to work, out for a happy hour, weekend trips, yoga, running, all the stuff I enjoyed. But internally, I was training my mindset, the same way I had trained to run in races. Small daily steps that eventually made a big impact. Slow and steady, being consistent is how you change your mindset. It’s how you retrain yourself towards love and away from fear.
So I invite you to spend a little time and start retraining yourself to LOVE. It can be just a little every day. It does not need to be hard. You can choose for it to be easy. Do what you can and will notice a difference.
