by Dr. Heléna Kate | Jun 28, 2018 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog, Empowered Action, Self Awareness, Uncategorized
Our pleasure shows us where we are in alignment. It is a natural built-in system that shows us what is right for us. However, not all experiences we might label as pleasurable are created equal.
It is helpful to learn to differentiate between types of pleasure. For example, eating a piece of chocolate cake might feel good in the moment, but that does not necessarily mean it is in alignment with you. To determine whether it is or not, you need to pay attention to the entire experience. How do you feel after you eat the chocolate cake? Does it continue to be a pleasurable experience?
It is also helpful to pay attention to the quality of the pleasure. Is it consistent throughout the layers of the experience? Using the same example of the chocolate cake, it might feel good in your mouth but not in your body. Or, maybe it negatively impacts our emotions because it\’s more food than we actually need and we know it, and so we feel a little uncomfortable about having eaten it.
This approach applies to all experiences in our lives: How we feel at work, how we feel in our relationships. As we pay more attention to our pleasure and learn to really listen to it, we strengthen our ability to navigate through life.
Another thing that gets in the way of using pleasure as our guide is having a negative relationship with pleasure, which can make you feel bad about something that is actually good for you. Your conditioning distorts the picture of what you are experiencing based on ideas about what you should or should not enjoy. The opposite can also be true: we can be conditioned to feel pleasure associated with things that are not good for us.
The basic experience gets distorted by misconceptions and misinterpretations of events that take what would be a simple mechanism for determining what is right for us and make it confusing. It would be wonderful if it were as easy as a pleasurable experience automatically being in alignment with your needs so you could say yes to it and welcome more of it into your life. And if it were not a pleasurable experience, then you could redirect and go in a different direction. Once we get past all of the conditioning, this is true—but that takes some time to do.
It may seem as if, given all this conditioning, it is impossible to trust how you feel about things. However, the trick is not to cast pleasure aside and start trying to figure out what is best through your mind, but instead to dive more deeply in and practice paying closer attention.
To use pleasure as a guide—and it is a very useful guide—you can start to pay attention to where you might be filtering or misinterpreting the information that\’s coming in about what is pleasurable and thus learn about what does or does not work for you in any given situation. As you pay attention to all aspects of your experience around an event that you consider pleasurable, your understanding of what is pleasurable will become more refined. As we become more and more refined, it becomes easier to have that simple relationship with pleasure—if it feels good, then it is good for me. Then you will be able to use pleasure to cultivate the things, the people, places, situations, and activities that you want in your life.
As you do so, you will feel so much better and better in all aspects of your life because you are creating a life that is in alignment with you. And as you cultivate this, it will actually raise your overall energy. Your energy will start operating at a higher level, which continues the refinement process of your pleasure and allows you to really hone in on what is working for you and what is best for you through what feels good. And then your pleasure will become this incredibly valuable tool for creating a life that feels really good and is in alignment with who you are.
For ideas on designing a more pleasurable life, take a look at my article >>> \”How to Bring More Pleasure into Your Day-to-Day Life\”
by Dr. Heléna Kate | Jun 21, 2018 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog, Empowered Action, Self Awareness, Uncategorized
1. Savor it! Actively focus on the parts of your life that are pleasurable. Receive the pleasure that is there. Do you ever notice that it is much easier to remember what went wrong? Counter this tendency by really allowing yourself to experience and remember the parts of your day that are pleasurable.
2. Start small and the pleasure will build on itself. Don’t make it a burden on your to-do list. Choose things that you can easily incorporate into your daily life. The pleasure and confidence that you receive from those small things will give you an energy boost in the direction of more pleasure.
3. Give yourself permission to do what you want, rather than what you think you should do.
4. What sparks you most regularly? Identify what brings you into your body and your senses. Is it deliciously flavored food? Soft fabrics? Beautiful artwork or surroundings? Find ways to surround yourself with that. Maybe you get an extra-ordinate amount of pleasure from having super soft sheets, using a fancy pen, having beautiful boxes for organization, or doing computer work outside. Find those small shifts that regularly please you and do that more.
5. Feeling more pleasure is not just about doing things – it is also about removing things. Tune into and adjust the things that add to the stress and tension in your life. Oftentimes, we feel stuck in these situations and let ourselves endure them. However, upon examination, another path appears. Look at the areas of your life that cause you the most stress and tension. Then, meditate on whether there is a way to add more spaciousness and joy to it or whether you need to cut it out altogether.
6. Do something you really love in the morning to start your day off right. If you are feeling good and centered in your heart and your senses, chances are you will find more opportunities for that during the day.
7. Experiment! Sometimes, we can have a hard time including pleasure in our life because it feels like we don’t have time or it will cause other problems in our life. Try an experiment for a day or two so that you feel comfortable letting go into it. Let yourself do everything you want to do that authentically brings you pleasure (think beyond overindulging in sweets and T.V.) and see what happens!
8. Regularly listen to music that you love. Intersperse music or dance breaks throughout your day.
9. Do something sweet for a stranger or someone that you love.
10. Find and incorporate something that ignites your childlike, playful spirit. Maybe it’s wearing a wig for part of the day, blowing bubbles, talking in gibberish, or rolling down a hill. Give yourself permission to play.
For ideas on designing a more pleasurable life, take a look at my article >>> \”How to Bring More Pleasure into Your Day-to-Day Life\”
by Dr. Heléna Kate | Jun 1, 2018 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog, Empowered Action, Self Awareness, Uncategorized
Dedication to our path, whatever that looks like for us, is necessary for our continual advancement. However, this dedication, which gives us the inner resolve to stay the course regardless of what comes our way, needs to be in balance with our dedication to our self, which shows in how we care for ourselves in each and every step we take.
I have been blessed with unparalleled stamina and a resolve matched by few others. While that has been a backbone on which I can rely, it has been much more challenging to learn how to deeply care for and nourish myself.
I look around and see that I am not alone with this challenge.
When self-care is left out of the equation, we experience burnout, apathy, depression, and illness. Without self-care, we are unable to truly enjoy our lives, reap the rewards of our hard work, or experience real happiness.
Lack of self-care is nothing short of a denial of self. It is a strong statement of self-negation and has many roots. It is passed down through our lineage. It is taught to us through religion. It is born of our personal wounding.
Because of this, self-care is no small act. It turns centuries of indoctrination on its head. It lifts the weight of our negative childhood conditioning. This simple act of loving and caring for ourselves can be both an act of healing and an act of revolution all in one.
Our lack of ability to care for ourselves can look like many things: not allowing ourselves to rest when we are tired, eating the wrong foods or not eating the right ones, putting ourselves in bad environments or with less than ideal people. Regardless of whether you do not exercise or you stay in a job that is not right for you, there are underlying reasons why you do things this way. Some of these came from your childhood.
As a child, you may have been told that your tears were silly, or your requests for things may simply have been unanswered. These repeated messages told you to ignore your needs in order to to be safe, get approval, or maintain love. Even if you were not directly told to ignore your own needs—which many of you were—when you experienced any kind of wounding, the implied message in the wounding was that your needs did not matter.
This is a message that you likely believed.
As a result, you may continue to act as if your own needs are not important; you may continue to believe those who tell you that this is the case. Because of this, you may, in many small or large ways, not care for yourself.
But, the problem is even more than just devaluing your own needs. Through this process, you lose the fundamental mechanisms of meeting them—you forget how to receive and you forget what it feels like to be someone who is full and whole.
Your wounding creates a deep sense of unworthiness. And wherever you believe that you are unworthy, you will not allow the necessary care and nourishment for your expansion.
In the places where you are unable to attend to your needs, there is an emptiness, a frailness, a primary lack of ability to receive that blocks you from receiving the benefits of all you do. In essence, there is an unhealed place that is incapable of experiencing the joy, wonder, abundance, and other fruits of your life.
When you learn how to care for yourself, you heal the parts of yourself that were wounded in the past. You give yourself what you were unable to get at this other point in time. You show yourself a reality that is different than what you once experienced as possible.
As you commit to radically and completely caring for your needs, you are able to deeply feel not just the results of your specific efforts but all of life in a more deep and profound way. As you learn to deeply care for yourself, you unlock the door to your own happiness and return to the fullness of who you truly are.
For motivation to create self-care rituals in your life, take a look at my article >>> \”13 Reasons Why Sensitive Souls Need Rituals\”
by Dr. Heléna Kate | May 22, 2017 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
Our personal power is the key to our wellbeing and personal effectiveness. Personal power is the empowerment of the true self that exists in all of us. It provides us with strength, courage, and compassion throughout all life’s ups and downs. By learning how to improve personal power, we facilitate this life long pursuit of empowerment that encompasses every area of our life.
As you learn how to improve personal power, it is important to differentiate between true power and ego inflation. If I did a good job, and it makes my ego feel good, I might feel powerful. If I am praised, and if makes my ego feel good, I might feel powerful. While these things might help us feel powerful, real personal power comes from internal, not external, motivations. True personal power makes our ego’s grasps at power look like what they are –feeble. Below are 8 steps you can take to improve your personal power. The kind you really want — the real kind.
HOW TO IMPROVE PERSONAL POWER IN 8 STEPS
1. Learn what is in your heart: We are bold in our actions when we are connected with the trough of our heart. The word courage –a form of personal power — is formed from the Latin word cor or heart. When we are aware of the contents of our heart and we know its truth, we are more powerful than we previously might have imagined. Think of the powerful rebellion of Ghandi. When we use our heart as our guide, we become clearer and more resolute. Our confidence is no longer the confidence of superiority but the confidence of devotion.
2. Love and Acceptance of who you are at your core: You are completely perfect and infinitely flawed. Learning to truly love and accept yourself, while still holding yourself accountable for your actions, is a powerful skill that helps you maintain perspective, even as you are being tested and stretched by life’s circumstances. When you find a part of yourself that you are having a difficult time accepting, try asking yourself how this part of you is productive or helpful. Learn to see that there is always a flip side and that, often, negativity or positivity is just a matter of use of that part of yourself, rather than an inherent goodness or badness.
3. The recognition that you have the power to change: A lot of people believe that they have the power to change over the course of their lives, but don’t give themselves the power to change in the moment. You do not need to hold onto something that does not serve you any longer than you want to. Let yourself be at choice in each moment as much as you possibly can. When we truly recognize our choice in each moment is when we truly feel our personal power. Click here to read more on embracing your power of choice and how to change your life when you feel stuck.
4. Take action: When we take actions to create positive outcomes in our lives, we feel more powerful. When you see an opportunity to move things forward, seize the moment. This can be as simple as picking up some trash off the ground or saying something kind to a stranger. It is also important to take action to put boundaries in place for yourself and to give clear feedback to others when things are not going well.
5. You are instrumental in shaping events: Your love, kindness, care, and compassion can sculpt any moment. You have the ability to shift the tide when you see things moving in an unpleasant direction, or add more to things moving in a positive direction. Begin to recognize your contributions to the unfolding of all the events that you experience and you will unlock a giant piece of your personal power.
6. Work with the pain: As much as we want life to be pain free, it is not. The teaching is in the pain. This does not mean you should become obsessed with focusing on the pain of life, but pain does serves as a cue that we are going in the wrong direction or that we are not quite on track. Next time you are feeling this challenge let it remind you to refocus on what it is that you are trying to create.
7. Be with discomfort: Another teaching that helps us step into our personal power is discomfort. Trying to push away all the hard and uncomfortable things in life does not work. When things are hard, it is sometimes necessary to be willing to just let it be hard. Have your anger. Have your sadness. And THEN, move on. Difficult emotions will pass on their own, if we do not hold onto them.
8. Celebrate: Celebrate yourself. Celebrate others. Celebrate your life. Gratitude for all that we have is critical to feeling empowered. When we look at our life or ourselves and see that our efforts have yielded more love, more happiness, more abundance, and we take time to acknowledge these successes, we naturally feel more powerful and more right in our own skin. Find ways to acknowledge you for all of your efforts and gain even more personal power.
by Dr. Heléna Kate | Feb 13, 2017 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
Self care may be a buzzword today, but it hasn\’t always been. Even concepts of \”the self\” are relatively young to public understanding. So how do we capitalize on today\’s understanding of the self and practice self care in a way that will have the greatest impact?
According to author Caroline Myss, \”the self\” that we talk about today is an idea that emerged in the nuclear age. It wasn’t until the 1950\’s that psychology and psychoanalysis became commonplace ways of thinking about people and their behavior. In turn, the rich inner-life that we all experience became just as real as our outer-world.
This new way of thinking about \”the self\” ushered in the birth of self-care. Until the 1950\’s people didn\’t talk about self-care. They didn\’t think about balancing their everyday life demands with things that foster their well-being. Fast forward to today, and self-care is a multi-billion dollar industry and an everyday conversation.
I think that the conversation about self-care leaves out one major thing: and that\’s inspiration. Inspiration is more than just happening upon a clever idea. It expresses our creativity and forges a path to real change in ourselves and in our world. When you\’re inspired, you feel alive!
So how do we move beyond the self care suggestions to eat healthier and exercise more (good suggestions!) and learn more inspired ways to feed our spirit and nurture our soul? Get creative, and get in touch with YOU.
Feeding your soul is self-care. Self-care is all about honoring and caring for yourself in ways that matter most. When you\’re able to practice inspired self-care your life becomes less of one huge to-do list and more of a field of abundant meaning and joy.
So take a look at the ways that you feel most enriched, and then put some real time and creative energy into creating some inspired self care practices for yourself. To get you started, here are 4 easy, rich, and deep ways YOU can bring more inspired self-care into your life.
Write a poem about someone you care for.
Inspiration is within reach most of the time. So, cozy up to your inner-bard and write a poem about your partner, your child, or a good friend. See if you can capture what you love about them in this expressive form. If you brainstorm adjectives, qualities, or feelings you associate with this person, you\’ll quickly create phrases that inspire you.
Notice the tiny, beautiful details and riff on them.
Say you\’re sitting at home or taking a walk through your neighborhood. Look around you, and free associate with what you see. For example, if you see thin blades of long grass growing by a wall, maybe they remind you of a time when you saw a piece of beautiful graffiti on a wall with grass just like that. Perhaps the grass near the wall reminds you of the eerie beauty and loneliness of neglected things. Let yourself wander into your thoughts. You\’ll be amazed where you wind up!
Create the most luxurious and perfect experience, FOR YOU.
If your version of self-care is to take a bath, a walk in the woods, or get a massage, then it\’s time to take it up a notch. Make a decadent, fantastic, and — yes — inspired experience for YOURSELF. Try new things. Mix and match your experience. Take a bubble bath with candlelight, wine, chocolate, the smell of jasmine, and opera music. Or, walk in the woods bundled in soft fabrics singing a song to yourself and noticing how the light hits things.
Give an impromptu gift that will make someone\’s day.
Tap into your inspiration and find something – or make something – that will let another person know how special they are to you. When you think about bringing pleasure to someone else’s life, you naturally think creatively and playfully about what\’s in the world and how to use it. And even better, when you give a gift your heart opens up and you feel satisfied on a deeper level.
It\’s too easy to let days slip by while we\’re distracted from what matters most. So challenge yourself to spend an hour each week doing one of these activities. It won\’t take long before you\’ll feel more inspired and your spirit will feel more nourished. Help remind yourself by printing out this list of ideas!
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