http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal Awareness and Consciousness Audio on Changing Core Beliefs, Controlling Emotional Reactions, and Creating Love and Happiness in Your Relationships Tue, 08 Apr 2008 04:41:23 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Self Judgment is the most common type of abuse. It’s self abuse. No one is more critical of you than the voice in your head. If anyone else talked to you the way the Judge in your mind spoke to you, you would fight back, or walk ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2008/04/07/self-judgment/ The Importance of Keeping Your Faith What is Faith? What is a Belief? What is the relationship between your emotions and what you believe? Do thoughts have power? Why it’s not that important to stop your negative thoughts. How can you recover your personal power? ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2008/01/24/faith-personal-power/ Finding your Self or figuring out who you are is one of those eternal questions. We often struggle with it as teenagers, then again in our thirties, or during a mid life crisis. The struggle to know thy Self is as old as spiritual traditions that attempted to ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2007/08/20/finding-your-self/ Do you have free will? Is there even such a thing as Free Will? It is true that we are to some degree products of our environment. Our minds get filled with ideas, beliefs, and emotional patterns as we grow up. We are socialized to become ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2007/07/01/free-will/ How can you tell if a relationship will work out? There are specific indicators to tell if your relationship will run into trouble down the road. The signs aren’t found in how much love, romance, or physical attraction there is. Two people can have great chemistry but ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2007/04/11/how-to-tell-if-a-relationship-will-work/ How to Not Take Things Personally In the book, The Four Agreements, Miguel Ruiz outlines a code of conduct for creating love and happiness in your life. One of his Four Agreements is “Don’t Take Anything Personally. In this podcast I describe some of the hidden assumptions that cause ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2007/02/23/dont-take-anything-personally/ In a Four Agreements workshop I shared a model for understanding consciousness and the ego mind. I recorded the workshop and part of it makes up this mp3 audio podcast. Understanding the ego mind and understanding consciousness means becoming aware of the way our mind dreams. The ego mind has ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2007/01/28/the-ego-mind-and-consciousness/ I often get asked if people can really change their life. They want to known if they can overcome fears, stop the judgments, and quiet the voice in their head.  The answer is yes. However, when people ask, they usually ask with such fear and doubt that almost no amount ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2007/01/01/is-change-possible/ It might be hard to believe that we fear love and happiness, but it is a real dynamic that happens in the mind.  It is easier to understand if we consider the mind to be a living being with many different aspects.  If we attempt to change our beliefs and ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2006/12/01/fear-of-love-and-happiness/ Overcome fear by gaining mastery over your core beliefs.  Fear is that emotional force that drives us in a direction away from joy, happiness, and love.  Fear can paralyze us to the point that we feel helpless and suffocated.  Often fear appears irrational, but it only looks this way at the surface.  ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2006/11/15/fear-and-overcoming-fear/ What are core beliefs and how do you identify them? That’s what many people are realizing they need to do to change their emotional reactions. The problem is where do you look to find core beliefs? They are in the mind but can be hard to pin ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2006/10/31/identify-and-change-core-beliefs/ Ask Gary   Gary, A friend of mine, Alice, broke up with her boyfriend. When I talked to another friend on the phone (she also knows Alice) I told her that Alice and her boyfriend broke up. Of course I asked myself the question: why am I sharing this info with my friend?   ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2006/10/27/impeccability-and-gossip/ Understanding Conflicting Desires Our body has physical desires, our emotions have a desire to express love, and our mind has a desire to have its beliefs and expectations met.  This can create some internal conflict that gets more complicated when we add another person's desires to the mix.  The desires from the body ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2006/10/11/love-relationships-part-ii/ Understanding Desire and Yearning in Relationships  Desires for a relationship come from deep within us.  They aren’t desires for a specific person so much as a need for expression and experience of connection and feeling that we can have with another person.  Those desires include the emotion of love, physical affection, ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2006/09/30/love-relationships-part-1/ An audio course subscriber who had dissolved many of her beliefs about her body, and her body image wrote in with the following question.  Dear Gary, How do you care enough about your body in order for it to be healthy, without getting too stressed about it? Dear M, TREAT YOUR BODY LIKE A DOG! Treat ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2006/09/25/relationship-with-your-body/ Money can buy comforts and our comforts can help keep the mind distracted from fears that eat away at our happiness.   Money doesn’t buy happiness.  Happiness is an emotional state.  From one point of view inanimate objects can’t create emotions within us.  The things money can buy does allow us to occupy our mind ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2006/09/20/can-money-buy-happiness/ Inspiried by Tim Boucher's blog article on fear and power and way too much time in front of the computer screen.   I’ve observed that many people who seek power do so out of self created fear.  Their mind drives scenarios of misfortune.  Without awareness, they invest belief in their imagined stories ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2006/09/20/power-control-fear-and-freedom/ Dear Gary, In a situation like the one I am going through (overcoming jealous and controlling behavior that is alienating my partner), how do you avoid overcorrecting too far the other way. You want to avoid being passive aggressive so you hold back on what you say and do. ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2006/09/13/controlling-relationships/ Most people spend their whole lives looking for some measure of happiness. Why is it so elusive?  What creates happiness?  People will tell you that material things or other people won’t make you happy.  Experts will advise you that in order to be happy you first have to make yourself ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2006/09/12/happiness-as-choice/ When it comes to stopping or changing emotional reactions people often approach the problem like they are fixing a car.  They ask, “How can I change this reaction?” or “How can I stop my jealousy, anger, frustration etc.”  The assumption seems to be that if we change one thing the ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2006/08/22/emotional-reactions/ I had a few thoughts on a post Steve Pavlina wrote about the Law of Attraction.  I look at it a little differently.  Maybe it is really the same but I am interpreting the words differently.  This is always a difficulty with language, particularly with written words.  Steve writes: “The Law of ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2006/08/19/the-law-of-attraction-beliefs-and-thoughts/ Of don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements most people will say that the hardest one to keep is Don’t Take Anything Personally.  I don’t agree.  The most challenging agreement is actually Be Impeccable with Your Word.  In taking something personal you take what someone said and express an interpretation that makes it personal.  ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2006/08/15/the-four-agreements-hidden-assumptions/ I wrote an article about feeling not good enough. It relates to issues of insecurity. A big component of feeling insecure is the image of perfection that we create in our mind. When the voice in our head compares us to that image of perfection it concludes ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2006/08/11/feeling-not-good-enough-beliefs-structure/ There are many programs and organizations that describe what they do as empowering people.  Empowerment of people might even be in their mission statement.  This is common language among personal development and personal growth organizations.  The idea is appealing, and the organizations probably do good work.  However be aware that there ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2006/08/08/empowerment-programs-and-claims-to-empower-people/ Hi Gary, After doing the first couple exercises that you gave us I begin to see the whole (or part of) judge-victim story. Man, how many judges and victims are there?  It is a bit overwhelming sometimes. So, my question is; is it 'normal' to feel a bit powerless, to think ... http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/journal/2006/07/28/judge-and-victim-stories-in-the-mind/