If you have been following me you know that I wrote a post about changing your perception around the word Selfish. I even went as far as to say we should see it as us needing to Start Empowering Life For Inspired Self Healing. If you haven’t read it yet, go check it out.

In this post we will look at ways to live the best selfish life you can. You may be saying..

Angie, are you taking this too far?

I counter, with conviction, Absolutely Not!

In a minute I will take you through what I consider to be the Top 4 ways to live the best Selfish Life. I encourage you to read through all 4. If by the time you are done you still think I have gone too far?? Leave me a comment with a reason why. However, if you think I am on to something… Drop me a Hell Yeah!

Here we go…

Go within, sort your past pain/issues and set that shit on fire as you forge forward with a torch of inspired growth from all you have learned.

~ Angie V

Self Healing

Lets be real… Self Healing is a long and arduous journey. Its not for the timid and is very personal. When I meet with clients I always make sure we get that noted right out the gate. There isn’t a miracle pill or drink that can make this shit easy. It takes dedication to a cause. What’s the cause? You silly! Which is where some people get it twisted. They start to consider the required time spent on themselves to heal as selfish. Well, to be honest… It is. But that’s exactly what I am talking about my friend. Why oh why would taking time to heal be bad selfish? Life has many competing factors depending on which phase of life your in. College Years, Career Driven, Family Planning, Parenthood, and Retirement Planning are a few of the many different phase. Lets hope you got the majority of the self healing managed by the time you are heading into retirement planning, but hey.. I always say, “its never too late; your never too old!”

Its important to note here that all of the above listed phases, even the ones not listed, benefit from selfish if you are at the top of your game. How do you get there? Taking time to use these top 4 tips for a selfish life. When you take time to heal the wounds that create reactionary responses instead of empowered choices coming from a healed place?? Its a game changer my friend.

Which leads me to our next tip… Empower Your Life. Go within, sort your past pain/issues and set that shit on fire as you forge forward with a torch of inspired growth from all you have learned.

Empower Your Life

What does this even mean? When I say Empower Your Life, I mean Own Your Shit! Stop hiding. Be Accountable for your choices, your desires, your weaknesses, everything! Its holding a mirror up to reflect on it all. It’s not a one time deal either. This is an ongoing dedicated journey to SELF.

Mirror work can get ugly. It can take you to some really uncomfortable spaces. It can trigger denial, and the desire to walk away. If you push through and stand in the darkness your eyes will start to adjust so you can see your way through. You begin to see the benefits to owning your thoughts and actions and the impact that has on the people and things in your life.

When you Empower Your Life, you begin to make choices from a different space. You start to appreciate and have gratitude for the reflections as they come because they allow you to shift and grow. With the growth comes wiser choices in the future. Choices that exemplify an empowered life. In order to achieve this it takes self focus/healing and daily inspiration. Which brings us to our next tip.

Live Inspired

To Live Inspired, is to find beauty, gratitude and excitement in the small stuff. As with the other 2 tips, this takes some work and practice. It’s like reprograming your brain, for some its a complete program rewrite. 😬

A survey done at Johns Hopkins medicine, https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/the-power-of-positive-thinking, found that people with family histories of heart disease with a positive outlook on life had 1/3 less likely chance of heart attack or other cardiovascular event.

So how exactly do you live inspired? You find things, people and places that inspire you and indulge. Find positive people or groups to follow on your social media. There is no shortage of people plastering positive memes and quotes if you set your intention on it. You can also find daily inspirational tear off calendars to give you a daily dose of positivity. There are “life circumstances” coming at us from all directions on a regular basis. When you keep yourself surrounded with positive inspiration it helps to buffer any potential unsavory encounters. Another way to look at it is building up a resiliency bank. For every, for lack of a better term in the moment, “bad” experience it depletes some of your reserves from your resiliency bank. For every positive experience or thought or activity it builds the bank.. Cha Ching! Can you see it? Coins a clamorin’ like they are rushing out of a slot machine? Every positive is jackpot! There will always be things around us that will take from our reserves in some way or another. The goal is to have a steady stream of jackpots filling that bank so it doesn’t end up depleted.

Another way to live inspired is to make time for inspired meditation with a journal by your side. If your new to meditation, be kind to yourself. Its not about winning the “how long you can sit in a quite thought free place” contest. There are different ways to meditate. The closest to the thought above is… Taking some moments to attempt being thought free by focusing elsewhere and gentle redirection when the thoughts come to derail you. Its a fantastic way to “retrain” the brain. I would like to offer up a way to use meditation as a way to find inspiration.

Inspired Meditation:

• Its all about intention. When you enter into your meditation, dedicate it to being “gifted” with an inspired thought. Ask God, or whatever your name preference, to provide you with inspiration.
• Here is where you will “let go of thought”, with the caveat of being mindful of what comes. What does that mean? Use your preferred focus tool to release expectation and stressful thoughts of the day but be open and mindful of the thoughts that follow.
• Be mindful as thoughts come. Are they serving you? No? Let it go with your next exhale. Are they inspired? Yes? Allow them to take you in that direction. Allow the thought to continue and delight in it as it grows and transforms into a well developed thought.
• When you are finished with your meditation, immediately journal the experience. Allow yourself to go right back into the experience and feelings as you journal. Reviving the inspired thought so you are embedding it into your consciousness.
• End with gratitude for the gift you have received..

Living inspired is also about Forgiveness.

Forgiveness

Last but definitely not least is forgiveness. No different than the work above, forgiveness is a B*. The very word alone stirs up pretty heavy feelings for some people. I can hear the rebuttals of people saying, “Why would I forgive someone for doing such a hateful thing to me”? Or “Why do I need to forgive myself? I didn’t do anything wrong”! “I would never willingly want that to happen to me”!

I think I have heard it all. While on some levels all are true because you believe it to be so, they are also false in the sense that thinking like that is not going to help you take your life back. So it comes down to choice my friend. Do you choose an empowered life?

If the answer is yes, then congratulations you are already on your way. Forgiveness is super selfish when done right. You make a decision that you are ready to feel better. You make a decision that you will no longer be held in a cage with an open door. You stand up and say No! I am not going to let you win any longer! I am taking the power back. I am choosing to Forgive so that I can move forward. I am choosing to forgive you so that I can let go of the power you/it has held over me. I am winning today. I am forgiving myself for allowing myself to be a victim for so long. I now choose me! I now choose to be free from chains. I now see the cage door has been open this whole time waiting for me to walk out and I choose to walk through it.

You might be thinking… Angie, that sounds all good and well but how do you actually do it? That my friend is a process unique to each person. There are similar steps but we each have our own unique needs based off of our personal experiences. There are many books and personal coaches like myself, couldn’t pass up that opportunity ;-), that are available to help guide you through the journey. It’s just that, a journey. It’s not an overnight quickie either. While timelines vary, and you shouldn’t feel discouraged by this, it is deeply personal and can take many years. I have also seen it resolved and return. The good thing about it returning is you have already put in the work and recognize the work that needs to be done. Which makes the process quicker the second time around.

Tips on forgiveness work:

• Assess where you are at. Take a good hard look at yourself through the eyes of a prosecutor. Put yourself on trial. At this point we aren’t looking for kindness that can create excuses. We are looking for cold hard facts.
• Journal your findings and read them aloud. How does that feel? Journal it.
• List out all the people, things, and circumstances that need forgiven.
• On a separate page, at the top write an affirmation/ Goal for this work. Example: I, insert name, feel compassion and grace for the experiences in my life. This may feel inauthentic at first. It’s okay, just recognize how it feels now as a baseline and write it down with date felt. As you progress and check back in you will start to notice a shift.
• Now arrange your list in order from easiest to hardest and then pick the easiest one to focus on.
• Once you have picked the easiest one, I want you to choose one small baby step regarding that person, situation, experience to focus on. Chunk it down small. So small it seems laughable. The reasoning behind this is to ease your way into the process so that achieving/succeeding in it becomes second nature. Then when you get to the bigger stuff it won’t seem so unsurmountable. You will be “seasoned” as they say.
• Now your ready to sit with your chosen item and go through the process of release and gratitude. There are many different ways to do this and hypnosis can often be a good tool to use in this part of the process. *shameless plug, I am not only a life coach but as an Integrative Healing Arts Practitioner I am also certified in hypnosis.

Due to the nature of the work being unique to each person, its up to you to either find the process of healing that fits or a person to work with that can help you navigate the journey. Hypnosis can help skip over much of the work because it goes directly to the subconscious that thinks its helping you but just needs to hear your true desire to let it go. Our brains are incredible, and once we figure out how to use it to our advantage instead of allowing it to run the show behind the scenes? Things start to look and feel different.