Are You Adaptable To Change?
BY ANNIE MOORE
As one door closes another one opens! How many times have we heard that phrase at the beginning of a New Year?
I think the reality of this year is staring us straight in the face. Signs and signals are pointing towards a door opening to more struggle and hardship ahead!
As you soak up the negative vibes that bombard your day, are you finding that feelings of anxiety, insecurity and uncertainty are overloading your emotions?
Well, sure there are challenges to face in the forthcoming year, it’s inevitable that these challenges will provoke negative thoughts and feelings. Our mind maybe constantly flying around like a butterfly; our thinking and feelings all over the place.
Is this driven by fear of changes that are happening too quickly, or of events that are out of your control? Are you tending to feel overwhelmed about stuff and are worried about the future?... You just want it all to stop!
These negative though patterns are known as 'mindless' thinking and when we are in the midst of them, we are not in control of our thoughts. To be 'mindless' is to be unaware. On the opposite side of the coin, when we are 'mindful', we are fully conscious of ourselves, our actions and awareness.
Increasing awareness and having a non-judgemental mindset gives us the opportunity to gain our emotional freedom.
This is our get out of jail card! We can release our mind from a dismal down-ward spiral by recognising that if we set an intention to be aware as much as possible, we will begin to notice the signs of when the mind is trying to gain control.
Next time worrying thoughts pop into your head, notice how these thoughts are taking you away from the reality of where you are now, in the moment – Are you safe? Do you have food and a roof over your head? Good!... Now you can step out of your thoughts and bring your awareness into your body, acknowledge the feeling and let it go.
A habit that we don’t even notice we are doing is to be completely lost in our own negative thoughts. Again, use your mindful tool to alert your awareness to the thoughts, observe them and name them, i.e., how they make you feel in your physical body. Perhaps you may feel fuzzy in the head or sick in the belly. Whatever the physical feeling, name it and then let it go with a deep inhale and long exhale. This will help to stop it in its tracks.
Having your mindful tool to work with, will help you cultivate a strategy to become more adaptable to change, and when we are adaptable, we are able to meet challenges as they arise, juggle multiple demands and stay open about how to achieve our purpose, ambitions and aspirations.
Going through this COVID era has stretched our emotional intelligence and our response to the stresses COVID has caused. And it’s not just us as individuals, clearly the world is also looking for strategies to cope with change.
This is where 'hope' with resilience clearly become a means of helping us cope and manage our relationship to change. Having ‘hope’ is a strong tool we can use in times of hardship. It helps us to build resilience, giving us the ability to recover quickly from setbacks. 'Hope' gives us the expectation that something good will happen, and that we have some control over it.
By making a choice to encourage 'hope', we put our-self in control of how we react to our circumstances and how we handle what comes next. Cultivating a more easy-going way of thinking will give us the freedom of self-assurance, of knowing that with 'hope' as our saviour, we can adapt to anything.
If you would like help in adapting to change, cultivating hope, building resilience and igniting your vitality, I invite you to join my ‘Fountain of Youth’ 12 class yoga and meditation challenge, running through January 2021.
This program will give you the tools and health benefits you need to make changes in your life, so that you can enjoy a better life, feel more alive, positive and more able to face life’s encounters.