By: Lissa Rankin / Source: Care 2

The key to happiness is to be more of who we are. That’s what Gretchen Rubin, author of ”The Happiness Projects” tells us. Gretchen says that in order to know who we are, we must ask ourselves a few key questions.

Try writing down your answers to the following questions she lays out for us.

1. Who do you envy and why?

When someone has something you want, that’s very useful information about who you want to be. Rather than focusing on the negative aspect of envy or the judgment you might put on yourself for feeling that way, focus on being grateful for this additional information about what you value and care about.

2. What do you lie about?

Anything we try to hide is a big red flag. The lie is a disconnect between your behavior and your values.

3. What would you do for fun?

It is a sad fact about happiness that when you say to adults, “What would you do for fun?” many adults are truly mystified. HINT: If you don’t know the answer, answer this—What did you do for fun when you were 10 years old?

4. Are you an abstainer or a moderator?

Think of something you find very tempting — chocolate, cigarettes, sex, alcohol, Cheetos, shopping — whatever.

Gretchen says there are two types of people — abstainers and moderators. To avoid temptation, abstainers have to go cold turkey. They can’t even get started with a bag of potato chips or they’ll eat the whole bag.

Moderators, on the other hand, can eat just one square of dark chocolate and be happy, and if they abstain completely, they get totally cranky. Moderators feel rebellious if they’re not allowed to have just a little bit.

Since part of what makes people unhappy is trying to resist temptation, it helps to know whether you’re an abstainer or a moderator.

If you know yourself and your own nature—and you OWN it—you’re much better prepared to handle temptation. In other words, just accept your own nature and act accordingly.

5. What’s the nature of your relationship to the expectations of yourself and others?

When you are trying to change a habit, you’re trying to impose an expectation upon yourself. But there are two kinds of expectations—outer expectations (work deadlines, a request from a loved one) and inner expectations (what you desire for yourself).

Gretchen explains that there are 4 categories of expectations:

• Upholders

These people respond well to both outer and inner expectations without much fuss. They just do as they’re told, whether their motivations come from internal or external expectations.

These are your classic “goody two shoes,” who follow rules pretty blindly. If a sign is posted, they will obey it. If they set a New Year’s Resolution, they’ll just do it.

Upholders are motivated by fulfillment. They feel good when they meet expectations. They hate to be blamed or let people down. They want to know the rules, and they’re great rule followers, but they’re unhappy if they don’t know what is expected of them.

They’re good self-starters. If they make up their minds to do something, they do it. But the dark side is that if upholders don’t know what’s expected of them—if things are ambiguous, they feel paralyzed.

There’s a grinding quality, a relentlessness, to upholders. They need to stay within their comfort zones to feel happy, and that includes knowing what is expected of them.

• Questioners

These people question all expectations, whether internal or external. In order to change a behavior, they must be persuaded.

If their questions are answered to their own satisfaction, they can be persuaded to meet an expectation. If the motivations for change don’t make sense to them, forget it!

Questioners can have either upholder tendencies or rebel tendencies, but most lean one way or another.

Questioners wake up in the morning and think “What needs to get done today?” They want to know why they should do something. The questioner is saying, “Why are we doing this at all?”

They love information and research. If they accept an expectation, they’re good at fulfilling it. They endorse everything internally if they sign on. But their upside is also their downside.

If you don’t get a questioner on board, they’re not going to meet expectations. It’s hard for them to act if they feel they don’t have enough information. This can make them seem totally arbitrary.

• Rebels

These people resist all expectations, inner or outer. A rebel wants to do what a rebel wants to do. If you set an expectation for a rebel and tell them to do something, they’ll actually go out of their way to disobey you and fail to meet the expectation, just to prove a point.

The upside of the rebels is that they’re willing to think and behave outside the box. They can be creative nonconformists who push the envelope. But they can be incredibly frustrating!

Gretchen says rebels can be manipulated by challenging them and suggesting that they CAN’T do something. Tell a rebel she can’t do something and she’ll be all, “Well, I’ll show you. Ha!”

Tell a rebel, “I don’t think your team can get that done by Friday!” Then watch them be ready by Wednesday.

Although rebels are not motivated by following the rules, rebels may occasionally (and shockingly) choose to do something purely out of love for you — not because you asked them to do it, but because they love you. But not always. So don’t get your hopes up.

• Obligers

These people readily meet outer expectations but have a hard time meeting inner expectations. So they’ll go out of their way to please others, but they do at the expense of what is in their own best interests. These are the typical “people pleasers” who sell themselves out for the approval of others.

Obligers wake up and think “What do I HAVE to do today?” They are motivated by external accountability. They’re great to have around — great team members, great friends, great family.

They hate to make mistakes. They bear the brunt of it on themselves. They hate being people pleasers but they can’t stand to let someone down. An obliger needs to build in external accountability for inner expectations.

So if they’ve made a New Years Resolution, they need to tell everyone by blogging about their intentions, for example. Then they’re motivated to please those they’ve promised, even though they’re really serving themselves.

Obligers are not good self-starters. They need deadlines, coaches, late fees, check ins. They’re also very susceptible to burn out. Everyone else takes advantage of the obligers. So if you’re in a relationship with an obliger, be mindful of that.

Certain combinations of people and jobs work better together. Rebels are almost always married to obligers. Upholders must be in relationship with upholders or questioners with upholder tendencies. Otherwise, it’s a disaster in the making!

In the end, we can only build a happy life on the foundation of our own true nature. To learn to understand yourself is the adventure of a life—to love ourselves, to accept ourselves, and to live in accordance with your true nature.

By: Sara, from Institute of Heart Math / Source: Care 2

Now and then we all take a moment to look at the life we are living and daydream about how our futures will look. So, take one of those moments right now, and rather than “thinking” about what the future might look like based on your life as it is now, do the following:

Look as deeply as you can into your heart and visualize the future you‘ve always truly desired, the one that fills your heart with joy whenever you imagine it.

In that simple exercise, you have glimpsed what I call your heart blueprint.

What Is Your Heart Blueprint?

From the earliest days of our lives, when we begin to imagine the future and our place in it, an idealistic vision begins to unfold of what could be, or as some would say, what we came here for.

Think of your heart blueprint as a city map that shows all the one-way and two-way streets, left- and right-hand turns, traffic jams and detours you must negotiate as you travel a city.

In each instance that you do this or that, go one way or another or otherwise delay your arrival at your heart’s desired destination, you drain precious energy. Similarly, following ambitions and desires not aligned with what your true heart yearns for, delays the arrival at your heart’s desired destination.

Detours away from your heart’s destination, especially during these times of rapid change and relentless demands on our time, can lead to harmful levels of stress.

Researchers at the Institute of HeartMath have found that constant change and time overwhelm are leading contributors to stressful responses to situations and challenges in our daily lives.

The result is a depletion of energy reserves and a breakdown in resiliency, both of which are critical for meeting the challenges of our modern world.

Look for Your ‘Hinge Points‘

Although looking back and pinpointing the precise “big” moments or encounters in life that steered us in one direction or another and helped shape our futures is often difficult, most of us are aware that they did happen.

Those big moments actually are a series of smaller moments, or what is called “hinge points,” that happen most every day.

Each of us makes innumerable choices that navigate us through the day. Hinge points are those choices that arise in which we can elect to remain on the most efficient course, according to the heart’s higher blueprint, or take a detour. For example, consider the following:

Among the sincerest desires you hold in your heart is to always be unreservedly kind to everyone you encounter.

As you arrive at your workplace one day, a supervisor greets you with the admonition: ”There‘s a lot to do today, so there‘s no time for slouching.“(Now there’s a hinge point for you!)

You can choose to take a detour from your heart’s true desire by replying, “Why are you telling me that?“ (Sounds confrontational).

Or you can stay on course with a response like, ”I‘m ready. Let‘s get to it!“ (Pure kindness.)

The ”on-course“ reply in this example compromises neither your heart’s blueprint nor your self-respect. In keeping with your true heart’s blueprint, you are listening to your heart, sticking to the highway and staying in the flow toward your heart’s desired destination.

Remember that popular definition of insanity? “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Hinge points are like that: If you don’t meet them, the same or similar situations may loop around over and over, and despite your heart’s blueprint, the outcome will be the same each time: detour, detour, detour.

All of the hinge points/choices we encounter daily comprise a collection of possibilities for our unrealized futures. As we act on these, we crystallize the possibilities – the words we speak, who we meet, the relationships and jobs we choose.

This is the process of activating our futures according to our heart blueprints.

Unfolding in the Planetary Shift

You’ve often heard in recent years about the current shift in global consciousness. In this great shift, millions of people are seeking a deeper heart consciousness and connection – within and with others – and to rewrite the future and create a better world.

A new heart-conscious generation is accelerating the shift and remaking the world “from the inside out.” These individuals are learning skills for generating high levels of personal heart coherence and radiating compassion, healing and creative solutions across the planet.

HeartMath has developed a unique set of tools and technology that help individuals and groups expand their heart field environment – and ultimately activate the heart of humanity.

As greater numbers expand their heart environment, they encompass more and more people and enable them to more easily discern their heart’s intuition and visualize their own heart blueprints.

Connect to your purpose, create a life mission statement

This is a practical exercise to help you understand your heart blueprint.

• Focus your attention in the area of the heart. Breathe in and out through the heart area.
• Appreciate your own heart intelligence and its encoded blueprint for your fulfillment and optimal potential.
• Ask your heart what your life’s mission statement might be. Write down what first comes to you, without judgments or editing. Know that this is something that can grow and evolve, change and refine as you do!

By: Daniel Lefferts / Source: Bookish

Yoga diehards have long claimed that the practice can allay physical ailments, such as back pain and headaches, as well as improve mood and mental agility. But these perks may not represent the full reach of yoga’s power, says parapsychology researcher Dean Radin in his new book, Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities.

Before its recent popularization as an alternative physical and mental discipline, Radin writes, “The essential goal of yoga was to achieve states of insight that revealed the true nature of Reality.”

This rarefied plane of consciousness offers many spiritual rewards, some of which we’re familiar with — deep focus, empathy, enlightenment — and some of which sound more like the paranormal weaponry of the X-Men.

By clearing their minds of static and attachments, and perfecting bare focus and attention, Radin suggests, yogis of previous eras were able to transcend their intellectual and bodily confinements to commune with—and alter—the world around them.

“After thousands of years of exploration, refinement, and discussion about [yoga] techniques, advanced yoga practitioners may have advanced far beyond what science is currently capable of confirming,” Radin asserts.

Radin’s investigation into the supernormal potential of yoga begins with a look at ancient yogic writings called the “Yoga Sutras,” which date back as far as the second century B.C. and which “provide a taxonomy of supernormal mental powers” — called siddhis — “and a means of obtaining them.”

He then turns to the cutting-edge field of paranormal science and parapsychology, where researchers test the validity of these ancient claims through a range of studies and experiments. We take a look at the hard science behind four yogic superpowers Radin identifies.

Clairaudience

The “Yoga Sutras” name 25 siddhis, one of which is “knowledge of the meaning of sounds produced by all beings,” or, what Radin refers to as “clairaudience.”

Achieved by maintaining a meditative focus on the area behind the ear (a kind of trance state known as a “samyama”), clairaudience “may be interpreted as a form of clairvoyance, or telepathy that extends beyond human minds and includes animals, insects and other species,” Radin writes.

In other words, yogis who attain clairaudience would be able to communicate with–or at least understand the messages of — living beings other than humans, leaving us to wonder if Dr. Dolittle was really just an esoteric yogi extraordinaire.

Breatharianism

According to the “Yoga Sutras,” performing samyama on the throat enables some yogis to liberate themselves from the need to eat and drink, a phenomenon known in Catholicism as “inedia” and, more generally, as “breatharianism.”

“The implication is that the human body can transmute ambient energy into nutrients,” Radin writes, “and through the practice of cultivating this ability one can live comfortably for as long as one wishes without food.”

He points to the case of an Indian yogic ascetic named Prahlad Jani, who claims to have lived healthily without eating or drinking from the age 11 to the present (he is now in his 80s).

Jani has participated in two medical tests in India — the first in 2003 and the second in 2010 — in which he was observed to go without food or drink for as many as 14 days with “no drastic changes…in his physiological condition.”

Telepathy

Just as a samyama focused on the ear can engender clairaudience, a samyama focused on another person’s mind — as in the case of trying to send a message to another person’s mind — can engender telepathy, according to the “Yoga Sutras.”

Radin points to a type of test called a “ganzfeld” experiment, in which “receivers” are deprived of sensory input (in Radin’s example, they wear headphones that pump in pink noise and wear halved Ping Pong balls over their eyes) while “senders” attempt to mentally communicate a specific image.

The receiver then reports any images that come to mind over the course of their sensory deprivation. Radin recounts a ganzfeld experiment that he and a team of researches conducted in 2010 in which the “sender” telepathically communicated an image of the pyramids at Giza.

The “receiver,” in turn, reported images of something “tall,” “monolithic” and of a “rough texture.” Radin classifies this experiment as a “hit.”

Psychokinesis

According to Radin, “some of the siddhis in the ‘Yoga Sutras’ are described as interactions between mind and matter.” He points to an experiment in which subjects were seemingly able to influence the physical body of another person through deep meditative focus.

In this “Love Study,” Radin and his colleagues tested 36 adult couples, one of whom was healthy and one of whom was undergoing cancer treatment, to see if focused, channeled affection could measurably influence the physical body of another person.

The sender (the healthy participant) sat in a remote chamber watching an intermittently played video of their partner, while researchers measured the skin conductivity of the receiver (the ill participant).

Radin reports (with graphs showing results) how the ill patients’ skin consistently displayed markedly higher rates of conductivity after the healthy patient had viewed a video of them.

Radin argues that this constitutes evidence that a purely mental faculty—in this case, love—is able to influence material reality.