Dear all, good morning and a great day to everybody! My week started out fantastic. We had a very relaxed Sunday. I got up at 6.30 (in the morning!) which is not very common for me on Sundays, but I was full of energy and happiness. I took the dogs out for an early morning walk. Then I made a great healthy all grain pancake breakfast and I spent almost 4 hours taking care of my love. He really needed to relax but he was so wired from everything he had to do that he was finding it hard to enjoy his day off.
For me the ultimate way to help somebody relax is by using massage and reflexology techniques. I love touching my love’s body so for me it is a very pleasant experience as well. Really anyone can give massages and use reflexology, I found that it is a really special experience for you and your love to discover all these great instruments of wellness together. Start by reading about the techniques you want to use, get nice smelling massage oil and a quiet place to start practicing. Make sure you and the receiver are comfortable, not too cold, not too warm, you can set the ambience by lowering the lights and lighting a bit of incense. For me personally I prefer for my love and me to be naked while massaging I feel it enhances you connection (another great advantage of massaging each other in stead of going to a salon). So yes massaging and reflexology are all about connection, close your eyes and let your hands feel his or her body, when you first start, do not press to hard and check regularly with the receiver how it feels. I have received quite a few massages so what I do while massaging is I try to imagine how the moves I make feel on the receivers body, I really try to imagine the sensations he is feeling and that way become mentally and spiritually closer to each other. Of course the other great advantage of giving your love a massage is that it will probably set the scene for other very nice couples activities… making love is one of the best ways to relax so my advice is to really enjoy and relax together, learn to understand each others bodies and reach a fantastic climax together.
If you want to catch up on your massage or reflexology techniques I found these really interesting websites and videos to tell you more:
http://www.how-to-do-reflexology.com/
Referring this account back to the theme of this blog, how to create change in your life. Well I found out that it is inevitable to share your life with people. My dream when I was little was to live on a deserted island with only animals, no people; I have always felt people were ruining this planet, killing each other, killing animals, killing mother earth I didn’t want anything to do with people.
Well then you grow up and you start to realize there are some people that are OK and there are a few that you love and in the end you have to deal with people to live your life, the good ones and the bad ones. As I tried to explain before I started this blog about my quest to make positive changes in my life. During our therapy sessions I discovered that it is really hard for me to show empathy towards people.
#Google -> Define: empathy -> The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
This is one thing I had to work on because it was really threatening the relationship with my love, one of the only people I really love to be with.
So to be honest I really had to teach myself to be more emphatically towards others, actually to change my mindset to not to think about myself in the first place. Weird thing is that I have always had seas of empathy towards animals but when dealing with people I would always go into a defense mode instead of a understand mode.
In my previous blogs I have told you about me trying to improve my communication skills by learning more about non-violent communication and being a better listener. Listening and understanding others is really important if you try to have empathy for the other. So besides improving my communication skills I also try just to be nicer in general. I have always been nice during short exchanges like with a teller at the shop, I am really a pleasant customer. But that is not what I mean. I try to be nicer to people around me by doing things for them without expecting anything is return.
If you are like me, not used to this, it something you have to think about, for example, last week I had to get some groceries for the office and while in the shop I saw some doughnuts, I was thinking, sweet a doughnut, just what I wanted. Then I thought, wait a minute; maybe the guys in the office would like a doughnut as well. Now in the past this thought would not have occurred to me, I would have just bought and eaten a doughnut myself without anyone knowing what they missed out on. But this time I bought 4 doughnuts, one for me and three for the colleagues and I waited until I got back to the office and hand them out before eating (I didn’t even protest when the chocolate sprinkled doughnut which I wanted was taken by someone else). It turned out one of our colleagues had left for the day so we had one doughnut extra, my first thought was, yummy one extra for me, and then I thought, no you can divide it in three and share this one as well, and so I did. And it felt really good!
It all sounds so simple but if you are not used to this mindset it is something you have to think about, but over time it will be more something you just do instead of something you have to tell yourself to do. Here, my example about Sunday comes in, I could have thought ‘what a great day for me to spent doing the stuff I want to do for myself’, but in stead, with no prior self-instructions, I felt that my love was really stressed and I wanted to do something to help him feel better and enjoy our Sunday together.
In conclusion I still believe there are a lot of evil people in the world and all the empathy in the universe will not help me understand how people can abuse and kill other human and non-human beings. I have been disappointed and betrayed by people whom I trusted. Looking back I realize these things have happened for a reason I was able to see these peoples true nature, to remove them from my life and now my life is better without them. It was a sort of cleansing that needed to happen, so if some one betrays you do not think about revenge and grief, be happy you found out who they really were before they did greater damage. And most importantly do not be afraid to give your trust to others, do not let one bad experience ruin your life.
Trying to be emphatically towards others will make your life happier, because you will receive back what you give. Just start out on a small scale and think about it, think about the people you feel deserve your empathy most and start by showing it to them, you will find these small steps will change your mindset and without trying you will start to be more emphatically towards all around you.
I’ll be back later with some great stuff about loosing weight, feeling good and being healthy in the “have fun and relax’ category of this site.
Love Life Peace!
attitudeforchange 