Are you tapping into the metal element energy of the fall season? Appreciation and accomplishment are qualities activated at this time of year. It’s no coincidence that celebrations of Thanks Giving (both American and Canadian) are scheduled in this time period. Appreciation is a basic life need. If our needs for being validated and appreciated were not met at a young impressionable age, we can spend a life time trying to untangle from the pain of it. We become perfectionists, procrastinators or out of balance entertainers seeking attention where ever we can get it-positive or negative.
Chances are if no one modelled appreciation for you when you were young, you did not learn to do it for yourself and so the pattern persists . Your accomplishments may be long, but you are still driven to do more for the validation, appreciation or acknowledgement that you need. For some of us the lack of acknowledgement especially for our accomplishments when we were young resulted from what was thought to be good parenting. It was a well-known Victorian era parenting rule that praise would spoil your children. It has taken several generations for good parents to realize that appreciation or validation of their children was actually the right thing to do. So how do we recover from the remnants of this ancestral pattern?
Appreciation both for yourself and giving it to others is a very powerful healing tool. When we feel appreciation our field of energy expands and we are motivated to do more for ourselves and others. You don’t need to wait for others to appreciate yourself. Something I learned sometime ago from [amazon_link id=”0312321597″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Dan Baker’s book “What Happy People Know” [/amazon_link] is that it is scientifically shown that you can’t be in a state of anxiety or worry AND appreciation at the same time. The brain can hold one emotion or the other but not both in the same moment. If you find yourself unreasonably anxious you could try his recommended exercise of naming what you appreciate about yourself and /or name your accomplishments however small. Actively writing out a list of appreciations for at least a minute will get you some temporary relief. Write for 10 minutes and you will kick start a new more positive brain wave that gets you out of the anxiety loop. Keep it up for an hour and you could be rewiring yourself for a better state of mind.
One of the things to appreciate about yourself is your list of accomplishments – your level of education, something you recently learned, your driver’s license, your income, your ideas, your strengths – big or small when we appreciate what we have accomplished we send a signal to our brain that this is good. The brain responds by trying to get more of that experience lined up for you. Suddenly there is less time available for feeling sorry for ourselves or feeling not good enough etc. – the brain is too busy responding to the list of accomplishments.
Are you resonating with appreciation for yourself and your accomplishments? Join my Energize! online repatterning program if you don’t. One of the 7 basic life intentions that I set up in the daily Energize! group proxy program is “I appreciate 3 good things that happened for me today.”
Today is Canadian Thanksgiving and my love, blessings and appreciation go out to all of you. Thank you for being part of the resonance repatterning community, for your referrals over the last year , for your emails of appreciation and stories of change. It is indeed a privilege to serve you.
Quick – name 3 good things that happened for you today!
With light and love
Carolyn
carolynwinter.org 