Blog – Page 16

Time Living Now

Time is of the essence. The time is now. Where did all the time go? Time can seem so important to how we live our lives and yet as a concept it is also pretty nebulous and often unexamined.

What is your relationship with time? It may seem weird to consider it that way but we all have a relationship with time that affects us profoundly. Do you feel like you are always running out of time, that there are never enough hours in the day? And what of that upsetting little stressor, running late and never on time?

The way we use language of course can be very telling. If you want to uncover the script that is running you with time just replay a few of these phrases in your head and watch how you react. What do you notice and feel in your body? What memories come up? What happened as a child when you were not ready on time for the adults who controlled your schedule? How much resentment do you have about time, “wasting” time, or the giving of your precious time to others? Are you passive aggressive about time, keeping others waiting and always late? Or do you feel empowered to choose how you spend your time and a corresponding sense of mastery in your life?

How do you feel about ageing, birthdays and marking the milestones of time? Who directs your use of time both in work and leisure and what makes up that work life balance that today for many seems so allusive. It is definitely worth “spending time” considering your own relationship with what is at once seemingly infinite and endlessly gone. Do it now!

If you would like some support with your relationships or creating greater happiness in your life, please contact me on 0403 814 477 for a free 10-minute consultation to discuss your needs.

Life Purpose

By Margie Ulbrick Leave a Comment

Finding a life purpose may well be the most significant thing you do with your life. It is just too easy to sail on from day to day without ever giving much thought and consideration to what is your reason for being here. Now, of course, we all have numerous reasons, family, work, hobbies, things that we get involved in, that keep us busy. But this is different from being on a deliberate path. A path that you choose rather than one you simply end up on or fall into. A path in which you intentionally choose how you want to be and feel and act, that together combines to give you a strongly held map that makes sense of your life. Creating a map for yourself in which every day feels like a gift is the sort of life we can lead when we are clear about our life purpose! It acts as a kind of treasure map for our soul.

Too many people end up at the end of their days wondering what was all that about? It should not take a near death experience or a significant life trauma for us to evaluate our lives. Each person alive deserves to feel good about their life, and to appreciate the gift that is a life lived filled with purpose, passion and meaning. Having a life purpose has got people through incredible tragedies. Victor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning tells the stories of holocaust survivors who were enabled to endure the most horrific circumstances because of a deeply held sense of life purpose.

Working on discovering and creating your own life purpose that is specific to you and has nothing to do with what others expect or demand of you, can be a surprisingly liberating experience. It can also provide a blueprint to refer to when decisions are upon you and when the going gets tough.

One of the best ways to define your own life purpose is to write down a mission statement, much as any organization does. This helps you have a clear and compelling vision of what you are here for and what your life is about. Having a clear understanding for yourself of what you aspire to be and how you aspire to act, affects every decision and choice you make.

Part of this involves knowing your values, what especially resonates with your heart. I suggest choosing a couple of values which really strike a chord for you, can be a meaningful way to bring about an increased sense of fulfillment in your life and can help illuminate your life purpose. It may be kindness, honesty or forgiveness. You may aspire to be non-judgemental or compassionate or patient. However, whatever values you choose, need to resonate with you and to make sense to you. They need to be consciously chosen and regularly revisited. Reflecting for just a few minutes each day on how you are going with your newly chosen values is necessary to bring about the change you desire. Writing them down is also a great reinforcer.

Someone once said life is too short to live for the weekends. Don’t leave it to chance! It’s too important. Imagine: looking back at the end of your days over your life, imagine the feeling you will have when you can say, yes, that was what I wanted my life to look like, that is how I wanted to live. It may not have turned out like you thought it would; that’s not really the point. The question you will be answering for yourself, is not what happened to me or how hard did I work. For most people it will be how did I live my life and what did I bring to life? Did I live a life connected to what was really meaningful to me? Living a life on purpose brings happiness, and reduces anger, frustration and bitterness. It really is worth the effort.

©Margie Ulbrick

If you would like some support with your relationships or creating greater happiness in your life, please contact me on 0403 814 477 for a free 10-minute consultation to discuss your needs.

Intuition: Friend or Foe?

By Margie Ulbrick Leave a Comment

Intuition is a vast intelligence which we just barely tap into or it is nonsense of our imagination, depending on where you sit. In the family in which I was raised it was the rational mind that was given the most value. Anything from the heart or resembling emotion was not to be touched. Thus I was raised deaf dumb and blind to what I now term, my own internal guidance system: my intuition. From experience I now know that intuition is a wonderful gift available to every one of us. I see it as a great friend, a companion I can trust, an aspect of the mystical and spiritual in my life.

Intuition is often thought of as a 6th sense, a kind of knowing that we “inherently” possess. The more consciously we choose to follow our intuition the more we can develop this aspect of our lives and incorporate it into the adventure of our living. A life lived attuned to one’s intuition is often experienced as a life lived on purpose.

But how to describe intuition to one who doe not know what it is: that is the question! How to cultivate a life lived from this place, where does one start? A great way to start to look inwards, to get a sense of an inner life, an inner voice or compass is by processes such as meditation or focusing. Gene Gendlin the originator of focusing talked of the edge of awareness, a vague something which he termed the “felt sense”. This again is distinct from intuition, but developing the capacity to connect with an inner knowing goes along way to describing intuition. In focusing this is done by sensing into bodily awareness. Meditation may not involve body awareness but it can. Practices that are increasingly popular today which teach mindfulness and use it as a modality of immense healing also cultivate awareness. Intuition is another aspect of awareness.

Developing intuition is one thing but what about having the courage to trust it? Many of us are more comfortable with rationality and with the mind than with anything intangible and not able to be proven. Intuition is not evidence based! However, society is showing a greater openness in some sectors to such things as emotional intelligence and intuition is surely a part of E I. The field of executive coaching is developing and the corporate world is now increasingly seeing a place for other aspects of communication and decision making than the purely rational. Even in the field of medicine and science many practitioners are now becoming more open to the place of inner awareness.

So if you want to develop your capacity for intuition start with small choices. Try testing things in your body and checking for bodily repsonses. The body does not lie but the mind can easily confuse us. Ask questions that perplex you and put them to a part of you that is internal. Bring an intention to focus some place inside, to enhance your connection with an inner knowing, an inner wisdom that you can trust is already present. For enhancing this capacity to trust yourself and to follow your own beat, is likely to bring fruits well worth the effort in a rewarding and enriching life, a creative and connected life: a life that takes you into possibilities not yet dreamed of.

If you would like some support with your relationships or creating greater happiness in your life, please contact me on 0403 814 477 for a free 10-minute consultation to discuss your needs.

Happy Just Because: Further Tips for Happiness

By Margie Ulbrick Leave a Comment

This is a sequel to an article in the last edition of which outlined qualities discernable in happy people. In that article I outlined that happiness can be taught, it can be grown inside of you like building a muscle. You can raise your happiness set-point, that residual place you always fall back to, by building habits of happiness.

Perhaps one of the greatest gifts we human beings have is the power of choice. Many people feel like they do not have much choice about a whole range of things and this keeps them feeling stuck. In fact when I talk with clients we often discover they have a whole lot more choice than they recognized.

For instance in any given moment we can cultivate the skill of choosing peace. No matter what is going on outside we can consciously decide to feel peaceful. In fact the ability to remain calm and to be peaceful no matter what is happening, can give rise to something more lasting than happiness which is experienced as a profound joy. This is a learnable skill and not just something people are born with. It is possible to develop an attitude and a perspective that allows one to do this despite external stress. The ability to choose peace is available to all of us. It is helpful to be clear about what you can change and what you cannot. An example of this is in our relationships. We cannot change another human being. We cannot force another person be it a sibling, parent, or partner to conform to our wishes. To attempt to control others in this way merely sets us up for frustration. Far better to put our energy into what we can change which always leads us back to ourselves. It is a delightful and simple irony that when we clean up our own act, change the tone with which we speak, change our own attitude to another person and refuse to blame or criticize another, we suddenly find he/she is more willing to co-operate or more receptive to our requests.

Don’t take my word for it. Set yourself a challenge. Pick one difficult relationship in your life and refrain from being critical with this person for one week. Choose to listen to them and honestly put aside your own perspective, just for one week. Choose to really try and see their point of view without justifying your own. Notice how hard it is and keep on going.

But a caution: this is not to say that we should tolerate bad behaviour. In fact we recognize that we have a choice and we clearly state what we will tolerate and what is unacceptable for us. As you find your voice to set boundaries, as you take responsibility for your own behaviour and your own life, as you choose the power of peace in any given moment, the experience of your life changes. You build your happiness muscle step by step. You lay down new neural pathways in your brain and you build for yourself a meaningful and happy life.

If you would like some support with your relationships or creating greater happiness in your life, please contact me on 0403 814 477 for a free 10-minute consultation to discuss your needs.

« Previous Page

Time Living Now

Life Purpose

Intuition: Friend or Foe?

Happy Just Because: Further Tips for Happiness

About Margie Ulbrick Relationship Counselling

Looking for something?

Contact Margie