Are You Serving Your Thoughts and Worries or This?

When you're struggling with mental health issues, it's difficult to get out of your head and think about who you're serving. Are you serving your thoughts and your worries - the darkness that keeps you restrained? Or are you serving your presence, inner-state, your divinity? 

When you struggle with mental health issues, you are, typically, caught up in your head most of the time. It's difficult to see this when you're in it. I know I couldn't distinguish the difference when I first started learning how to get present, but if you could just take a few seconds of your time and become present by listening to your breath or focusing on your heart, you'll immediately know or realize a "shift" occurred. This "shift" is a release of tension, even if it was only for a moment, from being in the space of your head to being in your present state of awareness of your entirety. 

When you're in your head, full of thoughts and worries, there is a strong resistance in your body that you don't really recognize because you are (sort of speak) cut off from your body. When you get present or centered, you can literally feel a shift from your head to your wholeness. 

I can talk about mental (or brain) health because I struggled with mental illness all my life, and I still have to find ways to manage my head-space. It never really goes away for good because of the way life is and the challenges we constantly. A time will come when an event or a circumstance will overwhelm you and you'll need to find a way to work through it. Today, when I have days of darkness and when it feels like my ankles are tied or I have no control, I may sit in this place for a little while - this place of darkness.

What's different today from yesterday is that I reach out. Reaching out looks like . . .

I.) Asking good questions. Where did this all begin? What was I doing? What was I thinking? What was it about that that made me spiral downward? What haven't I worked through? Is there something that needs to be addressed (or looked at) that I've been hiding from myself? 

II.) Listen to your body. My body is a good indicator. Where can you feel the resistance? Does your body tense up? Do you start shallow breathing at some point? Pay attention to your body posture? Do you begin to slouch? If you are lying in bed, do you succumb to a fetal position?

III.) Breathe: Typically, I am shallow breathing, so I make sure I start to breath deeply to get some oxygen into my body and brain. I open up my chest cavity by pushing my shoulders back.

IV.) At this point, I may reach for my iPhone and watch a video or read something inspirational. Joel Osteen. Grant Cardone. Brandon Dawson. Bill Johnson. Anita Moorjani. I am in business creation right now in my life so I watch some highly influential people that have amazing stories to tell about their own journey as well as ministries. Read scripture. Watch ministries. Listen to music. Write a poem. Pray. Do whatever works for YOU! We are all different. 

V.) I will ask myself existential questions like, Who am I? Is this forever? What is the meaning of my life? Am I in alignment with it?

VI.) Then, I will make decisions from my state of well-being. I may unfollow people that are not authentic or sincere or have been selling their products and services in a way that instills fear. I may rewrite my goals, or reassess and edit them . . .

The process is not, usually, quick since my emotional state doesn't shift that fast especially when I get too deep into the darkness. And that's why it's so important to stay in check everyday and throughout the day!

Yesterday was that kind of day and as the day progressed, I could feel my energy waning. By the evening, I was not facing what I needed to, so I went onto Instagram and became a zombie scrolling mindlessly wasting time when I should have been reading scholarly papers. After I put my phone away, I started the process, just as I laid out above. I still had to work through some stuff this morning, but I am in a better place.

The point is, check in with yourself everyday and throughout the day. I've always been a very sensitive and emotional person, and I think people like us pick up the energy around us quite easily. If we don't check in with ourselves regularly, we may be opening up ourselves to heavy energy that can take us down quickly. But then again, perhaps, I need to be around more optimistic and happy people.

Grant Cardone says in his sales program, "If you are feeling the rejection, you don't have enough people in your pipeline." I think the same is true for feeling and being optimistic and happy. If you have that one negative person around you all the time, it's pretty difficult to be happy and positive. Having one negative person around you all the time will cause you to be that way too, but having a dozen or so positive people around you, that one negative person will get muffled out!  

Anyway, ask yourself, "Who Am I Serving?" My thoughts or my presence? "Which one keeps you mentally and emotionally healthy?"

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