Author: Karen Lang

Counselor/Energy Healer Grief Mentor/Mindfulness teacher/ Author of two books.

Take Responsibility

by Karen Lang, posted in Uncategorized

“You must take personal responsibility.  You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself.  That is something you have charge of.” – Jim Rohn

When life presents us with challenging situations or when we are confronted with personal fears, we have two choices; To resign to this part of ourselves and face we will always be this way,  saying “What can I do?”  “That’s just the way I am” …or take responsibility for them, by stepping into our fears and changing our life.

Charles Givens reminds us that, “You have to let go of your past in order to effectively design your future.” In other words to let go of who you think you are, and take action, instead of wishing things were different.

Instead of asking  “what do I want from life?,” a more powerful question is, “what does life want from me?” – Eckhart Tolle

Whenever an answer, a solution, or a creative idea is needed, stop thinking for a moment by focusing attention on your inner energy field. … When you resume thinking, it will be fresh and creative.  When we allow negative thoughts in and continually feed them, we cannot focus on how to change our situation.

Firstly, be honest with yourself “What part of you is fearful and why do you find it so hard to accept?”.  When we acknowledge and accept this truth, we can start to recognise the conditioned pattern of our thoughts that bring our fear’s to the surface.  You need to be able to watch yourself in these fearful situations and see how you can act differently.

Becoming conscious of this fear will begin to change the course you have created in life and as you step into the fear and realise it wasn’t as big or as scary as you first thought, you will be able to address other parts of your life too.

“The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it”  ~ Eckhart Tolle

Wake up and be conscious of your fearful thoughts.  “Are they real?”  “Are they preventing your growth?” if so, why are you holding onto to them?  Challenge yourself to feel uncomfortable in fearful situations and work through changing your thoughts.  If we do what we have always done, we will always have the same results.

We all have the “Ability” to “Respond” differently in all situations.  Each day is a new beginning.

“Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally”. –  Eckhart Tolle

 

Be Inspired and Motivated

by Karen Lang, posted in Uncategorized

”Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ‘em.” – William Shakespeare

The Greatest Salesman in the World

“The Greatest Salesman in the World” written by – OG MANDINO

A definite read for those of you who seek a deeper way to live and think.  It will motivate you and help you understand why only a few are successful in life!  Here are the steps that the book encourages you to do.  Don’t wait until tomorrow to make changes.

1:  Today, I begin a new life.  I will shed my past……I will form good habits everyday and become their slave.

2. I will greet each day with love in my heart.  I will love the ambitious for they can inspire me; I will love the failures for they can teach me.  React only in love.

3. I will persist until I succeed.   Each obstacle I will consider as a mere detour to my goal and a challenge to my profession.

4. I am nature’s greatest miracle.  None that came before, none that live today, and none that come tomorrow can walk or talk and move and think like me.  I am unique.

5. I will live this day as if it is my last.  I will waste not a moment mourning yesterday’s misfortunes, yesterday’s defeat’s or yesterday’s aches of the heart.

6. Today I will master my emotions.  Yesterday’s joy will become today’s sadness; yet today’s sadness will grow into tomorrow’s joy.  If I feel insignificant, I will remember my goals.

7.  I will laugh at the world.  No living creature, can laugh but man.   I will laugh at myself and with laughter all things will be reduced to their proper size.

8.  Today I will multiply my value a hundredfold.  I will set goals for the day, the week, the month, the year and my life.  I will always strive to make the next hour, better than this one.

9.  I will act now.  Lest I act I will perish in a life of failure, misery and sleepless nights.  Success will not wait.

10. I will have faith.  Only for guidance will I pray, that I may be shown how to acquire what it is that I need.

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” – Robert Louis Stevenson.

Overcoming suffering

by Karen Lang, posted in Uncategorized

“Success is not final; failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill

Why is it that suffering is our greatest motivation to change?  When we get the call from our doctor to tell us we have cancer, or told that we have been made Redundant or our  husband of 30 years, decides to leave us.

Suffering blesses us with a willingness to let go of the ways in which we normally react.  When all the ways we have learnt over the years to deal with stress, no longer works, it causes us to let got of whatever it is that we have been clinging to, and do things differently.

It takes courage to change the way we have lived before suffering came along.  You may not be able to change the diagnosis, or divorce or the drama, but you can change your perception and experience through this suffering.

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.” –  Paul Coelho

People used to say to me after losing our son Nathan “You have every right to stay in a place of pain or depression, for what happened to you is devastating.”  But what I recognised, as many do when they are suffering, is that staying in that deep place of pain doesn’t help or change your situation.

When we react to suffering in our usual way and it doesn’t work, we have to go to a deeper place within ourselves and discover who we really are, rather than who we are in this tragedy.  I questioned everything about my life after Nathan died, my entire identity was taken from me and in order to survive, I needed to discover, who I would become through this suffering.

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” – Kahlil Gibran

How do you find this deeper place?  You must become still in your pain.  Practicing meditation and Yoga, will take you beyond the chatter and the chaos of your emotions and will allow you to witness your feelings and slowly let them go.

Each day is a lifelong practice of decision-making and creating.  Only you, can make this decision to go deeper.  By accepting your situation overtime without judgement, you will start to feel stronger, and understand your true nature and potential.

“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what my heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape.” – Charles Dickens

Make Changes today

by Karen Lang, posted in Uncategorized

“To make a change, you must have a new thought.  To cement the change, you must take action.” Keith J. Cunningham

Our ego creates stories to “convince us that we cannot be at peace now or cannot be fully ourself now … The ego says: Maybe at some point in the future I can be at peace — if this, that, or the other happens, or I obtain this or become that. Or it says: I can never be at peace because of something that has happened to me in the past.”

When we become aware of our thought patterns and take responsibility to create them differently, we can slowly begin to see the changes that will alter our destiny.

Although that seems easy enough, because we are addicted to our identity, we will struggle to convince our ego that this new thought pattern will benefit our future.  Your ego will fight you on every level, convincing you, that your life is comfortable, convincing you, that stepping out of this identity is too difficult when you are familiar with the outcome to every situation.

“You have to wake up and believe that change needs to happen in your life; there are old wounds directing our lives in destructive ways, and it is only by facing and releasing these old patterns that we can live with greater freedom and joy. To not work on these old wounds and simply be with the moment as it is, is not acceptance … it’s delusion. There is work to do more than to simply “surrender to what is.”  Eckhart Tolle

“The acceptance of suffering is a journey into death. Facing deep suffering, allowing it to be, taking your attention into it, is to enter death consciously. When you have died this death, you realize that there is no death, and there is nothing to fear. Only the ego dies.” – Eckhart Tolle

When we allow our ego identity to die, we can then move forward into our true self and see how we have limited ourselves on this journey.  Taking the first step is always the hardest.

Write down the areas in your life you would like to see change.  Become aware of your thoughts and how they teach you to stay in this old identity.  Learn to be still with these thoughts as they come in, and work on changing them to positive loving ones.

Challenge yourself to let go in one area of your life.  Practice love and acceptance for yourself.  Acceptance of ourselves and others, frees us to make the right decisions in life, allowing better outcomes.

Feed your soul with non-judgment, with love and with acceptance…this is what will starve the Ego, this is what will let GO of the EGO.

Unravelling Anxiety

by Karen Lang, posted in Uncategorized

“It has been said that our anxiety does not empty tomorrow of it’s sorrow, but only empties today of it’s strength.” – Charles Spurgeon

For those of us who have experienced anxiety, you will know, it is not a feeling you wish to keep.

Family and friends often tell you “Don’t worry so much” or “Things will work out” and as helpful as these words seem, they don’t help you feel less anxious.  What I have found is that it’s much more useful to own your anxiety – to observe its patterns, to look at what might be setting it off, and then to find ways to work with it.

Anxiety can be a powerful teacher.  It can show you where you’re hiding your stress or holding unprocessed emotions.  It might even remind you that there’s something you need to take care of.  Most important, anxiety often signals the need for growth or for some inner shift.

“Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems” – Epitetus

Anxiety is our body’s way to warn us that something isn’t balanced in our life, and if we ignore the early signs, it can lead to very scary anxiety attacks or feelings of isolation and fear.  When the anxiety becomes acute, the intense activity in your brain can make it difficult to think creatively, much less change the situation you are in.

Most anxiety comes from childhood conditioning where you may have felt powerless to cope and often begins at a time when you may not have felt safe to acknowledge your anxiousness.

“Anxiety’s like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you very far.” – Jodi Picoult

It’s only when you are willing to bring consciousness to your anxiety, to pay attention to the bodily sensations it brings, the thoughts that go along with it, and the situations that trigger it, that you can begin to learn from it.  We have the power to take control and understand anxiety and to embrace fear.

Become aware of how you feel when the anxiousness comes over you.  What part of you tightens when you feel nervous? Note what kind of mental dialogue you are having with yourself during this attack.

When you face your anxiety head first and not with fear, you will find that your anxiety is usually based on lies that you have told yourself over-time.  No-one I know has died of an anxiety attack and even though some attacks end up in the hospital, it is always because they thought they were going to die.

Yoga, breathing exercises and meditation are all wonderful techniques in helping us release built up emotion and fear.  When you use feelings of anxiety as a signal to let go, you begin to discover ways to free this energy from our mind and from old emotional patterning.

“Why do anxiety, stress, or negativity arise? Because you turned away from the present moment. And why did you do that? You thought something else was more important. One small error, one misperception, creates a world of suffering”.  – Eckhart Tolle

So learn to be present and aware.  Fear not of the future, but rather that you are not living fully in this moment.