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For those of you that have taken the first of the Pathwise 10 Essentials, you know about Suspension of Attention. This concept explains the idea of grounding yourself in the physical world as a means to balance your thinking brain. It’s a form of active meditation that aligns the different inputs: fligh/flight or freeze; emotions; and cognitive thinking. By doing this, you gain more insigt and can react more appropriately during times of fear, ambiguity and stress. You will find a clarity and understanding of what the other person’s intention is, beyond what he or she is not saying.
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We have very similar and repeatable physical patterns that emerge, when we are feeling threatened or have emotional unbalance. These physical patters, or “triggers” may be a tighness in the chest or jaw, flush face, or maybe even a nervous habit or desire to run away. All of these are clues from our primitive brain that we are in danger. The brain doesn’t know the difference between a tiger about to pounce, or your boss calling you into his office unexpectedly. However, you have a powerful tool that will keep you from diving into your self-preservation patterns that make innovation and creativity impossible.
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Once you realize you are being triggered, then your response is to Suspend Attention. We do this by thinking about a body part, or connecting with our physical environment. Your homework for this month is to:
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1. Recognize your trigger – How do you respond when things heat up? Do you know what you do next? Do you fight, freeze, flee? Just taking inventory is a huge step in recognizing and making conscious the patterns that may not have helped us the way we wanted them to in the past.
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2. Practice Suspension of Attention by thinking of a body part. You can think of your foot on the floor, fingers touching each other, or anything that interrupts the pattern enough to give you and opportunity to assess the situation and CHOOSE a conscious (rather than unconscious) response.
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Let me know how you do and share with us your experience of Suspension of Attention. Enjoy!

How do you know what is the right or wrong decision?  Sure, asking friends, looking at past history, reading, contemplating are all really great ideas.  However, when one is in the middle of an emotional situation, deciding what is the right decision can be very vague.  One can truly never know if the decision was the right or wrong one, until the results of the decision can be seen.  Even then, lessons learned and the “bright side” of failure offers hope that no decision is truly a bad one.  Still, fear of making the wrong decision often leads to procrastination, and then decisions are made in haste or under duress.  A recipe for a bad decision.

So, how do you make the right decision?  The answer lies not in the intellectual facts of the decision.  While these details are important, the way you feel about a decision is not based on these facts, it is based on how you feel about the outcome.  So the first step is to take inventory of where you are right now.  If you are in the middle of fear, ambiguity and stress, chances are, you will make a decision that you might regret, or not feel good about later.  One way to take inventory is to ask yourself, “how old am I acting right now?”.  If you feel like a kid, fiercely guarding a sandbox, you are operating at a lower level and conversations as well as decisions don’t feel good here.  If you are present to all the feelings, good/bad or otherwise, explore those.  These give us clues to what we want the outcome to be from an emotional perspective.  If you begin with the end feeling in mind, and ground yourself, you will feel better about your decision, regardless of how it turns out.  In most cases, the decision is one that is needed and provides benefits.   Caution: It is easy to trick yourself into believing you are present or grounded, when you are just going through the motions.  Try meditation, a car ride, soothing music, sit outside or anything that puts you into a place of higher thought and ask yourself again, “how old am I acting right now?”.  If the answer is “older and wiser”, this is a good time to focus on what you want and balance that with what you should do.  Stay tuned for future blogs on how to find your intrinsic motivation that all but removes the decision making process, because you just “are and do”.  Can’t wait?  Call Kim for a consultation.

What are signs and how do they speak to us?  Some believe in them from a divine intervention perspective. We see little things in our lives that somehow have meaning from another spirit sent to guide us along our journey. Some are searching for a scientific alignment of the Universe to explain the unexplainable.  Signs are merely scientific evidence of different dimensions interacting with this one.  Some already have the answers from ancient wisdom.  In the course of human evolution and suffering, we have lost our connection to this wisdom from the past.  Signs have always been there, we just haven’t been open to seeing them.  Some believe in the collective unconscious that wills us to manifest our dreams.  Some think this is all hokey mythology and life is completely random and coincidental.   Whatever you believe, there is no question that we want to understand them and give meaning to signs.

I’m of the persuasion that we have thousands, if not millions of things around us that we are oblivious to, that can help us think differently.  Unless our unconscious deems something noteworthy, we don’t see them or are able to ponder on them.  I have a few book ideas in my head and have already started on one, then I got busy.  This last week, it just happened that I had encounters with four different authors, all of whom gave me great advice on how to start and encouraged me to move forward with my ideas.  Did I bring these people to me at this time?  Did I go searching for them and this is the pinnacle that we all met?  I am not sure, but I took the timing of this as a sign that I am ready to integrate the book idea into my life right now.   This “sign” is also the subject of this blog, and who knows where that will go?  We all have a path we walk and what is most comforting to me, is that you can choose to go as fast, or as slow as you want.  You can deviate, and take another path and if you don’t like it, you can turn around and go a different way.  Too often we are plagued with this nagging feeling that we aren’t living up to our “purpose”.  I think this is a bit of crap.  We are living a purpose every moment.  Our purpose shifts and changes with our direction. The question is, do you want to be blindly led and distracted through your life, looking for what is right under your nose?  Or do you take a chance to stop and enjoy where you are and look at the gifts and ponder your options?  Signs appear in the later, where your mind, body and spirit can align in the present to count your blessings, and ponder all of the wonderful opportunities you get to share.

Communication has the power to launch dreams or destroy them.  No one person has the power to revolutionize or create innovative ideas, without a team of different talents helping along the way.  This is why understanding what motivates us and effective communication within ourselves and others makes the difference between living life with excitement or crushing frustration.  Arellano Consulting focuses on understanding the intuitive nature we all have and how to integrate that nature with the intellect society instilled within all of us.  When you harness the power of the intuitive, intellectual and creative mind within yourself and those you surround yourself with, mind-blowing things happen.