Travel: A Needed Boost

I’ve said this before, mostly because it is so very true — traveling lifts the mind and spirit! Right now, we are in Vienna after traveling a couple of nights ago from the Slovak Republic. Before that we had been in Budapest. Just wow, wow, wow! Talk about lifting one’s spirit. Our trip is doing that for me big time!

Even after all that flying around, we still have two more countries to visit — Austria and Germany. I’ve been to these countries before and just love the culture and the variety of people, buildings, and landscape we encounter along the way. I’ve now been to 94 countries and loved all of them.

You may wonder why I travel so much and why I’ve been to so many countries. Well, for one, I really love it. The reason for that, and another reason that I keep doing it, is because our minds really crave new and different things. There are a lot of ways to introduce novelty in your life, but going to new places and meeting new people is one of the best.

All this travel makes me want to do more and more things with my life and it is so mind expanding. Sometimes I take my kids and grandkids. They love all the new experiences and I get even more out of it because I get to share it with them.

Now, we have been to Europe many times, so maybe it doesn’t sound like such a new experience. However, this time was quite different for us, and I think I like it even better. Why? Because this time we took a cruise ship called the Viking. They do so much for their passengers. They arrange all the land tours at the various stops, and they serve a great food and drinks. They are also always there to answer any questions that passengers may have.

Having the cruise staff take care of all the details really took the pressure off our minds and reduced the stress on our bodies. If you haven’t taken a cruise, you might want to look into the cruise lines available and all the places they travel. Yes, we will sure do this cruise thing again and again.

Whether you choose to take a cruise ship, a plane ride, or a road trip, I highly recommend that you do more traveling, especially now that we can travel so much more than we had been in the past couple of years. It’ll be good for your mind and your spirit.

Powerful Positive Self-Talk

Covid-19 and a concussion are both terrible, but there are certainly things that can be done to survive them. With my concussion, I was thinking all the wrong, negative thoughts, then I realized how stupid that was, especially since I’ve written and preached for a long time about how powerful your mind can be. The mind can cure you and help you heal very fast. The key to this is what you are thinking and what you are saying to yourself – your self-talk. When I realized that all my self-talk was negative and changed it to positive self-talk, it made a big difference. My dizziness and vertigo have been getting better every day since.

I’m not saying that if you have the virus that you can totally cure it by positive thinking, but I do believe that if you have the right positive self-talk, your brain can help lessen the chance of you dying from it.  There’s been many studies that prove that point by the placebo effect. There are even studies and evidence that having the right mindset and self-talk can help cure cancer and heart disease.

In a great little book by Elaine St. James called, Inner Simplicity – 100 Ways to Regain Peace and Nourish Your Soul, the author says “Hand in hand with affirmations go visualizations. In addition to verbalizing to yourself, both silently and out loud, the inner qualities you want to develop, creating a powerful mental image that projects how you want your life to be, focuses your attention on that outcome and helps bring it into your life.”

St. James goes on to say, “Numerous studies in recent years have shown how effective visualization can be for healing, personal growth, and empowerment. Life affirmations and visualizations are just as potent for our spiritual journey.”

I know these things work because they have worked for me in the past and are working now, helping my brain get back to normal. That’s rather incredible and funny at the same time, knowing that the brain can help heal the brain. Self-talk is so powerful and wonderful we all need to use it every day for better health, better relationships, our business, and many, many other parts of our lives that we want to improve.

So, if you want to make 10 million dollars, your self-talk should not just be, “That’s my plan.” It would be much better to say, “I’m in the process of making 10 million dollars.” And then keep saying that!

 

Vigilance as the Key to Battling Depression

In my book “How to Ignite Your Passion for Living”, I touch upon some of the depressive episodes I have been through and some of the ways I have dealt with them. I have a whole list of simple but effective things you can do to combat depression. And although I still believe the items on that list to be important actions, I think Eckhart Tolle, in his book “The Power of Now”, has hit upon the true source and most effective ideas to combat depression as well as other mood disorders.

The first few ideas on his list are some of the most important, at least in my experience. They deal with becoming a watcher of one’s thoughts and redirecting the mind when we start to buy into the idea of “being a depressed person”:

• Vigilance is one of the first concepts he speaks to. Learning to recognize how your mind labels thoughts and sits in judgment so you know what ideas lie at the source of your pain.
• Secondly, Tolle believes that you need to accept whatever the present moment contains as if you had chosen it.
• Thirdly, you need to realize and understand that the pain or depression wants you to unconsciously identify with it, allowing it to survive in your mind. If you are not a careful watcher of your thoughts then you may come to believe that you are a depressed person and then this becomes your identity.

Letting your mind create this depression identity will make it very difficult to get past the dark feelings and the pain because you will then believe this is who you are. But if you start with these first few ideas of Tolle’s, recognizing how your mind is working and seeing the present moment as something under your control, you can avoid the mindset that makes you think of yourself as a “depressed person”.

These ideas are true for any issues of mood. I choose to talk about them in terms of depression because that has been a recent and difficult battle of mine. However, if you are dealing with anger, guilt, low self-esteem, fear, etc. watching your thoughts and taking control can help you with all types of painful moods and attitudes.