Daily Gratitude: Of course since I study Internal Family Systems I believe there is you and a lot of other “yours” (your parts) but the concept is the same. You have relationships with your parts (or the one other you if that’s what you choose to believe. Once I realized that there really was a big old family inside of me, I began to feel less alone and also started to understand many of the behaviors I could not comprehend. That was the beginning of my developing a strong relationship for the first time. I’ve continued with this relationship building and it’s been the best experience of my life. You have to know what’s going on inside of you. That’s the only way you can present your true self to the world. It helps you be more authentic and calm when being in the world. Stop focusing on things outside of your world and pay attention to what’s going on inside of you. If you don’t, your nervous system will continue to go haywire and you’ll manifest it in physical symptoms. Work on yourself please.

Daily Gratitude: This is so important. I was (and sometimes still am) a victim of this thinking. “I’ll be happy when I do this or do that (lose weight, gain weight, gain muscle, graduate, etc)”. What if that never happens? All those days and weeks and sometimes years went to waste. The ironic part is that many of us won’t even be happy when we lose those 10 pounds or get x amount of money. We have to look deep – at the reason behind this desire. What are we really looking for? That is the important question to examine. When you find yourself saying “I can’t wait until x,y, or z” stop and ask yourself why you can’t just be happy and enjoy the now? It may be all you have.

Daily Gratitude: It’s with not giving up that faith comes in. You hear about people who tell you that the most common time people give up is just before they are about to succeed. I always wonder how they know that if they’ve given up. But enough people have professed it to be true that I kind of have to believe it. And maybe you should too. But if I can remember this and put it forefront in my mind just when I want to stop doing something, perhaps it will give me a better chance of succeeding. I do know I’m going to try it and embed that philosophy in my subconscious mind so that it will be easy to call upon it when things are at that point. You know. The point of just giving up!