You Have Nothing To Fear:

As I work with people, or even as I watch TV (especially “The Bachelor”), I constantly see that people are scared to open up, and scared to love because they fear getting hurt or fear that the other person will “break their heart”.

We all want to love and be open but this fear of rejection and hurt is just so strong that it can often be very difficult for us to love. The purpose of this blog post is to show you that you have absolutely nothing to fear. This way, you can be free to love.

Why You Are Afraid Of Rejection

When you are fearing that someone will emotionally hurt you, you are inherently believing that someone else has the power to emotionally hurt you. So why do we believe this? Well it seems that this is just a fact based on our experiences in the past. But, let’s look at it a little more closely.

When someone compliments you, how do you normally feel? You will generally experience some happiness, pleasure or comfort. Since you feel this way when someone compliments you, you naturally form the conclusion that the other person’s compliment created this feeling. When someone insults you or rejects you, how do you normally feel? You will generally feel sad, angry, hurt, or ashamed. Since these feelings come immediately after the insult or rejection, you naturally form the conclusion that your feeling was created by the insult or rejection.

So I understand that it absolutely seems as though our unwanted feelings are created by others and their actions and comments… But if we break it down, we might come to a completely different conclusion.

Let’s Look at 2 Hypotheticals

I would like you to take a moment to imagine a stranger who you believe is really untrustworthy. For example, you might think of a homeless person, a salesman, a politician, a teenager, or anyone else. Now imagine you are walking down the street, and this type of stranger approaches you and says “You are so amazing, smart, caring, and kind. I love you”. How do you think you would feel in that moment? You probably wouldn’t feel much at all… maybe a little pleasure.

Now, imagine that you have been dating someone for a few months, and you think that you are falling in love with them. But you are not really sure how your partner feels about you. Then, your partner says “You are so amazing, smart, caring, and kind. I love you”. How do you think you would feel in that moment? You would probably feel a really strong joy and pleasure.

Why Would You Have Different Reactions To The Exact Same Words?

Let’s analyze the situation. The facts are that two people spoke the exact same words to you. If the words themselves created an emotional response, then you would have experienced the same emotional response in both situations. But yet that’s not what would have happened. Only one of their comments would have emotionally affected you.

So what’s the difference between these two situations? The only difference is that you wouldn’t believe the comment in one of the situations, but you would believe it in the other situation. Since the stranger had never interacted with you before, you wouldn’t believe their words, comment, or opinion. On the other hand, since your partner had spent a lot of time with you, you would believe their words or opinion about you to be true.

What this indicates is that when you believe someone’s words, it creates an emotion. But when you don’t believe someone’s words, those same words don’t have the power to create an emotion.

To put it a little differently, when we believe someone’s positive comment about us, it slightly improves our opinion (thoughts) of ourselves, and that is what creates the corresponding feeling of pleasure. If we don’t believe someone else’s comment about us, then it won’t have the power to change our opinion of ourselves, and therefore the comment won’t emotionally affect us.

The Implications

The only way that someone’s compliment can impact us is if we believe that what they say about us is true. What this shows us is that other people don’t have the power to emotionally affect us. Others’ words and opinions do not create our emotions. Our emotions are only created by our own action of believing words to be true.

What Would Happen If A Stranger Rejected You?

Please take a moment to imagine a stranger whose opinion you are highly unlikely to trust (e.g. a homeless person, politician, salesman, or teenager). Now, imagine that you are walking down the street, and then this random untrustworthy stranger approaches you on the street and tells you, “You’re unworthy of love”. What do you think your emotional reaction would be?

Their comment might annoy you a little, but would it seriously emotionally affect you? Would it make you feel hurt and broken hearted? No, almost certainly not. Why not? Since the stranger doesn’t know you, you wouldn’t believe their opinion about you, which means that it wouldn’t worsen your opinion of yourself, and therefore the negative comment (opinion/words) wouldn’t create a serious emotional impact.

Breaking Down The Scenario You Fear

Imagine that you have been dating someone for a few years, and you think you love them, and then they tell you, “You’re unworthy of love”. How do you think that would emotionally affect you? You are likely to feel seriously hurt.

At first glance it would seem as though your partner’s rejection or insult created your feeling of hurt. But, let’s look at it more closely. If the same exact words were said to you by a stranger, and those words wouldn’t create the feeling of hurt, then the words themselves can’t be what creates your feeling of hurt.

The only reason you would feel hurt when you hear the words “You’re not worthy of love” is if you believe these words to be true. Since your partner has spent a lot of time with you, and maybe played a role in helping you to believe “I am worthy of love”, when they say “You’re unworthy of love”, you are much more likely to believe their comment/opinion.

Once you believe their words or their opinion to be true, that makes you have more negative thoughts about yourself. In order words, believing their negative opinion about you would worsen your opinion of yourself. And when your opinion of yourself worsens, you experience the feeling of being hurt. This feeling is also what we call a “broken heart”.

It’s not your partner who created this feeling of hurt; it’s not the rejection that created your hurt, and it’s not even their opinion that created it. If the opinion, “You’re unworthy of love”, directly created your feeling of hurt, then the stranger’s opinion would have had the same emotional impact on you as your partner’s opinion. Your hurt was created simply by your belief – your thought – that their opinion is true.

Getting Rejected Can’t Hurt You

Generally when you get rejected or someone breaks up with you, your partner won’t say “You’re unworthy of love”, but rather, we actually just guess what they think about us, and then we believe our assumption of their opinion to be true. For example, if someone breaks up with you, you might think (guess) “he must think I’m not good enough” and then you think “If he thinks I’m not good enough, then I must not be good enough or there must be something wrong with me”.

The rejection wouldn’t create your hurt. It is your thoughts about it that makes you feel hurt. When you believe someone’s negative opinion about you (regardless of whether they said it to you or you’re just guessing), it simply changes your thoughts about yourself. When your thoughts about yourself worsen, you will feel hurt and suffer.

When someone rejects you (or insults you), they are essentially handing you a knife. When you believe their opinion about you to be true, you are cutting yourself with the knife. You don’t need to fear the knife. The knife itself is no problem… the rejection is no problem.

What This All Means: Nobody Can Hurt You

So why is it important to understand this distinction? What this all means is that nobody can hurt you. Only you can hurt you. You don’t feel hurt because someone has a negative opinion about you, you feel hurt because you believe their opinion to be true. You don’t feel hurt because someone stops loving you or rejects you, you feel hurt because of what you think that means about you.

This means you don’t have to fear others’ opinions of you, and you don’t have to fear that others will reject you or stop loving you. Nobody’s actions or words can affect you or make you feel hurt. Only your thoughts can do that.

That means you are free to love without any fear of others rejecting you. You can stop for a moment now and just really let that sink in.

What if someone rejects you?

You don’t have to fear rejection because rejection can’t hurt you. But, at this point, if you get rejected, you will probably believe your thoughts about it and then feel hurt. The purpose of this post is to show you that you don’t have fear the rejection… you basically just have to fear your own thoughts. But if you don’t want your thoughts to make you feel hurt when someone rejects you, the only thing you have to do is stop believing your thoughts that decide others’ words and opinions about you are true. That’s it. Then you are free.

If you want to know how to stop feeling hurt, and how to stop believing someone else’s negative opinion about you, that will be addressed in the next video blog post. If you would like to make sure you get to see the blog post when I post it, please just put in your email address below and subscribe to the blog.

Thanks for reading. Please let me know your reaction to this post in the comments area below.

With Love,

Noah

How to heal a broken heart

The feeling of hurt or being “broken hearted” seems like an inevitable part of life. It seems that when your significant other breaks up with you, or insults you, you will automatically feel hurt or a “broken heart”. This feeling is no fun at all. But, no matter how much you don’t want to feel it, and no matter how much you want to escape it, it often seems like an impossible task. It seems that the only thing which can dissolve your hurt is time. But, luckily, that’s not true… and there is a way to stop feeling hurt right now.

FYI: There are generally 2 elements of a “broken heart”: hurt and missing. This post is about how to stop feeling hurt, but if you would like to know how to stop missing someone, please click the following link: How To Stop Thinking About Someone

Why you think your “broken heart” was created by getting rejected

To understand how to heal a broken heart, you first need to understand what is creating your hurt. Well, it seems obvious that your broken heart is created by getting rejected or broken up with. But why do you think that? Because of 2 reasons:

1. Everyone you have ever known in your life (including TV and movies) have said that rejection creates a broken heart.
2. Since your feeling of being “broken hearted” or hurt begins immediately after the break-up or rejection, you naturally assume that your feeling was created by these words or events.

Why the rejection itself can’t be what’s creating your hurt

If you would like to see why any type of rejection can’t be what’s creating your hurt or “broken heart”, lets do a little exercise. Please take a moment to identify the comment (words) that you think have caused you to feel hurt or broken hearted. For instance, maybe your child said “you’re a terrible mother”, maybe your boyfriend told you “I don’t want to be in a relationship with you”, or maybe your parents told you “I am disappointed in you”. Please stop here for a moment to really locate the comment (words) that you think made you feel hurt. This exercise will only help if you take the time to engage with it.

In order to claim that a specific circumstance creates a specific experience, it must always create that same experience. For example, you could claim that a turned on light bulb creates light because every person that comes into contact with it will experience light. You could claim that a flame creates heat because when anyone comes into contact with a flame, they will experience heat.

What would happen if a stranger said “I don’t want to be in a relationship with you”?

Now, take a moment to imagine a very untrustworthy stranger. Imagine that you’re walking down the street and then this untrustworthy stranger approaches you in the street and says the same comment (words) to you as the person who you think made you feel hurt. For instance, imagine that the untrustworthy stranger said “I don’t want to be in a relationship with you.” How do you think you would feel? You probably wouldn’t feel much of an emotional reaction at all.

If the words themselves created your hurt, then when the stranger spoke those same words to you, you would also feel hurt. So why wouldn’t you feel hurt or broken hearted when the stranger said the same comment to you? It is simply because you wouldn’t believe their words to be true. If you don’t believe what the other person is saying to be true, their words can’t create emotions. Your hurt and “broken heart” can’t be created by what someone said to you, it can only be created by your belief that their words are true.

What creates your feeling of hurt when someone explicitly says something negative to you

Right after you got rejected, you seem to immediately feel hurt. But, something happens in between the rejection and your feeling of hurt.

When someone says something negative to you, you don’t just hear it, then focus on whatever is happening in the next moment. As soon as you hear the negative comment about you, you begin to unconsciously think that their opinion is true. Once you think that someone’s negative opinion about you is true, you feel hurt.

What creates your “broken heart” when you get rejected

When someone rejects you without saying anything negative about you, you will likely begin to immediately think 2 things. First, you decide what the other person thinks about you, and then you believe that their opinion must be right. In other words, you make an assumption about what they think about you, and then you form the conclusion that what they think must be true. Here are a few common examples:

1. The assumption about what they think: “He thinks I’m not good enough”, “He thinks something is wrong with me”, or “He doesn’t think I am worthy of love”
2. The conclusion that what they think must be true: “If he thinks I’m not good enough, then I must not be good enough”, “If he thinks something is wrong with me, there must be something wrong with me”, or “If he doesn’t think I am worthy of love, then I must not be worthy of love”

You may be aware of these thoughts or you may not be. But if you’re feeling hurt, they are there.

Once we believe these negative thoughts about ourselves, we are essentially worsening our opinion of ourselves. When our opinion of ourselves worsens, we experience the feeling of hurt or being broken hearted. (I won’t get into the details of why this creates hurt in this post).

How to stop feeling hurt (how to heal a broken heart)

If you want to know how to heal a broken heart, or how to stop feeling hurt by someone else’s rejection, insult, or disapproval, here it is: All you need to do to heal a broken heart is recognize that you don’t actually know whether someone’s opinion about you is true. That just because they have a specific opinion about you, it doesn’t mean that their opinion is correct. It would seem obvious that we can’t know whether someone’s opinion is true, but we very easily lose sight of this as we go through life.

If our partner insults us or breaks up with us, we tend to think that there’s something “wrong” with us. If our boss insults us or fires us, we are likely to believe that we aren’t “good enough”. If our parents disapprove of us, we might believe that we’re unworthy or insufficient. In other words, when someone else believes that we aren’t “perfect”, we often believe them.

An analogy to help you see why rejection doesn’t mean that you aren’t “good enough”

To understand the flaw in this logic, let’s look at a quick analogy. Imagine you are with your four-year-old son as he plays one of his games at home. He has several wooden shapes that he is trying to place in matching holes on a wooden board. Now imagine that your son picks up a square shape and tries to put it in a triangle-shaped hole, and then says to you, “Mommy (or Daddy), the square isn’t good enough for this hole”. What would you say to him? Probably something like, “Sweetie, just because the square doesn’t fit, it doesn’t mean that the square isn’t good enough or that there is something wrong with it”.

The same is true with all of our relationships in life. If someone breaks up with you, fires you, or disapproves of you, that doesn’t mean that you are not “perfect”. That simply means you don’t fit their definition of “perfect”. To go back to the analogy, this means you don’t fit in the shape of their hole. Just because you don’t fit the shape of their hole, that doesn’t mean you aren’t “good enough” for them.

You can’t be “not good enough”

You can’t be “not good enough” and there can’t be something “wrong” with you because there is no such thing as “good enough” or “wrong”. These concepts don’t exist as facts. They only exists as thoughts in each person’s mind. But it’s not as though everyone has the same concept about what is “not good enough” and “perfect”. Each of us has completely different definitions of what we think is “good” and “bad”, “right” and “wrong”, “helpful” and “harmful”, “beautiful” and “ugly”, “funny” and “boring”.

What one guy finds unattractive, another one may find attractive. What one girl thinks is annoying, another girl may love. What one boss believes is a “bad” trait, another boss may value. What one mom thinks is a ridiculous career choice, another mom may be proud of. What one dad may think is a disappointing house, another dad may be proud of.

Is one person’s definition of “right”, “good”, or “attractive” somehow more correct or more true than others’ definitions? If someone thinks one of our characteristics is “bad” or “not good enough”, this just means we fit that person’s concept of those words. It doesn’t mean we are these concepts.

How to heal a broken heart? Here is the exercise to do it

How to heal a broken heart… how to stop feeling hurt… all you need to do is ask yourself a few questions in order to help you discover that you aren’t “not good enough”. Here are some questions, but it is by no means an exhaustive list of questions. Take a moment now to ask yourself the following questions.

1. Am I absolutely certain of why they broke up with me or rejected me? Is is possible that they broke up with me because of a different reason? If so, then can I be sure that they really have the negative opinion that I think they have about me?
2. Am I absolutely sure that their opinion about me is true? Could someone else have a different perspective than theirs? If so, can I really be sure that their perspective is true?
3. Is their opinion somehow more true than other people’s opinions? Is it true that just because I care about this person, or they spent a lot of time with me, that their opinion is somehow more valid than other people’s opinions?
4. Am I sure that something about me isn’t “good enough”, or is it just that I happen to fit their specific definition of this word? If they don’t want to be in a relationship with me, am I sure that means that “there’s something wrong with me”, or does it just mean that we aren’t the right fit for each other? When two things don’t fit together, is one of them inherently “worse” and “not good enough”, or is it just not the right fit?
5. Where does “something is wrong with me” or “I’m not good enough” exist? Can I locate it, touch it, pinpoint it, see it, hold it, show it to others? Does “not good enough” exist as a fact, or is it just a thought about a fact? If I can’t physically locate “wrong” or “not good enough”, then can I admit that these concepts only exists as thoughts in my mind? If so, can I admit that it’s not true that “I am not good enough” or “I have something wrong with me”, but rather that I just have a thought that says “I am not good enough” or “there is something wrong with me”?
6. Can I think of any reasons or examples as to why the opposite of their opinion might be true? If so, then can I know with absolute certainty that their opinion about me is true?

There is nothing wrong with you

When you truly discover this for yourself, your broken heart will just dissolve.

Thank you for reading and engaging with this post about how to heal a broken heart! Please let me know how it went for you in the comments area or send me a message. Or, feel free to contact me if you want some extra support in your specific situation.

Noah

As soon as we find a thought that creates our suffering, the first question we must always ask ourselves is the very simple question, “Is it true?” If we stop for a few moments and allow ourselves to really look, this question is often enough to help us discover that we don’t know for sure whether our thought is true. On the other hand, if the answer is an immediate “yes my thought is true!”—as it often is—it’s worth asking yourself, “Am I absolutely sure my thought is true?”

Many times, when we experience intense emotions, it is because we are believing thoughts with extreme words such as “everyone”, “no one”, “always”, “never”, “everything”, or “nothing”. These extreme words intensify our emotions because they leave no room for positivity at all. For example, we may think, “Everyone hates me”, “No one likes me”, “He is always mean to me”, “I am never going to find a wife”, “Everything hurts on my body”, or “Nothing ever goes my way”. But if we just ask ourselves, “Am I sure this thought is true?”, then it is usually possible to recognize that we can’t be certain such extreme statements are true.

Similarly, we also tend to unknowingly have thoughts that exaggerate the “bad” effect of unwanted events. For example, we might think, “My father will kill me if I get fired from my job”, “My life is over if my boyfriend leaves me”, “I need this job”, or “I have to get everything done”. When we believe these thoughts, we can experience a lot of fear. But if we allow ourselves to question the truth of these thoughts, it is often clear that these thoughts aren’t really true.

When we recognize that our extreme statement or exaggerated “bad” effect either isn’t true or isn’t known to be true, we lose our reason to feel whatever intense unwanted emotion we had been experiencing.

The Questions: Is it true? Am I absolutely certain that my thought is true? Can I be absolutely sure that such an extreme statement is accurate? Am I certain that I am not exaggerating the effects of a “bad” outcome?

Any time we are experiencing an emotion, it is because we are believing a thought to be true. Since we don’t want to think of ourselves as “wrong”, we unconsciously want to keep believing that we were “right” to believe our thought is true. Because of this dynamic, once we believe a thought, our minds generally only look for evidence that will support our thought. Doing this, of course, perpetuates our unwanted emotions.

For example, once we think, “My husband doesn’t appreciate me”, we may immediately see a bunch of images of past events projected in our mind that all help to prove our thought is true. We would only think of the times when we didn’t get any praise from our husband, and we would not think of the times when he did give us praise. We might leave out key details of a story, like the fact that our husband didn’t even know that we did something worthy of praise. If our minds think back to any time when he said “thank you”, then we generally interpret that “thank you” to be said in an unthoughtful and uncaring way.

The evidence we use to prove our thoughts to be true is almost always biased, almost always includes only memories that back up our claim, and is almost always based on whatever perspective or interpretation we think proves our point. This process of finding nothing but supportive evidence for our thoughts winds up strengthening our beliefs and intensifying our emotions.

Now that we know how our minds keep us believing thoughts, we can flip this process upside down in order to help us disbelieve our unwanted thoughts. Once we are aware of a thought we want to disbelieve, instead of looking for supportive evidence, all we have to do is look for a few possible reasons or examples as to why the opposite of our thought might be true. In other words, if we think a situation is “bad”, we can look for reasons or examples as to why it might be “good”. If we can find some genuine reasons or examples why the positive thought might be true, then this often makes us realize that we can’t be sure whether our negative thought is true.

If we think, “My boss is mean”, then we might be able to remember a few times when he was nice to us or others. If we think, “My job sucks”, we can try to remember all the aspects of our job that we like. If we think, “I am unworthy of anyone’s love”, then we can try to find a few reasons why we think someone would want to love us. If we have decided, “I don’t make enough money”, then we can look for a few reasons as to why we do actually have enough money. If we think, “My girlfriend said ‘thank you’ in an unappreciative way”, then we can try to find reasons why it is possible that we misread her intentions and that she was appreciative when she said it. If we think it is “bad” that our husband always leaves his dirty clothes on the floor, then we can try to find reasons why his habit might be “good” for us or our relationship(e.g., it gives us consistent opportunities to do things for the person we love).

When we only look for evidence to prove that our negative thought is true, or only remember and think about the negatives of any situation, we will always be proved right and will inevitably suffer as a consequence. But it is almost always possible to come up with genuine reasons or examples why any situation, person, or event is positive. When we are used to thinking of a circumstance as “bad”, it may take some effort, creativity, or even brutal honesty to find some reasons why the opposite thought might be true, but it is always possible. It may even require a few minutes (or more) of thinking in order to find genuine reasons or examples as to why the opposite might be true.

If we are able to recognize that the opposite of our thought could be true, this usually makes us realize that we can’t really be sure that our thought is true. Once we are able to recognize that we don’t know whether our thought is true, then the emotion our thought was creating naturally dissolves, or at least loses much of its power.

This question can be applied to any thought and is often the only question we need to ask ourselves in order to disbelieve a thought.

The Questions: Can I think of a few reasons or examples as to why the opposite might be true? If there are a few reasons or examples (memories) as to why the opposite thought might be true, can I be absolutely certain that my thought is true?

My name is Noah Elkrief and I am here to help you live with the the peace, fulfillment, freedom, love, and wholeness that you have been searching for.

With the type of work that I do in my individual sessions with people, the emotional impact is generally immediate and strong. You don’t need to wait a few sessions to see if it will give you the benefit that you want it to have. You will likely know within the first 10 minutes, but will almost certainly experience a noticeable impact by the end of the first session.

Who is Noah?

1 FREE spiritual counseling session

Are you a good fit for spiritual counseling with me?

2) Do you want to stop feeling lacking or unfulfilled?

3) Do you want help in following your heart?

4) Do you want to live in peace (i.e. spiritually awaken)?

Where/How:

• Manhattan office:
  • 1133 Broadway, New York, NY 10010 (corner of 26th street)
• Westchester office:
  • 369 Ashford Avenue, Dobbs Ferry, NY  10522 (on the border of Ardsley)
• Skype
• Phone: 646-205-3054

Rate:

• Skype & Phone: Generally $50-$100 / hour
  • The 1st session is FREE
  • If you can’t afford the standard rate, pay whatever you are comfortable with.
• In-person: $100-$150 / hour
• I am also more than happy to speak to you on the phone about whether having a session with me would be a good fit.

Or you can…

• Email me at: Noah@liveinthemoment.org
• Call me at: (+1) 646-205-3054

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What You Really Want:

In this blog post, I am going to explain why you don’t want to BE loved, and that you actually want TO love. In other words, why the feeling you want in life doesn’t come from receiving someone’s love, but actually from giving love.

The Desire To Be Loved Makes You Unhappy

When we think that we want someone to love us and that someone’s love will make us happy, we go through life with a lot of suffering. Here are some of the main ways:

• These thoughts make us feel lacking and as though something is missing from our lives because we think that we don’t have the love that we need to be happy.
• We feel anxiety and fear that we will never find someone to love us
• The constant searching for someone to love us takes up a lot of mental energy and makes this moment thoroughly unenjoyable.
• We worry about what to do, what to say, and what to wear in order to get someone to love us.
• When we find someone to love us (i.e. get into a relationship or marriage), then we often worry about whether they still love us.
• When we believe that receiving love will make us happy, and we are in a relationship but don’t feel fulfilled, then we conclude that our partner must not love us enough. This creates feelings of disappointment, lack, and resentment.

Going through life with the belief that someone’s love can make us happy is clearly very unenjoyable and causes a tremendous amount of suffering.

The Simple Truth

The funny thing is… this pursuit of love is all created by a simple misunderstanding. The misunderstanding is that the feeling that you want in life is created by receiving love. When, in fact, this feeling that you want is actually created by giving love. Now, I would like to give you a few examples and hypotheticals to show you how this is true.

An Example To Show You How You Can’t Feel Someone’s Love

Imagine that you are in a wonderful relationship where you love your partner and they love you. It feels amazing. You feel great. And you think that your great and happy feeling is directly created by your partner loving you so much. You feel their love and that’s what’s making you happy.

Now imagine that your best friend tells you that she saw your partner cheating on you with her own eyes. She watched it happen. So you believe her. You confront your partner, they say that they didn’t cheat and that they still love you, but you don’t believe them at all.

How do you feel in that moment? Do you feel happy? Do you feel your partner’s love? No, absolutely not. In that moment, you would probably feel hurt, sad, disappointed, and any other possible mix of unhappiness.

Lastly, imagine that a week later, you find out that your partner did not cheat on you. Your best friend saw someone that looked similar to your partner, but she made a mistake. It turns out, that your partner always loved you, and they loved you the same amount in the past week as they always have. So, if your partner loved you the same amount in the past week as they always have, why wouldn’t you have felt their love? They loved you so much over the last week, but yet you would have felt incredibly unhappy and wouldn’t have felt their love at all.

If Your Partner Loves You, But You Don’t Feel It, What Does That Mean?

If the nice feeling and happiness you experienced during your relationship was directly created by your partner’s love for you, then you would have continued to experience these feelings over the last week. If your partner’s love created a specific nice feeling for you, and your partner loved you the same amount in the last week as they always have, then you would have continued to experience this feeling. But, that is almost certainly not what would have happened.

Rather, as soon as you begin to think “they don’t love me”, you stop feeling their love. If all it takes to stop feeling someone’s love is to think “they don’t love me”, then you never felt their love. You only felt your thoughts about their love.

We know that a flame creates heat because even if I think “this flame is not hot”, I will continue to experience the heat. Therefore, if you could directly experience someone’s love, you would continue to feel their love even if you think “they don’t love me”.

Please take a moment to let that sink in. That is a big statement. It is a radical statement, and it goes against everything we have been taught. But, if you are willing to look at this honestly, it becomes very, very clear that you can’t feel someone else’s love.

You Can Feel “Love” Even When Your Partner Doesn’t Love You

Let me give you another example to demonstrate how you can’t feel someone’s love. You may have experienced this example in your life, or you may have witnessed it on some reality TV show.

Imagine that you are in relationship and you think that you are in love, and that you feel the other person’s love. And it feels so great and wonderful. You believe that the reason why you feel this wonderful feeling is because you finally found someone who loves you.

Then, a few months later, you find out that your partner didn’t love you. They were just using you, and had been cheating on you the whole time.

This happens all the time. It is an incredibly common scenario. So what would was that wonderful feeling you had during your relationship? Why did you feel so great? If they didn’t love you, then you couldn’t have been feeling their love.

What Causes The Feeling That You Think Is Love?

So what would cause your wonderful feelings in a relationship where your partner doesn’t love you? It could be many different things.

• The thought “they love me” helps you to unconsciously think “I am loveable” and that makes you feel better about yourself.
• The thought “I finally found someone to make me happy” eliminates the sense of lack that you had.
• The thought “We are going to be so happy together” creates excitement.
• The thought “We are going to stay together” eliminates the anxiety that you had about the possibility of never finding someone to love you.
• Being in a relationship eliminates the thought “I shouldn’t be single”, which causes shame.
• Spending time with someone distracts you from the thoughts that make you unhappy
• You may have had a lot of fun together, and enjoyed their company.
• And you may have felt your love for them.

The Feeling That You Want Comes From Loving Others

Ultimately, the feeling that we all want in life, the feeling that we are constantly yearning for doesn’t come from receiving someone else’s love simply because you can’t feel someone’s love. The feeling that we all want actually comes from loving others. That’s it. That is the feeling that we want, that is the love that we want. Everything we hoped to feel in life comes from the love that we give, not from the love that we receive.

When we are with people, and we love them, it feels wonderful. We feel free, we feel happy, we feel whole. There is absolutely no suffering that comes from loving others. Absolutely none. It is completely independent of everything.

So when we are with someone and we love them, when we have no judgments about them, when we give them our complete attention, we are with them without wanting anything from them, then we get everything we have ever been yearning for in life. It is complete satisfaction and contentment. Loving others just feels so great.

You probably already know this. You might have had this experience at some point or another. If you are a parent, you might have had this feeling when your child was born. You were just filled with immense love. It is not as if you felt your baby’s love for you, you felt your love for your child.

If All You Want Is To Love, Then You Can Relax

All we want is to love, not to receive love. So you can stop worrying about whether you have love from your partner, you can stop worrying about whether you will ever find someone to love you, and instead you can focus on the feeling that you actually want, which is to love others.

And you don’t have to limit your love to just one person. You don’t have to limit your love to just your partner, your child, or your family. You can love anybody. You can love anyone that you interact with. You can even love anything… but we will save that for another day.

I hope you understood what I was talking about. I love you.

May 10th, 2013 – How To Love Yourself:

When we love ourselves, we are going to be happy, regardless of our situation or what others think of us. When we don’t love ourselves, we are going to be unhappy, regardless of our situation or what others think of us. Therefore, loving ourselves is quite important. In this blog post, I am going to explain how to love yourself.

The Most Popular Tactics To Love Yourself Don’t Work

Before we get into exactly how to love yourself, I think it is important to address why the most popular and most common tactics for how to love yourself can’t give you the results that you want.

The 2 most commons tactics that I hear for how to love yourself are:

1)      Positive affirmations

2)      Treating yourself to something physically nice

Both of these tactics are fine. There is nothing wrong with doing either of these. But, if we look at these tactics closely, we can discover why they don’t have the ability give us the love that we are looking to have for ourselves.

What Are Positive Affirmations?

For those of you that don’t know what a positive affirmation is, many people recommend that to help you love yourself, you should tell yourself over and over again something along the lines of “I am great”, “I am smart”, “I am loveable”, “I am worthy of love”, or “I am kind”. Basically, the tactics is to repeatedly tell yourself something positive about yourself or your situation.

This is, more or less, an attempt to convince yourself to think more positively about yourself and your situation. If you have been doing this, and it works for you, that’s fine. But, more than likely, if you have done positive affirmations, you will know that it may help you to experience a moment of pleasure, but it doesn’t truly give you a deep and lasting love for yourself.

Why Positive Affirmations Won’t Make You Love Yourself

The reason why positive affirmations often aren’t fulfilling and don’t get us to love ourselves is because telling ourselves something positive generally doesn’t eliminate the negative beliefs we have about ourselves.

If I think I am unloveable, then there is a reason why I believe that. If I just tell myself over and over again that I am loveable, it is very unlikely to make me fully believe that I am loveable because this statement doesn’t address the original reason for why I believed I was unloveable.

If I am ashamed about my life, then there are some beliefs I have about my life that are making me feel this way. If I just repeatedly tell myself “my life is great”, this is unlikely to make me feel happy about my life because it doesn’t address the reason why I was feeling ashamed about my life.

If I don’t love myself because I believe that I am unattractive, then telling myself over and over again “I am attractive” is unlikely to make me truly believe “I am attractive” because it doesn’t address the reason why I believed I was unattractive.

This is why positive affirmations don’t have the ability to make us truly love ourselves and feel happy in life. Well, that’s one of the reasons. But I am not going to get into the other reasons in this blog post.

Doing Something Nice For Yourself Won’t Make You Love Yourself

The 2^nd  common way that you may have been taught for how to love yourself is to do something nice for yourself. For example, we may be told that to love yourself, you should go to the spa, eat more healthy, treat yourself to your favorite food, go on vacation, or get a manicure. That is treating your body well, or treating yourself well in a sense. But, does doing an activity we enjoy really make us love ourselves?

The only reason why we don’t love ourselves is because we believe negative thoughts about ourselves or our situation. These negatives thoughts are what create our shame and sense of unworthiness or insufficiency. When we treat ourselves to something nice externally (spa, vacation, dessert etc.), we are basically saying “I deserve this”, “it is nice that I get to experience this”, “this is something I should give myself because I am worth it”. And that is completely fine. There is no problem with this at all. It can feel enjoyable to do these things. If you enjoy it, continue doing it.

But, since treating ourselves to something physically (externally) nice doesn’t address the thoughts that make us feel unloveable, ashamed, insufficient, or unworthy, these actions of treating ourselves well don’t have the ability to make us love ourselves.

How To Love Yourself

Now that we see why the 2 most common tactics for how to love yourself don’t really work, let’s examine how to truly experience love for ourselves.

The first question you have to ask yourself is “Why do I not love myself?”, “What do I not like myself?”, “Why do I feel unloveable?”, “What do I not like about my situation?”

We are generally so busy entertaining ourselves and distracting ourselves from our thoughts that we don’t allow ourselves to just be with our thoughts. And if we don’t see what thoughts are making us feel unloveable, then we certainly can’t address these thoughts.

Since negative thoughts about yourself and your life are what make you not love yourself, the answer to the question “How to love yourself?” is to address the thoughts that make you not love yourself. In order to love yourself, you need to eliminate the thoughts that make you feel unloveable.

What Thoughts Are Making You Not Love Yourself?

It may seem scary to look at why you truly don’t love love yourself. But, if you don’t look at these thoughts, if you don’t identify the reason why you don’t love yourself, you will just keep feeling the way that you do and going through life trying to make everyone else love you in order to help you love yourself. And that creates a lot of suffering.

For some of us, we might not love ourselves because we believe “I am unattractive”,  ”my personliaty isn’t good enough”, “I am a failure”, “I am not successful enough”, “I am a bad parent”, “I am not fun enough”, or “I am not outgoing enough”. For other people, there is often no specific trait that we don’t like about ourselves. Rather, there might just be an underlying sense of unworthiness or unloveability.

You can have a look right now to see if you can find your reason. You can ask yourself any of the following questions: “Why do I not love myself?”, “What do I not like myself?”, “Why do I feel unloveable?”, “What do I not like about my situation?”

The answers might be very obvious to you, but it also might be very difficult to identify the reason or thought as to why you don’t love yourself. If you don’t want to do it right now, try to give some time toward this discovery process later on. And be patient with yourself. You can’t force it.

Whatever thoughts are making you feel unloveable or unworthy, these thoughts pop up out of nowhere. You didn’t pick these thoughts. You didn’t choose them. They are not under your control. If you controlled your thoughts, you quite obviously would choose to never think negative thoughts about yourself. So this is not personal issue. Therefore, you can be gentle with yourself.

An Exercise To Discover That There Is Nothing Wrong With You

We tend to think that we feel insufficient because we ARE insufficient. We tend to think that we feel unloveable because we ARE unloveable. We tend to think that we feel lacking in our life because there IS something wrong with us.

But I would like to help you see how these assumptions could not be further from the truth. In order to help you do this, I would like to ask you to ask yourself the following questions:

1) Can I Escape My Unwanted Feeling When I Am Being Distracted From Thoughts?

How do I feel when I am being entertained? How do I feel when I am engaging in my favorite hobby? Do I feel lacking, do I feel unworthy, do I feel insufficient, do I not love myself in these moments? In the moments that we are having fun, we don’t feel unloveable or unworthy. In other words, when we are not thinking about ourselves (when we are distracted from thoughts), we don’t feel unloveable, unworthy, lacking, or insufficient.

If your feeling of unloveability was caused by you being unloveable, then you would continue to experience this feeling when you are simply distracted by thoughts. If your feeling of insufficiency was created by you being insufficient, then you wouldn’t be able to escape this feeling simply by distracting yourself from thoughts. If your feeling of lack was created by there being something wrong with you, then would still have this feeling even while you were being entertained.

If all it takes to eliminate your feelings of not loving yourself is to simply distract yourself from thoughts, then it must mean that your feeling of not loving yourself isn’t created by anything about yourself… but only created by thoughts about yourself.

If you would like to understand this concept better (to help you with how to love yourself), check out the following post: Can Entertainment Instantly Stop Your Unwanted Emotion?

2) Is There Factually Something “Wrong” With Me, Or Does This Idea Only Exist As A Thought About A Fact?

Take a moment and ask yourself “What are the negative things that I think about myself?” Then, ask yourself: Does this exact as fact? Am I factually unworthy of love? Am I factually unattractive? Is my situation factually bad? Is there factually something wrong with me?

Can I touch these concepts? Can I see them? Can I hold them? Can I grasp them and show them to others? If it is a fact, is this something that can be seen by everyone? Where does unloveability exist? Where is my “bad” trait? Am I not good enough factually, or does that idea only exist as a thought? What are the facts, and what are thoughts about the facts?

It is not that you ARE unloveable or unworthy. It is not as though there is something wrong with you or you are insufficient. It is not as though you have any “bad” personality traits or “bad” physical characteristics.  ”Bad” can’t exist as a fact. “Bad”, “not good enough”, “unloveable”, and “unworthy” can only exist as a thought about a fact.

Therefore, your experience of being insufficient, not loving yourself, or feeling like there is something wrong with you can’t be created by the facts of who you are, what you look like, how you act or what your situation is. These feelings can only be created by thoughts in your mind. So it is not as though you ARE unloveable, it is just that you sometimes feel this way when certain thoughts pop up in your mind and you believe them.

If you would like to understand this concept better (to help you with how to love yourself), check out the following post: Does “Bad” Exist As Part Of The Facts?

An Exercise To Discover That Your Thoughts About Yourself Aren’t True

When you discover that your feelings of not loving yourself aren’t created by something about YOU, that can weaken the strength of these feelings, and possibly even free you from them.

But, in addition, once you see what thoughts are keeping you from loving yourself, then you can begin to question whether these thoughts are actually true. And when you stop believing a negative thought about yourself, it stops creating the emotion.

Take a moment to think of your answer to the question ”What are the negative things that I think about myself?” Then, based on your answer, you can ask yourself the following:

1. Can I think of any reasons or examples as to why the opposite might be true? If the opposite could be true, can I be sure that my thought about myself is true?
2. Could someone else have the opposite perspective? Could someone think that I am attractive, enjoyable to be around, and completely worthy of love? If other people could have a positive opinion about what I think is “bad”, can I be sure that my perspective is true?
3. Does the “bad” quality about myself exist in every moment? Does it describe how I act or how I am in every moment? Am I always me? If I am always me, but yet this quality or characteristic doesn’t exist in every moment, then am I sure that it describes who I am?

Next Steps for How To Love Yourself:

The next time you begin to feel unworthy or not loving yourself, instead of pushing away or denying this feeling, instead of distracting yourself from this feeling, instead of telling yourself something positive and trying to convince yourself that you are great, look to see what thoughts are creating these feelings, look to see what stories are being told in your mind in that moment. And then question whether these thoughts or stories are true.

Once you see that these thoughts aren’t true, or that they aren’t real and tangible, or that these thoughts don’t mean anything about you, then you are free.

You won’t have a thought that says “I love myself” or “I am wonderful”. But you don’t need these thoughts to love yourself, you don’t need these thoughts to feel wonderful. Loving yourself is simply the absence of negative thoughts about yourself.

Thank you for reading this post about how to love yourself. Please let me know if you found it helpful or if there was something you didn’t understand. Also, if you were unable to figure out why you don’t love yourself, or this post wasn’t able to help you love yourself then please contact me and I will help you to directly experience feeling loveable, worthy, whole, and complete.

Noah

Noah@liveinthemoment.org

+1-646-205-3054

May 19th, 2013 – How To Stop Thinking About Someone:

Do you want to know how to stop thinking about someone? Do you want to know how to stop missing someone? In this blog post, I will answer both of these questions. Generally, when we want to stop thinking about someone, we try to push the thoughts away, stop them, deny that we have them, or distract ourselves from these thoughts.

As you may have come to discover, these tactics generally don’t bring the results that we want and don’t help us to stop thinking about the person we’re thinking about. In this blog post, I am going to introduce you to a new tactic that is likely to be much more effective. But, before I talk about how to stop thinking about someone, I just want to briefly explain what missing someone is.

What seems to be the cause of missing someone

If someone was with you that you love, and they are no longer with you, it can seem as if missing that person is a direct result of that person you love no longer being with you. It seems as though missing someone is an automatic reaction to not being with someone you love, and it is an impossible reaction to escape. It seems as if when someone you love leaves you, you miss them, and that’s just the way it works. There’s no choice in the matter. The feeling of missing someone seems to be directly created by not being around someone you love.

But, now it is time to examine this assumption.

The real cause of missing someone

Let me ask you a question, do you have anything that you do for fun? Take a moment to think about some of the things that you enjoy doing the most. For example, maybe you watch movies, maybe you eat desserts, maybe you go dancing, maybe you play sports, or maybe you play with your kids.

If you are missing someone, and then you engage in some activity that you really enjoy, would you be able to have fun or enjoy yourself? In other words, are you able to have fun and be happy when you are engaging in these activities even though the person you love is not here? Yes, you would almost certainly still be able to have fun when you are doing something you love.

When you engage in activities that you like, you are able to enjoy yourself because you are distracting yourself from the thoughts that make you unhappy. So, if the person you love is no longer here, but yet you can be happy simply by distracting yourself from thoughts, then clearly your feeling of missing them isn’t created by the factual circumstance of that person not being here. If your feeling of missing someone was directly created by a person you love not being here with you, then you would be forced to have this feeling of missing them for as long as they weren’t here with you, and you wouldn’t be able to escape this feeling simply by distracting yourself from your thoughts.

Can you see how missing someone is not created by someone you love not being here with you, but is actually directly created by thoughts? When you think about someone you love not being here, you miss them. But, when you are not thinking about them, you don’t miss them. The feeling of missing someone is just created by thinking about someone that you want to be here, but isn’t here.

To understand how to stop thinking about someone, you need to understand why you think about them

Let me first say this: there is no problem with thinking about anyone. It is not as though you shouldn’t do it or it is a bad thing to do. But, if you want to know how to stop thinking about someone, then you first have to understand why you are thinking about them. If you don’t understand why you are thinking about someone, then it is very, very difficult to stop thinking about them. You will end up just trying to push your thoughts away, rather than directly addressing the cause of why you’re thinking about them.

So why do you think about the person you are thinking about? When it comes to relationships, which is the most common situation for when we want to stop thinking about someone, the reason why we think about them is because we think that we would be happier if they were here. The reason why you keep thinking about them or missing them is because you think you would be happier if they were here.

Are you thinking about someone because you think you would be happier if they were here?

To test this out, think about a time that you were enjoying yourself while the person you have been missing isn’t here. In the moment that you were having fun, being happy, and enjoying yourself, were you thinking about the person you have been missing? No, almost certainly not. This is because when you are already happy, there is no reason to think about the person you have been missing.

But when you’re sitting there, not particularly happy, or just not doing much, your mind just keeps bringing up how you would be happier if they were here and that causes you to keep thinking about them.

If you thought that you would be unhappier if they were here, would you continue to think about them? No, almost certainly not. Do you see how that is true?

Let’s examine whether you would actually be happier if the person you are thinking about was here

When we are thinking about someone, what we do is we remember a moment of pleasure (or happy moments) from our time with them, and then we think (often unconsciously) “I would be happier if they were here”. But let’s now examine this major assumption “I would be happier if they were here”.

Tactic #1: Were you always happy and fulfilled when they were?

How to stop thinking about someone: Were you always happy when the person you are missing was here? Were all of your times together enjoyable? Were there some moments when you were with them and you were worrying about what they think? Were there some moments when you were really annoyed with them, when you judged them, when they judged you, when you got in arguments, when you were worried about whether they were cheating on you, when you were worried about whether they still loved you, when you resented them because they didn’t appreciate you enough, when you felt uncomfortable because you were trying to please them?

When you are thinking about how you would be happier if they were here, you are thinking about a specific moment/s of pleasure that you had with them, but you can’t just bring back the happy/fun moments. If you bring the person you have been thinking about back into your life, you will be bringing everything back. You will be bringing the worrying, resentment, disappointment, arguing, doing things you don’t like, and all of that stuff along with the fun moments. Right?

So let me ask you the question: Do you know with absolute certainty that you would be happier if the person you have been thinking about was here? Is it possible that there would be more unhappiness in my life if they came back into my life? Just asking yourself these questions might help you to discover “I don’t actually know whether I would be happier if they were here again”.

Tactic #2: Could new things come into your life that wind up making you happier?

How to stop thinking about someone: Maybe your experience with the person you are thinking about was almost always wonderful and filled with happiness. But, that experience is over now. Now, you have a new experience in your life. In other words, your experience in life is now different because you no longer have that person in your life. And then you decide “I would be happier if they were here”. But, do you know what all of the effects are of losing the person that you were with?

Do you know for sure that you won’t wind up being happier single? Is it possible that losing that person will allow you to spend more time with friends, to make new friends, or to spend more time engaging with your hobbies? Is it possible that you will find someone else that you will enjoy being with much more than the last person? Can you be absolutely sure that these things aren’t possible? Is it possible that all of these types of things could wind up leaving you happier in your life without the person you have been thinking about? Is it possible that something wonderful will happen to you now that they are no longer in your life? Can you think of a few good effects of the person you are thinking about no longer being here with you?

If it is possible that you could be happier without the person that you have been thinking about, then you don’t need to keep thinking about how you would be happier if they were. Because the truth is that you don’t know whether you would be happier if they were here.

Tactic #3: Could your unhappiness motivate you to start working on yourself, which could make you much happier?

How to stop thinking about someone: Losing the person you have been thinking about seems to have created some unhappiness for you. But, that is just one, very short-term effect. Is it possible that this unhappiness you are experiencing will provoke you to start examining your unhappiness, to start questioning what makes you unhappy, to discover that thoughts cause your unwanted emotions, and to discover how to address these thoughts, which will ultimately make you much happier in life?

In other words, most of us go through life assuming that external circumstances and events make us happy and unhappy. But, the truth is that our thoughts about external circumstances and events cause all of our emotions. And, if you learn how to deal with, or eliminate, the thoughts that would normally make you unhappy, then you will be significantly happier in your life. It is possible that the unhappiness you are experiencing from losing someone will cause you to see thoughts that you didn’t know you had, and to somehow get you to a website like this which can show you how to deal with the thoughts that make you unhappy. And that could make you much happier in your life.

Tactic #4: Could “bad” things have happened in your relationship with the person you are thinking about if they were still here?

How to stop thinking about someone: Is it possible that if the person you have been thinking about was still here, maybe something bad would have happened? Is it possible that they would have cheated on you? Is it possible that the relationship would have gotten old and boring? Is it possible that you would have gotten into a big argument that really hurt both of you? Is it possible that you would have gotten more and more jealous or more and more worried about whether they still love you?  Is it possible that if they were here, they would keep you from doing something that was really wonderful and important to you, and you would miss out on it? Is it possible that you would wind up much more unhappy if they were here?

You can’t possibly know whether any of this would happen or not. So when you are thinking about someone, it is an uninvestigated assumption that you would be happier if they were here. But, as you can see, you can’t possibly know whether that’s true.

Tactic #5: Could either of you have changed, making the relationship incompatible?

How to stop thinking about someone: If the person you are thinking about was still here, is it possible that they would have changed in some way that you wouldn’t like? Is it possible that you would have changed in some way where you no longer like being with them? Is it possible that something would have happened to make both of you not a good fit for each other anymore? Is it possible that the enjoyable moments you had together would have been over very soon?

If these 5 tactics didn’t help you, and you have been thinking about someone that broke up with you… then click here for my blog post titled “How To Stop Thinking About Someone That Broke Up With You”

Thanks for reading “How To Stop Thinking About Someone”!

That’s the end of my post about how to stop thinking about someone. I hope you found it helpful. I hope you get some relief from constantly thinking about whoever you have been thinking about. Please contact me if you have any questions or if you would like more support for your particular situation.

Noah

Imagine you went to see a movie with a few friends. When you come out of the theatre, you say to your friends, “I didn’t think that movie was very good”. You say this with a certain softness or lightness; you know that you are just giving your opinion, your perspective. Then imagine your friends respond by telling you how they thought the movie was really great. Since you understand that your statement was just an opinion, you acknowledge their opinions, and you may find them curious, but you don’t argue about it.

Now imagine a different scenario in which you leave the movie telling your friends, “That movie was so boring and terrible!” This time, your statement is still just an opinion, but yet you don’t see it as an opinion. You think your statement is true. There is a sort of hardness or certainty about your statement. So when your friends tell you that the movie was really great, you either argue with them, try to convince them to see it your way, think they are stupid, or think they don’t know what they’re talking about or are just wrong.

In both of these scenarios, you had a thought about a movie. How-ever, in one of these scenarios you saw your thought as an opinion, whereas in the other one, you believed your thought was true, or a fact, and didn’t recognize that it was just an opinion. When you saw your thought as just an opinion, it didn’t have any power to create emotions when your friends disagreed. However, when you believed your thought to be true, you experienced anger and judged your friends when they disagreed. No matter how sure you are that a movie is “bad”, it is still just a thought you have about a movie, and not a fact. If you can acknowledge that others could disagree  with your thought, then you can admit that you really don’t know whether your thought is true, and you can acknowledge that your thought is really just a perspective.

In the same way, all of the thoughts in our minds are just perspectives. The only time our thoughts create emotions is when we confuse our perspective to be what’s true.

Throughout our life, we have absorbed the belief that certain types of words, actions, situations, and appearances are “bad”. Over time, we each have created our own definitions of what words and actions are “disrespectful”, “mean”, or “annoying” and what physical attributes are “ugly”. When we hear certain words, witness certain actions, or see certain physical attributes, we unconsciously ask ourselves, “Does this meet my definition of disrespectful or respectful, annoying or pleasant, funny or boring, pretty or ugly?” Then we answer this question by making the judgment (decision) that what we witnessed is “disrespectful”, “annoying”, “boring”, or “ugly”. We have no uncertainty about whether our thought is true. We don’t view our thought as a perspective, we unknowingly view it as a fact, as true. Once we make this judgment, we react with the corresponding emotion.

What’s important to understand here is that the facts themselves are neutral. It’s our individual minds that label the facts as “good” or “bad”, “right” or “wrong”, “pretty” or “ugly”. But since we all have different genetics and life histories, it is always possible for other people to label the same facts differently. We can all have different definitions of what types of actions, words, appearances, situations, or events qualify as “bad”, “inappropriate”, “unattractive”, “disrespectful”, and so on. We may believe a circumstance is “bad”, but someone else could disagree with us if the circumstance doesn’t meet their definition of “bad”. If someone else can disagree with us, this may help us to realize that we don’t know whether our thought is true and that it is really just a perspective.

As we have now seen, our emotions are created by innocently believing our thoughts to be true and factual. However, if we believe our thoughts are true, we are unknowingly claiming that every other perspective on the subject is wrong. If we experience anger from believing, “His actions were inconsiderate”, we are unknowingly believing that anyone who thinks, “His actions were considerate”, is wrong. If we experience anxiety from thinking, “It was bad that she left me”, we are unknowingly believing that any-one who thinks, “It was good that she left you”, is wrong. Any time we believe, “This is bad”, we are inherently believing, “Anyone who thinks this isn’t bad is wrong”. But what we are not seeing here is that if others could disagree with us, then our thought must just be a perspective. Can we really know with absolute certainty that our thought is true when others could disagree with us?

Our thoughts often seem true because the people around us tend to reinforce our beliefs by frequently agreeing with our perspectives about what is “good” and “bad”. They often have similar perspectives because they live in the same area or were raised in the same culture, because the same type of job often draws similar people, or just because we often choose to spend time with people who have beliefs that are similar to ours. In this way, when we think some-thing is “bad” and we get sad, angry, or worried, our friends usually agree with our judgments instead of offering us a different perspective.

For example, if you tell your friend that you are angry because “my husband shouldn’t have said that to me”, your friend will most often say, “You’re right, he shouldn’t have said that”. If you tell your friends, “I am worried that my son will fail his exam”, your friends usually tell you, “He will do fine”. This may seem as if it is helpful, but by making this statement, your friends are agreeing with your decision that “failing the exam would be bad”, while at the same time they are trying to calm you by saying, “He probably won’t fail”. If you are sick, the people around you usually tell you, “That’s such a shame, I hate it when I’m sick, I’m sorry you have to be sick”. These comments are telling us, “Being sick is bad”, which strengthens our belief “sick is bad” and perpetuates our sadness and self-pity. We often unknowingly choose not to be around people who would disagree with us, because it can be con-fronting. We want people to tell us we’re right, and we want their sympathy. But by being offered sympathy, we are effectively being told by others, “Your thought is true”, and therefore, “Your reason for suffering is completely valid and true”. This causes us to continuously have our concepts of “bad” reaffirmed as true and perpetuates our suffering.

We may think, “My boss is too demanding”, “It is bad that I still don’t have a husband”, “I am not attractive”, “He is selfish”, “It would be bad if I don’t land the new client”, or “My boyfriend doesn’t appreciate me”. But is it possible that someone else could have the opposite thought on any of these issues? Could someone think that your boss is reasonable, that it is more enjoyable to still be single, that you’re good-looking, that he is considerate, that not getting the client would be “good” for your business, and that your boyfriend really does appreciate you? If it is possible, then can you really be completely sure that your thought is true?

This simple question might help us realize that our thought is just a perspective. We might recognize, “I think my boss is demanding, but maybe he is reasonable”, “It seems bad that I’m still single, but maybe this gives me more freedom to enjoy myself”, “I think I’m not attractive, but it’s possible that I am attractive to others”, “He often seems selfish, but it is a possibility that he is a considerate person overall”, “There would be some bad effects if I didn’t land the new client, but it could wind up being good for my business”, “My boyfriend doesn’t show me appreciation, but that might not actually mean he doesn’t appreciate me”.

If we acknowledge that others can have a different thought about the same circumstance, then we may be able to recognize that our thought is just a perspective, and that it is not a fact, nor is it what’s true. We can come to understand that our opinion is just an opin-ion. Once we acknowledge that our thought is just a perspective, we may be able to recognize, “I don’t really know whether my thought is true”. If we truly see that our thought is just a perspective that we don’t know to be true, then even our seemingly “bad” circumstances won’t cause us to suffer anymore because we won’t believe our thought that says, “This is bad”.

The Questions: Am I sure my thought is true, or is it just a perspective? Is the agreement from others enough evidence to prove that my thought is true? Could someone else from a different culture, gender, age group, geographic region, religion, or economic status have a different perspective? If someone else could have a different perspective, can I know with absolute certainty that my thought is true? Am I sure that my thought is true, considering that the belief, “My thought (perspective) is true”, inherently means that I must also believe, “Every other thought (perspective) about this circumstance is wrong”? If someone else could react with a different emotion, can I be sure that the thoughts which create my emotion are true?

The 2^nd most common reason for why you might be thinking about someone is because they broke up with you

In order to understand why you think about someone after they break up with you, you need to understand what happens when someone breaks up with you. Basically, when someone breaks up with you, you decide 2 things: 1) They must think I am not good enough. 2) If they think I am not good enough, I must not be good enough or there must be something wrong with me.

This causes our opinion of ourselves to worsen. For example, we might go from thinking “I am attractive” to “I must not be very attractive” or “I am somewhat loveable” to “I am not worthy of love”. When our opinion of ourselves worsens, it has 2 major effects on our emotional experience. 1) We experience the feeling of being hurt or broken hearted. 2) We have less confidence, and feel worse about ourselves, which makes us less happy.

Clearly, we don’t want to feel this way. And since it was their opinion of us (their breaking up with us) that made us think less of ourselves, we want them to take us back and love us because we unconsciously believe that this will help us think more positively about ourselves again. In other words, we unconsciously think it will make us happy, even if we know on some level that we weren’t actually happy when we were with them.

An example to help you understand why you think about someone that broke up with you

If we are in a relationship, and our partner says “I love you” to us over and over again, it may help us to think “I am loveable”. If our partner then breaks up with us, we may then think “I am unloveable” because our partner was a big reason for why we believed “I am loveable”. Believing “I am unloveable” makes us feel sad and hurt.

Since we don’t want to think “I am unloveable”, we unconsciously look for a way to believe “I am loveable” again. Generally, we are presented with 2 options for how to do this: a) Find someone new to love you. b) Get the old person to love you again. If we find someone new to love us, we are still left with that lingering belief that if our old partner doesn’t love us, then we must not be worthy of love. Therefore, we unconsciously believe that the key to our happiness is to have our old partner love us and want to be with us again. In other words, if we get our old partner to love us, we unconsciously believe that this will make us feel worthy of love again and therefore make us happy.

An easier way to stop thinking about the person that broke up with you

Let’s quickly examine the beliefs that make us unhappy when someone breaks up with us. When someone breaks up with us, we often unconsciously believe “If they think I am not good enough, I must not be good enough or there must be something wrong with me.” This is what causes our sadness, hurt, and loss of confidence.

Since we think that our unhappiness is directly created by being broken up with, and aren’t aware of the true cause of our suffering, we naturally try to win our ex-partner’s love in order to make ourselves feel good again. But, if we can see that our suffering is actually created by thoughts (i.e. believing our ex-partner’s opinion to be true), then it becomes much easier to become happy again. Instead of needing to change our ex-partner’s opinion in order to make ourselves feel better, we can just discover that their opinion isn’t true to make ourselves feel better. Once you feel better about yourself, you will naturally stop thinking about your ex-partner because you no longer need them to love you for you to be happy.

To be happy now, discover that your ex-partner’s opinion about you isn’t true

Just because one person thinks you aren’t good enough, does that mean it is true? Is it possible that there are many people that would want to be in a relationship with you? If so, is this one person’s opinion somehow more valid than everyone else’s opinion? Does it exist as a fact that you’re not good enough? Where does “not good enough” or “something is wrong with me” exist? Can you see it, touch it, hold it, show it off to people? Or does it only exist as a thought?

Can you see how it is not true that you ARE “not good enough” or that there IS “something wrong with you”? If you can truly see this, then you don’t need to get your ex-partner to love you again in order to make you feel happy with yourself. And if you don’t need your ex-partner’s love to feel happy, then you will have no reason to think about them.

If this feels relevant for you, you can find a lot more exercises, tactics, and explanation for this situation in the following blog post: How to heal a broken heart. That will help you to stop thinking about the person you have been thinking about.

Thanks for reading

I hope that this helped you stop thinking about the person that broke up with you. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Noah

Do you want to read some of the best quotes about love? The following quotes about love are separated into 7 categories: Saints, Spiritual Teachers, Icons, Poets, Authors, Celebrities, & Musicians

Quotes about love – Saints

“Love is the bridge between you and everything.”
― Rumi

“Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“To understand everything is to forgive everything.”
― Buddha

“Where there is love there is life.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.”
― Mother Teresa

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.”
― Jesus Christ (Corinthians 13:4-13)

Quotes about love - Spiritual Teachers

“I love, because my love is not dependent on the object of love. My love is dependent on my state of being. So whether the other person changes, becomes different, friend turns into a foe, does not matter, because my love was never dependent on the other person. My love is my state of being. I simply love.”
― Osho

“You are loved just for being who you are, just for existing. You don’t have to do anything to earn it. Your shortcomings, your lack of self-esteem, physical perfection, or social and economic success— none of that matters. No one can take this love away from you, and it will always be here.”
― Ram Dass

“Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you.”
― Eckhart Tolle

“Our job is unconditional love. The job of everyone else in our life is to push our buttons.”
― Byron Katie

“The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.”
― Thich Nhat Hahn

“Love doesn’t need reason. It speaks from the irrational wisdom of the heart.”
― Deepak Chopra

Quotes about love - Icons

“Our separation of each other is an optical illusion of consciousness.”
― Albert Einstein

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
― Martin Luther King, Jr.

“At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.”
― Plato

“Love is a better teacher than duty.”
― Albert Einsten

Quotes about love - Poets

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
― Pablo Neruda

“Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star.”
―E.E. Cummings

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Rumi

“Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit.
― Khalil Gilbran

Quotes about love - Authors

“Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye.”
― H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

“Love is always bestowed as a gift – freely, willingly and without expectation. We don’t love to be loved; we love to love.”
― Leo Buscaglia

“If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“A loving heart is the truest wisdom.”
― Charles Dickens

“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Love is when the other person’s happiness is more important than your own.”
― H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”
― Oscar Wilde

Quotes about love - Celebrities

“A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.”
― Ingrid Bergman

“Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. ”
― Lucille Ball

Quotes about love - Musicians

“Love is the flower you’ve got to let grow.”
― John Lennon

“Everything is clearer when you’re in love. ”
― John Lennon

“Love is real, real is love.”
― John Lennon

Thank you for checking out my quotes about love. If you like these, please have a look around my website for other content that relates to these quotes about love.

Noah

Do you want to read some of the best quotes about life and love? The following quotes about life and love are separated into 7 categories: Saints, Spiritual Teachers, Icons, Poets, Authors, Celebrities, & Musicians

Quotes about life and love – Saints

Quotes about life and love by “saints”:

“Love is the bridge between you and everything.”
― Rumi

“Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“To understand everything is to forgive everything.”
― Buddha

“Where there is love there is life.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.”
― Mother Teresa

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.”
― Jesus Christ (Corinthians 13:4-13)

“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”
― Mother Teresa

Quotes about life and love - Spiritual Teachers

Quotes about life and love by spiritual teachers:

“I love, because my love is not dependent on the object of love. My love is dependent on my state of being. So whether the other person changes, becomes different, friend turns into a foe, does not matter, because my love was never dependent on the other person. My love is my state of being. I simply love.”
― Osho

“You are loved just for being who you are, just for existing. You don’t have to do anything to earn it. Your shortcomings, your lack of self-esteem, physical perfection, or social and economic success— none of that matters. No one can take this love away from you, and it will always be here.”
― Ram Dass

“Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you.”
― Eckhart Tolle

“Our job is unconditional love. The job of everyone else in our life is to push our buttons.”
― Byron Katie

“The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.”
― Thich Nhat Hahn

“Love doesn’t need reason. It speaks from the irrational wisdom of the heart.”
― Deepak Chopra

Quotes about life and love - Icons

Quotes about life and love by icons:

“Our separation of each other is an optical illusion of consciousness.”
― Albert Einstein

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
― Martin Luther King, Jr.

“At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.”
― Plato

“Love is a better teacher than duty.”
― Albert Einsten

Quotes about life and love - Poets

Quotes about life and love by poets:

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
― Pablo Neruda

“Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star.”
―E.E. Cummings

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Rumi

“Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit.
― Khalil Gilbran

“To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis

Quotes about life and love - Authors

Quotes about life and love by authors:

“Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye.”
― H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

“Love is always bestowed as a gift – freely, willingly and without expectation. We don’t love to be loved; we love to love.”
― Leo Buscaglia

“If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“A loving heart is the truest wisdom.”
― Charles Dickens

“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Love is when the other person’s happiness is more important than your own.”
― H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”
― Oscar Wilde

Quotes about life and love - Celebrities

Quotes about life and love by celebrities:

“A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.”
― Ingrid Bergman

“Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. ”
― Lucille Ball

Quotes about love - Musicians

Quotes about life and love by musicians:

“Love is the flower you’ve got to let grow.”
― John Lennon

“Everything is clearer when you’re in love. ”
― John Lennon

“Love is real, real is love.”
― John Lennon

“Love is supreme and unconditional; like is nice but limited.”

― Duke Ellington

“Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.”

―Mozart

Thank you for checking out my quotes about life and love. If you like these, please have a look around my website for other content that relates to these quotes about life and love.

Noah

The post The Best Quotes About Life And Love appeared first on How to live in the moment - with Noah Elkrief.

Spiritual guidance overview

My name is Noah Elkrief and I am here to help you live with the the peace, fulfillment, freedom, love, and wholeness that you have been searching for.

With the type of work that I do in my individual sessions with people, the emotional impact is generally immediate and strong. You don’t need to wait a few sessions to see if it will give you the benefit that you want it to have. You will likely know within the first 10 minutes, but you will almost certainly experience the major impact you were looking for by the end of the first session.

Who is Noah?

Why am I giving you a FREE spiritual guidance session?

Are you a good fit for spiritual guidance with me?

2) Do you want to stop feeling lacking or unfulfilled?

3) Do you want help in following your heart?

4) Do you want to live in peace (i.e. spiritually awaken)?

Or you can…

• Email me at: Noah@liveinthemoment.org
• Call me at: (+1) 646-205-3054

The post Want Spiritual Guidance? 1 Free Spiritual Guidance Session appeared first on How to live in the moment - with Noah Elkrief.

How To Love Yourself:

When we love ourselves, we are going to be happy, regardless of our situation or what others think of us. When we don’t love ourselves, we are going to be unhappy, regardless of our situation or what others think of us. Therefore, loving ourselves is quite important. In this blog post, I am going to explain how to love yourself.

The Most Popular Tactics To Love Yourself Don’t Work

Before we get into exactly how to love yourself, I think it is important to address why the most popular and most common tactics for how to love yourself can’t give you the results that you want.

The 2 most commons tactics that I hear for how to love yourself are:

1)      Positive affirmations

2)      Treating yourself to something physically nice

Both of these tactics are fine. There is nothing wrong with doing either of these. But, if we look at these tactics closely, we can discover why they don’t have the ability give us the love that we are looking to have for ourselves.

How To Love Yourself: Why Positive Affirmations Don’t Work

If I think I am unloveable, then there is a reason why I believe that. If I just tell myself over and over again that I am loveable, it is very unlikely to make me fully believe that I am loveable because this statement doesn’t address the original reason for why I believed I was unloveable.

How To Love Yourself: Why Doing Something Nice For Yourself Won’t Make You Love Yourself

The only reason why we don’t love ourselves is because we believe negative thoughts about ourselves or our situation. These negatives thoughts are what create our shame and sense of unworthiness or insufficiency. When we treat ourselves to something nice externally (spa, vacation, dessert etc.), we are basically saying “I deserve this”, “it is nice that I get to experience this”, “this is something I should give myself because I am worth it”. And that is completely fine. There is no problem with this at all. It can feel enjoyable to do these things. If you enjoy it, continue doing it.

How To Love Yourself

Now that we see why the 2 most common tactics for how to love yourself don’t really work, let’s examine how to truly experience love for ourselves.

The first question you have to ask yourself is “Why do I not love myself?”, “What do I not like myself?”, “Why do I feel unloveable?”, “What do I not like about my situation?”

We are generally so busy entertaining ourselves and distracting ourselves from our thoughts that we don’t allow ourselves to just be with our thoughts. And if we don’t see what thoughts are making us feel unloveable, then we certainly can’t address these thoughts.

Since negative thoughts about yourself and your life are what make you not love yourself, the answer to the question “How to love yourself?” is to address the thoughts that make you not love yourself. In order to love yourself, you need to eliminate the thoughts that make you feel unloveable.

What Thoughts Are Making You Not Love Yourself?

It may seem scary to look at why you truly don’t love love yourself. But, if you don’t look at these thoughts, if you don’t identify the reason why you don’t love yourself, you will just keep feeling the way that you do and going through life trying to make everyone else love you in order to help you love yourself. And that creates a lot of suffering.

For some of us, we might not love ourselves because we believe “I am unattractive”,  ”my personliaty isn’t good enough”, “I am a failure”, “I am not successful enough”, “I am a bad parent”, “I am not fun enough”, or “I am not outgoing enough”. For other people, there is often no specific trait that we don’t like about ourselves. Rather, there might just be an underlying sense of unworthiness or unloveability.

You can have a look right now to see if you can find your reason. You can ask yourself any of the following questions: “Why do I not love myself?”, “What do I not like myself?”, “Why do I feel unloveable?”, “What do I not like about my situation?”

The answers might be very obvious to you, but it also might be very difficult to identify the reason or thought as to why you don’t love yourself. If you don’t want to do it right now, try to give some time toward this discovery process later on. And be patient with yourself. You can’t force it.

How to love yourself: Whatever thoughts are making you feel unloveable or unworthy, these thoughts pop up out of nowhere. You didn’t pick these thoughts. You didn’t choose them. They are not under your control. If you controlled your thoughts, you quite obviously would choose to never think negative thoughts about yourself. So this is not personal issue. Therefore, you can be gentle with yourself.

An Exercise To Discover That There Is Nothing Wrong With You

We tend to think that we feel insufficient because we ARE insufficient. We tend to think that we feel unloveable because we ARE unloveable. We tend to think that we feel lacking in our life because there IS something wrong with us.

But I would like to help you see how these assumptions could not be further from the truth. This will be the key in seeing how to love yourself. In order to help you do this, I would like to ask you to ask yourself the following questions:

1) Can I Escape My Unwanted Feeling When I Am Being Distracted From Thoughts?

How do I feel when I am being entertained? How do I feel when I am engaging in my favorite hobby? Do I feel lacking, do I feel unworthy, do I feel insufficient, do I not love myself in these moments? In the moments that we are having fun, we don’t feel unloveable or unworthy. In other words, when we are not thinking about ourselves (when we are distracted from thoughts), we don’t feel unloveable, unworthy, lacking, or insufficient.

If your feeling of unloveability was caused by you being unloveable, then you would continue to experience this feeling when you are simply distracted by thoughts. If your feeling of insufficiency was created by you being insufficient, then you wouldn’t be able to escape this feeling simply by distracting yourself from thoughts. If your feeling of lack was created by there being something wrong with you, then would still have this feeling even while you were being entertained.

If all it takes to eliminate your feelings of not loving yourself is to simply distract yourself from thoughts, then it must mean that your feeling of not loving yourself isn’t created by anything about yourself… but only created by thoughts about yourself.

If you would like to understand this concept better (to help you with how to love yourself), please download my free e-book below.

2) Is There Factually Something “Wrong” With Me, Or Does This Idea Only Exist As A Thought About A Fact?

Take a moment and ask yourself “What are the negative things that I think about myself?” Then, ask yourself: Does this exact as fact? Am I factually unworthy of love? Am I factually unattractive? Is my situation factually bad? Is there factually something wrong with me?

Can I touch these concepts? Can I see them? Can I hold them? Can I grasp them and show them to others? If it is a fact, is this something that can be seen by everyone? Where does unloveability exist? Where is my “bad” trait? Am I not good enough factually, or does that idea only exist as a thought? What are the facts, and what are thoughts about the facts?

It is not that you ARE unloveable or unworthy. It is not as though there is something wrong with you or you are insufficient. It is not as though you have any “bad” personality traits or “bad” physical characteristics.  ”Bad” can’t exist as a fact. “Bad”, “not good enough”, “unloveable”, and “unworthy” can only exist as a thought about a fact.

Therefore, your experience of being insufficient, not loving yourself, or feeling like there is something wrong with you can’t be created by the facts of who you are, what you look like, how you act or what your situation is. These feelings can only be created by thoughts in your mind. So it is not as though you ARE unloveable, it is just that you sometimes feel this way when certain thoughts pop up in your mind and you believe them.

If you would like to understand this concept better (to help you with how to love yourself), please download my free e-book below.

An Exercise To Discover That Your Thoughts About Yourself Aren’t True

When you discover that your feelings of not loving yourself aren’t created by something about YOU, that can weaken the strength of these feelings, and possibly even free you from them.

But, in addition, once you see what thoughts are keeping you from loving yourself, then you can begin to question whether these thoughts are actually true. And when you stop believing a negative thought about yourself, it stops creating the emotion.

Take a moment to think of your answer to the question ”What are the negative things that I think about myself?” Then, based on your answer, you can ask yourself the following:

1. Can I think of any reasons or examples as to why the opposite might be true? If the opposite could be true, can I be sure that my thought about myself is true?
2. Could someone else have the opposite perspective? Could someone think that I am attractive, enjoyable to be around, and completely worthy of love? If other people could have a positive opinion about what I think is “bad”, can I be sure that my perspective is true?
3. Does the “bad” quality about myself exist in every moment? Does it describe how I act or how I am in every moment? Am I always me? If I am always me, but yet this quality or characteristic doesn’t exist in every moment, then am I sure that it describes who I am?

Next Steps for How To Love Yourself:

The next time you begin to feel unworthy or not loving yourself, instead of pushing away or denying this feeling, instead of distracting yourself from this feeling, instead of telling yourself something positive and trying to convince yourself that you are great, look to see what thoughts are creating these feelings, look to see what stories are being told in your mind in that moment. And then question whether these thoughts or stories are true.

Once you see that these thoughts aren’t true, or that they aren’t real and tangible, or that these thoughts don’t mean anything about you, then you are free.

You won’t have a thought that says “I love myself” or “I am wonderful”. But you don’t need these thoughts to love yourself, you don’t need these thoughts to feel wonderful. Loving yourself is simply the absence of negative thoughts about yourself.

Thank you for reading this post about how to love yourself. Please let me know if you found it helpful or if there was something you didn’t understand. Also, if you were unable to figure out why you don’t love yourself, or this post wasn’t able to help you love yourself then please contact me and I will help you to directly experience feeling loveable, worthy, whole, and complete.

Noah

Noah@liveinthemoment.org

+1-646-205-3054

The post How To Love Yourself Unconditionally – A Permanent Way To Love Yourself appeared first on How to live in the moment - with Noah Elkrief.

July 13th, 2013 – How To Love Someone:

Hello, my name is Noah Elkrief; and in this video I’m going to talk about how to love someone. So, if we want to love someone; we simply need to start with the question: “why do I not love them? What is it about them that I don’t love? What stories am I telling when I’m around them?”

If you have any reason not to love someone, you will just love them

See when we don’t have any reason not to love someone, we’re left loving them; it’s that simple. If we have no reason not to love it’s just our nature to love. So if you’re with somebody and you feel anger towards them, or judgment towards them, or lack of love with them; it’s generally because you have some story about them. More specifically it generally means that you have some story about how they’re not good enough or they’re doing something wrong.

The most common reason why people want to love someone is when they’re in a relationship with them. So, I’m going to speak about that a little more specifically; but everything that I speak about in terms of relationships—romantic relationships—can really be applied for everything or everyone.

The reason we may not love someone is because we compare them to our ideas of “perfect”

In relationships, we tend to have an idea about the perfect way to do pretty much everything. We have ideas about the right way to cook, how much they should clean, the right thing to say, the perfect way to sleep with us, the perfect thing to say, what they should say, what they should do in this situation, how they should interact with the children, how often they should call us, all of that. Right? We have so many ideas about the perfect way to say and do things that we’re constantly comparing what our partner does with our idea of the right way.

For example, we may think that the perfect way to interact with our children is for them to go to their soccer games and drive them places. Then, if they don’t have the time to do that or they don’t feel like doing it at some point, we think that they shouldn’t have done that, or that they don’t love the kids enough, or that they’re not a good enough father. Or, we have the idea that they should always clean up after themselves. And when they don’t clean up, we say they aren’t good enough, they don’t care enough, or they don’t care enough about us.

What stories are making you not love them

Alright, so whatever story it is for you; just take a moment now and look. Think about the person that you’re trying to love; and then ask yourself:

• What stories do I have about how they aren’t good enough?
• What stories do I have about how they aren’t acting how they should be?
• What stories do I have about how they aren’t perfect at something, or what they’re doing is wrong?

Take a moment now and just look.

How do you feel when you tell these stories about them?

Okay, so now ask yourself a couple of questions about it now that you’ve located what you think you’re doing wrong, or what they aren’t good enough at. Well actually before going into questioning it just look at how you feel when you think those thoughts. When you think about what they’re doing wrong, when you think about what they’re not good enough at; how do you feel? Maybe you feel resentment, maybe you feel disappointed, and maybe you feel lacking in your relationship.

It doesn’t feel good to judge our partner. It doesn’t feel good to constantly be comparing our partner in the way they act to our ideas of perfect. It just doesn’t make for an enjoyable relationship or an enjoyable experience ourselves; and especially not for them also. Because when we resent them, when we judge them we also tend to treat them without love.

How to love someone: See how your stories about them aren’t true

So, if you don’t want to experience that and you want to experience more love in your relationship then you need to be willing to question whether your judgments about them are true and useful.

Exercise 1:

So, look at the judgment you have about them, what they shouldn’t be doing, what they’re not good enough at and all of that. And now look. Do you know with absolute certainty that they know what your idea of perfect is? Alright, so sometimes you might think they should call me once a day, or twice a day, they should call me from work, they should this or that. But maybe our partner doesn’t even know what we want, what the perfect thing is to us. We just assume that they should know. But how are they supposed to know?

So, that’s one thing. So, how are they supposed to act in a certain way, if we don’t even know how we want them to act?

Exercise 2:

The second thing is look to see whether you’re using them in a specific moment. Basically, when we look to our partner to make us happy, when we’re effectively using them to make us happy; then when we aren’t happy we judge them for not being good enough.

For example, when maybe we want intimacy from our partner, we want them to be intimate with us in a certain way so that we can be happy. We constantly are judging them because we’re not happy, and it doesn’t make us happy. But in that moment we’re not thinking about them. We’re not thinking about are they enjoying it. Are they comfortable with situation? Maybe they don’t want to cuddle; maybe they don’t want to be intimate the way we want to be intimate. We’re purely thinking about how this affects me. So we’re saying I want you to change to be how I want you to be. But if we want them to change so they can be how we want them to be, then we can’t get angry at them when they want us to change to be how they wanted us to be.

For example, we’re sitting watching a movie, you want to cuddle, and they don’t want to cuddle. So you judge them because they don’t do what you want. But you might think if he does cuddle then he’s not doing what he wants and he’ll judge you because you’re forcing it on him. So when you’re making demands of your partner, look to see whether you’re being selfish in that moment; when you’re not taking them into consideration.

Exercise 3:

Another thing is look to see whether the reason why you’re not loving them in a specific moment is created by the facts or your thoughts about the facts. If they don’t put away their dishes, if they don’t clean up after themselves just look and see. You’re angry in this moment, you’re angry because he didn’t do what he should do, and then say if I didn’t have that thought how would I feel in this moment? I would just pick up the dishes, clean up and I would be fine, no resentment. But as soon as I have the thought it says, “He should’ve done that”—bam—anger.

So what do I want to experience? Do I want to feel angry right now; or do I want to be at peace? Where is this anger coming from? His actions or my thoughts about his actions? And when you can see that it’s your thoughts about his actions or her actions then you can stop blaming the other person for yourself. Right? And instead you can blame your own thoughts. It lets your partner off the hook a little bit. It’s not their action that created your resentment. It’s only your thoughts.

Exercise 4:

Once you are aware of what they’re doing wrong, ask yourself, “Could somebody else really love that trait?” Could somebody else really like it for their partner to act that way? Are they really not acting good enough? Or are they just not acting how I want? Just because I want it that way does it mean that it’s the best way?

How to love someone

You can try these types of things and don’t limit yourself to just these questions that I asked or that I offered you. The most important thing when you’re not feeling love for somebody is to discover why. To question what story is going on in this moment? Because when you don’t have that story, when you’re with your partner, when you’re with someone without any story about them; you’re fine with them. It doesn’t have to be some exaggerated love like, “I love them so much and this is so wonderful.” It can be just that you’re with them; you’re connecting, just enjoying it.

But then as soon as you have a judgment about them, it’s gone. So when you’re not loving someone, look to see why, look to see what story is there. Once you find the story then the opportunity is there to question it: to see whether it’s true, to see whether it’s a fact, to see whether they know, to see if whether they can even control it. Even they wanted to do what we want, could they actually do it?

See how that goes and then let me know how it works out. See you soon.

The post How To Love Someone – The Easy Way To Love Someone appeared first on How to live in the moment - with Noah Elkrief.

July 13th, 2013 – How To Deal With Loneliness

Hello, my name is Noah Elkrief; and in this video I’m going to talk to you about, “How to deal with loneliness.” As I do one-on-one sessions with people, people who constantly come to me telling me that they are lonely. And what I often see when people come to me is that they’re confused about the cause of their loneliness. Or in other words they don’t really understand what’s causing it. So therefore, when they try to make themselves stop feeling lonely, they’re not really addressing the cause of their loneliness.

The cause of loneliness

So what’s causing our loneliness? What do you think is causing it? Most people think if they’re single, that it’s caused by being alone. And if they’re in a relationship they think it’s caused by their partner not loving and appreciating them enough.

Let’s take a look at what’s actually causing our loneliness. So does being alone cause loneliness? Well, take a look at your life. Are you lonely in every moment that you’re alone? Or do you sometimes not feel lonely: when you’re distracted from your thoughts, when you’re watching TV, playing sports, dancing, playing with kids, doing something. When you are distracted and entertained you almost certainly don’t feel lonely; because in those moments you’re just not thinking about it. Is everyone that’s alone, lonely? Of course not. If being alone created loneliness then everyone that is alone would feel lonely. Can you see that? In addition, if being alone created loneliness then everyone who is in a relationship wouldn’t feel lonely; but that’s not the case. Many people in relationships feel lonely. Does the lack of being loved create loneliness? Well take a look.

Are you loved? Do your parents love you? Do your friends love you? Maybe your partner loves you. Right? But yet, you still feel lonely. So if being loved got rid of loneliness, then you wouldn’t feel lonely. So, it’s clear that none of these things that seem to be causing loneliness actually do. The only thing that causes loneliness is our own thoughts.

The specific thoughts that cause loneliness for single people

What thoughts are creating this loneliness? Well that depends. There is a few different types of thoughts. But broadly speaking there is one major thought for single people and one major thought for people in relationships. First we’re going to look at single people, and then we’re going to look at relationships.

For single people what happens is we tend to believe being in a relationship would make me happy. Being in a relationship would make me feel complete and whole. Being in a relationship is how to be happiest. And as soon as we create this fantasy all of the sudden this moment is insufficient. This moment is lacking. This moment isn’t good enough. And that’s what creates our loneliness.

So, paradoxically having a fantasy about what you think will make you happy, creates loneliness in this moment. And then we end up constantly end up searching for somebody to love us, somebody to be with; and that all just perpetuates the loneliness. So in other words what creates our loneliness is the belief that a relationship can make us happy. So if you want to stop feeling lonely, you need to question that belief. So let’s look at it real quick, let’s examine it.

Being in a relationship can’t fulfill you

Can a relationship fulfill you? Make you feel whole. Make you feel as happy as you want to be. Let’s examine it. What makes you unhappy? Thoughts. Judgments about yourself, insecurities, thoughts about yourself that make you feel ashamed, worrying about what people think, anxiety about the future, judgments about situations in our life, judgments about situations in our life. Our situations aren’t good enough; our apartment isn’t good enough, that event was bad, resentment towards the people in our life, feeling guilty about the past. All this creates our unhappiness, and lack of fulfillment.

So the simple question is, “Can a relationship eliminate the things that make you unhappy?” Can it eliminate all of those thoughts? Look. No, it can’t. It can’t get rid of your anxiety about the future, you worrying about what other people think. Your judgments about yourself. It just doesn’t have that ability. If it did, everyone in a relationship would be happy. But yet clearly, they aren’t. Alright, that doesn’t mean that you cannot be happy, it just means that a relationship can’t make you happy in of itself.

We tend to look at happiness as it’s acquired or achieved. That if we just got “this” we’d be happy, or got “that” we’d be happy. But happiness is what remains when we lose thoughts that make us unhappy. That’s it. If you can see that a relationship doesn’t have the ability to make you happy, then you can stop these fantasies. Whether you’re in a relationship or you’re single doesn’t affect your happiness; only thoughts do.

So being single, being alone, being by yourself doesn’t create unhappiness only thoughts do. So you’re not in a disadvantageous position of being happy. You can be as happy and fulfilled just as easily as somebody in a relationship can. So your life is not lacking. Your life isn’t lacking. Your life isn’t missing anything. Your life isn’t insufficient. Just because you’re single—it’s okay—it doesn’t mean anything. And it absolutely doesn’t mean you can’t be happy. So if you can see that, then watch the loneliness just subside. You’re not missing anything.

The specific thoughts that cause loneliness in relationships

So now let’s move onto the second part. If your loneliness occurs while in a relationship. What tends to happen in relationships is that we feel lonely. Often times even in relationship seems perfect, even if the other person loves us, even if all of that stuff loneliness occurs in a large percentage of relationships.

When we feel lonely we look to blame it on something. They don’t appreciate me enough. They don’t spend enough time with me. They’re not intimate enough with me. They don’t cuddle enough. They’re not close enough. They spend too much time at work. Blame it on all of these things, as if they are the cause of our loneliness; but they’re not. And the easy way to see that is just look. In a moment when you’re by yourself, and you’re not with your partner, are you always lonely in these moments? If not being with your partner created this loneliness then every moment that you’re weren’t with them, you would feel lonely.

If your partner not being intimate enough with you created loneliness, then every moment you weren’t intimate, would be lonely. But clearly that’s not the case. Sometimes you feel lonely, sometimes you don’t. So what happens is there are specific stories that create loneliness. And when you tell these stories, the loneliness comes. But when you don’t tell those stories, there is no loneliness. So you have to look to see what stories are there for you.

Generally it’s ideas about what is the perfect relationship. Or what is the perfect way for them to act. So if we believe they should be spending x amount of hours with us every day, and when they don’t spend that amount of time with us we think, “It’s not good enough that they’re not spending that amount of time with me.” Or if we think that they should want to hold me, and they should tell me that they love me. Right? Or telling me that they love me means that they do love me, or something like that. When they don’t tell us that they love us, when they don’t cuddle us, when they don’t do those things; we think, “If they loved me, they would do those things.” Or. If it was a perfect relationship, they would do those things; and then we feel lacking and insufficient. Right?

But, in any moment that you don’t judge your partner, when you let any ideas of how they should be acting, or what they should be doing, or what the perfect relationship would be like. There’s no loneliness, they’re just present with them. You’re just being here with them. When you’re just here with your partner, or without your partner; everything is fine, regardless of what they’re doing. But as soon as you start to tell stories, loneliness comes. In this moment, just look. What do I judge that’s not good enough about them?

How do you feel when you judge your partner?

Do I judge that they don’t spend enough time with me? Do I judge that they don’t tell me they love me enough? That they don’t appreciate me enough. Right? So look at what you judge them to do. And then notice that when you have that judgment; that’s when loneliness comes. So, if you can see that then you can stop blaming them for your loneliness. It has nothing to do with whether they appreciate you enough, or how much they appreciate you. It only has to deal with whether you think about them appreciating you enough or not enough.

If you can see that, then you can come back to this moment. Oh, I’m not missing anything. It’s just these thoughts that are creating loneliness. Nothing else, it’s nothing to do with them. And when you stop judging them, you’re left with love for them. When you don’t believe you’re judgments about someone, what’s left is love. Love is simply what remains when you don’t have judgments about others. So when you don’t judge your partner to be not good enough, you’ll feel love for them. And we can’t be lonely and feel love. We tend to think that somebody loving us will get rid of our loneliness, but it can’t. No matter what somebody else does that doesn’t get rid of our loneliness.

How to deal with loneliness

What gets rid of our loneliness when we’re in a relationship is loving the other person. Just loving them, that’s it. So if you want to stop feeling lonely, look to see what judgments you have about your partner and the relationship. And then question whether they’re true or not. Question whether they are important or not. Because when you lose those judgments you will be left with love; and be left without your loneliness.

I hope this post about how to deal with loneliness helps. Please let me know how it goes. Thank you for watching and I’ll see you on the next video.

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Noah Elkrief: Hello, my name is Noah Elkrief and in this video I’m going to talk about how to forgive yourself. So, for most of us when we are looking to forgive ourselves it’s basically because we feel guilty about something we did. We feel anger toward ourselves. We feel sad or bad about something we did in the past. And often times when we feel this way it can seem impossible to stop feeling this way.

It seems as though our feeling is directly created by what we did in the past and that there’s no way to escape it. But if you look at your life do you feel guilty and bad about yourself in every moment? Or are there some breaks here and there? For example when you’re watching TV, watching a movie, listening to music, playing with your kids or doing something fun, chances are in that moment you’re not feeling guilty or bad about yourself. The reason why is because in those moments you’re not thinking about it. You’re not thinking about what you did. You’re not thinking about how bad it was. And you’re not thinking about how you’re to blame for something.

So the real reason why you feel angry toward yourself and guilty about what you did is not because of the past action itself but only because of the thoughts you have in this moment. When you have certain thoughts they create certain feelings. In any moment that you don’t have those thoughts those feelings naturally don’t arise. So what thoughts are creating this anger and guilt and feeling bad for yourself? Well, when we do something the only reason why we would feel these emotions is if we have two major thoughts. One, the outcome of what I did is bad and two, I am to blame for that bad outcome. If we don’t feel like we’re to blame we won’t experience guilt. And if we don’t think that the outcome of what we did then there’s obviously no reason to feel guilty about it.

So I’d like to show you how it’s possible that whatever you did you’re not to blame for it and whatever you did it might not be bad. So let’s just take a moment and look. Let’s look at an example of how this could happen. First let’s look at how what you did might not end up being bad. So for instance if you crash into somebody and it’s your fault, right? Let’s say you’re driving a car and you crash into them and they break your leg. You would think that what you did was so bad and you’d feel bad about it, right? But if you talk to them six months later, the victim of this accident, and it turns out that while they were in the hospital waiting to fix their leg they met somebody who gave them their dream job and they’re so much happier now. So now, if you look at this would you still feel bad about what you did? No, probably not because what you did somehow ended up making that person happier, making the victim happier in their life.

So, any time that we have decided something is bad we’re looking at one little effect of what we did. But we’re ignoring all the possible future effects of that outcome. So, if we break someone’s leg we look, “Oh, it’s bad. I broke their leg.” And it seems so obvious that it’s bad but then the simple question that we have to ask ourselves is do I know what all the effects are of this outcome? Do I know what all the effects are? So look at your particular situation, whatever you did, and now look, is it possible that what I did could wind up making them happier? Is it possible that I could help the world in some way? Just be creative. What are the possible effects? Is it possible that it could make them happier? It could help them in some way? It may have made them suffer a lot in that moment.

But is it possible that it could make them happier in the future? And if it’s possible then do you know that the outcome you helped to create was bad? No, how could you possibly know? How could we possibly know all the effects? We don’t. So, if we don’t know that the outcome of what we did is bad then there’s nothing to feel bad about. So that’s the first way to help you forgive yourself about something that you did. The second way is to see that you’re not to blame for what you did. So it seems that if you committed some action you’re obviously to blame for it, right? But if you weren’t to blame you would have this guilt, this anger toward yourself. So let’s look at an example. If you’re watching a car accident occur outside of your window and you see both people are really suffering, they got hurt. Would you feel guilty about it? No, of course not. So why wouldn’t you feel guilty? Because you’re not to blame. You’re not to blame for what happened. So there’s no reason to feel guilty about it.

So, if we did something, if we caused the accident, if we said something to someone, if we hit somebody, if we did something that seemed to create suffering it seems obvious that we’re to blame. But let’s take a moment and really examine that assumption. Do you control the thoughts that arise in your mind? Take a moment and look. Do you control the thoughts that arise in your mind? Do you want to be happy? Of course, right? So do negative thoughts create happiness? No. Judgments create happiness? No. Thinking, worrying about the future create happiness? No. But yet you still do it don’t you? You still have all these negative thoughts you don’t want to have. If you controlled your thoughts you would always think positive, never think negative. Maybe not think at all if you could control your thoughts. So it’s clear that you don’t control the thoughts that arise in your mind.

So, if you look I don’t control the thoughts that arise in my mind, well now, what determines your actions? What determines your actions; whether to say something nice or to say something mean? What determines that? Who determines that? Thoughts. If we think something negative about them, we’ll say something negative about them likely. And if we think something positive about them we’ll probably say something positive. If we have judgments about someone and hate them we’ll do something hurtful or unloving towards them. And if we have positive thoughts about them and think they’re so wonderful we’re likely to act lovingly towards them. But as we already discovered we don’t control the thoughts that arise in our minds. So, therefore we don’t determine our actions. Right? I know that’s a big statement and I don’t want you to believe me. Look for yourself. If you don’t control the thoughts that arise in your mind and your actions are determined by thoughts then do you determine your actions? You could also look at it in another way.

As in let’s see, if you, well, basically, do you always do what you want? Are there some moments you really want to do something and you just can’t get yourself to do it? If you controlled your actions you would just always do what you wanted. Are there some things you want to stop doing so bad yet you just can’t? If you controlled your actions and your thoughts you would be able to. So the fact that we can’t always do what we want is another indication that we really don’t control our actions or the thoughts that control our actions. So if you don’t determine your actions, if you don’t control them, then you’re not to blame for them. Really! And don’t believe me. Look. If I don’t control it then I’m not to blame for it. Just like the car accident that we watch outside the window. If we didn’t control the accident we wouldn’t think we were to blame. So if we don’t control our own actions then we’re not to blame.

And if we’re not to blame for it, ah! It happened. It’s just a product of what we were taught and the thoughts that arise in our mind and our own life history and unique set of experiences, our conditioning. There’s nothing we can do about it. So we’re off the hook. It doesn’t help to feel guilty. We tend to think that feeling guilty means at least I care. Guilt means I care. Guilt doesn’t mean you care. Guilt just means you’re believing that what you did was bad and that you are to blame for it. But that doesn’t help you to stop acting in the same way. If you want to stop acting the way that you did in the past you need to discover what thoughts made you act that way. And then you need to stop believing those thoughts. Figure out why those thoughts aren’t true and then you can act differently in the future. Because as you may have come to discover just feeling guilty about something we did in the past doesn’t help us to stop acting in that way.

So, to review what we just spoke about if you want to know how to forgive yourself or if you want to forgive yourself first question do I know that what I did will lead, will end up being bad for the victim? Do I know all the effects? Is it possible, is it possible that they’ll wind up happier because of it? Do I know? And the other questions to ask ourselves is am I to blame for what happened? Did I control the thoughts that arose in my mind? Did I control the thoughts that determined what actions I would commit? Am I in control of my own actions? Why would I act unloving if I was in control? I wouldn’t. Both of those can help us to discover we don’t know whether what happened was bad and we’re not even to blame for what happened.

So, you’re not to blame for what happened and you don’t know whether what happened was bad for you, the victim, life, the world. We don’t know. So you can take it easy on yourself. And if you want to make sure you don’t do the same thing again, look to see what stories you were telling in the moment that you did that action or said that thing. So, I hope you enjoyed this video and found it helpful. Please don’t hesitate to contact me or comment if you have any further questions. See you on the next video.

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The symptoms of spiritual awakening

In this blog post I’m going to explain how we relate to our mind when we’re spiritually awake. The spiritual awakening symptoms are not symptoms to our body, but rather just a change in how we relate to our thoughts. Broadly speaking, spiritual awakening consists of 1 (or more) of 3 different major changes to how we interact with our mind.

Spiritual awakening symptoms #1: Loss of thoughts that create identity

The first way to spiritually awaken is to simply lose the thoughts that make up your self image. Almost everyone has an identity/self-image that is comprised of thoughts. For example, we might think some version of “I’m unattractive, successful, boring, caring, spiritual, and a mediocre mother”. If the thoughts that describe who you are stop popping up in your head, then you have lost your identity. When you lose your identity, that is spiritual awakening.

I was living like everyone else, with a very strong self-image that made me almost always feel like I was insufficient or there was something lacking in my life.  Then, in one moment, I lost almost all of my thoughts, including my identity and who I thought I was. And these thoughts didn’t come back. Since the thoughts which made up my self image don’t arise in my mind any more, I was left just being here now, without having any story of who I am. There is no “I am this” or “I am that”, there is just “I am”, I’m just here and that’s the end of the story.

So first way spiritually awaken is to just lose the thoughts and not have the thoughts that make up your old identity.

Spiritual awakening symptoms #2: Don’t believe the thoughts that create identity

The second type of spiritual awakening is to just see that the thoughts that make up your identity aren’t true. So, let’s give you an example of that. For example, maybe you have a part of your self-image that is “I am a nice person”. But, when you wake up, you might see, well where does nice exist? Is that real? Is that factual? Where is it located? Or you might say, I’m me in every moment; But am I nice in every moment? Well, sometimes I’m mean and sometimes I’m just normal, so nice isn’t who I am because in some moments I’m not nice but yet I am still here. If I am here and nice isn’t, then nice can’t be me. Or, you might look at it in a different way, such as some people will think I’m nice, some people won’t so how do I know whether I am nice or not?

Basically, there are many different thoughts that come together to form your self image, but if you’re able to see that these thoughts aren’t true, aren’t real, aren’t factual, aren’t based in reality, then you’re not going to be affected by these thoughts that create your self image. In addition, you won’t have a self image because when you don’t believe a thought, they don’t come back, they don’t create our emotions, they don’t create our experience of life. So that’s the second possible spiritual awakening symptom.

For me, what happened was I lost my identity in one moment, but then my mind tried to create a new identity of “I am awake”, or “I am happier than others”, or “I know so much”. But, each time a new thought popped up in my head to create a new self image, I would just take a look at it and see that the thoughts weren’t true. Then, that new identity would just dissolve and not come back.

Spiritual awakening symptoms #3: Recognize that the thoughts aren’t yours

The third type of spiritual awakening is to recognize that the thoughts in your mind aren’t yours, and have nothing to do with you. It is hard to understand this concept intellectually or theoretically, so lets try a little exercise to make this concept more experiential. In this moment, I’d like you to just be curious about what thoughts are going through your mind right now, and then ask yourself “I wonder what the next thought to pop up in my mind will be?”. Just take a look for yourself. Be curious, and check out what the next thought in your mind will be? Okay, did you see it? Did you see the next comment, question, thought, that arose in your mind?

Well, where did that thought come from? Who put it there? How do you know it’s yours? Do you pick the thoughts that enter your mind? Do you control the thoughts that enter your mind? If you pick the thoughts that enter your mind, why would you pick negative thoughts? If you control the thoughts you give attention to and believe, why would you ever give attention to negative thoughts and believe negative thoughts that create your suffering?

After spiritual awakening (when we fit into this 3rd category), we just recognize that the thoughts in mind aren’t mine, they’re just background noise. Thoughts are like a radio playing in the background when you don’t have an on/off switch, you don’t control what channel it’s on, and you can’t change the volume. The thoughts in your mind have nothing to do with you. It’s not personal and when you see that the thoughts in your mind aren’t personal, then just because it says “I am unworthy” or “I am great”, it doesn’t actually mean I am unworthy or great. It’s like a stranger has been saying “I am unworthy” to you and you think it was your own voice. Since it seems to be your own voice, you just automatically take the words as true and real.

But, when you recognize that the thoughts in your mind aren’t yours and you’re not identified with the thoughts in your mind, then these thoughts won’t affect you. You meet these thoughts with the same skepticism that you would a stranger’s words. There’s no who you are because the only thing to tell you who you are is thoughts and if you see that the thoughts in your mind aren’t yours,

Then, it doesn’t matter what thoughts say, whether mind is busy or quiet, whether mind is positive or negative, because the thoguhts in our mind aren’t ours, and therefore don’t mean anything about us. And thoughts can’t create any emotions (or our experience of life) when we see that thoughts aren’t true or real. And when we see that the thoughts aren’t our voice, then it is automatic for us to recognize that the thoughts aren’t real or true. Then, we’re free!!

Most of the time, I am not identified with the thoughts in my mind, yet sometimes I am. But, since thoughts rarely arise in my mind, I seemingly lost all versions of identity, and I can’t believe the concepts that create suffering, it doesn’t seem to matter whether I’m identified with thoughts or not in a given moment.

Spiritual awakening symptoms

For each person, the spiritual awakening symptoms are different. But, the vast majority of spiritual awakenings fall into one of the three categories mentioned above. Some people just lose a chunk of their thoughts, some people stop believing a large portion of the thoughts that make them unhappy, and some people just don’t identify with their thoughts. Each one of those categories of awakening has different intricacies about the experience of being awake or different intricacies about how they view the world, and different intricacies about how they teach. So, there might be more types that I’m not aware of but those are the types that I can relate to and that I see in my own experience.

I hope the video helped to clarify spiritual awakening symptoms for you. If you have any questions, or would like some help with this, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Thank you for reading! Bye.

Noah Elkrief

646-205-3054

Noah@liveinthemoment.org

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Spiritual growth is very different from our normal idea of “growth”

Hello, my name is Noah Elkrief and in this blog post, I’m going to talk about what spiritual growth is and how to have spiritual growth. When we hear the term “growth”, we tend to think about increasing or improving. For example, when a tree grows, it gets bigger. Even in the world of “self-help”, growth is about increasing, improving, and acquiring. It may about getting a bigger house, getting more money, achieving more success, adding new skills, or doing more “great” stuff. But, in spirituality, growth is the opposite of that.

What spiritual growth is not

Spiritual growth is not about increasing or improving anything. When it comes to spiritual growth, most people tend to think about it as getting more knowledge, better beliefs, increased understanding, or something like that will makes us have spiritual progress, right? But, spiritual progress or spiritual growth doesn’t occur from having more knowledge or better beliefs. As long as we are trying to make ourselves think more positively, learn more ideas, or anything like that, we are remaining in the world of thoughts and illusion. We are trying to improve a fantasy in our minds, but no matter how much we “improve” it, we will not be making any spiritual growth.

What is spiritual growth

Spiritual growth is about seeing through the illusion of mind, seeing the difference between reality and our thoughts about reality. In other words, spiritual growth is about losing the beliefs that have been creating our suffering and our experience of life.

To take a step a back, if you’re involved in spirituality, if you’re interested in spiritual growth, what you’re really looking for is peace or spiritual awakening or enlightenment or something like that. Therefore, the real question isn’t “How do I make spiritual growth?”, but rather, the question is “How do I get to peace or awakening? What type of growth or what is the growth that gets me to peace or awakening?” The simple answer is to lose the thoughts, lose the beliefs that prevent you from being in peace, lose the beliefs that prevent you from being awake. That’s it.

Without beliefs, peace is what remains

When you were 2 or 3 years old, weren’t you in peace? Weren’t you happy? Didn’t you feel complete and good enough just as you were? When we’re 2 years old, we’re already in peace because we don’t have all the beliefs about ourselves and life that create suffering. When we’re 2 years old, regardless of whether we’re fat or skinny, we feel fine. Why is that? Because we haven’t yet been taught that fat is “bad” and skinny is “good”. Regardless of whether we’re shy or outgoing, when we’re 2 years old, we’re at peace. We don’t feel unworthy or insufficient until we learn shy is “bad” and outgoing is “good”.

By the time that we’re adults, we’ve been taught so many ideas about what’s perfect and imperfect, right and wrong, good and bad, should and shouldn’t, that we end up constantly comparing everything about ourselves, our life, and others to our ideas of perfect, good, and right… then come to the conclusion that we’re not good enough, our life isn’t good enough, nobody else is good enough, and the world isn’t good enough. So, if you want to make spiritual growth, if you want peace, growth is losing the beliefs that make you unhappy.

Spiritual growth is about losing all the beliefs that make you suffer

Spiritual growth is losing the belief that anything about you isn’t good enough, eliminating the feeling of lack and shame. Spiritual growth is losing the beliefs that make you feel resentment towards others and judge others instead of loving them. That’s it. Spiritual growth or progress is just losing beliefs. That’s all there is to it. If you want to wake up, you want to have peace, then you just need to recognize that what you believe isn’t true. Then you’re there, you’re awake, you’re at peace. That’s spiritual growth.

So, if that’s what you want, you’re welcome to check out all the free resources on this website for how to stop believing the thoughts that make you unhappy, for how to stop believing the thoughts that prevent you from waking up. If you want to be in peace, all you need to do is identify the specific thoughts that are making you unhappy and then stop believing them.

Thank you for reading this blog post about spiritual growth. If you have any questions about this, or would like some help, please feel free to contact me.

Noah Elkrief

646-205-3054

Noah@liveinthemoment.org

The post What Is Spiritual Growth & How To Have Spiritual Growth appeared first on How to live in the moment - with Noah Elkrief.

What spirituality is not – Hippies, chanting, and om signs

Hello, my name is Noah Elkrief, and in this blog post I am going to talk about what spirituality is. The term “spirituality” gets thrown around a lot. When we hear this term, there are often connotations of meditation, chanting, hippies, fire pits, om signs, and all of that type of stuff. But, the term “spirituality” really has a very specific meaning that has nothing to do with outer appearances, and that’s why I thought it might be useful to make this blog post “What is sprituality?”

As young children our job is to believe every word we hear

Generally, as we go through life, we just believe everything we’re taught. I know it may not seem that way, but bear with me for a moment and you might see what I mean. When we’re being raised as young children, our parents tell us “this is a cup” and we say “okay”, and then our parents say “this is a shirt” and we say “okay”. When we go to school, the teachers say “that is a cloud” and we say “okay”, and then they say “that is a car” and we say “okay”. That’s how it goes.

When we’re young, we’re a sponge. Our job is to learn everything we can. We’re not given this discernment what is true and what is not true. Who can I trust, who I cannot trust. We just believed everything that’s said, of course. And that doesn’t seem like a problem.

Eventually, we believe the words that create all of our suffering

When we’re young, we start out being taught about what all of the inanimate objects around us are called. But, what eventually happens is that the people around us start telling us about what is “good” and “bad”. And, of course, we just believe everything they say. That is the beginning of our suffering.

For example, when someone says “You did great!”, we think “Yay! I did great!” as if it’s true. Then, of course, when they eventually say “You didn’t do so well”, we think “Oh no, I didn’t do so well” as if it’s true. We just believe everything that everyone tells us. As we get older, when somebody tells us “I love you”, we think “Great, I am loveable”, as if their opinion is somehow a factual indication of whether we are loveable or not. Then, of course, when somebody breaks up with us and says “I don’t want to be with you anymore”, we think “Oh no! I must not be good enough” as if their opinion is true.

But, we don’t just believe everything that the people around us say… we also believe everything that society tells us through the form of the people around us, as well as all of the media. They teach us what look is good and what is bad, what personality traits are good and what are bad, what we should do in our life and what we shouldn’t, what job we should have and what we shouldn’t. We also take on our society’s ideas of what will make us happy. For example, depending on the society we grew up in, we might believe happiness comes from success, prestige, power, fame, love, marriage, children, helping the world, fulfilling potential, or something like that.

What is spirituality? It is about questioning the validity of what we have been taught

So what is spirituality? Spirituality is about stopping and questioning what we have been taught throughout our life, questioning the assumptions we have in our head, questioning what someone tells us, questioning what society believes will make us happy, questioning what we want in life.

Spirituality is simply about direct discovery. It’s about directly discovering what we want. It’s about directly discovering what is true. It’s about directly discovering what’s working for us. For example, we might have been taught that success is the key to happiness, but if we have success, then we can ask ourselves the question, “Am I happy? Is success making me happy?” If not, then we can discover success doesn’t create happiness. If we have been taught that marriage can make us happy, and we are married,  then we ask ourselves “Am I happy? Is it true that marriage creates happiness?” If we are married, but not happy, clearly marriage doesn’t create happiness.

Generally, when we are taught that something can make us happy, and we achieve this goal but aren’t happy, we just assume we don’t have enough of it. We think something along the lines of “I must not be happy because I don’t have enough…. success, wealth, love, appreciation etc.” Stop! Examine that assumption. Examine what you have been taught.

Even if we haven’t achieved the goals that we have been taught will make us happy, we can just ask ourselves “Is everyone who has what I want happy?” If not, then getting what we want must not create happiness.  Or we can ask “What makes me unhappy?” and discover that it is the thoughts that create anxiety, sadness, guilt, insecurities, judgments, resentment, etc. Then we can ask the simple question “Can achieving my goal eliminate all of the thoughts that make me unhappy? If not, then how could this goal magically make me happy?”

In addition, we can question the validity of others’ word toward us. If someone breaks up with us, we automatically believe their words to be true and think “it must be because I’m not good enough”. But, wait, is that true? How do they know? Is their opinion somehow more valid than other people’s opinions? Do they know what is good and what is bad? Where does good and bad exist? Where is it in reality?

What is spirituality? It is about directly discovering what is true

What is spirituality? It is about questioning, about direct discovery. It is not about believing anyone, not even a spiritual teacher. Same thing. Don’t believe what a teacher says, any teacher. It doesn’t matter if they’re spiritually awake, not awake, popular, not popular. Trusting any words is the opposite of spirituality. Spirituality is about directly discovering what is true for you in this moment. Most spiritual teachers are here to give you questions, exercises, pointers, guides to help you experience things for yourself, discover things for yourself.

That’s my version of spirituality. That’s how I see it. But, don’t take my word for it. If it resonates with you, if you feel that it relates to your life, okay. If you want more of this type of content or how to progress, grow, awaken, live with more peace check out the links in on the right.

If you have some questions or you’d like some help with this, please feel free to contact me. Thank you for reading this post about what is spirituality. I’ll see you around. Bye.

Noah Elkrief

646-205-3054

Noah@liveinthemoment.org

What is spirituality?

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