Onward and Upward: How to Supercharge Your Life to Overcome Difficulties and Live With Joy and Fulfilment

By Antonica Daniela Wilson

I think Health is the new Wealth! Onward and Upward invites the readers to think about their own 'wealth', asking "How rich are you?"

We live in a lo

• Language: English
• Publisher: Agape Coaching Institute
• Release date: Apr 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9780648494706

Antonica Daniela Wilson

Romanian born with a background in visual arts worked as a stage designer. Immigrated to Brisbane Australia in 1997, studied Bachelor of Nursing, Post Grad in Health Promotion, Dip of Life Coaching, Adv Dip of Christian Life Coaching (USA), Hypnotherapy (USA), Post Grad Cert in Ministries, Dip of Arts, Master Practitioner in Neuro-Linguistic Programing, studied Emotional Freedom technique, Trauma Release exercises and mindfulness

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Introduction

We All Want to Be Happy, Don’t We?

If you were to ask anyone what they want in life, some might say financial stability, good looks, a life partner, travel, good health, or fun. The list covers the spectrum from the most trivial to the most essential to life and depends on the state of mind of the person when asked the question.

Not many people are certain about what they want, so they say something general, like, happiness. If you ask the same people what they need, versus want, a fuse blows in their head. The truth is, most of us can’t articulate the difference. Ask the question when all is going well, you’ll get one set of answers. Ask when troubles abound, and you’ll get another set. For example, you can have wealth, good looks, and a beautiful family, but if you have health problems, nothing else matters.

If you have great health, holistically, a healthy body, mind, and spirit, then you can plow through anything. Highs and lows even out and you always come out on top. You might say it’s like surfing the waves of life, where the joy of being alive is always there, even when life’s adversities challenge your balance. Even then, your light inside only gets dimmed, but never goes out, your joy is still there and never truly leaves you. You can learn how to reach this state of joy awareness, for yourself first, and then you can teach your children how they can too ‘surf’ the waves of rejections, disappointments, disapprovals, not fitting in, not being perfect, or whatever life throws at any of us.

To live like this, with never-ending joy and a still peace inside, to be like the rock in the middle of the storm, you need to learn how to respond to your life challenges, instead of reacting, with the ability to chose your thoughts and change your emotional states. You can reach optimal health and well-being, but optimum coping strength only comes from the harmony between your mind, body, and spirit. Anything less invites problems.

To look youthful, you need to feel youthful, and that comes from inside, from loving yourself. You might like to try the H.S Diet; a lifestyle wellness program that I used and does not involve punishing your body with fierce regimens or surgery. If you want to lose weight, you need to be compassionate toward yourself first, and work with your body, not against it. The H.S. Diet (explained in Your Body section) allows you to eat, exercise, sleep and behave in a way that is optimal for you. This is no ‘one size fits all’ wellness plan. The program is tailored for you specifically and enables you to feel joy when you are doing it because it is your new lifestyle. In this venture, your mind, beliefs, and body are all on-board with what you are doing, so you feel loved when you are doing it, rather than punished!

A positive approach applies to everything. If you want to be successful, you must love what you do, and do it with love. Rocker, Marc Anthony wrote, If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. It’s true. Just imagine how it would be to get paid for your hobby, enough to make a living out of it? This is the most desirable outcome for everyone’s career.

We are taught in schools to find and follow our passion, but with the silent assumption that it will immediately attract wealth and happiness. In reality, this is a romanticised view, because it is like a coin with two faces. If you are not able to make a prosperous living out of your passion, that does not mean that you failed and cannot live with joy. We all have to make a living and put food on the table, so, making a living from what you love may not be possible for a short or long time.

The important point to remember is, We are not what we do, but we do what we are. Even if you have to clean homes to pay your bills, it does not mean you are a house cleaner. You are what you think you are, working towards fulfilling your passion, whatever it may be. You can apply your true self to your paid job and find joy, you can volunteer, or develop your passion into a hobby, a business, or find an outlet for expressing who you are, but with gratitude for your paid job. Just keep checking in with your ‘joy levels’, paying attention to the heart being in charge, having a voice, not your mind’s reasoning. If you ‘shut’ your heart down, and let the mind rule over, here it comes… Disease.

If you live with an attitude of gratitude, expressing your true self lovingly, and learn the skills of dealing with life’s challenges, joy is guaranteed to follow, and if you are determined, success too.

What are your priorities? What do you value most, and how does it make you feel and behave? Do you know if it is good for you, does it serve your goals and make you happy? Are you happy? So happy that you live with deep joy and fulfillment and there is nothing else you would want more or could do more to bring more happiness to you, or your loved ones, or into the world?

Nowadays, when it is so easy to stay connected, we are most disconnected and are addicted to seeking connections, approval, significance, belonging, and understanding. Unfortunately, we are becoming more and more fragmented, as we lost the ability to keep the deep loving connection even with ourselves, let alone with others. I want to show you how to access and work with your mind, body, and spirit, so you are whole, aligned, at peace, fulfilled, joyous and able to look further than yourself, make deep and loving connections with yourself and others. Let’s begin with the mind, as training the mind is tricky. For reasons that are beyond our capacity to understand fully, the mind is the most troublesome to train, and yet the most powerful. Some call it the battlefield between our true self and the world. However, we are only as strong as our minds.

Your Mind

Your mind is what makes you, you. Show me a woman with a gorgeous body, a truckload of money, and a screwed up mind, and I’ll show you a sad and troubled soul.

Your mind can be your most terrible master or most faithful servant. It can be your best friend and best ally, or your most snicking and undermining ‘frienemy.’ You are only as strong as your mind!

Your mind can make you fat or slim, get you to take up smoking or give up smoking, have self-destructive behaviours or be invincible.

Your mind only needs training, an exercise that is much easier than you might imagine.

The Mind and How it Works

Your Will Is Not Your Mind, but It Is Most Powerful

We had come a long way since the times when we didn’t know what was inside of us and how it all worked. We have learned about the workings of the heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, and a lot more. We know what we should eat – and not eat – and the importance of exercise and avoiding stress to keep these organs functioning at their best. But how about the mind?

We know a lot about our ‘hardware,’ the brain, but how much do we know about the ‘software,’ our mind?

What Is the Mind?

The mind is not the brain; the mind transcends the brain. We need first to get clear about what most folks mean when they use the term ‘mind’. The mind most often refers to the seat of consciousness, seemingly separable from the body. The awareness we call ‘mind’ is what we are in contact with and know its presence in our conscious state. But this is only the tip of the ‘iceberg,’ to give you a visual understanding; your mind is much greater and has more power than your conscious mind, whose best quality is its will power. If you can learn to harness this, to use your will, how to focus at will on what you want, you would be amazed at what you could do. And this is a skill that can be learned.

Our mind is the ‘software’ of our fleshy brain. And what amazing software it is! Structured in multilayers, each layer has its database, different ‘processor’ and processing speeds, and its own memory. Each layer has a specialised function that can work independently, whilst still interdependent with the others. These layers of the mind can work together in synergy, simultaneously, and in smooth harmony with each other.

However, as I expect you have discovered, these layers sometimes do not work together. When the layers are out of sync, changing lifestyle behaviours are not easy to implement, even if your conscious mind desires to achieve those changes. This further affects our emotions and actions.

When all the mind layers are in total harmony, some call it enlightenment, some call it being closer to God, some a state of bliss, some just simply being at peace and living with joy, but it is very desirable and, to some extent, possible to achieve. Note, I did not say easy! But this is not the purpose of this book; we will aim a little lower than that, for something accessible to everyone and easier to achieve: emotional balance or living with joy and fulfillment

An emotional balance that will enable you to live with passion and purpose, with an ever-present joy, and have a harmonious mind-heart and heart-mind relationship, a loving approach to life and living with gratitude. It also presents the possibility of attracting and manifesting the life you want (giving that what you want does not affect anybody else in any way).

Think of a time when you felt your heart and mind didn’t agree on something. How difficult was it to make that choice and which path did you follow, your mind, or your heart? Was it the right choice?

Mind ‘Anatomy and Physiology’

Knowledge Is Power – The Science You Can Apply to Your Life

We all are born with a mind, and it is wonderfully and powerfully made, ready to take in information and continuously updating it to create our identity. It gives us our uniqueness, making each of us a one-of-a-kind, never-to-be-duplicated individual, different from anyone that has ever lived or will ever live. Even identical twins are different by the way their mind works, the way their brain expresses the same world around them. As you are born, your mind is already structured and layered to be ready for the new life, and here are the players.

The Conscious Mind – blank and ready to learn, soaking all the information like a sponge (as we see clearly during early childhood).

The Subconscious Mind – also born blank, and it will become who you are deep down.

The Unconscious, or Primal Mind – the most automatic part of you and programmed for survival, just like any other creature on the face of the Earth.

Please see in the Mind Theory figure below for another level, a characteristic developed later (around age 9-12, depending on the individual’s development), as a ‘gatekeeper’ between the conscious and subconscious layers, and it is called The Critical Mind.

As part of the subconscious mind, there is also the so-called super-conscious mind as some psychologists call it, or higher-self, or as most of us know it: the spirit. This super-conscious mind is the one that allows you to connect with another and the greater divine intelligence. It is sometimes called gut feeling, knowing in the heart, intuition and, hunch.

The Conscious Mind

When You Can’t Run, You Walk, When You Can’t Walk, You Crawl, and When You Can’t Crawl, You Find Someone to Carry You

The conscious mind is the will and the ego mind, the one that people are aware of and use every day, thinking that is the one in charge. This is the mind that we associate with who we are. This mind is the one that we try so avidly to develop, enhance, train, assess, and raise its IQ. Yes, it seems, due to plasticity, we can raise our IQ. The mind loves to compete and be the best, make decisions, thinks, elaborates, solves, perfects, protects and has a strong will that can overcome anything in the short term. It is more like a very advanced life navigation tool that can lead and take control of anything, whilst in our state of awareness. It is capable of greatness and is continuously evolving, and there is nothing wrong with that; it is the best asset we have.

However, it is the same one that chatters and does all the judging, the labeling, and the picking. It has been designed to be a very good tool, a real survival tool, and its main job is to be screening and broadcasting all the time, observing, analysing, labeling, sorting, perfecting, improving, comparing, being concerned with the future and fitting in, avoiding pain and promoting pleasure, thinking, thinking, thinking… analysing, analysing, analysing…protecting, protecting, protecting.

How well is your conscious mind working? Does it obey you, or does it overpower you? Does it allow you to be who you want when you want? Is your conscious mind more like a naughty and loud child, or more like a listening and wise counsel? Which do you prefer?

We are where we are today because of this mind. It has been protecting us from famine and predators, and it can learn lessons of survival and apply them to future situations from only one event! The downside is that it was designed to work under a high volume of stimuli or stressors for short periods, and in between be relaxed. You may say that it is like a sprinter, that can make a great sprint for short times, or might even be able to run a marathon at times, but there is no way that he could be running non-stop, as a day to day lifestyle. And this is what we are trying to do to our minds these days.

The caveman’s mind was unchallenged beyond finding some animal to kill for food and avoiding becoming a meal. Today, we have the ‘predators’ and ‘famine’ of the modern-day dawning down on us 24/7…and you might wonder why we ‘malfunction’?

We can use our mind as our ally (if we train it), or it can be our worst enemy (if we leave it to its floundering). Imagine if you could train your mind to like the foods that are good for you and hate those that are not, or enjoying exercising? Your mind can serve your best interest, but you need to train it with love and nurture, not by force because if you are a hard master, you can create a mind that is like a disobedient ‘servant.’ Your mind wants to serve you; the key is love, balance, and joy.

Learning mindfulness and somatic awareness are a few good tools to help you train your mind to be capable of communicating with your body and ‘read’ the environment outside and inside your body. Women had this ‘six sense’ from a long time ago; we just forgot how to use it. And men can learn how to tap into their extra senses too, we all are capable of fine-tuning the language of our mind. I have to use Gerry Robert’s example, from Black Card Books, how he was describing this as the Captain and the Crew. The conscious mind is the captain giving the orders, and the subconscious mind is the crew, totally obedient and executing the orders blindly, but only the crew has the power to make things happen.

What is your ‘captain’ (conscious mind) keeps telling to your ‘crew’ (powerful subconscious mind)? Does it say, Don’t smoke; don’t eat that cake; don’t buy those shoes, you don’t need them? You may think you are good trying to discipline yourself, but remember, your ‘crew’ cannot interpret ‘don’t’ and ‘not’ just like gender and label. It only understands simple commands, by words, or even better picture, and best by all: words with pictures and feelings, because your ‘crew’ operates best using feelings. So, when you say those words above, your subconscious hears, Smoke eat cake; buy those shoes you need them.

If you focus on what to eat to lose weight, you keep thinking about food, right, so, pictures, words, and feelings around food will be in your mind? So, what your ‘crew’ does, it obeys, and brings you more food by increasing cravings and social situations that bring food…and so it goes. You need to know how to use your mind to support your desires, not to sabotage them. You can try with simple things, but you need to give some of the toughest love for this training, as your mind will try to escape or fight you back! You need to be a tough ‘PT’ of your lovely