How to Achieve Emotional Balance | Jack Canfield

Hi, welcome back. I'd like to talk to you about this month's challenge. As you know, every month we've been doing a challenge, or maybe you want to call it an experiment. Living your life as a set of 30 day experiments to see the difference it makes in your life. And so today we're asking everyone in the Canfield community to focus on your emotions with the idea of how can we create more peace, harmony, love and joy and happiness in our life as opposed to stress and anger and fear and grief and all those other what we often call neg negative emotions. And so it's really critical that you make a commitment. I'm going to teach you a couple of techniques today that'll help you do that. The first is meditation. Now I'm sure you've heard about meditation. If you're already doing it, great. Make a commitment for the month to meditate every day. Even if it's just for three to five minutes. Just be so you can check that off. Just if you've never meditated before, all you have to really do is sit, close your eyes. Now you don't have to sit in a cross legged position on the floor. If you're more comfortable in a chair, that's great. You know, turn off all the distractions so you're not going to be interrupted by your phone and all that. And to simply close your eyes and to focus on your breathing. And you can focus on the sensation of the rise and fall of your chest and stomach, but. Or you can focus on the sensation of the air coming in through your nose. It tends to be colder as it's coming in and warmer as it's going out. And just observing that, just being the witness to that. And then thoughts are going to arise, memories, ideas, concerns, worries, whatever it might be, just allow yourself to watch them to be in the observer position. Now the other thing, if you want to do some more sophisticated meditations, I have a program called Awakening Power and you can go to my website and go to the store. And the awakening power has 12 meditations and guided visualizations that you can use. I find when I first started meditating, having someone guiding me made it a whole lot easier. You can also go online, go to YouTube. There are kinds of meditations there as well. But the idea of having someone guiding you, it can be very, very helpful. Also some relaxing music, often called spa music or environmental music, meditation music. It's also good to have in the background. It kind of relaxes your mind a little bit. Another thing you can do and I've recommended this to people over the years. I'm going to recommend it again. There's a woman named Byron, Katie, who wrote a book called Loving what Is. And the whole concept in Katie's work is that the only thing that upsets us is our belief that something shouldn't be the way it is. It's not the event, it's our thoughts about it. You know, Bob shouldn't have gotten angry. Inga should have been nicer to her daughter. My daughter shouldn't have left a mess in her room. The President shouldn't have done that, The Congress shouldn't have done that, or this person should have paid their bill. Whatever it might be. It's not the event. It's our belief and our thought that it should be different. That creates the pain, that creates the anger, that creates the sadness, the discomfort, the stress in our lives. So she teaches a four step process, or it's really five. First of all, you think about what is the thing that you're upset about. And then you ask yourself four questions. And you do something called a turnaround. Goes like this. So the first question, is it really true? Is it true? Is it true that Bob shouldn't have gotten angry, or Inga shouldn't have yelled at her daughter, or whatever it might have been. Then you ask yourself, can I really know? Is it really absolutely true? Well, maybe my daughter need to be yelled at. Because that's the only thing she was listening to at that moment in time and had to get yelled at to get her attention and realize how strongly Inga felt about it. So my answer all today, I can never know for sure that that thing shouldn't have happened the way it did. Maybe there's some karma being played out. Maybe it's necessary for someone to develop some quality they need to develop whatever it might be. And then you ask the question, who am I when I believe this thought? And the answer for me is always angry, upset, distant from the person judging them, feeling bad, not connected, whatever. And then who would I be without that thought? And then the answer is, relax, calm, loving, peaceful, related in connection with that person. Not distant, all that good stuff. And then you do what's called a turnaround. You know, Inga should have got mad at her daughter. You know, her daughter should have got mad at Inga. You know, I should get mad at Inga, I should get mad at the daughter. I shouldn't get mad. You go through a number of questions, turnarounds like that. Like I remember once I thought Inga should listen to me. When I got to the turnaround, I went, I should listen to me. She would be telling me something about my diet and I'd be getting upset with her. And then I would want her to know what, maybe I'm stressed out. I want to eat this thing. And then I realized I don't listen to myself because myself is telling me not to do that. And I. And so it's a very, very powerful tool. And you can go to thework.com and you can download what she calls the worksheet. And that's something you can take yourself through. And it's free. And so I would encourage you to do that. Another thing is smiling. When you smile, you actually create more joy in your life. Just a simple act of smiling. Now there's two kind of smiles. Smiling at the outside world and something we call the inner smile. You can literally close your eyes, put a smile on your face and. And send a smile to your brain. Send a smile to your throat, to your heart, to your lungs, to your kidneys, to your liver, to your body, all the way down to your toes. And that actually is a way of giving joyful energy to your body and experiencing joy in yourself. The simple act of smiling. The other thing is to develop that observer position that we talked about in the meditation. In your daily life, is it possible to just notice what's going on without getting upset about it, just to allow it to be the way it is? You know, I just had a travel day. We would all say from hell not too long ago. And I missed a connection because a flight was canceled. I had to drive from Orange county up to LA to catch a different plane. It was going to take me where I wanted to go. When I got there, I missed that connection. Had to spend the night in Toronto with no luggage because it had gone on before me. And I. I literally was. I was sweaty. Cause I'd run through the airport. I didn't have any of the normal things. You'd have pajamas and so forth. I normally sleep with a CPAP machine. Didn't have that. And I just kept noticing it. I didn't get upset. It was just called, well, this is what happened. That's possible to stay in a state of neutrality if you just make that an intention. Two last things. Number one, there's a wonderful program called Braintap. What it is, it's an app. You can get it at the App Store and called Braintap. And you put the earphones in and it takes you on a journey that synchronizes the two sides of your brain and gives you the rest. You would have if you had like a two hour nap in just about 20 minutes. So I would really encourage you to check out Braintap and there are other programs like that coming online all the time, new technology that you can use. And finally, I would talk about laughter. Laughter always leaves us with joy. The only channels I listen to on XM and Sirius Radio is to the comedy channels and I just laugh. Everywhere I drive, I'm laughing. I don't want to be listening to cnn, msnbc, Fox News. And hearing all the negative news doesn't change anything. I can't change it. And so I just want to be having fun and laughing and wherever I get to, when I get there, I'm happy. Every time you laugh, you secrete endorphins into your brain. Endorphins are a natural opiate that make you high. Now, literally, you can have a source of laughter like you're watching a comedy movie, listen to the comedy channels on your radio, etc. Or you can simply choose to laugh. There's something called laughter yoga that was started in India where groups get together and they just laugh. In my seminars, I'll often ask people to simply close their eyes and I've said, I'm going to start laughing. I want you to start laughing with me on the count of three and I'll just go, ha, ha, ha ha. And everybody starts laughing. And after a few minutes, nobody can stop because everyone's cueing off everyone else's laughter. We have repressed laughter as much as we have repressed feelings like anger and things like that. So simply choosing to laugh can make you very, very happy. So if you need a source like a comedy tape or CD or something like that, or simply choose to laugh, there's a lot to laugh at in the world. So laughter is a great idea. If you've ever come to one of my live seminars, you'll see me start with cartoons every session. Why? Because as people laugh, not only do they enjoy themselves more, but they also remember more of what they learn. And by the way, we'll be doing a number of seminars throughout the year. And go to my website, go to my place where it says trainings and look on down. We'd love to have you come and experience that experience for yourself along with all the other things that you can do to transform your life. So stay happy, use these techniques, and I look forward to seeing you next month. Hey, thanks for watching today. And if you like what you saw, make sure to like it. Share it with a friend who may need it, and subscribe to my channel if you'd like to receive more videos like this. And if you'd like more information about the topic we talked about today, go to my website@jackcampfield.com for some resources that you can use to apply even more of what you learned today. Thanks again for watching.