Dear Ones,
When troubles come into your life, what do you do to deal with them? Have you established strategies to cope with problems or do you allow them to take over your day, your life? Have you thought about the coping strategies that you use and examined them for relevance in your current life or are you still doing what you did when you were a child, a teenager, or someone much younger without the experiences and the learnings you have gained over the years?
Think about that. When your life is upset, by your own internal emotions or responses to external stimuli, or when external events upset your plans, how do you react? Children learn very early in life to react to stimulus. They learn to assess their situation and to figure out a way to get what they want or need. A tiny baby craves attention and food and dry clothing and will do whatever it takes to get what they need in the moment. A toddler learns to test the boundaries of their world by saying ‘no’ and pushing on the limits set by authority figures. Older children learn to acquiesce when a tantrum won’t give them their desired outcome.
And some adults have never learned skills beyond what they practiced as teenagers. Do you have some coping mechanisms in your skill set that are outmoded and inappropriate for your current life?
Look at some situations that you encounter in your daily life and then examine how you react in those situations. Are you awake, aware, fully conscious of your response or do you act with a ‘knee-jerk reaction’ that might have been appropriate earlier in your life but might not be appropriate today? Do you take time to pause and consider your response or are you consistently acting from habit not conscious thought?
We would tell you that most adults on Planet Earth are acting unconsciously in the 21st Century. Most are using strategies that might have worked when they were 10 years old but that are no longer appropriate. Have you ever seen an adult pout, perhaps in an adult way, when they do not get their way? Have you ever caught yourself wanting to say something a 7-year-old would say in response to something upsetting? That automatic pilot that searches your personal unconscious data base might not know that you have grown beyond the age where tantrums were appropriate, and if you are older than 2 and are reading this then tantrums are most likely not appropriate.
The person living a Conscious Life chooses very deliberately how he or she will respond to an upsetting situation. It is impossible to remove all troubles or concerns from a human life so upsetting situations will occur. You cannot prevent that. You can, however, control your response to those situations.
The best strategy for responding to upset is to have considered this before the upset occurs, when you are calmly assessing your life and your responses to stimuli. Think about situations in your recent past that have been upsetting to you. Did you respond in the moment the way you would respond today given time to be calm and consciously choose your response? Or were you on unconscious automatic pilot? Program into your tool box a new response to that situation so that, if it or something similar occurs again, you can choose a different response. Think about your overriding values and decide that you will respond to upset in accordance with what you value highly and who you wish to be.
This is especially important in dealing with your family. You might be a different problem-solver at work than the person who deals with upsetting situations at home. Examine this honestly for yourself. Can you bring some of those business skills home with you? When you are tired do you react to your children’s antics differently from the way you react when you are rested and relaxed? Do they understand the difference? Think about your spouse or partner and how you react to things that they say. Are you choosing a conscious reaction or are you being a recalcitrant child throwing a tantrum?
Be conscious. Choose your behaviors for you do have control over those. Plan your response to things that don’t go your way. You become a Peacemaker when you are not the one throwing a childish tantrum! Live a Conscious Life and you will be teaching others how to be a Peacemaker, too.
And so it is.
________________________
Please feel free to re-post this article and share it with your readers. All I ask is that you include the following information when you do:
Mystic Messages 
MUSE-INGS: Oh, how tempting a tantrum can be!
July 13, 2010 — RosemaryAren’t there times when you would really like to throw yourself onto the floor and bang your fists while kicking your feet and screaming at the top of your lungs? Who of us hasn’t seen a little one doing just this and envied them their ability to drop down to the floor in the middle of a department store and let their feelings out?
I remember stepping over my daughter when she threw her tantrums, allowing her to cry herself out. She got so smart that she would move to a room with a carpet on the floor so that she wasn’t throwing herself down onto a hard kitchen or foyer floor where the tantrum wasn’t so comfortable!
But most adults have eschewed such behavior. Or have we, really? Maybe we don’t get down on the floor but do we shut down and ignore others when we are doing our ‘adult pout’? Do we ‘accidentally’ say or do something that causes hurt to another when what we really want to do is throw ourselves on the floor and scream at the unfairness of it all?
Being honest with yourself, can you see a way in which you might still have some of the strategies you developed as a child working in your life today? It’s easy to wish that the world was fair – which it is because we all get our share of lessons, some easy, some difficult — and that everyone around us treated us exactly the way we wished they would – which might be easier if we didn’t expect them all to be mind readers. So what do we do if we find a coping mechanism at work in our life that we no longer desire to choose?
The best strategy to develop is what I call ‘The Pause Button.’ Can you learn to catch yourself reaching into your unconscious database and pulling out an inappropriate response? Hit The Pause Button so you can be conscious about your choice of reaction/behavior. This is what the old ‘count to 10’ maxim is all about. Pause. Reflect. Act consciously.
As we move through life we are giving challenges to our personal growth and how we react to stimulus is one of the ongoing life lessons with which we must learn to deal. What challenges do you face that you must find resources to handle? Who in your life is bringing you practice lessons in finding your ‘Pause Button’? And who knows exactly how to ‘push your buttons’ so that you find it nearly impossible to pause?
Challenges are with us. Our response to challenges can change with each encounter. Living a Conscious Life requires that we learn to grow through all our experiences. We’re not allowed to throw ourselves onto the floor and do a tantrum anymore, even when that unconscious little child within is begging to be allowed to do just that. Find another way. Think about it now and tell your unconscious mind to latch onto the new, preferred response before it goes back to childhood memories and chooses that old strategy. Plan to hit ‘The Pause Button’ when somebody pushes your other buttons. Breathe and consider. And make sure that your new choice isn’t just an adult form of that toddler’s tantrum on the carpet!
________________________
Please feel free to re-post this article and share it with your readers. All I ask is that you include the following information when you do: