EverydayOasis.com

For almost 30 years, Dr. Dean Ornish has directed clinical research demonstrating, for the first time, that comprehensive lifestyle changes may begin to reverse even severe coronary heart disease, without drugs or surgery. Excerpted from his book Love and Survival.

One of the comprehensive lifestyle changes he discussed was to rediscover inner sources of peace, joy and well-being. The idea behind Everyday Oasis.com was to help people realize the importance of learning to relax, renew and reconnect on a daily basis. Dr. Ornish demonstrates that there are real measurable health benefits to learning to relax. And learning to really reconnect at a deep level with ourselves and then with others will be like a daily dose of aspirin only easier on the stomach.

So exactly how do you reconnect and start enjoying the inner sources of peace, joy and well-being? To start, you have to realize that you are the creator of your emotional responses to everything that happens in your life. Yes, it is true, no matter how much you want to blame your responses on everyone and everything, in reality, you are the one who controls the response and we all know what a highly emotional negative response does to your heart rate, breathing, muscle tension, brain waves, and nervous system.

How many times a day do you end up in a situation where you are having a negative interaction? Now think about the last time you looked at someone with complete love and compassion and gentleness. Think of that picture in your mind and feel those feelings, not just for a moment but really let yourself feel those feelings down deep inside you.

Concentrate that emotional response of love, compassion and gentleness so that you begin to feel it permeate your entire body, muscle group by muscle group until your whole body vibrates from that emotion. That is one way to reconnect yourself, mind, body and spirit. You become disconnected when you feel one thing, and think another, and your body does something totally different. We spend most of our lives disconnected. How many times have you said, “I need to take better care of myself.”
But then you don’t work out or you grab fast food that has no nutritional value and you allow yourself to wallow in negative thoughts about yourself and/or others. You’ve heard the statement –

Everything you have in your life began as a thought.

Try choosing positive, life – affirming thoughts so that the life you lead will be the life you really wanted to lead.

The choice starts way before something happens. We all know that things are going to happen in our lives, so we must first begin with understanding ourselves and what we value for ourselves. When you come from an understanding of what you value then you can make up your mind ahead of time and decide how you will handle situations that come up in life in a more positive way.

You can be proactive and decide that you will not give others the power to make you happy or sad or angry or depressed. You can decide that your feelings come from inside of you and are a chemical reaction to the myriad of previous emotional responses you’ve had over the years in similar situations.

The great thing about knowing this is that you can take a proactive stance right now about how the rest of your life, beginning today, will go. You can begin to change the reaction by stopping and taking a good long look at your response and then realizing that at this very moment you can choose a better response. Practice this mode of reprogramming your negative automatic responses and see what a difference it makes in how you feel and how others react to you.

You have the power to change your world and it resides within you. Taking the time out of your day to reconnect with yourself and start directing that power in the way you really want it to go will be the most beneficial thing you can do for yourself and all those around you.