Russell Simmons Eptiomizes Meditation’s Benefits

“Yoga has really helped me feel more comfortable with the idea of being present, the simplest idea of spirituality, the power of now.” -Russell Simmons

In my last post, I explained that hypnotherapy, is one form of meditation, and when practiced regularly, it will markedly improve the amount of success you achieve in your personal and professional lives; Russell Simmons epitomizes this concept. I believe it was last Tuesday when I saw Larry King interview Russell on his show Larry King Now.

Larry and Russell were discussing Russell’s new book, Success Through Stillness: Meditation Made Simple, and Russell explained how his discovery of meditation (specifically yoga) changed his life. I’m sure you’ve heard of Russell’s prepaid debit card called the Rush card – ironically, that card bears part of his nickname before he discovered meditation, Uncle Rush! In this clip, Russell tells Larry the story of how exactly he became addicted to the powerful peace of mind meditation gives him and how it’s impacted his career (watch from the beginning until about 7m30s):

Russell Simmons on Yoga and Meditation

What struck me the most is Russell’s cogent explanation of meditation being a practice; it may take a few minutes for our impatient minds to calm down, but once they do, stressful problems are easily solved. We must remember two key points:

1. The adage that “Rome was not built in a day,” and

2. the fable of the tortoise and the hare

Faster results and instant gratification is not always best.

Russell Simmons reaped such astounding benefits from the simple practice of meditation, and you can too!!

Now that you know that simple changes in your lifestyle can make a huge difference, I want to share with you the many ways we can transform our own lives by “exploiting” the expectations society places on us. We all have to eat, so why not use the  foods we have (ideally, organic) to continue to build and reinforce our Aphrodite Attitudes? The same idea can be applied for makeup, skin care products and fashion.

How Hypnotherapy Helps You Succeed!

Hypnotherapy audios help illuminate your strengths.

With my last post, I hope that I was able to elucidate that hypnotherapy is NOT the sorcery that some ultraconservatives would have you believe; rather, it serves as a means of self-empowerment. Hypnotherapy is just one method of meditation that you can use to begin your journey to building a solid and healthy Aphrodite Attitude.

I am a firm believer in the power of hypnotherapy because it has yielded consistent results since my first experience with it back in my junior year of high school. I can’t remember exactly why, but my social studies teacher said she wanted to reward us with a relaxing exercise. I think she saw the stress of the college application process was starting to wear on us (and to make matters worse, we had just experienced the unsettling events of September 11, 2001!). We began by closing our eyes and taking several deep breaths. Then, in a hushed tone, she told us to let the stress from our feet, shins and calves melt away – I’m assuming that the exercise itself only lasted for maybe five minutes because it was so effective that I actually fell asleep! When she was done, it felt as if I had been in a deep sleep for about an hour and I had this incredible sense of peace and determination that made every other responsibility I had seem easy.

I would love it if we all had the freedom to set aside about 20 to 30 minutes every morning (just after you wake up) and every night (right before you go to bed). Those are the ideal times because you are the most receptive to the messages of empowerment – remember that hypnotherapy is not meant to put you to sleep, but place you in a deep enough trance that its messages of empowerment sink in most effectively.

However, I know that life gets in the way (usually when we try to do anything to improve ourselves). I guess that is the universe’s way of testing your dedication to yourself and you can get around that test by starting small. If your life is unusually hectic right now, you can listen to an audio once a week and build up to making it a daily habit. Remember that Rome was not built in a day, so finding the perfect cornerstone for you is worth the time and effort.

Here are some free hypnotherapy audios that can help you see that no matter what your circumstances are, you CAN AND WILL break through them!

1. I found Ray Sullivan via Google search; I listened to his first audio when I was having a really stressful day with school and finding a new job and it was just what I needed to get through the rest of my day.
2. I’ve listened to a few of Joseph Clough’s audios over the last five years and I really love how extensive his collection is. Another great thing about him is that his audios are usually nine or ten minutes long, so they can fit in to any hectic lifestyle.

Another important thing to remember is that hypnotherapy is the most effective when you have a coach you trust and that will take some time. I must note that great hypnotherapists, you can truly connect with, can prove that they’ve been certified in the process (and when you’ve found someone you connect with, I highly suggest you see if you can make them your “mindset success coach”).

I’ve been listening to various hypnotherapy audios for about five years. At first it was very sporadic because I was trying to find the right coach for me; that changed in June 2013 when I found my mindset success coach, Jenn August. Her audios genuinely resonate with me because she asks me to visualize golden staircases, doors and suns – my class at Wellesley College renamed ourselves “The Golden Class of 2007” because we weren’t fond of our class color: Big Bird Yellow.

I listen to one of Jenn’s audios, in the morning and at night, at least three times as week. If life gets too hectic and I skip it for a week or two, I can absolutely notice a change in my outlook. It’s not that I lose faith in myself – It’s just that society’s proclivity to be so pessimistic can be overwhelming (especially since I’m known as the happy-go-lucky one in my social circles).

Once you’ve found your mindset success coach, you’re ready to move on to the last, and probably most important step in reinforcing your new meditation practice: doing at least one thing every day to remind yourself that you deserve to treat yourself as the goddess you ARE!

Again, you can start with the things we have to do every day and eventually, you’ll want to find other ways to pamper yourself. A good place to start is by improving the tasks we do on a daily basis anyway: eating, bathing, and sleeping. In my next few posts, I’ll share some of the small adjustments I made that completely changed my life for the better!

Daily Meditation and Your Aphrodite Attitude

Meditation and hypnotherapy audios are two INCREDIBLE methods to erase the Negative Nellies in our lives and rebalance our focus.

If you are ready to join me in building a healthy Aphrodite Attitude, I’ll give you the cornerstone of the new mentality we’ll build together: daily meditation.

Remember the examples of the “acceptable” milestones we are bombarded with incessantly from a very young age? Well, to erase those you need to have a new recording ready to play at a moment’s notice (especially when the haters will do their damnedest to knock you down!).

The way I broke through those stupid boxes was twofold: I had a picture of a woman dressed as a queen taped to my wall (above my bed) and I found a daily hypnotherapy audio I could play in the morning and just before I went to bed. I know some of you might be a little wary about hypnotherapy because mainstream society views that as “hocus pocus,” but if you think about it, you’ve experienced hypnotherapy many times in your life (and if you’re a mom or older sibling, you’ve actually done it as well!).

Remember when you were a child and you had a bad dream? What would you do? I ran into my parents room and clung to my mother and sobbed uncontrollably. Without fail my mom would hug me and let me know I was going to be OK. After a few minutes, she’d take me back to my room and stay with me until I fell asleep again. She’d help me fall asleep by singing my favorite lullaby in a very hushed tone. It’d only take 10 or 15 minutes before my eyelids got heavier and heavier and I eventually fell back into a peaceful, deep sleep.

That is all hypnotherapy is; using hushed tones and positive messages to relieve stress and replace negative thoughts and messages from the world at large with messages of empowerment.

Don’t worry about whether what people would think of you if they knew you listened to these incredible audios because YOU are the focus. I know I felt a little weird when I first started to include audios in my daily routine, but after a couple weeks, I noticed a huge change! Before I started listening to the audios, I’d take every criticism to heart and I’d dwell on it for days. After the audios became an integral part of my routine, I noticed that it was so much easier to tune out the negative people in my life and the different tactics they’d use to bring me down.

Again, reprogramming your mentality will take some time, but every little bit helps.

Let’s Build a HEALTHY Aphrodite Attitude

As I’m sure you all know, I’ve loved Greek mythology for as long as I can remember, especially Aphrodite because of her unshakable confidence in her beauty and sex appeal. After I wrote my last post, I thought of another goddess I admired, Psyche; I loved her because of her steadfast determination to fight for what she wants. When she lost her love, Eros, she happily completed the labors Aphrodite assigned to her, regardless of how demeaning and in the end, she married Eros in a great celebration blessed by all of the other gods and goddesses.

In today’s society, Merriam-Webster gives two distinct definitions of the word “psyche.” The first relates to the English translation of the Greek word, psychē, which refers to a person’s soul, personality and mind. Definition #2 refers the way everyone (especially clinical psychologists) have a proclivity to “anticipate correctly the intentions or actions of [someone.]” On the surface, these definitions seem to be polar opposites, but in truth they are interconnected.

A well-respected journal of psychology, “Psychology Today” does an excellent job of melding the two definitions. In my last post, I detailed the three critical aspects of a HEALTHY Aphrodite Attitude, the most important being an understanding that we are inherently flawed, but our flaws are NOT fatal. In fact, they are just as, if not more important, to defining who we are as our strengths. When properly understood and harnessed, your flaws can and will become strengths.

Many women have a broken psyche as a result of the many pressures we face from society. Think about some of the boxes we’re bombarded with from infancy:

1. You have to be a certain dress size or you’re fat and ugly,
2. If you don’t get married and have a family by this age, you’ll be relegated to the life of an unwanted spinster,
3. Follow this career path and keep your opinions to yourself or you’ll be known as a bitch, and so forth.

Whenever I start to feel defeated by the pressures of society, I visualize two trees, one broken and a grand old oak tree. Every once in a while branches break off in a big storm, but that DOES NOT stop the tree from growing. Rather, the tree takes the time to get to know its wound and heals it the best way it knows how. When it is given enough time, the tree will replace that broken branch with two stronger, more beautiful branches. This is a tree after a massive storm:

Dove recently released a sad statistic: only 4% of women in the world consider themselves beautiful

If you’re willing to go on this journey with me and rebuild your Aphrodite Attitude, I want to make your psyche look like this:

An ancient oak studies its injuries and takes all the time it needs to grow stronger, more beautiful branches.

Our goal is simply this: do as an oak tree and absorb whatever criticisms are directed at us and use them to our advantage. It NEVER frets over a broken branch… it studies it’s faults and then takes the time to not only heal itself but grow two bigger and stronger branches in its place. And just like an ancient oak, this will not happen overnight; it will take dedication, but EVERY step you take is important.

Aphrodite Attitude Redefined

Embracing your inner goddess means honestly contemplating whether all three parts of you (mind, body and spirit) are truly in harmony on a regular basis.

A few days ago I had a webinar from one of my business mentors playing while I was cooking my lunch and at the time I didn’t fully understand why. Then, just as I was starting to tune the audio out, she mentioned how she almost lost the rights to use one of her tag lines in a legal proceeding. The slogan she referred to reads as follows: “Remove your blocks so your business rocks!”

Unbeknownst to me, playing that webinar was the best thing I could have done for myself and for y’all. I’ve been pondering why the tag line resonated with me as much as it did, and I realized why: I’m ignoring a major block of my own!

While I absolutely LOVE helping y’all learn about the amazing healing properties of food, I understand now that that is not my only mission. To serve y’all to the best of my ability, I know that I have to stay true to myself and embrace EVERY aspect of a complete Aphrodite Attitude, especially the mental component! I could give you advice on infinite external tools you can use to improve your self-esteem, but if I continue to be negligent in acknowledging that we need to discuss the mental component as well, I am not fully honoring my mission.

From this point forward, I want to use this blog to help you embrace, develop and maintain your Aphrodite Attitude. In order to do that, you have to want to examine the following:

1. Your willingness to acknowledge that a HEALTHY state of mind allows you to admit you’re flawed (and that your flaws are just as beautiful as your strengths, just like Aphrodite),
2. Examples of strong, confident women who have the the courage to break down and eradicate the societal compulsion to force every aspect of your life into a perfect box, and
3. External tools that will reinforce our stronger senses of self-worth, including (but not limited to) balancing your psyche, proper nutrition (weight loss/gain is a bonus!!) & skin care/makeup.

Is Your Weight Loss Program Foundationally Sound?

I’ve been trying to find a way to verbalize how important your mindset is when you’re determined to be healthier, but Ellie said it better than I ever could!

Enjoy!

New Creations Ministries

It’s the end of January and once-determined dieters are falling by the wayside every day. Why? Discouragement, boredom, distractions . . . all influence decisions. The most important reason for failure however, is that their program wasn’t built on a firm foundation to begin with!

Until one asks “Why do I want to do this?” it’s like slathering paint over moldy dry wall. The underlying problem always returns. It’s important to unmask the emotional and psychological reasons why one uncontrollably eats in the first place. It’s painful facing up to the truth.  It is so much easier to procrastinate and hide from it than to rip away the revealing scars in our memory.

One of my patients had been horribly abused as a child and theorized that if she hid her body under layers of fat, no man would find her attractive. God lifted her out of her despair when she realized that she had value in His eyes…

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Russell Simmons’ #1 Piece of Advice for Successful Women: Stillness

Best business advice EVER!

Aside from Bethenny’s passion to inspire women to go for their dreams, I LOVE how she brings different people on to showcase what success looks like.

I’ve always adored Russell Simmons’ attitude towards business and being an entrepreneur. I love how he’s not afraid of failure — failure is NEVER fatal unless it makes you quit.

Here’s a clip of him during his recent appearance on Bethenny where he talks about his new book, “Success Through Stillness: Meditation Made Simple.” –>  Russell Simmons’ #1 Piece of Advice for Successful Women: Stillness.

I’d love to hear what you think about his advice.