Once upon a time, an eagle’s egg was found by a farmer and mistaken for a chicken egg. The egg was placed with the other eggs in the incubator at the hen house.

Some weeks later that egg hatched. The baby eagle was raised as a chicken with the other chicks. Along with his chicken peers, he was taught to peck and scratch. He was made to scurry along the ground like the other chickens. He was sternly warned against flying, because chickens don’t really fly, they flutter and fall.

This eagle made a miserable chicken. He didn’t peck well. He hated scurrying because he was always feeling clumsy and falling. He was constantly hungry and irritable, because the chicken feed just couldn’t seem to satisfy him. The other chickens found him disruptive and odd.

After years of struggling to be a normal chicken, this poor eagle’s self esteem was pretty low. He hated himself. “Why am I so big, awkward and different?” he often wondered, “Why can’t I be happy like all the other chickens here?”

“Is this all there is to life?” he agonized, “Where’s the thrill? Where’s the flow?”

He began to do more and more disruptive things just to get a little hit of excitement. He was starved for action and adventure – he desperately craved in his heart that feeling of soaring – only he didn’t even know what that was – so he tried to compensate by making his own thrills around the chicken coop, causing drama and disturbances. Other chickens called him selfish, disordered and a troublemaker. The poor eagle took it all to heart, believed them and became depressed.

One day, high overhead the young eagle saw another eagle soaring in the sky. It took his breath away. For a moment he felt a surge of recognition. He felt something inside him stir. He felt more alive than he had ever felt before.

In his excitement he told his family of chickens what he saw and how he wanted to fly like that too. They scoffed at him. “Are you nuts?!” “You’re dreaming.” “Get real. Chickens don’t fly.” “You are being totally impractical.” “You can’t even cluck and scratch – and now you think you can fly someday!?” the chickens chided. “When will you grow up and join the pecking order of this chicken coop. Why can’t you be more like your peers? What’s wrong with you?!”

The young eagle was shamed and disheartened. He felt hopeless and alone as he fell to sleep at night.

Days later, to his delight, he spotted the soaring bird and this time it let out the cry of an eagle. The moment the young eagle raised by chickens heard this cry something unexpected happened. His body lurched uncontrollably – his entire being responded automatically to that eagle’s majestic cry with a powerful eagle cry of his own. He was astonished. “What just happened?!… Did that glorious sound come from me? Chickens don’t make that sound! Only eagles do… Wait… Only eagles do!”

The young eagle, finally aware of what he truly was, for the first time stretched out his wings and flew. Before he knew it he was soaring. He was no longer imprisoned by the chicken coop, because he was no longer imprisoned by the idea that he had to be a chicken. Nothing could contain him anymore.

A chicken coop can only coop up chickens; it cannot stop an eagle from soaring – especially once they hear their call.

Have you heard your call?

Maybe this is it…

Thanks to wayseernews.com for this inspirational story.

These are descriptions of the common types of faulty thinking, all of which can be improved or eliminated with a Mindful practise.

1. All-or-nothing thinking: You see things in black and white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.
2. Overgeneralization: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
3. Mental filter: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolours the entire beaker of water.
4. Disqualifying the positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. You maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.
5. Jumping to conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.
   1. Mind reading: You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you and don’t bother to check it out.
   2. The Fortune Teller Error: You anticipate that things will turn out badly and feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.
6. Magnification (catastrophizing) or minimization: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your stuff-up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow’s imperfections). This is also called the “binocular trick.”
7. Emotional reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.”
8. Should statements: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn’ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.
9. Labelling and mislabelling: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behaviour rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him, “He’s a bloody idiot.” Mislabelling involves describing an event with language that is highly coloured and emotionally loaded.
10. Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event for which, in fact, you were not primarily responsible.

 

10 Ways to Know For Sure

1. You’re tired.
This isn’t just a sleepy feeling when you lay down for bed at night, but an ongoing sense of tiredness throughout the day. It’s as if no matter how much sleep you actually get, your reserve energy to face the day is always low or missing.

2. You’re frustrated.
You want the feeling of unsettledness to go away so you can just “show up” and do what needs to be done. When other people don’t do their part, or prevent you from doing yours, you grow even more frustrated by the situation. You may even fail to understand why it bothers you so much.

3. You’re stressed.
Not just stressed, but over-stressed. You can be fine, doing your thing at home or work, and then something goes slightly wrong. And you find yourself going from fine to extremely stressed in an instant. This is over-stressed, when you teeter on the edge between fine and not fine.

4. You’re desperate.
You just want it to work without anything having to change. You think to yourself, “if only such and such would do this then everything would be fine.” All of your focus is placed on altering the external circumstances around you instead of the actions you could take to make things different.

5. You’re full of regret.
You have a negative internal dialogue that reminds you far too often of all the past mistakes, failures, and moments where you didn’t quite accomplish what you set out to do.

6. You’re ashamed.
You don’t want the world to really see you. You don’t challenge yourself to step out from the crowd because then they can see the failure within.

7. You’re resentful.
You just want it to be different. If only everybody else would cooperate with the plan, then the standing still plan would work. Why won’t they just do their part?

8. You’re doubtful.
Deep inside, you know that standing still isn’t the answer. You know that you have to do something, to begin listening to the whispers that well up within your heart. But you don’t think you have what it takes to change. You don’t know what the answer is for what actually needs to change.

9. You’re fearful.
You’re scared. You may fail, you may end up worse off than you are. After all, life isn’t all that bad. You’ve got good things and good people—there are happy parts. Why then are the bad parts still so overwhelming?

10. You’re looking for an escape plan.
Perhaps if you just packed up and moved to a new town. Then things would be different for you. You could start over, no one would know your past history there.

A Mindful practise can eliminate any or all of these things. The way to change your life is to change the way you think. Make an appointment today!

Here is a list of 15 things from the Purpose Fairy which, if you give up on them, will make your life a lot easier and much, much happier. We hold on to so many things that cause us a great deal of pain, stress and suffering – and instead of letting them all go, instead of allowing ourselves to be stress free and happy – we cling on to them. Not anymore. Starting today we will give up on all those things that no longer serve us, and we will embrace change. Ready? Here we go:

1. GIVE UP YOUR NEED TO ALWAYS BE RIGHT

There are so many of us who can’t stand the idea of being wrong – wanting to always be right – even at the risk of ending great relationships or causing a great deal of stress and pain, for us and for others. It’s just not worth it. Whenever you feel the ‘urgent’ need to jump into a fight over who is right and who is wrong, ask yourself this question: “Would I rather be right, or would I rather be kind?”  Wayne Dyer. What difference will that make? Is your ego really that big?

2. GIVE UP YOUR NEED FOR CONTROL

Be willing to give up your need to always control everything that happens to you and around you – situations, events, people, etc. Whether they are loved ones, coworkers, or just strangers you meet on the street – just allow them to be. Allow everything and everyone to be just as they are and you will see how much better will that make you feel.

“By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond winning.” Lao Tzu

3. GIVE UP ON BLAME

Give up on your need to blame others for what you have or don’t have, for what you feel or don’t feel. Stop giving your powers away and start taking responsibility for your life.

4. GIVE UP YOUR SELF-DEFEATING SELF-TALK

Oh my. How many people are hurting themselves because of their negative, polluted and repetitive self-defeating mindset? Don’t believe everything that your mind is telling you – especially if it’s negative and self-defeating. You are better than that.

“The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive.”  Eckhart Tolle

5. GIVE UP YOUR LIMITING BELIEFS

about what you can or cannot do, about what is possible or impossible. From now on, you are no longer going to allow your limiting beliefs to keep you stuck in the wrong place. Spread your wings and fly!

“A belief is not an idea held by the mind, it is an idea that holds the mind” Elly Roselle

6. GIVE UP COMPLAINING

Give up your constant need to complain about those many, many, maaany things – people, situations, events that make you unhappy, sad and depressed. Nobody can make you unhappy, no situation can make you sad or miserable unless you allow it to. It’s not the situation that triggers those feelings in you, but how you choose to look at it. Never underestimate the power of positive thinking.

7. GIVE UP THE LUXURY OF CRITICISM

Give up your need to criticize things, events or people that are different than you. We are all different, yet we are all the same. We all want to be happy, we all want to love and be loved and we all want to be understood. We all want something, and something is wished by us all.

8. GIVE UP YOUR NEED TO IMPRESS OTHERS

Stop trying so hard to be something that you’re not just to make others like you. It doesn’t work this way. The moment you stop trying so hard to be something that you’re not, the moment you take off all your masks, the moment you accept and embrace the real you, you will find people will be drawn to you, effortlessly.

9. GIVE UP YOUR RESISTANCE TO CHANGE

Change is good. Change will help you move from A to B. Change will help you make improvements in your life and also the lives of those around you. Follow your bliss, embrace change – don’t resist it.
“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls”  Joseph Campbell

10. GIVE UP LABELS

Stop labeling those things, people or events that you don’t understand as being weird or different and try opening your mind, little by little. Minds only work when open. “The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.”  Wayne Dyer

11. GIVE UP ON YOUR FEARS

Fear is just an illusion, it doesn’t exist – you created it. It’s all in your mind. Correct the inside and the outside will fall into place.
“The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.”  Franklin D. Roosevelt

12. GIVE UP YOUR EXCUSES

Send them packing and tell them they’re fired. You no longer need them. A lot of times we limit ourselves because of the many excuses we use. Instead of growing and working on improving ourselves and our lives, we get stuck, lying to ourselves, using all kind of excuses – excuses that 99.9% of the time are not even real.

13. GIVE UP THE PAST

I know, I know. It’s hard. Especially when the past looks so much better than the present and the future looks so frightening, but you have to take into consideration the fact that the present moment is all you have and all you will ever have. The past you are now longing for – the past that you are now dreaming about – was ignored by you when it was present. Stop deluding yourself. Be present in everything you do and enjoy life. After all life is a journey not a destination. Have a clear vision for the future, prepare yourself, but always be present in the now.

14. GIVE UP ATTACHMENT

This is a concept that, for most of us is so hard to grasp and I have to tell you that it was for me too, (it still is) but it’s not something impossible. You get better and better at with time and practice. The moment you detach yourself from all things, (and that doesn’t mean you give up your love for them – because love and attachment have nothing to do with one another,  attachment comes from a place of fear, while love… well, real love is pure, kind, and self less, where there is love there can’t be fear, and because of that, attachment and love cannot coexist) you become so peaceful, so tolerant, so kind, and so serene. You will get to a place where you will be able to understand all things without even trying. A state beyond words.

15. GIVE UP LIVING YOUR LIFE TO OTHER PEOPLE’S EXPECTATIONS

Way too many people are living a life that is not theirs to live. They live their lives according to what others think is best for them, they live their lives according to what their parents think is best for them, to what their friends, their enemies and their teachers, their government and the media think is best for them. They ignore their inner voice, that inner calling. They are so busy with pleasing everybody, with living up to other people’s expectations, that they lose control over their lives. They forget what makes them happy, what they want, what they need….and eventually they forget about themselves.  You have one life – this one right now – you must live it, own it, and especially don’t let other people’s opinions distract you from your path.