Posts Tagged ‘Self Help’
Each “Now” Moment Is a Raindrop
July 14th, 2010 | Author: A.J. Mahari
A.J. Mahari, an author and Life Coach, talks about the importance of now and how each moment is like a raindrop. What is, is now. Goals and dreams are important but what is it that keeps people blocked from their goals and dreams in ways that take them out of the now?
Do you separate out your goals and dreams and your experience in the here-and-now of your life? This can be a major contributor to being blocked and/or feeling stuck. What you aren’t aware of, in the here-and-now, can help you so much in further understanding yourself in ways that can and will help you get unblocked and unstuck – into action – and be the catalyst that propels you forward into to taking necessary action-steps to achieve and realize your goals and dreams.
- Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life – 19 Coaching Exercises – End Negative Thought Patterns
- Self Help for Change – Healing and Recovery
- Loneliness is a Teacher
- Beginner’s Guide To Yoga and Meditation
- Achieve Your Goals
- Law of Attraction – Thoughts Determine Destiny
© A.J. Mahari, July 14 2010 – All rights reserved.
Where is There?
July 14th, 2010 | Author: A.J. Mahari
Author and Life Coach, A.J. Mahari, in her Life Coach Zen series of videos, asks the question, “Where is there?” Is there some “there” you are trying to get to that you think is the destination that once arrived at will make everything okay? Do you think that what you are needing or wanting, desiring, and looking for is out “there” somewhere?
Will make you better? Will make you happier? Will mean you finding the place at which all your goals and dreams are realized?
- Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life – 19 Coaching Exercises – End Negative Thought Patterns
- Self Help for Change – Healing and Recovery
- Loneliness is a Teacher
- Beginner’s Guide To Yoga and Meditation
- Achieve Your Goals
- Law of Attraction – Thoughts Determine Destiny
© A.J. Mahari, July 14, 2010 – All rights reserved.
Acceptance
July 13th, 2010 | Author: Coach A.J.
Acceptance is a very significant measure of your experience in life. If you can radically accept what is, you will find less resistence to the flow of who you really are, from the inside out.
The degree to which you resist practicing acceptance, letting go of judgment, thinking negative thoughts or taking action on negative feelings, will be the mesaure of your unhappiness.
Acceptance of what is right now, as it is, and simply because it is what is, is authentically empowering.
Radically accepting and surrendering to that which you do not have control over, awakening to that awareness, is the middle-way to the power of now.
© A.J. Mahari, July 13, 2010 – All rights reserved.
Patience
July 12th, 2010 | Author: Coach A.J.
Patience plays a central role in achieving and realizing your goals and dreams. Patience is a gift that you can actively give to yourself in each unfolding moment, over and over again.
Patience is a virtue. A virtue that finds its own rewards. Patience goes hand in hand with an attitude of gratitude.
“Patience makes lighter What sorrow may not heal.” – Horace
Even when the change you seek isn’t unfolding perhaps as quickly as you like it to, a patient attitude and mindset can lighten the intensity of what you feel. Sometimes we will find challenge in what blocks us. That challenge is such a growth opportunity when we meet it and engage it from a patient mindset.
Having patience is an action undertaken in and of itself. Undertaking patient action will move you in the direction of your goals and dreams.
Patience is a gift that you can actively give to yourself in each unfolding moment, over and over again.
© A.J. Mahari, July 12, 2010 – All Rights Reserved.
Psyche Whisperer Radio Show
July 11th, 2010 | Author: admin
I have a new radio show. I am looking for guests too if you’re intersted. The show is called Psyche Whisperer. In many ways that what I do. In many ways, that’s what people have called me. In a sense this goes deeper than my life coaching work, however, the journey that I have taken from the brokenness of my childhood to where I am today has in fact given me a very profound understanding of many aspects of the human psyche. I have been told by many who know me and many who have appreciated my work, over the years, that I am somewhat of a whisperer.
However, that’s that. It’s a meaningful title to me. I hope it will be a meaningful title to listeners. At first it may be somewhat confusing, I don’t know. Time will tell.
I believe that everyone has the potential to be a psyche whisperer of sorts when there is willingness, openness, and awareness. So much of everything we experience in life, so much of what we focus on in life, all, at some point or other, in some way or other, does have to do with our individual and collective psyches. This makes any and all topics relevant to this show.
If you’d like to be a guest on my show please email me at psychewhisperer(at)yahoo.ca and tell me about yourself and what you’d like to talk about. Perhaps you’ve written a book. Perhaps you have an active blog. Maybe you offer an interesting service. Perhaps you’ve had an interesting journey in your life thus far.
This show will be fairly ecclectic. So, really, no topic is out of bounds. What shapes my individual psyche and your individual psyche plays a part in shaping what Jung termed the “collective psyche”. In that way, I see many different topics as being much more related than perhaps many people think at first glance.
© The Psyche Whisperer – A.J. Mahari July 6, 2010 – All rights reserved.
Life Coach Zen © AJ Mahari – There is Only One Unique You
June 24th, 2010 | Author: Coach A.J.
In all the world there is only one you. You unique and worthy. Unique because you are who you are, just as you are right now. You do not have to fit anyone else’s mold or expectation for you to be who you really are. The only person that you truly need to understand is yourself. From there profound understanding of others and life itself will flow. You are unique. Unique if you succeed. Unique when you fail. Unique when you are happy. Unique when you are sad. You are unique. You are worthy.
© A.J. Mahari, June 24, 2010 – All rights reserved.
Life Coach Zen © A.J. Mahari – Mental Health is not perfection
June 20th, 2010 | Author: Coach A.J.
Mental health is not about perfection. Mental health is not about being “un-you” it is not about losing you. It is about connecting from the inside out to who you authentically are. Mental health is about balance and paradox in life. It is not an-end goal or a place of completion. It is a way of being in the world that still unfolds challenges to be coped with. It is relative balance in the here and now. It is what is, when what is, is, in balance. That’s all.
© A.J. Mahari, June 20, 2010 – All rights reserved.
Life Coach Zen © AJ Mahari – You Are a Gift To The Universe
June 19th, 2010 | Author: Coach A.J.
You are an unfolding gift to the universe just the way you are right now. Be mindful of what that gift that is you consists of. You are precious and unique child of this universe. You matter because you are. All feelings and experience in life unfolds to increase our awareness. Open to the unfolding gift to the universe that you truly are.
© A.J. Mahari – June 19, 2010 – All rights reserved.
Life Coach Zen © A.J. Mahari – Gratitude
June 17th, 2010 | Author: Coach A.J.
Gratitude is a way of being. Gratitude is an action undertaken. Gratitude is a both a blessing given and a blessing recieved. Gratitude is a love-boom-a-rang. What you have and give, share and set free – what you give will come back. An attitude of gratitude is cultivated and nurtured when you accept yourself and when you are truly grateful for every thought, feeling, and experience, mindfully without judgment. Gratitude isn’t just about what you deem to be wanted or good. Be thankful and grateful for everything. Gratitude is a humble self-nurturing and lovingkind attitude that is your love in action to self and outward to others. Gratitude is possibility. Gratitude is mindful. Gratitude teaches. Gratitude heals.
© A.J. Mahari, June 17, 2010 – All rights reserved.
Why Life Coaching?
June 11th, 2010 | Author: A.J. Mahari
Many people might be wondering what life coaching is all about. You may be wondering, why would I want to work with a life coach? What would actually be the point of life coaching? Life coach A.J. Mahari talks about how life coaching can play a central role in many facets of people’s lives, self help, personal growth, self improvement, mental health and wellness. Life coaching helps people to gain more awareness about what they need and/or want to change in their lives to have more peace, balance, and happiness. Life coaching with A.J. Mahari is client-centered and based in humanistic positive psychology. It is a sacred process between coach and client.
A.J. stresses the importance of her role as a compassionate, supportive, and non-judgmental listener. Life coaching supports the client and validates the client’s experience and concerns. A.J. sees her role as being a touchstone for her client’s personal growth. She reflects back to each clients what she hears them saying. She gives feedback and is also an educator. Life coaching is about living an examined life and learning new tools and skills to help you live a more authentic life. Life coaching also supports the client’s quest to identify goals, map out strategy to achieve those goals.
If you are asking yourself, what is life coaching, and or why life coaching? This just might mean you are interested. That you see potential to gain valuable insight and awareness into the kind of change you need and want to introduce into your life to achieve your goals and dreams. Asking about what life coaching is and why life coaching is a great beginning to taking the next step. An action step. Booking a session and finding out how A.J.’s life coaching can be helpful to you.
© A.J. Mahari and Touchstone Life Coaching, June 11, 2010 – All rights reserved.
Awaken From Your Illusions
June 11th, 2010 | Author: A.J. Mahari
Life Coach A.J. Mahari invites you to think about any illusions you may be operating from in your life and to awaken from them. Do you have doubts about choices or decisions that you’ve made? Are you feeling stuck and trapped in situations, circumstances, or relationships, feeling victimized because perhaps you aren’t as aware as you will benefit from being about the fact that you have indeed made choices. Choices that maybe aren’t serving you well. Are you stuck with these choices? Do you want to remain attached to that illusion? Or do you want to awaken to a more authentic way of living your life?
You can set yourself free from illusions about love, illusions about your past, illusions based upon how others may have defined you. Illusions are the inauthentic stories that we tell ourselves based upon negative experience or negative perception of ourselves through the ideas, statements, and opinions of others. Are you aware of your illusions? Are you kidding yourself about something? Are you choosing to remain trapped in painful denial of something? Your authentic self awaits your setting it free from any and all of your illusions.
© A.J. Mahari, June 10, 2010 – All rights reserved.
Radical Acceptance – Your Zen to Change
June 7th, 2010 | Author: A.J. Mahari
Everyone, really, whether they want to admit it and think about it or not, has goals and dreams – has desires, wants and needs. Most people understand what it will take to realize their goals and dreams – to fulfill their desires, wants and needs. Many people, at some point, tend to become resigned to a way of thinking wherein they start believing and reinforcing that they probably won’t ever get to achieving their goals and dreams. Many give up hope. Thinking that was once hopeful becomes pessimistic and negative. Why? Because all-too-often people don’t realize just how much the ways that they think create a self-imposed reality that they are actually choosing, often unconsciously – without awareness, to live from. The pain of uncovering these negative thoughts, negative core beliefs, and obstacles to change seems impossible. It is not impossible, however, to uncover, become more consciously aware of obstacles that are keeping you stuck and blocking you from realizing your desires, needs, wants, goals, and dreams. It is actually very possible. You can choose to embrace, one moment a time, a Zen philosophy of change that isn’t just a philosophy to be contemplated intellectually or spriritually.
Life Coaching Supports You
Your Zen to change is active practice that motivates, inspires, and promotes moving forward and finding the pathway to your goals and dreams.
Throughout our lives we are nudged by experiences that we begin to notice contradict or challenge many of the ways that we are thinking. Self-defeating ways of thinking. There are opportunities all around you to become more aware of what you are investing in – what you are focusing on. What are you resisting so strongly and why?
“What you resist will persist” – Carl Jung
Negative thoughts and negative patterns of behavior tend to repeat themselves. Unhealthy and/or self-destructive choices in relationships, reactive and defensive behavior to constructive criticizism, lack of friendships, disinterest in things that should matter are ways of resisting that only reinforce the persisting of that which you seek to escape or avoid. You may be becoming more aware of a pattern in the ways that people give you feedback or describe you. You may hear from others that they experience you as cold, controlling, difficult, inconsiderate, self-absorbed, or irresponsible. You may lose friends and relationships and not be aware of your responsibility in those losses. Negative and painful experience will continue to be the result of negative thinking and negative forms of relating or behaving.
No one grows up wanting to be described or experienced in these ways. No one wants to lose friends and relationships. It can be difficult and painful to take an honest look at what your experience, and/or other people’s feedback is trying to bring to your conscious awareness about you. You may want to just avoid or deny what is painful or not well understood. You may want to justify your behavior as having more to do with other people’s misinterpretations, insensitivity, judgment, or jealousy. The truth is that when enough people repeatedly give you the same feedback, directly or indirectly, you are being presented with a wonderful growth opportunity.
Your Zen to change involves a paradox. First, you will benefit from radically accepting yourself, as you are, right now in this moment, one moment at a time. If you feel hopeless, just radically accept that. Don’t judge that. Don’t judge yourself for that. Be with that. If you are a lot heavier than you want to be, stop resisting that. Radically accept yourself at the weight/size that you are. Be with that. If you feel lost or totally stuck and are thinking negatively, that’s okay, that’s what is. Radically accept that and be with that. No matter what you think or feel, radically accept it. Stop resisting it. Detach from the thoughts and/or the feelings. Observe them. One moment at a time just let them be what they are – what is – without reacting to them. Resisting what is in your life right now will reinforce it persisting.
The Zen dialectic or paradox that is the first step to moving forward is one that involves shifting your thinking from judging, over-focusing, ruminating,and negativity, to simply accepting what is – being neutral with what is because it is what is. Not attaching positive or negative meaning or interpretation to what is but instead just radically accepting it because it is. Embracing the moment in the here-and-now and letting the moment contain whatever it contains in a non-engaging way is the first step in your Zen to change.
The way to begin to free yourself up in ways that can get you on the road to achieving your goals and dreams and creating desired change in your life is to radically accept what is first. Stop resisting what is. Resisting what is, is how you keep yourself blocked or imprisoned in what blocks you from moving forward. Stop trying to be free in self-defeating ways that only pull you back to your emotional ground zero eventually. Your Zen first step to change is to just notice how you are imprisoning yourself in this very moment, right now, without judgment. Just observing that is the beginning of the freedom you want.
Then, radically accept that you are imprisoning yourself safe in the knowledge that as soon as you understand more about why and truly let go of resisting what is – the more you radically accept that you have imprisoned yourself in, for example:
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your pain
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in being obese
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in being self-critical
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in being alone
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in feeling shame
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in feeling unworthy
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in low self-esteem and a lack of self-worth
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in acting-out
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in settling
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in living up to a label, a diagnosis, or fear of abandonment, fear of being known
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in fear of being loved and fear of loving
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in old negative tapes from your past kept alive in your self-defeating patterns of negative thinking
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in fear of not being liked
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in not knowing who you are
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in trying to avoid loss
Radically accepting that you have continued to resist the very change, growth, and/or healing you really do want will provide you with new questions, the answers, as you live your way into them will provide you with the awareness that will invite you to stop resisting all that you have resisted for so long. This will make it possible for you to begin to work toward identifying and achieving your goals and dreams.
Radical acceptance is the beginning of your moment of Zen to change because the moment you let go of trying to be free – resisting all that isn’t – by radically accepting and surrendering to all that is – to what is – you will realize that just as you have had the power to imprison yourself so too do you have to power to empower yourself to the freedom from ___________ that you so long for, and that you so deserve.
Your Zen to change awaits your becoming aware of your role in what is right now in your life. What is, is just what is. It is okay, simply because it is. Let this moment of realization and newly-found acceptance and surrender sustain you just as you are, because you are. You are enough, right now, just the way you are.
© A.J. Mahari, June 6, 2010 – All rights reserved.
About
June 5th, 2010 | Author: A.J. Mahari
A.J. Mahari
G’day, my name is A.J. Mahari and welcome to my Mental Health and Life Coaching blog with a focus on providing information to increase your awareness.
I have been life coaching now for just over six years. I have learned a lot about life the hard way and bring a tremendous amount of my own life experiences with loss, abuse, mental health challenges and subsequent recovery, to the work that I do with my mental health and life coaching clients.
I hope you will find something on this site and/or my other sites and blogs helpful and/or interesting. If you are interested in my coaching services please be sure to read more about what I have to offer. Reading my various blogs and web sites will also give you a strong sense of where I am coming from.
Whatever might have brought you to this site, I hope that you are open to the change that might be trying to get your attention. You deserve to give yourself the very best opportunities you can to learn more about yourself and to continue to grow in ways that will create an increasing awareness of how change will enhance your experience in life.
More Touchstone Life Coaching Information
As a Life Coach, BPD and Mental Health Coach I have an open, in depth, and inclusively diverse philosophy about Life Coaching and the process of its unfolding between myself and each client I work with.
New beginnings beckon to us from what are experienced first as losses, failures, and painful experiences. There are times in life when transitioning from one phase to another the journey can be augmented positively by sharing part of it with a life coach like myself. Someone to walk a few steps of this explorative transition with you in a supportive, compassionate, and caring way.
Life coaching is a collaborative process with between the coach and the client with the mandate of supporting the client in achieving his or her personal goals. The process of life coaching, unlike psychotherapy, does not focus on the past or involve delving into one’s past. Life coaching focuses on effecting wanted and needed change in a client’s current and future thinking, attitude, feelings, and/or behaviour.
Personal Coaching, whether it is general life coach, BPD (BPD loved ones) coaching or mental health coaching is a process of supporting the client in his or her learning more about him/herself. In my experience, as a life coach, asking the client questions in a reflective way that is in response to what the client shares encourages the client to seek his or her own answers. Answers that will make themselves known through the kind of self-examination that produces both a deeper self-awareness and an increasing personal insight. Personal coaching is a learning experience.
Most clients seek me out as a life coach because they have come to some type of crossroads. They have come to realize that there is change needed in some area of their lives. Change is not easy for anyone. In some cases, where change is not possible, clients are exploring ways of coming to terms with challenges. In other cases clients are in search of more effective coping skills and techniques. And some clients face certain life challenges that call for adapation and strategizing when change itself isn’t the goal or is not a possible solution. Many clients seek support to find their way to the kind of personal understanding that enhances their confidence in being able to identity their needs and wants in ways that are the harbingers of the taking of the action required to create desired change or enhance personal coping strategies and to achieve personal, relationship, or career goals.
What you need to know about A.J. Mahari as a Life Coach as she describes in her own words along with visting the many links to her sites and online work will hopefully give you a firm idea of what A.J. has to offer to you as prospective client.
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I am not a mental health professional
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I have taken university courses in social work, psychology, religion, philosophy, sociology, communications, journalism, to name but a few
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I have not pursued a degree because I believe in being a free-thinker
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Not pursuing a degree has meant that I have been able to maintain an out-of-the-box experiential way of learning
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I have extensive first-hand life experience in what change requires
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I have extensive first-hand life experience in coping effectively with grief
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I have failed enough times in my life to truly know that success is failure turned inward out – failing is a necessary prerequisite for true success
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Failing and making mistakes are the growth opportunities that are gifts disguised as hard-times
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I have learned to heal from childhood abandonment and how not to be blocked by the past
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I have extensive first-hand life experience in recovery
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I have extensive first-hand life experience in learning to compensate for what cannot be changed and in learning to change what can be changed and accept and compensate for what cannot be changed
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I believe a down-to-earth personal approach – humanistic positive psychology
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I am extremely well-read and have 8 years experience life coaching
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I have been writing online for 15 years.
Some people do learn more from courses and getting degrees and others, like myself, become students of life and live and learn very experientially. You have to decide what is most important to you when thinking about working with a life coach. Do you value someone with a degree simply because they have a degree? Do you value someone because they have “professional” backing or testimonials in a given area of coaching or do you value what I have to offer?
What I have to offer is over 5 decades now of learning. Over 50 years of trial and error and putting to work in my own life, healing, recovery, change, grieving, forgiving , transforming myself into a healthy functional human being with compassion and empathy. I am a person of substance and character – not glitz, glamour and all the “right” promises or “catchy sales-pitches”. I give all I have to give to each and every client, each and every time we work together. I have 8 years experience coaching. I am extremly well-read and that coupled with a rich history of life experience – most of which was the you- have-to-learn-fro- it type of difficult life experience.
I invite you to listen to my Podcasts and to watch my Videos to give you more of an idea of what I am about and where I am coming from. This, along with all that I have written online, will provide you with a sense of whether I am the coach for you.
Life Coaching Involves Strategy
June 5th, 2010 | Author: A.J. Mahari
A.J. Mahari is a Life Coach who also understands that strategy is important to the client’s work. Developing strategy is part of the journey between the client and the coach as the client searches to identify what he or she needs. This means that as part of the coaching process I assist you in not only identifying your needs, goals, desires, and your dreams, but I also help you to plan a personal strategy that will work for you as the individual that you are. Strategy that works for you, that feels natural for you, that has meaning to and for you and that can help you to implement and design your strategy going forward.
In the life coaching process it can be very important to work with a coach, like A.J. Mahari, who is very skilled in the reality that change takes strategy to identify, implement, and support. Strategy involves the action steps that will drive your process of self-improvement, personal growth, coping more effectively, change, and/or recovery, moving forward.
“Water is never tired of flowing” You need not tire of growing. Believe in yourself and in what you know you want/need to change. Strategy is but one method of learning skills and of learning to use your strengths as tools to help you unblock yourself, and like water, that’s never tired of flowing, navigate your way effectively around the rock-like obstacles that are blocking you at this juncture of your journey.
For some clients it will take a little more time to awaken to actually strategizing – to be ready to do the work necessary to actually map out strategy. Some people really need to further explore where they are right now gaining more insight and awareness in the here and now. Your first action step is to purchase a coaching session. From there we can explore your next steps together.
Life coaching supports the client’s self-affirming strategy while also mirroring back to the client any negative or self-destructive and goal-blocking patterns, habits, ways of thinking that block the client’s ability to more clearly and productively implement an effective strategy to meet his or her goals.
© A.J. Mahari – All rights reserved.
Life Coaching Provides Support
June 5th, 2010 | Author: A.J. Mahari
A.J. Mahari firmly believes that Life Coaching supports the client. The client is at the heart of this process. The journey is the client’s. Life coaching is the process through which, in relationship to one another, the life coach walks along your path, for a time, on a part of your sacred journey. It is a sharing. It is support. It is guidance and feedback. Life coaching is a very supportive process that provides a safe place for clients to explore a better or clearer understanding of self and a getting to know you they really are at a deeper and more meaningful and authentic level.
In my Life Coaching practice, support involves active listening. I offer compassionate and patient support. Support also involves asking questions that can help you to gain new perspective that can increase your awareness, give you food for thought, and help you to continue to cope with and/or understand what you are concerned about.
Support as it center, respect and a non-judgmental lovingkindness that is given freely to each client in a validating and understanding way. Support is crucial to the process of life coaching because validating the experience of the client is of utmost importance.
There are many different tools and techniques that employ in coaching clients. I do not try to apply a one-size fits all approach. I have a very ecclectic approach that supports the journey of each and every client for the individual person that you are. Some people are working to address what is blocking success or blocking recovery. Others are interested in transformative change, which is a process – getting from where you are right now to identifying and mapping out strategy to support your personal growth toward the achievement of your goals, needs, desires, and/or dreams.
Others are working to cope with personal circumstances and challenges in ways that can support their moving forward and feeling empowered.
Support is first and foremost about acceptance. As a life coach I meet and accept each client where he or she is and for who he or she is regardless of some of the difficult and painful things people need to talk about. I do not change my opinion of a client and my support does not waiver based on what is shared. My philosophy of life coaching means that my support and unconditional acceptance of the client is given freely and consistently. Each client needs to know that I am not going to judge what they have to say. I am not going to judge choices or decisions made.
In my life coaching practice, as a touchstone, involved in helping people to educate themselves more about what they need and how to meet those needs (or goals) I believe that mirroring acceptance not only provides safety but it also provides a positive psychology-based perspective to help the client re-frame any negative core beliefs, negative thoughts, self-destructive and/or self-critical behaviour and attitudes toward self that may well be important to understand in terms of what often blocks you from attaining your goals.
Support is central to life coaching. Life coaching is not about me, as your life coach, telling you what you need or what you should do. It is up to each client to find that out, and to define that and make his or her own choices. Life coaching is not about giving you answers. It’s about hearing you, supporting you, validating you and helping you to ask the questions that can help you to find your own answers and your own way forward.
© A.J. Mahari – All rights reserved.
