Tag Archives: understand

I made it happen for myself

Posted on by
1

You, and only you, can make things happen for yourself. While there may be people that encourage or have an influence on your life, at the end of the day you are the only one who allows such encouragements or influences to have a positive or negative effect on your being.

It is only up to you to take everything that you can from every single situation. I know that sounds daunting and rather limiting (if you are trying, you are not experiencing), but what good does it really do for your being to go through a “same shit, different day” life, routine, or mentality? I often jokingly use that phrase to my peers whenever I’m asked, “What’s new?” because, in my reality, every single thing that I experience is new and ever-evolving, and most of those experiences are felt rather than spoken.

If you want things to happen you need to make them happen. Set goals and work towards them. You may not know how to reach those goals when you first set out, but every step, every experience, and every situation along the way offers some sort of possible insight, guidance, or interpretation as to how you can reach your goals (that is if you are open and unbiasedly experiencing). Experience everything that you can within reason because you never know what it may bring. Experience without boundaries, expectations, regrets, or judgements. Experience, learn, and then make it happen.

 

If you’d like to discuss this perspective along with other health-related insights, please contact me for a FREE Conversation.

jdperryhealth.com
jdperryhealth.tumblr.com
jdperryhealth@gmail.com

There is a reason for everything

Posted on by
1

When in a misunderstanding, when in-doubt, when in-question, when troubled, when confused, when lost, when broken, when nothing seems to work, when all else fails, when you need to retrace your steps, when you need to build a better path…

Don’t ask why?

Ask how?

  • How is more direct – Why did this happen vs How did this happen?
  • How provides a path of clues
  • How encourages an openness to understanding, to awareness

Don’t think that everything happens for a reason.

Think that there is a reason for everything.

Only you can figure out those reasons (those answers) to your everything (your questions). Your genetics, your habits, and your conditioning will never have those answers. You must first look within before you can look beyond. Know yourself to know how.

jdperryhealth.com
jdperryhealth.tumblr.com
jdperryhealth@gmail.com

Were you ever taught how to listen?

Posted on by
1

We are taught how to learn. We are taught how to read. We are taught how to write. We are taught how to play. We are taught how to share. But are we taught how to listen? Are we ever really given an education or proper advice on how to listen to someone – to truly hear another person’s perspective, thoughts, beliefs, and understandings?

Understanding is a major component in listening. But I do not mean understanding from your own perspective. I mean to put yourself in their shoes, to see the situation from their point of view, to understand their experience and why they have that experience, to be involved in their side before you involve yourself in your side. We have a tendency to project and diagnose another’s situation without truly understanding their situation.

Take a moment to reflect on yourself: When you listen to someone are you really listening or are you relating, assuming, judging, projecting, and predicting based on your own experiences? Do you assume that since you’ve been through a similar situation or you have experienced the same circumstances that your approach holds water for the other person, too? Do you realize how arrogant that sounds? No two people experience the same situation equally or in the same manner nor do they take away the same thing. To project your experiences, understandings, or perspectives onto another person’s story, life, experience, or situation is not listening at all… it’s waiting to answer, waiting to be right, waiting to give your two cents on how you would do or not do things, and waiting to be heard as a form of selfishness.

True listening requires a detachment of yourself from the situation. It requires empathy (which is very different from sympathy). It requires openness. It requires vulnerability. It requires selflessness. It requires genuinity. It requires honesty. It requires an even exchange of trust – to comfort and feel comfortable. It requires the ability to first understand from another’s perspective before you understand and provide your own perspective.

Listening opens doors to relationships all-the-while building them through trust, honesty, openness, and understanding. When we listen to someone – when we truly listen and understand from their perspective – we are able to understand that person that much more and we are also able to understand the relationship that much more. This understanding helps build an emotional foundation. Every time you truly listen and understand one another you are laying the bricks to your foundation, your connection, and that is the most important part in any relationship (with others AND with self).

What would you rather want… to be heard or to be understood? 

jdperryhealth.com
jdperryhealth.tumblr.com
jdperryhealth@gmail.com

Get healthy to lose weight or lose weight to get healthy?

Posted on by
2

Last week I was going through my usual internet routine of watching new YouTube’s and reading new articles when I came across a recent Josh Rubin video about Nutrition Timing and Exercise. So I’m watching, I’m nodding, I’m agreeing, and he throws this line out there… “Do you get healthy to lose weight or do you lose weight to get healthy?” A small part of me inside of me died. I have been feeding into this concept for the past two years by slowly… gradually… baby-stepily understanding what this means through my own research, trials, errors, and hindsights… but I never had a short, one-liner that made it all this health-mush that I’m piling up by the day mold complacently together.

Not too long ago I was under the impression that in order to be healthy I had to lose weight; not the other way around. My perspective went something along the lines of… How the hell can I be healthy and have body fat? Doesn’t body fat correlate to being unhealthy? So, that’s simple… burn fat and get healthy… because if I look healthy then I will damn sure be healthy! Time to do calorie-burning squats after calorie-burning squats.

Ahhh, those were the days… and I have the massive thighs to prove it (thank you, genetics and my ego).

It may take a bit of time, personal experience, and understanding for the statement to truly sink in, but as the kids say these days… it’s #realtalk.

Get healthy to lose weight.

I love it.

What does this statement mean for you? For your lifestyle? For your nutrition? For your mental and emotional state or attitude? For your actions and reactions? For your beliefs, programed thought patterns, habits, and current personality? For your sleeping patterns? For your work and school schedule? For your internal and external stressors? For your perspective? For your goals and dreams? For your path?

jdperryhealth.com
jdperryhealth.tumblr.com
jdperryhealth@gmail.com

Define: Fear

Posted on by
3

What are you afraid of? Make a list of everything you’re afraid of… and why. Go on. Do it before you read any further.

What do those fears represent in your life? What do those fear reflect and affect? What do those fear say about who you are? How do you act or react to your fears? Do your fears prevent you from making decisions or encourage round-about decisions?

Fears aren’t real. We make them up. They’re illusions of what we perceive to be reality. We blatantly know that fears are not real because there are people that experience and live through our personal fears each day – commitment, responsibility, public speaking, flying, sky-diving, cliff jumping, the ocean, the dark, sleeping alone, relationships, judgments, losing, etc. We attain fear through various life experiences and distance ourselves from those fears thinking that we are succeeding by removing the problem from our life. In a universal reality, the problem still exists within self, we’re just burying a part of self in hopes that it won’t show up later in life… but it always does, doesn’t it?

  • Fear is the presence of assumption, judgment, boundary, protection, separation, manipulation, shame, and weakness.
  • Fear is the absence of knowledge, confidence, comfort, familiarity, trust, stability, awareness, responsibility, and faith.

Fears are symptoms to a greater, deeper, and more meaningful cause. Those causes are found above as the presence and absence of fear. So, go back to your list of fears and see if you can dumb them down to their true cause – to the part of you that you are protecting, running away from, and not confronting.

jdperryhealth.com
jdperryhealth.tumblr.com
jdperryhealth@gmail.com

Live and let die

Posted on by
1

“If this ever changing world in which we live in makes you give and cry, say live and let die.” (Paul McCartney)

Live.

Take it in. Experience it. Feel it. Understand it. Show it appreciation. Learn from it.

And let it die.

Let go of the past to live the present. Move onto the next experience in life on your own time, on your own terms, at your own pace, at your level of understanding. Use every experience to better experience the next. Constantly grow and evolve into the person you want to be.

jdperryhealth.com
jdperryhealth.tumblr.com
jdperryhealth@gmail.com

Heeding your own advice

Posted on by
1

It’s so much easier to give advice than to follow it, amirite? So, why does it happen? Why are we good givers and sub-par receivers? Why are we able to see other’s trials with perspective and fail to see our own in the same light?

A fish doesn’t know it’s wet.

The first time I heard this quote was at the CHEK HLC 1 course in October 2011. It struck me and stuck with me. I find myself referencing the quote at least once a week – if I’m not experiencing and taking perspective on it, I am repeating it to myself.

The problem lies within our self-awareness… or the lack thereof. We become blinded by beliefs, emotions, habits, reactions, assumptions, judgments, or expectations – by our Ego, which serves to protect (sometimes it’s a bit overprotective). We fail to see our situation because when we experience a trial we tend to fall back into what got us there in the first place. To paraphrase Einstein, “a problem cannot be solve with the same level of thinking (or awareness) in which it was created.”

How do we gain perspective and attain awareness to start heeding our own advice? Well, there are a few ways…

  • Find yourself. Define yourself. Discover who you are and how you came to be. Write down all aspects of your personality, your beliefs, your perceptions, your actions, your reactions, your habits, your likes, your dislikes… and why.
  • Be present with your thoughts, beliefs, actions, reactions, and words. Understand consequences by defining the positive or negative energy action that created the reaction (Karma, what goes around comes around, what you give is what you get).
  • When you act or react ask yourself why it occurred… the cause to the symptom.
  • Remove or detach self from the situation, experience, or outcome. Become self-less. See the situation for what it is, not how you perceive, assume, expect, or want it to be.

jdperryhealth.com
jdperryhealth.tumblr.com
jdperryhealth@gmail.com

National Silence Day

Posted on by
1

Today, I declare as National Silence Day! Why today? Because why not? What is National Silence Day?

  • Take today to observe, take in, listen, understand, and reflect.
  • Avoid speaking, providing an opinion, passing judgments or assumptions, giving in your two-cents, or answering unless it is absolutely necessary.
  • Truly think before you speak, and then don’t speak at all.

Silence provides a greater learning environment to better understand self: Your experience of yourself around others and your experience of yourself through yourself. You will learn much about others through allowing them to be, to speak, to provide, to react, or to interpret without an outside influence, and you will also learn much more about yourself through the removal of you from you – you can take note of how you would react, interpret, provide, influence, or judge a situation or person.

“Those who know don’t speak,
Those who speak don’t know.” (Tzu Lao)

jdperryhealth.com
jdperryhealth.tumblr.com
jdperryhealth@gmail.com

Question: Communication?

Posted on by
Reply

I received this question tonight (Thursday, the 26th) and since it seems like a time-is-of-the-essence situation, I decided to push back my other queued posts and give this Friday’s spotlight…

What would you do if you had a very irresponsible, self-centered roommate? One that does not take his/her part in chores and cleaning. It is almost the end of the semester and we have not spoken for quite a long time now, mostly because of this behavior. Is it too late to say something? I know I should’ve said something earlier, but you know, life happens and now we’re getting ready to leave.

Perspective:

Irresponsibility or self-ceneteredness are merely symptoms of a bigger cause… and those are only your experiences of your roommate – not the definition of your roommate. It is unfair of you to label your roommate just based on your experience of him/her without knowing his/her true self or personal battles. Yes, it is also unfair to you if they are being selfish and do not contribute to the understood equal partnership of living together, but consider that he/she may have a very good personal reason as to why they only seem to care about themselves, why they are introverted, or why they have placed barriers between themselves and the world around them.

What’s the true issue here?

Communication… or a lack thereof.

Communication is an important part of any relationship.

Communication can provide a continuous exchange of ideas, thoughts, feelings, emotions, wants, and needs – that exchange is positive. You will not always agree with one another, but the experience of talking will encourage you to understand one another and move forward to better the relationship.

Silence can encourage barriers, [unrealistic] expectations, assumptions, judgements, and can bring a negative energy to a relationship (or even a room).

You are experiencing a misunderstanding and the best way to understand one another is to talk. I don’t necessarily mean to talk about it, but to just… talk.

The chores are a symptom of a bigger cause of not talking to one another or misunderstanding one another.

  • Lead by example.
  • Create small talk.
  • Show him/her your trust, your openness, your friendliness, your forgiveness, and your acceptance by merely taking an interest in their life, sharing experiences of your own life, and encouraging them to be a part of yours.
  • Be friendly, not over-bearing.
  • Be patient, not pushy.
  • Be open, not expecting.
  • Trust that what you give you will receive in return.
  • Walls will never exist in a relationship if no one has a reason to build them.

After some time, if your roommate does not want to communicate nor involve themselves in genuine, open conversation then I would suggest that you move on with your efforts. It may be hard, but it’ll be for the best. Everyone is traveling along on their own path and on their own time doing the best that they can, and sometimes we just have to leave people to be and do things their way. We can only hope that those who are lost amongst their inner battles will come around to find themselves one day.

All that you can ask of yourself is that you do your best and that you are genuine.

jdperryhealth.com
jdperryhealth.tumblr.com
jdperryhealth@gmail.com