gratitude – Crisbie Coach

Practicing Mindful Eating and Self-Compassion

When I sit in cafés, I use to watch people around me. Most are either on their phones or hurriedly eating their lunch, eyes barely focused on what is in front of them. It struck me how disconnected we’ve become from the act of eating. Our meals meant to be a time of restoration and pleasure, have become just another task to cross off the list.

Food often becomes an afterthought, something we grab between meetings or quickly consume while scrolling through our phones. For many, the relationship with food has become transactional, something that satisfies hunger but rarely nourishes the soul. Yet food holds the potential for so much more—it can be a source of joy, comfort, and connection. To reclaim that deeper relationship, we need to turn our attention to mindful eating and self-compassion.

The Lost Art of Eating Mindfully

Mindful eating is an antidote to this rush. It invites us to slow down and reconnect with the sensory experience of food. This isn’t just about eating slower, though of course that helps; it’s about being fully present. When we take a bite, we should focus on the texture, the flavors, and the colors on the plate. We could ask ourselves: What does this taste like? How does it make me feel? It’s an act of curiosity and engagement that deepens our awareness of what we consume.

The Practice of Food Mindfulness

Practicing mindful eating requires intention, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. Here are a few steps to get started:

Start small. You don’t have to overhaul your entire eating routine overnight. Begin with one meal a day or even one part of a meal. Take a few minutes to savor your food without distractions.
Engage your senses. Before you take a bite, look at your food. Notice the colors, the arrangement. When you eat, feel the texture on your tongue, the burst of flavors. Chew slowly, allowing your senses to fully absorb the experience.
Listen to your body. Often, we eat out of habit or because it’s time, not because we’re hungry. Pause before a meal and check in with yourself. Are you really hungry? How does your body feel? Learning to recognize true hunger and fullness is a key part of mindful eating.
Be grateful. Reflect on the journey your food has taken to arrive at your plate. This sense of gratitude can elevate the experience, helping you appreciate every bite.

Rebuilding Through Self-Compassion

But mindful eating is only part of the equation. To rebuild a healthy relationship with food, we must also practice self-compassion. For many, food carries emotional weight, guilt, shame, or anxiety. These emotions often stem from unrealistic standards we set for ourselves or pressures from society.

One key to shifting this narrative is treating ourselves with kindness. If we overeat, it’s common to spiral into self-criticism. We tell ourselves we have no willpower. But it’s okay to eat more if we don’t do it often. Therefore, what if, instead of judgment, we offered ourselves understanding?

Challenge the inner critic. The next time you catch yourself feeling guilty about food, pause. Ask where that voice is coming from. Is it societal pressure, or perhaps old beliefs about what it means to be healthy? Replace that negative self-talk with a gentle reminder that one meal does not define you.
Celebrate progress, not perfection. Shifting your relationship with food won’t happen overnight. There will be days when it feels easy, and others when old habits resurface. The key is to focus on progress rather than perfection. Each mindful moment counts, even if it’s just a single breath between bites.

Embracing Food as a Source of Joy

Ultimately, rebuilding our relationship with food is about more than what we eat. It’s about how we approach food, both with mindfulness and compassion. When we shift from seeing food as something that controls us to something we engage with joyfully and without fear, we begin to heal that relationship.

Eating shouldn’t be a source of stress but one of comfort and connection, a way to nourish not just the body but the mind and the soul.

So the next time you sit down for a meal, take a deep breath. Let go of distractions and be present. Approach your plate with curiosity and kindness, and slowly, you’ll start to rebuild your relationship with food, one mindful bite at a time.

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Elevate Your Vibrational Frequency: 7 Insights from Quantum Physics

In quantum physics, the concept of vibrational frequency holds a profound significance, suggesting that everything in the universe is energy, vibrating at distinct frequencies. Here, I delve into seven factors, inspired by quantum physics, that influence our vibrational frequencies and ultimately shape our reality.

1. Thoughts:

At the core of our vibrational frequency lie our thoughts. Each thought we harbor emits a frequency into the universe, which then returns to us. Negative thoughts breed negative frequencies, attracting discouragement, sadness, anger, and fear. It’s imperative to nurture positive thoughts, as they emit vibrations that align with abundance and positivity.

2. Company:

The company we keep significantly impacts our vibrational frequency. Surrounding ourselves with individuals radiating happiness, positivity, and determination elevates our own vibration. Conversely, associating with pessimists and complainers can dampen our frequency, hindering the manifestation of our desires.

3. Music:

Music, a powerful medium, can sway our vibrational frequency. Paying heed to lyrics laden with themes of despair, betrayal, and sorrow can lower our vibration. Choosing melodies that uplift and inspire us is vital, as they resonate with frequencies conducive to attracting positivity into our lives.

4. Visual Influence:

What we watch influences our vibrational frequency profoundly. Consuming content saturated with negativity can trick our brains into perceiving it as reality, thus affecting our vibration. Opting for content that uplifts and inspires fosters a higher vibrational state.

5. Environment:

The state of our surroundings directly impacts our vibrational frequency. A disorganized and cluttered environment can weigh down our vibration. By tidying and organizing our spaces, we signal to the universe our readiness to receive abundance and positivity.

6. Spoken Word:

Our words hold immense power in shaping our vibrational frequency. Engaging in gossip, complaints, and negativity lowers our vibration. Choosing to speak words of encouragement, positivity, and gratitude elevates our frequency, aligning us with the universe’s abundance.

7. Gratitude:

Cultivating an attitude of gratitude acts as a catalyst for raising our vibrational frequency. Expressing gratitude for both the good and seemingly challenging experiences in our lives opens the floodgates for abundance and positivity to flow freely.

Incorporating these insights from quantum physics into our daily lives can lead to a profound shift in our vibrational frequency, shaping a reality abundant with positivity, fulfillment, and joy. Let us embark on this journey of self-discovery and conscious living, harnessing the power of our vibrational frequency to manifest our deepest desires and aspirations.

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Achievable Resolutions for the New Year

As the New Year dawns, resolutions become a familiar topic of conversation. While setting goals is common, the challenge lies in their realization. Often, we find ourselves succumbing to boredom, doubting our abilities, and overwhelmed by competing priorities. The question arises: why bother taking these resolutions seriously? However, the key is not to burden ourselves with unrealistic expectations. Instead, consider setting achievable resolutions that align with your genuine desires.

Here are some practical and realistic resolutions to kickstart your year:

Cultivate Meaningful Connections: Dedicate more time to friends and loved ones, engaging in activities you genuinely enjoy. This is a powerful way to foster connection, even for introverts. Establishing a routine, such as joining a monthly club meeting every first Monday, can make this resolution more manageable.
Express Gratitude Daily: Boost your happiness by expressing gratitude each day. Begin by acknowledging the abundance in your life—your home, your job, and even your gym. Gradually, extend your gratitude to smaller joys, appreciating a blooming flower, the morning sun, or a smiling baby. Over time, you’ll become adept at finding joy in the little things.
Prioritize Sleep and Exercise: Improve your overall well-being by getting adequate sleep and incorporating regular exercise. If you currently sleep less than 7-8 hours per night, start by gradually increasing your sleep time. Add 10 minutes each night for a week, progressively reaching your optimal sleep duration. Additionally, kickstart your post-holiday fitness routine to shed those extra pounds and boost your mood with the release of endorphins—the hormones associated with pain inhibition and euphoria.

I wish you the best of luck on your journey to achieving your realistic resolutions.

May the coming year bring success and fulfillment to your goals!

Loving Yourself for Who You Are

In a world that often pressures us to conform to certain standards, it’s essential to remember the importance of self-love and acceptance. Embracing who you are, with all your quirks and imperfections, is a powerful journey toward personal happiness and fulfillment. In this blog post, I’ll explore the significance of loving yourself for who you are and share practical tips for cultivating self-love.

Understanding Self-Love

It’s crucial to understand what it truly means to embark on the journey of self-love. Self-love is mainly about accepting and appreciating yourself as you are. It involves acknowledging both your strengths and weaknesses without judgment.

Embracing Imperfections

No one is perfect, and that’s what makes each person unique. Embrace your imperfections as they contribute to your individuality. Instead of viewing flaws as drawbacks, see them as part of your story and a source of strength.

Comparison Detox

Social media and societal expectations can fuel the habit of constant comparison. Recognize that everyone’s journey is unique, and there’s no universal standard for success or beauty. Detox from comparison, focus on your own path, and celebrate your achievements, no matter how small.

Positive Affirmations

Incorporate positive affirmations into your daily routine. Affirmations help rewire your thought patterns, fostering a more positive self-image. Repeat phrases like “I am enough” and “I love and accept myself” to reinforce a mindset of self-love.

Self-Care Rituals

Engage in regular self-care rituals that nourish your mind, body, and soul. Whether practicing mindfulness, taking long walks, or indulging in hobbies, dedicating time to yourself fosters a deeper connection and appreciation for who you are.

Setting Boundaries

Establishing healthy boundaries is crucial for self-love. Learn to say no when necessary, and prioritize your well-being. Setting boundaries empowers you to maintain a positive self-image and protect your emotional health.

Practice Gratitude

Practicing gratitude helps you shift your focus from what you don’t have to what you have. Regularly express gratitude for your accomplishments, relationships, and even the small joys in life. Gratitude reinforces a positive outlook on yourself and your life.

To conclude, loving yourself for what you are is a continuous and transformative process. By understanding the true essence of self-love, embracing imperfections, detaching from comparisons, practicing positive affirmations, prioritizing self-care, setting boundaries, and cultivating gratitude, you can embark on a journey of self-discovery and acceptance. Remember, you deserve love and kindness – especially from yourself. Embrace authenticity and celebrate the unique individual that you are.

Do you think you love yourself enough?

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Late Bloomers: Instructions For Use

There is a direct relationship between ageing, physical, and mental activity. People who adopt a sedentary and passive lifestyle after retirement accelerate their ageing process. Lack of movement diminishes the body’s responsiveness and few social relationships inhibit intellectual abilities.

If we add also loneliness, the ageing process accelerates. Spending the day without stimuli other than television or cell phone, without seeing anyone or going out can cause you to lose motivation to take care of yourself and your health. Many of the illnesses we attribute to age are not due to age.

On the other hand, an active and purposeful person (a person with a purpose of life – ikigai) keeps connections and maintains healthy habits.

Therefore, to keep fit, why don’t you follow those three tips coming from Japan?

1. Give yourself a goal for your next birthday. For example, you may decide to practise some moderate physical activity every day to lose weight and reach that goal by your birthday. In addition, sport promotes the production of endorphins, the hormones of happiness.

2. Reconnect with nature. Practice shinrin yoku at least once a week, or immersion in a forest recommended by Japanese doctors to promote longevity. Furthermore, this practice can also protect you from diseases because the proximity to plants strengthen the immune system.

3. Be grateful. In the same way that an attitude of complaining and constant anger increases the level of cortisol (the stress hormone), an attitude of gratitude towards life and the people around us, promotes serenity and the joy of living.

Remember that life expectancy is statistically high in our Western societies. Most likely, you still have two good decades of “useful” life left after retirement that you could fill with meaning and activity.

Ageing with care is an art. The third age, which I prefer to call third youth, can become an opportunity to be able to love you more and take better care of yourself. Find something you enjoy doing or that you can attach an immediate reward to, and involve friends to add the lovely component of socializing.

What are your plans for your third youth?

The Trap Of High Expectations

Our brain does not like uncertainty. We are programmed for survival but we cannot move on if what surrounds us is not clear. To reduce the uncomfortable feeling that a lack of certainty generates, we create expectations. However, relying on our expectations does not always help us feel better. Our expectations affect us more than we imagine. They affect our learning, our perception, and how we treat those around us.

Our expectations can become a source of frustration. For example, you definitely want to see a movie because you have heard great comments about it but after watching it you find out that you actually did not like it that much, so you feel disappointed. If you go to eat in a famous restaurant, then the food does not seem to you so well prepared, you are disappointed (and you may have spent a fortune).

Expectations are said to be anticipated resentments, because when reality does not match your expectations it causes you frustration.

In marketing, customer satisfaction is defined as the result of perception minus expectation. The higher the expectation, the higher you will have to set the bar of experiences or relationships in order to be satisfied. This is an unconscious mechanism, but there are ways to act on your way of thinking, so that it could play in your favour.

Let’s see how they can help you in the context of the current pandemic.

1. Trust that soon the pandemic will end, thanks to the progress of vaccination. Do not get obsessed by setting an end date though. Now in Europe they are talking about mid-July, but can how you be sure? Do not let your happiness depend on the end of Covid.

2. Replace expectations with gratitude. Be grateful that you did not get sick, that you have a house to live in, that someone loves you. Look at the little details of your daily life and you will surely find something to be grateful for.

Living without so many expectations is easier because you value what happens to you in that moment without being influenced by the idea you created before. This does not mean abandoning your dreams or desires. You must keep them as a beacon that guides you in the decisions about your future, but you shall not make your happiness depend on external factors that are beyond your control.

Can you let go any of your expectations?

The Thought Landscape – An Alternative Way To Deal with Negative Thoughts

I have been receiving Miguel’s emails for some time, cannot really say how long. Recently, I received this article in my mail box that perfectly matches with the purpose of my blog. Actually Miguel, also published a video, in case you prefer watching to reading. Enjoy it!

Humans have a natural tendency to gravitate towards negative thinking.

We could assume that tendency is there because it gave our ancestors a small survival advantage.

Those that were happy-go-lucky optimists got eaten by wolves.

Those that were pessimists and hoping for the worst didn’t get eaten as much.

So here we are today with a lizard brain primed to expect the worst.

Although there might be an evolutionary advantage to being pessimistic, living your life pestered by gloomy doomy thoughts is no fun.

The truth is today we live in a much more safe environment than hundreds of thousands of years ago.

It’s very rare for people to succumb to hungry tooth sabre tigers and such.

Yet, we live in a constant state of alert and fear triggered in part by nature only exacerbated by the news and social media.

So how do we escape negative thoughts?

Besides recreational drugs, alcohol, mindless social media binging, and meditation, I dare to propose a new way to lead happier mental lives.

You could think of this method as a thought experiment, a new mental model to deal with pessimistic thinking.

I call it the thought landscape.

Disclaimer: if you have trouble using your imagination or suffer from aphantasia, it won’t be easy to implement this approach.

The concept is quite simple to understand but tricky to master.

It goes like this:

A: There is a large number of thoughts we can have (negative, positive, neutral)

B: However, at any given instant, we can only think of one thing.

C: We can choose what we think at any given instant (focus)

D: Therefore, we can choose to substitute any current thought with any other available thought from A.

These are vast assumptions so let me elaborate a bit on each point.

A: This one everyone should agree. The number of thoughts a human can have is between 0 and Many. Many could be thousands or millions, a lot.

If you have a working brain, A should always be many. 0 is only for dead people.

B: This could be debated. However, we could safely assume that we can only hold one thought at a time. Thinking two thoughts simultaneously is not possible. I.e., you cannot think blue or black simultaneously (“Bluk” is not a colour!)

C: This could be more debatable, but If I tell you to think of a white elephant, usually you’ll think of a white elephant, not of a purple platypus. So you were able to change your thinking deliberately.

D: If the three statements above hold true, then it has to be true that we can control what we think at any given moment.

And if D is true, then it is good news for all of us!

This means that thinking negatively is, for the most part, a choice.

So, if you catch yourself stuck on negative thinking, now you know it’s because you chose to do so.

Great, and then what?

Then you can discard that thought, take a step back and look at what other thoughts are available from A.

The goal of taking this imaginary step back is to gain a new perspective.

Is to gain some altitude and contemplate which other thoughts you could choose from.

In A., we established that there could be many other thoughts you could have.

The range of available thoughts is what I call the thought landscape.

Like a physical landscape, you’ll see valleys and hills.

Now that you’ve momentarily elevated yourself over your thought landscape, it’s time to choose.

What other thoughts do you see that you could choose to think next?

Let me give you a concrete example of how this would play out for me.

So here I am, thinking I’m not good enough, smart enough, that people suck, that the pandemic sucks, that politicians are hypocrites, etc.

I’m feeling like shit. This is no fun. Then I realize I can choose what to think.

I take a step back and look at what other thoughts are currently available across my thought landscape.

In the beginning, it’s hard to see past a few meters because all the negative thoughts are fighting for attention, clouding my vision.

I try to rise a bit higher, past the dark fog.

I know there are other thoughts across the dark valley of shitty thoughts.

There you go… I see some light.

About 2 km away, I see a couple of green hills peeking through the clouds.

I take a closer look.

I see my family on one of them.

They love me. I feel happy to know they are alive and they love me.

I see food. Yum! I can see I have plenty of food, and I can afford more if I need to.

That makes me happy.

Another hill. Wow! I’m relatively healthy. How lucky I am! I can still walk, play sports, dance, use my body. My hands work… I can build things!

Another hill further away.

I see people in need. People whose lives I could make better. It makes me happy I could help other people. That’s important.

This exercise took only a couple of minutes, and my outlook has completely changed.

I feel gratitude. I feel alive. I feel happy.

My thought landscape is full of wonderful thoughts to choose from.

I don’t want to discriminate against negative thoughts. I just don’t want them to dictate how I feel 90% of the time.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember a single day of my life where I didn’t have a moment where my mind wasn’t imprisoned by negative thinking.

Negative thinking is inevitable. It’s there for our survival. We just need to learn how to keep it at bay.

The thought landscape will always offer you plenty of alternative thoughts, equally or even more valid than the negative thoughts you currently hold in your mind.

Give your positive thoughts a chance to live.

They deserve some attention too.

Peace. Love. Happy-Cookies.

Miguel @ Grumo.com

Dealing with negative thoughts

Understanding Karma

Karma is one of the most known concepts of Buddhism. At the same time, it is also one of the least understood. You may hear speaking about having a good or a bad karma without really knowing what it is about.

What is karma then?

Karma is a Sanskrit word meaning “act” or “action”. According to Buddhism, karma is a cause-and-effect law: to each action corresponds a reaction. For Buddhists karma is part of the natural forces of the universe, such as the gravity force, for instance. According to the principle of karma, all our actions, thoughts and intentions create energy: they are causes that have consequences. If we let go positive energy, we will receive positive energy. At the same way, if you send negative energy to the world, you may get problems and difficulties. Karma is simply an echo of what we do, say and think.

This does not mean that karma takes revenge! Karma does not take revenge when we emit negative waves. However, this is the general Western understanding of karma. We think that it is a kind of punishment from the universe for our bad deeds of the past. But karma does not work that way, it is neither a revenge nor a justice. Karma is reflected energy.

How to live according to karma.

To create a good karma, you have to send positive vibrations to the world. This does not necessarily mean that you have to donate all you savings to an NGO or quit your job to work as a volunteer. It is the small gesture of daily generosity that count, such us giving up your seat on the bus, inviting that friend you have not seen for a while to drink something, or helping a colleague in difficulty.

Do not forget to express gratitude when others take care of you. What matters is to act selflessly, not to expect anything in return. Simply appreciate doing a good deed without a hidden agenda, even if you just keep the door open for your neighbour.

Do you think you spread positive energy?