TARA STILES

Many of us grow up learning that things are supposed to be hard. School, sports, relationships, careers, and family take hard work. Life is tough, but if you work harder than everyone else, you’ll have a shot at success. You have to be tough to beat your competition. You have to be tense in order to prove how hard you’re working. If you relax, you’ll be passed up, forgotten, and never achieve your goals. No pain, no gain. Sound familiar?

These rules have worked their way into every aspect of our lives. We become proud of how much we can take on and how much we can accomplish, and we fail to recognize the damage we are causing in the meantime. Living by these rules makes us desensitized to what we truly need and what will truly make us happy.

In our day-to-day lives, we are often at war with ourselves internally and in conflict with many things that come our way. How we feel on the inside affects how we feel about everything around us. When we are desensitized, anxious, tense, and frustrated, the slightest slip from how we expect things to go in our day can throw us way off. We rely on our house of cards to hold up to life’s twists and turns. If we are calm, grounded, centered, and sensitized, it doesn’t shake us much when something doesn’t quite go our way. When we are sensitized, we have the space to calmly focus and do what we need to do about the situation without anxiety and stress taking over.

When we lose touch with ourselves, we begin to shut down and search for space and pleasure wherever we can find it: sugars, fats, caffeine, fast and fried food—pick your vice—become our friends that help stuff down the tension we feel and give us some temporary peace. Unfortunately, our bad news friends don’t have good intentions. They are designed to feed into a cycle of tension and pleasure and trap us under the results of poor habits: an imbalanced life, weight gain, sickness, and feeling down about ourselves. Often instead of living out our dreams, reaching our goals, and enjoying life, we get stuck in gaining tension, frustration, and unease, which manifests in agitated views about our bodies and minds. We find ways to punish and reward ourselves and form all sorts of self-abusing behaviors, from destructive thought patterns to imbalanced and unhealthy relationships with food, ourselves, and the people in our lives. Our intuition can’t help us when we drift so far away from it. We have to be connected in order to navigate. When we are able to find ease in our lives, we can begin to dissolve the tension and get right back on the path to intuition lane, which takes us directly to our most fantastic self.

Tara Stiles, author of Make Your Own Rules Diet (Hay House 2014). To learn more about Tara Stiles and inspirational authors such as Dr. Wayne Dyer, Doreen Virtue, Congressman Tim Ryan, Kris Carr and more, we invite you to join us at the Hay House I Can Do It! event in New York, NY, September 20th & 21st, 2014. For more information please visit HayHouse.com or call 800-654-5126.