Seven steps to happiness part 6 – check in
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been sharing some brilliant tools to help you rid your head of negative clutter and instead find an inner calm and happiness.
In our penultimate week, Katie Phillips from Daring & Mighty shares her sixth step on the path to happiness – learning how to check in and listen to all four aspects of ourselves.
Check in
Over the past few weeks I’ve shown you a number of helpful personal tools, and they all – no matter how simple they may seem – take persistence and determined effort to pay off. You need to build new habits into your daily routine to feel the results, and that takes practice.
If you want to create change, get out of your head and start to feel better, you have to make a decision to do things differently and then DO it. And today’s tool is no different.
I learned this amazing technique from the Hoffman Process. It’s all about recognising that you have four aspects to yourself, and that it is important to ‘check in’ with each one. Our four aspects of self are:
- Our intellectual self (our head)
- Our physical self (our body)
- Our emotional self (our inner child)
- Our spirit self (our true self)
You’re probably already familiar with the concept of mind/body/spirit, but Hoffman adds a fourth element – your emotional self. And it makes sense. Your emotional self is your inner child. It expresses all your feelings and emotions through your physical body and can often feel ‘childish’ because so much of the way we deeply feel is determined from a very young age.
And these feelings need to be acknowledged, in the same way that you would pay attention to your child – with patience, love and understanding.
‘Checking In’ is all about consciously taking notice of what’s going on in each aspect of your self. Not just your head – your head is only one part of you. There is so much more going on!
How to check in with yourself
When you check-in, you stop and ask your head, body, inner child and spirit what’s going on for them. You then LISTEN to the answers. You pay attention. This is the key. Taking time to do this is a very self-loving, self-nurturing thing to do, and you might be surprised to discover what is REALLY going on for you because so often, what your head is telling you is going on is very far from the truth.
To give you an idea of how this can help, your physical self might be telling you that it has a headache. This is its way of trying to get your attention. Your intellect might be screaming that it’s feeling cluttered and confused, that nothing makes sense. And inside, your inner child might be silently feeling vulnerable and scared.
The confusion and headache are probably stemming from the insecurity of your needy inner child, so giving that part of yourself some reassurance and letting it know that everything will be okay, that it is safe, might really help to relax your intellect and relieve your headache.
Your spirit might also be feeling unheard and have a need to be listened to – after all, our spirit really does know what’s best for us, and has all the answers if we would only listen. In fact if we connect in with our spirit regularly, we’ll know how to soothe and serve the needs of all aspects of our self.
There is much learning that can take you deeper into an understanding of this. If you want to find out more, you can read about the Hoffman Process and the four aspects of self here.
By Katie Phillips from Daring & Mighty.
