The page for ‘Creative Thinking’, with the intent to do just that:

Making you think…and I’d love to receive your emails.

You are what you think you are and life is what you make of it.

One thing is for sure: Your attitude to life is your choice. Attitude determines how your life runs and solely depends on you. What do you see when you look at your life?
Did you know that you can learn how to perceive your life differently?

For those of you who have children or who work with children, here is a fun little experiment: Ask them to play some of their music, very loudly while you are watching a movie that really moves you. Notice what’s happening with the original soundtrack?

And how this other music makes you feel differently towards the movie when you don’t hear the sound anymore, but only the loud, hard-core teenager music?

Attitude is exactly that: the background music to the movie of your life.

Let’s get creative for a moment and think of recipes… Ready?

Just like a cooking recipe it is entirely up to you, to choose the quality of ingredients or alter the quantities, add elements or take some away.

It always depends on what your final ‘dish’ is supposed to be like, whether you want to prepare a quick feed or an elegant 5 course meal.

I often compare life to how we order in a restaurant.

Do we tell the waiter: “Hmm, I don’t like beef and I don’t want any of that brown stuff with it and I want some of those orange things on the side…”
Poor waiter, what chance does he or she actually have to know what you want and bring you what makes you happy?

Be specific about what you want. Your life is about you, just like the meal in a restaurant. There is a much higher chance to get what you actually want when you place a detailed order.

As you may have guessed by now: I love to think in metaphors and some of my favourite stories can be found on this page. We naturally think in metaphors – or let’s use a more technical term – we all have our personal constructs.

This creative thinking gives us a chance to come up with solutions to our many questions, issues or problems.

The stories we heard during our childhood, events happening around us during the time where those billions of connections in our brain are being formed, that is how these ‘solutions’ are created. It is then quite obvious that the more solutions, the more connections, neuro-networks, we have in our system, the more solutions, the higher the amount of possibilities, resourcefulness, we have later in life.

Creative thinking means that we love to create something in our mind to fill the gap, the missing information so that in the end it all makes sense to us.

Now, here in NZ you all know this advert: The Warehouse, The Warehouse, where everyone gets a ……

You see, you cannot help but filling in the missing word.

Here is something to think about now: The amount of information we get on a daily basis, advertising, pictures, posters, television and other media does just that. Without you being aware of it, you actually get presented solutions, bits of information that are supposed to fill the gap…only, that in this case it is done FOR you and doesn’t evoke the desire within yourself to fill the missing gap.

Do you honestly believe that it turns you into a wonderful, successful and healthy looking person to wear a certain watch or drive a certain car?
Does it really make you a good parent to use that certain kind of nappies, which incidentally costs $4 more than another brand?

It fills the ‘gap’ which might be that you don’t feel good about yourself in the first place, you do not see that success in yourself, you don’t have that reassurance within yourself of already being a good parent, etc.
It is, in fact, then very easy to look for that feel-good factor on the outside, or is it not?

Not long ago I had one of these very lively debating evenings with a very good friend of mine, both of us wanting to define happiness. Being a drastic, radical thinker at times I came up with this concept that we are not what we work as, we are not our relationships, we are not our family, and we are not what we wear or what sports we do. To really find out about this deep inner fulfillment and happiness within ourselves, we need to be able to sit alone for a few hours in an empty room, naked, and have a content smile on our face when we leave that room. Because we just spent a long time with the person that we really are!

Let me add here that my friend and I later found out that this is something that had already been said by Blaise Pascal (French philosopher, 1623-1662):
“All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”

It is a fact, scientifically researched and documented, that we crave our very own Emotional feedback – and the one from outside – to the point of addiction (see “Molecules of Emotions”, Dr Candace Perth). The chemistry that emotions create in our whole system, our mind, our heart, our body is what makes us believe that this is who we are. Without those chemicals we feel like a 500 piece puzzle with that last piece missing.

Anger, guilt, fear, shame, drama, feeling lonely, sadness, co-dependency, adrenaline-pumping sports, sarcasm, self-pity…the list is endless. Spending some time without the chemicals in our body, that these emotions create, is similar to what an addict in a rehab-centre would go through. Yes, that’s how strong our body’s own drug-factory is. We keep doing the same things in order to run our systems with the same fuel because we want to have that same missing puzzle piece, the same ending to our story, the same fix for the gap.

Give it a few minutes and think about it. Who would you really be without
Any of this? That’s a thought which made you hold your breath, right?
Maybe it really is time to change, replace all that old stuff with an abundance of gratitude, fun, excitement, passion and – love.

Enough said on here for now. Enjoy the recipes, embrace the quotes, and please do read the stories to your beloved ones and even to Number One: yourself.

Love, Light and Chi

Barbara.