A reflection of the most significant events, resources, and realisations of 2018.
So much happens in a year that it’s difficult to share it all in one post. So in this review, I’m sharing the most relevant happenings on my journey of authentic expression and included a list of resources for developing self-awareness, connection, and a sense of purpose. I also share what’s coming up for B is for Being in 2019.
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Wrapping up the year with a delicious reflection session.
It’s been a year of realisation, healing and going to work.
At the beginning of the year, I landed a stable office job with a great team of people. Very quickly, I was confronted by my unbalanced work ethic and was left trying to balance the remainder of my time between the podcast, Júlia, friends, family, exercise, and self-time. It was difficult.
But I was grateful for this situation because I became highly aware of some of the dysfunctional beliefs I hold around work, and why work takes priority over most other areas of my life.
The troublesome belief I became aware of was:
My value as a person is determined by the outcome of the work I produce. If people approve of my work, then I feel good, well and worthy. If they feel it’s lacking or needs improvement, then I feel worthless (worth-less) and need to work even harder to make up for the self-worth deficit I’ve just created.
This is a very intense belief. However, there is something I found helpful when I was deep in moments of being my own worst boss.
Every time I felt the pressure to work harder, I would look around the office and become aware of everyone else working around me. While I did this, I recalled the times they had shown their work to others and received feedback on things they needed to improve. From this, I realised that not everyone puts the same amount of pressure on themselves as I do, and they seem perfectly ok, maybe even a little happier…
I realised my workmates weren’t working for their worth. They were just working. They knew they were valuable even if their work falls flat and they have to do it all again.
Of course, not everyone in the office had this worked out. I found it quite sobering when I saw others putting pressure on themselves to produce good work or work harder.
I got to see this belief from the outside and realised it only serves to add extra pressure to perform which makes it even harder to work efficiently because suddenly my self-value is riding on the quality of my work.
Anyway, enough of this intro. Let’s get to this post! Continue reading
Thinking about exploring meditation for yourself? Take a look at 5 of the biggest benefits my friend Peter experienced and learn how to begin your own practice.
Intro from Ben: Peter’s previous article was a yearly reflection on the biggest self-discoveries he made in 2015 which greatly improved the quality of his life. However, one of the things he didn’t mention was that he’d made most of these discoveries alongside starting his own meditation practice.
Not being able to fit all of these juicy experiences into one article he has returned with this article featuring the biggest benefits he’s experienced through meditation.
A recommended read if you’re curious about what to expect from starting your own explorations with meditation.
Starting with meditation about a year and a half ago was definitely one of the positive changes in my life. I believe that the benefits I gained through meditation were a catalyst enabling me to further change my life for the better. Meditation helped me in getting rid of some bad habits and identifying some unhealthy thought patterns. As well as making me generally more balanced and more focused.
With this article I want to convince you that meditation is for everyone. But in order to convince you I will refrain from getting all esoteric about it because I’m aware that this might scare you off. Maybe one of the reasons why you can’t see yourself actually trying out something like meditation is because you think it’s only for “hippies” and “esoteric people”? Well it’s not, I believe that everyone should at least try it and that everyone can benefit from it. So here I’m just going to give you a simple list of benefits that I personally experienced very quickly after first starting to meditate. No esoteric hocus-pocus, just plain facts.
I’m taking every seventh week off to recharge and reflect so I can bring my best to you every week.
I’ve been so focused on producing new episodes for the podcast that I’ve neglected other parts of B is for Being and it’s starting to show.
If you’re a mailing-list subscriber you would have noticed the giant wall of unformatted text coming through with each new episode of the podcast. This is not cool and not how it should be! But this has been a persistent issue that’s remained unresolved because I’ve been spending so much time producing podcasts.
So I’ve felt the need to step back to review everything that’s happened in the previous six weeks, recharge, plan and make some changes to my process. Continue reading
Writing can be used as a tool for understanding the origins of our strong emotional reactions, thought patterns and the underlying beliefs we hold, providing a space for us to choose positive action bringing us closer to ourselves and others.
Strong emotional reactions like fear, anger, anxiety, jealousy and doubt, greatly affect our sense of well-being and make it difficult to maintain our harmonious connections with others.
When we aren’t aware of what is the cause of our emotional reactions we usually look outside of ourselves for the apparent cause of a disturbance. In this way, we usually end up blaming ourselves or those around us for how we feel.
It’s pretty crazy, but in most cases, these emotions are not inherently connected to the situation in front of us but are a result of the deeper beliefs we hold about how the world should or shouldn’t be.
All of the emotions we experience are a reaction to our thoughts. What we feel in our bodies as our emotions is our body reacting to our thoughts, and it’s our thoughts which are determined by the beliefs we hold. Continue reading
A Tiny Intro from Benjamin: In the very first guest post on the site, we hear from Peter. Peter and I lived together in Berlin and would often find ourselves at the kitchen table talking about all sorts of things, from the meaning of life to how to bake the most delicious cake.
In this article Peter takes us behind the scenes, sharing some specific points which have changed the way he perceives himself and others, and explains how these changes have resulted in an overall improvement to his well-being.
In this article I want to share with you a couple of things I learned in the past year about myself and about life. I know that sounds very general, but you will soon understand what I’m talking about.
I’m writing this because I feel that I grew a lot as a person during the past year and wanted to share some of my learnings. Maybe you can benefit from reading this, or maybe you already know all of it. In any case writing this has helped me better understand and reflect on what I’ve learned. Continue reading
Site Origins, Lessons Learned, and What’s Coming up in 2016
It’s been a tremendous year of learning and self-development for me. And producing content for this site has brought up new challenges of self-expression and authenticity for me to work through.
I’ll be sharing all of it with you as I unravel these challenges and begin to move through them.
But right now I’d like to take a look back at the year that was 2015 and reflect on everything that’s gone down. Continue reading