Have you questioned any of your negative thoughts lately?  Without having to "tell yourself" that they shouldn't be there and trying to push them away, you can just check whether they appear to be completely true.  This leads to letting them fall away on their own.  When you question your thoughts, especially the one's that create a feeling of limitation and discontentment in you, you'll find that they do not have that much substance and truth.  In my experience, this is much more powerful in practice than it is in philosophy.  By really questioning and adding any amount of doubt to your beliefs, you'll find their sense of firmness weakening and eventually being replaced by either tranquil awareness or a new, more accurate and empowering belief.

This understanding and idea comes mostly from Bryon Katie and her amazing tool for awakening called The Work.  It is essentially 4 questions that lead you to discovering within yourself that the seemingly solid beliefs we have are not as true as they might seem.  Until we question them, however, they are as real as we make them and they can have a huge influence on our lives.  While just "pretending" to yourself that they don't really exist or that they're false does not really change anything in the way you feel overall, looking truthfully at the thoughts and beliefs you have and questioning their validity can have remarkable effects.

For those who want to get started on learning this FREE technique, here is the link to the how-to on the official site. http://www.thework.com/thework-4questions.php

When you really question your thoughts, you'll find your mind freeing up in a way that gives you a new perception of your life.  You might even find a sense of contentment beyond what any object can really give you.  This expanded way of living is true inner freedom and you can access it at any time.  It (you) lies just beneath your thoughts and feelings.

There are many personal development strategies that CAN actually help you to develop into the kind of person that you want to be and shift your life direction toward something more favorable to you.  Still, many people have difficulty ACTUALLY putting a lot of these nice-to-hear approaches into practice.  This is not to say that the practices and techniques don’t work or that they are just to make you feel good about not being where you want to be, but that an inner movement is also an essential aspect of any new development.  This “inner movement” I’m referring to is a real profound shift in your awareness to where you are moved to a new level inside.  This article will detail one powerful way to do this, utilizing only natural foods and herbs as well as empowering strategies that you can act on right now.

The Cacao/Empowerment Connection

Many times, the single attribute that brings inspiration and real productivity is empowerment.  When you feel utterly empowered and ready to create what you want in your life, you’ll more than likely receive new insights about how to further your success and you’ll be in more of a position to take action on them because empowerment brings motivation.  This is often what many of us are striving for in our search for self-help insights.  How do we increase this sense of empowerment quickly and easily?

My answer to this might surprise you if you have not read other articles that I’ve written:  Cacao, or dark chocolate.

Dark Chocolate, or even better in most cases, raw cacao, is one of the most powerful foods for increasing feelings of empowerment.  It contains so much magnesium, compared to other foods, that it can help to “fill in the gaps” regarding our need for replenishing this important stress lowering mineral.  Just by introducing high quality raw cacao, or dark chocolate, into your diet you can begin to obtain more of this calming, centering, mineral that helps to offset excess stress.  This is key for those who want to feel more uplifted, more often.

In addition, cacao contains the endorphin Anandamide, which is what we release during excersize.  It also contains PEA, which is a component we naturally produce in high amounts when we are in a state of love.  This has been shown to increase contentment and concentration.  Furthermore, cacao contains MAO inhibitors which help us to have the “feel-good” dopamine neurotransmitter circulating for longer periods of time.

With these attributes, cacao is definitely a love food.  As a result, in can help you to connect more to your true self, which might be covered at times by fear and other emotions.  As you can probably agree, love is a powerful antidote to fear.  In this way, cacao can help you to transcend limiting emotions that might be holding you back.  While you can certainly cultivate these qualities of empowerment and love without cacao, it can be a very helpful tool and potentially make it easier.  Of course, like other foods and herbs, you likely don’t want to consume very high amounts of it every day, as that might be a little imbalancing to some people.  A good idea is to see how well you feel eating and eat it whenever you truly want it, which could be essentially everyday for periods of time.

Eating Cacao With A Purpose:

While it is always good to eat foods that inspire and uplift you, it is something else to eat them with an intention.  The intention here would be to empower yourself and use that increased sense of courageousness and creativity to notice insights and inspired ideas for you to act on.

Here is a useful equation that I’ve found to be helpful for this:

Uplifting food + directing your thoughts toward creative ideas regarding your goal or overall desire= improved ability to define and act on the steps needed to obtain or reach that goal.

This means that cacao or other foods that you find to be helpful to you, including tonic herbs, can give you that extra natural lift in order for you to see your objective with greater illumination and creative insight.  By feeling more capable of reaching your goal, which cacao and other feel-good foods can promote, you’ll naturally notice more applicable steps for you to take toward it, many of which you'll actually feel inspired about.

It is a way to more easily get into the flow and use your creativity to power your ability to take that first step.  By noticing an abundance of choices, through feeling empowered and directing your thoughts toward solutions, you can decide on one small action to take.  If you’re in a real flow and feel utterly inspired, you might want to write down your plan and list how you are going to get to where you want, along with a few steps that you can take NOW.  If you are having any issue with procrastination, a powerful key is to choose just one small aspect of the first step and decide to do just that, allowing yourself to stop right after that one small step if you want to.  Very likely, that little step, no matter how small it is, will give you the motivation needed to do the next step.

In essence, by eating cacao with the intent on being entirely productive and moving forward on an area of your life, you can likely “tune into” more creative ideas and intuitive nudges about steps for you to take.

A small note about cacao is to choose high quality cacao if you can.  This is usually raw cacao nibs or powder that has more of a deep, rich taste along with its natural bitterness rather than a very off taste.  Also, if you do not feel well after eating cacao it’s likely either an indication that the type or brand of cacao doesn’t work well with you or cacao itself doesn’t work well with you right now.  For some people, cacao increases feelings of well-being without being too stimulating.  It provides a sense of satiety, nutritionally, that outshines many other foods but without any notion of “side effects”.  If you do not have this beneficial experience with cacao, you might not want to eat very much of it.

Dark chocolate is a good second choice, especially for short term productivity improvements and creativity sessions, though it might be slightly too stimulating for some people to eat on an ongoing basis.  You can usually tell whether it appears to work well with you by how you feel hours after eating it.  If you feel overly tired, as if you drank too much coffee earlier in the day, it might be too stimulating for your adrenals.  If that's the case, just eat it infrequently if you choose to eat it at all.  High quality raw chocolate, for many people, does not have nearly the same level of stimulation, yet is very uplifting and nutritionally dense.  Choose what works for you.

Many of us have had issues with emotional eating before.  We may think that we are just eating mindlessly when we do it, but a lot of the time it is because of unresolved emotions.  By eating, we feel more in control of "stuffing" our emotions down and suppressing them.  A constant, pleasurable action that we can often-times easily act upon can be difficult to avoid when we are going through stress.  Here's how to do it, though, in a way that is utterly empowering.

1.  Turn around your desire for emotional eating.  By viewing the "why" for emotional eating and really looking at it truthfully, you can see how unhelpful it is in the long term.  Even in the short term, it is likely keeping you from true action.  To turn this around, simply find compelling reasons to focus more of your attention on other more empowering actions.  If you feel stuck and only feel able to cope with your stress through distraction, realize that there is ALWAYS some small empowering action to take in the direction of courageousness and truth.  Eating excessively is a way to escape our inner desire for change.  This desire is always with some kind of applicable choice for us to take in the moment.  It may be to confront the emotion directly or to start a project that you've been putting off.  Either way, there is the ability to make powerful progress in the same moment that you could be eating.  Just one step forward, when you've been avoiding something altogether, can move mountains and bring you closer to your true potential.  Remember, the things we feel to be the most difficult are sometimes magnified in our minds in a way that we feel "sure" about it's difficulty and truthfulness.  Remove those inner limitations today, or whenever you choose to be right for yourself, by just taking that one step forward.




2. Amplify your reasons for moving forward by considering how good you'd feel during and after. Imagine how exhilerated and empowered you'll feel if you do move forward on something you've been worrying about and suppressing through emotional eating.  How much greater will that feeling be than the "excitement" of eating to numb yourself.  Even if you take all appropriate action, at least from your understanding, but you don't get the "goal" or the solution that you felt you needed, you'll be much more in a position to truly let it go and naturally dissolve emotional eating.  When you've already made the choices you've been putting off and overeating to avoid, how many reasons are there for you to still turn to emotional eating?  That's not to say that you won't feel stress if it doesn't work out in your favor but it will likely propel you to step 3, which is still empowering.




3.  Reshape your perception and viewpoint of the issue.  Try to see a more well-rounded view toward your stressful situation.  Do you know for a fact that you're interpretation and level of importance you're attributing to it is completely accurate?  If not, why act as if you do.  A wonderful technique for releasing our hold on our beliefs, which can potentially turn around your need to emotionally eat, is The Work by Byron Katie.  It is a set of questions that can have miraculous effects when answered truthfully.

In addition, The Sedona Method is a wonderful way to quickly release any negative emotion you're carrying about the issue.  You can literally free yourself from a lifetime of stress related "programs" that have been influencing you to over-eat etc. by learning and practicing this technique.  If you try learning the three questions, and cannot seem to do it correctly, you can try just noticing the feeling and saying "yes" to it.  This is a technique from The Release Technique, which is very similar to the Sedona Method but taught in a somewhat different style.  By saying yes to your feelings and actually feeling them fully, you are essentially giving them more room to release, which can result in you letting them go.

If you feel up to the task and want to feel truly empowered, jumping straight to letting go and taking inspired action toward dealing with the issue you are suppressing with eating, which often takes courage in the beginning, can propel you from emotional eating to the amazing potential you have within you.

Additionally, you can take tonic herbs and superfoods.  While I've suggested this in numerous blog posts, their effects are applicable in many situations and are likely one of the most powerful tools for anyone to really change their way of thinking.

Many times, people emotionally eat because they feel stuck.  According to well-known herbalist Ron Teeguarden, this can be do to liver issues, as the liver/gallbladder is associated with empowering qualities like decisiveness.  When we start taking tonic herbs associated with liver health, like Schizandra and Reishi, this can begin to shift and decisiveness and clarity can re-emerge.  In addition, both of these herbs have powerful Shen, or spirit, qualities and help to promote higher awareness.  This quality alone can make it easier to see beyond your own stressful way of thinking if you are dealing with emotional eating.  Reishi, for example, is even suggested to help release suppressed emotions.  Because of that, I feel that they are two important and powerful herbs for most people dealing with emotional eating, though everyone is different.  We offer both of these herbs in extract form at our online store and ship them quickly and inexpensively.

Whether you take tonic herbs or not, you have the ability to move past emotional eating and into empowerment.

Sometimes it just takes innovation and creativity to move forward quickly.  When we are thinking in the same way all the time and not getting anywhere, this can be an indication that our inner wisdom has not been tapped lately.  Here are some ways that can help point you in the right direction.

1.     Let go of any stress related to the issue, or other issues, that you notice and are willing to release now.  This will greatly clear up your mind and allow you to more easily locate solutions.  Often, just a little release can bring in powerful insights.  The space created by letting go can give your inner wisdom more freedom to flow.

2.     Ask yourself more empowering questions.  Tony Robbins offers a brilliant tool in his book, Awaken The Giant Within.  He suggests that by asking questions that are designed to bring about powerful solutions, you can more likely find that insight that can turn around your situation.

3.     Set an intention and then let go of attachment to the “how”.  Brandon Gilbert, of Hyperion Nutrition, suggests this interesting technique in this video.  He even suggests going to do something completely unrelated to the goal after you set the intention, essentially forgetting about it for a little, allowing your mind to more freely generate innovative ideas.  In essence, the key would be to get clear about what you want or what solution you are after, feel what you would feel like to actually obtain it, and then release yourself from it and get into a more relaxed or inspired state of mind in whatever way works for you. From there, you might receive new insights out of nowhere related to your intention.  Author Joe Vitale, who was in The Secret, also suggests a similar notion that by making an intention and then being open to the how unfolding naturally, you’ll likely be guided by intuition.  The key, in both of these ideas, though somewhat different in their wording, is that having an intention can bring about powerful ideas of innovation if we can just step aside and get somewhat out of the way for a little.  This does not mean not to take inspired action, but instead to allow for inspiration to take hold rather than constantly focusing on the “how”.

4.     Take tonic herbs and foods that uplift and inspire you.  Whichever they are, find the one’s that promote vitality in you and help to you reach new heights of wellbeing.  This can help you to stay more “in the moment” and less attached to you the “how” part of your goals.