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The Positive Diary #16 – Ability to step back

9th March 2020 – What am I grateful for today? I’m grateful for many many things, as usual. For my health, my job, my loving and caring boyfriend; for all those possibilities to grow through my past mistakes or just through experiences. There is so much to be grateful for. But what am I grateful today, what am I grateful specifically on this day?

Let’s talk about our ability to step back today.

As a person who is constantly overthinking everything, I find this ability very helpful. It is a feature I’ve been rediscovering for the last couple of days and it gives me what I was searching for thoroughly for the last couple of months.

I’ve been through a lot last year. It was essentially a storm year – for my personal life, for my work life, for the way I used to see myself. It gave me as much as it took away from me. But eventually, I managed to find my way out of every trouble, with a little help and also with a sense that none of what happened was a mistake. These were only experiences. Not necessary only pleasant ones, but still – just experiences. Just this shift, to see what we did without the constant judgement of ourselves and without that constant comparison with what could have been instead of what actually was, is freeing.

Another step is a simple realization. It is the moment when you realize, you are going to heal, with time. It is about learning that you need to be patient with yourself the same way you are patient with others. It is a promise of hope. You are on the right path; you just need to persist.

But even with knowing all of this, there are certain moments of weakness. It goes hand by hand with overthinking and the trigger might be almost everything. Moreover, with overthinking, it is not just our old scars and experiences that can start to exhaust us. It can be the most teeny-tiny problem you are dealing with in work, minor problem with people at school, basically, it can be anything. But with a little ‘help’ of overthinking, the problem can grow in your head really quickly really big.

So, what then? Learn to acknowledge that you are overthinking and learn to take a step back. Get distance in order to see the problem with fresh eyes, from a new perspective. It can be a guided meditation that will teach you how to become aware of this. It can be a person, who notifies you that you are thinking too much. In the first, second or even a third time. It’s okay to have help. And trust me, eventually, you will learn how to realize that on your own. And when you do, there are different rituals that will help you to take a step back.

Like breathing. Focusing on your breath and on your inner voice can help to take away the outside noise and redraw your attention to something worthy. What helps me, right now, is my imagination.

I lighted two candles in my bedroom this weekend. Those helped me to get rid of my negative thoughts or memories during the time when they burned. It was my safe space, a shelter where I can be happy, finally, and enjoy time with my special one. So now, even when I’m not there and the candles are not burning, I can picture them in my mind, see their light and feel their warmth. I can easily tune back into that feeling of safeness and harmony and use this feeling to repel those unnecessary negative ones.

That is magic. On some level. It must be.

And that is what I am grateful for today.

 

Happy Monday, everyone!

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Held captive.

She inhaled, deeply. Once again. The pain laying on her shoulders loosened. With the light-bearer by her side, every thought was lighter, every feeling more bearable, every nightmare survivable. Still, there were moments, glimpses of her past, memories, which held her captive inside the labyrinth of her deepest fears.

It seems like we are always drawn back, we are always held captive by our past mistakes. By our foregone attempts to live, genuinely, she thought herself.

On some days, fights were easy to win. But on other days, she was so annoyed by the amount of damage that was still present in her life that the fights were burning up her whole energy.

But it’s always a victory. Unless you stop fighting, she nodded and gave a shining smile to the light-bearer, who sat quietly next to her and carefully observed every single thought mirrored on her face.

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The Positive Diary #15 – The music memory

24th February 2019 – This February was very enriching, surprising and empowering in so many ways that I cannot still properly comprehend. It all started with the most emotionally tensed 1st February I’ve had in a very long time. It was all about passing one of the hellish exams we have on my master program in the morning, having an argument with my younger brother during a lunch and accidently meeting someone I thought I forgot about a long time ago in the evening. I have to say, meetings like this one make you wonder about your past. You might find yourself thinking about the decisions you made in your life, reckoning.

 

When I got home after that exhausting day, with a slight hangover, I started to search for my diaries from that time of my past so I could bring some of my memories back in order to revise them. Because it is all almost forgotten history to me (everything happened almost ten years ago and all of it resemble more a dream than an actual history) I needed to dig deep to find my rather modest diary excerpts in my many personal notebooks. As I found it, I realized with horror that I hadn’t written much about my experiences from those days. I also went through some stories and unfinished novels from that time, but I haven’t found a lot. I felt a little disappointed, but I let it go, eventually.

 

But today, as I was listening to some random playlist on Spotify, one of the tracks struck me with a memory and reminded me what music I had listened to back then so intensely that it had become a part of my memories of that time. I rushed to listen to it as a whole and I couldn’t be more astonished! As I was listening to these songs, many memories were brought back to a daylight. So many pictures I thought I have forgotten already, so many contradictory feelings, so much joy and sorrow at the same time!

 

I know it can be viewed by many rather as a tool of torture because we sometimes want to forget about certain things that happened in our lives. That is totally understandable and even I have to confess there are some songs that I prefer to avoid because memories which are brought back to life by them are still too heavy to carry. But in moments like these, when you want to remember something in order to gain some clarity over a problem you are solving right now, or in case you want to remember how extraordinary and happy you felt once in the past, this kind of memory is just remarkable. And it always hits me and surprises me when I realize how powerful these memories can be!

 

So today, I want to express my endless gratitude for being able to remember such intensive feelings through beautiful music and songs. I am also very grateful for living in the time when all we want to listen to is just within arms reach. I simply cannot imagine how dull, lifeless and sad my life would have been without the possibility to plug my headphones in and surrender to sounds only I decide to listen to.

 

Have a wonderful Sunday, my friends!

 

With love

 

Wicked And Clever

 

Šárka

 

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Learning Tip #2: Gratitude as the Essential Key to Success

As you already know, I am putting a big emphasis on building gratitude through my Positive Diary series here on my precious blog. I feel like once you will master the ability of gratitude it can expand into every branch of your life and bring you the most unexpected joy and happiness. Therefore, I decided that this surprisingly free of charge, but invaluable ability should be covered as one of my learning tips for being more successful in what you want to learn.

 

My new YouTube video aims exactly in this direction. I shot it during the last week and since then, many things in my life has changed. But I still believe in what I say in the video and I sincerely hope I will believe it until the rest of my life.

 

Why, you might wonder. Well, I have to admit that while practicing gratitude on everyday basis through my positive diary, working hard on my projects and attending my favorite classes at school, I was the happiest I have ever been. Of course, some days are harder that others and it is so easy to forget about one’s goals and gratitude in a face of a life’s strugglebut what is important is that you always need to find a way back and a will to fight back. And again, remembering your practiced gratitude can help a lot with this comeback as well.

 

I hope you will enjoy my tiny video which captures one beautiful day in Prague and one important message. And let me know how do you power your dreams; how do you manage to complete your goals.

Happy Sunday, my friends!

 

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The Positive Diary #9 – Czech medical care

20th October 2018 – Dear Diary, it has been a while, again. This last week was quite a mess. I turned twenty-six last Sunday and since then, everything went downhill. Not only I have found out about the inconvenient of studying while being older than 25, my younger brother, the light of my life and my very best friend, found out that he has a type 1 diabetes. What a shock it was, considering he is about to turn twenty-one next March. To my great surprise, today in my positive diary, I want to talk about medical care here, in Czech Republic.

 

When our mum died, I was so furious about the same system. After what felt like ages, during which my mum was told from various doctors that she is totally okay and if she feels bad, it is probably because she fakes it, she was hospitalized and two months later, she passed away. I was fifteen then and I wasn’t able to understand how this could have happened. I was angry as I was never before. Since then, I always considered your days over once the medical system gets you. I am much older now and, not only based on our latest experience, I have to admit that even here it depends on the people you encounter on your journey, as almost in every case in one’s life. (Also, our mum’s disease was quite rare.)

 

Visits at hospital can be harsh. I know it myself from the visits of my grandpa, as he was fighting a lung cancer, and I know it from the look on faces of my grandparents, as they were coming home from the hospital in the final stage of my mum’s disease. But this time, I was pleasantly surprised, as everyone – nurses, doctors, nuns, and other nursing stuff – was always smiling at us, always eager to explain what bothered us, always happy to answer the dumbest questions of ours.

 

Therefore, today I want to say how grateful I am that my brother was so lucky. I am also grateful that he discovered this freaking disease early enough and thus, there was less space left for the disease to start mess with his body in a hard way. I am so proud and so happy I have my wonderful brother and also satisfied I was able to be with him during those crazy days. (And to freak out about it, just a little bit. O:) )

 

 

Take care until the next time!

With love

 

Wicked And Clever

 

Šárka

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The Positive Diary #8 – Ability to cherish our memories

12th October 2018 – We all know these days when we have to do something, some visits or some work we aren’t entirely into. I was wondering today, how I will manage to survive my today’s obstacle, and I was thinking about gratitude from the moment I opened my eyes this morning. I was home alone, with my dogs only, so I had time and space to think it through. At first, I thought I will be grateful for things I have already discovered and wrote about, but then I remembered something from my past and started to laugh loudly and from the heart.

 

My today’s task is not going to be as dramatic as it might sound– we have planned a visit at my mother’s-in-law. The weird thing is, these people are always very nice to me – or I can at least say, they try to – but during the nights there I have these most awful episodes of sadness, inescapability, and I just feel trapped in a life I don’t necessarily want to live. It is a horrifying state of mind. Therefore, no one can possibly wonder why I am so worried when we are almost on the way there.

 

But, and I need to stress this, I am living a new life now. And I don’t want to ruin it. Therefore, I hope I will be able to live it through with a gratitude I am trying to cultivate here through my positive diary notes. Today, I want to write about our ability to cast almost forgotten memories back at the moments we tend to lose our hope.

 

My happy memory, the one that made me laugh this morning, isn’t that old. It came from this June when me, my classmates and teachers spend five incredible days in Jeseniky Mountains. The memory involves a story about me and one of my best friends being drunk, but the funniest part – in retrospective, it definitely didn’t seem funny back then – was when we were climbing a mountain the day after, in the most sunny and warm weather and with the second greatest hangover I have ever had. The jokes and quotes about how we are going to die very soon was comical. And except that we felt very sick, it was a perfect day.

 

I love to think about my memories like if they were ordered as books in a book shelves in my private room where I am the only one person able to entre. And when I feel sad, broken or lonely, when I am trying to remember something, I can go through them page by page and search and live it again and feel these emotions again. I believe that we can learn to focus more on the books which contains happy beautiful memories and we can cherish them in these moments when we feel down.

 

I know it is better to live our lives in the present moment, but sometimes we have no other choice than to live something inconvenient through. And in these moments, it is better to grasp any helping hand we can than not to do it.Our heads can be mighty allies while fighting. So, let’s be thankful for this ability to resist bad thoughts by remembering the good ones from the past – or maybe by daydreaming the ones that are yet to come.

 

I wish you the most joyful, colorful and memorable weekend!

 

With love

 

Wicked And Clever

 

Šárka

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The Positive Diary #3 – Being supportive to each other

22nd September 2018 – I don’t usually feel the need to remind myself of gratitude during the successful days like today. I had a terrific day – after a little blackout when I got the chance to have an offline breakfast and to set my daily goals freely I decided I will finally make my first YouTube video. If the things will go smoothly tomorrow, you should be able to see it tomorrow as it took me the entire rest of the day to edit it into the form with which I am satisfied.

The first hinds of what to be grateful for today came while I was working on the video and texting with one of my friends. And I was definitely sure what to be grateful for when my husband, who kind of isn’t able to be supportive (even though he tries to very hard), went back home from work.

 

Today I want to talk about being supportive to each other, about surrounding ourselves with people who believe in us in those moments when we for some weird and unexplainable reason can’t.

 

I have been having this dream about starting a new English blog and a YouTube channel for two years already. You might wonder why I even bother to start it now and I can tell you I am wondering that too sometimes. Well, it is because I realized I, myself, am my biggest obstacle on the way to reach my dreams, I have to fight my demons alongside the work on these projects. But without friends and some family members who were backing me all that time, it would have been much much harder, if not impossible.

 

Another great thing about having supportive friends is that it is not hard to give the afford back and it also fills you with a pure joy. Because you already know your friends are great and skillful people and with hard work and commitment they can achieve whatever they take into their heads. And the least thing you can do is to tell them.

 

I’ve noticed some people treat words as if these were nothing, as if you could take back what you have already said or worse, as if the words you once said had no meaning to you now in the present. From my point of view, it is the quite opposite. Words work like powerful spells and through them you either hurt someone or you give him the strength to do or to overcome what they need to do or to overcome.

 

Today I am so grateful and happy for having these people in my life, people who cast on me only the good spells, people who helps me to overcome my demons. And today, I am very proud that I can be such guardian for others, for people who are worth sometimes so much more than they tend to think about themselves.

 

I wish you the endless faith in your skills and in improving them beyond the limits. I believe that if you put your best affords into the thing you want to achieve the most, there is no possibility of failing.

 

Good luck, my friends!

 

Yours

Wicked And Clever

Šárka