by Lisa Cybaniak
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Do we feel you have healthy minds? That’s such a strange question, isn’t it? But in a world that is so fixated on mental illness, it’s important to shift the focus towards mental health. How do we get healthy minds?
Today we’re talking about how to change the narrative around anxiety to build healthy minds, by understanding three core principles that can literally change your relationship with anxiety, yourself and others.
Sarie Taylor is a trained psychotherapist and coach who found herself going from attending university and travelling the world, to being housebound within a couple of weeks with severe anxiety.
Meet Sarie Taylor
Sarie spent a month hospitalised and heavily medicated, with her support team focused on what was broken. Once released, she spent over 10 years “fixing” herself. During that time, Sarie underwent therapy, and became trained in numerous modalities, including Psychotherapy, NLP, CBT, and Hypnotherapy, all in her quest to create a healthy mind from the outside in. During those years, she had no idea that the answer actually lay within.
Sarie now helps others completely transform their relationship with stress and anxiety and fall back in love with life, as she did, in a fraction of the time, all through the understanding of three basic principles first described by Sydney Banks: Mind, Thought and Consciousness.
These principles were literally the piece to the puzzle for Sarie. She continues to use them today, and she shares with her clients to help them change their relationships with anxiety, and with themselves and create healthy minds. And she’s sharing them with us today!
So, let’s dive right in!
Healthy minds through…. Your MIND!
Sarie explains that when we’re talking about the mind, it’s very different from the brain. The mind is the universal intelligence of life, the guidance we get through life, our gut instinct, an inner knowing, God, something bigger at play.
It doesn’t matter what you call it or how you look at it. What does matter is your understanding that healthy minds begin with the trust in our connection to something bigger, especially when you get pulled down into what Sarie calls “thought storms”. These are the run-on thoughts we get when we overthink something, like how Sarie used to do when she’d wake up with anxiety.
Healthy Minds through the power of THOUGHT
That leads us nicely into creating healthy minds through the understanding that 100% of our experiences in life are through our thinking. Let’s really think about this one for a minute, no pun intended.
Sarie reminds us that just because we have a thought, doesn’t make it true. We give our thoughts way too much credit, when really, they are quite neutral. We shouldn’t be attaching anything to our thoughts.
We’ve all seen this a million times, whether in ourselves or in others. These are the times that something happens, and the person rationalises in their mind what’s occurred. Really, they’re making assumptions – the most likely reason for what’s happened, based on all their past experiences with life.
That is different from actually knowing what happened. That initial assumption became truth just through being given attention.
Whenever we’re facing anything in life, the best thing we can do is remember that our thoughts are just thoughts. They are not necessarily the truth and they certainly don’t need to be given all our energy.
Awareness through CONSCIOUSNESS
We’ve all heard the expression, “This too shall pass”, right? Sarie dives deeper with this concept by explaining that we have levels of awareness, just like riding an elevator to different floors of a building.
In this case, the top floors would be higher energy levels, with a higher consciousness. On these floors, the view is unrestricted, and we can recognise that our thoughts are really just ideas we had.
Conversely, the bottom floors are lower energy levels, with a lower consciousness. On these floors, the view is very different – it’s restricted. Here, we are more likely to believe our thoughts to be true.
Sarie shares that when we face difficult times, understanding that our level of consciousness will naturally shift, just like riding that elevator. There is no need to get caught up in what to do about the perceived problem. In fact, if you don’t trust this process and you insist on finding a solution, focusing on the problem, you will become stuck.
Letting the elevator of life ride on creates healthy minds!
More from this episode
Sarie goes into so much more detail in this episode, sharing details of her struggle with severe anxiety, her long road to recovery, and how she now helps people make the same realisations and shifts, but in a fraction of the time.
She also shares how we are more focused on mental illness in society over mental health. Rather than talking about our resilience, we talk about how we’re broken, and that needs to change.
I’ll leave you with these though provoking questions: If you’re suffering from a past experience, are you keeping the suffering alive through your thoughts? When is it time to stop?
Press play on the episode above to get all the details!
Follow Sarie Taylor
Find out more about Sarie’s work through her website. You can also follow Sarie on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
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Voice over credit: Shari Vandermolen. Shari is offering a free download of one of her songs to the fans of the Life Like You Mean It podcast! Just visit www.GiftFromShari.com and tell her where to send it. Shari’s debut album is available for streaming on all the major platforms including Spotify and iTunes.
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