focus – Page 5 – Allan Johnson, PhD

How to Live Intentionally

Posted on February 25, 2022August 20, 2022 by Allan Johnson in intention, wellbeing

Living with intention means taking conscious actions that are in alignment with your deepest values and passions. It means walking through your world with a firm focus, a clear vision, and an unwavering gaze. It is about consciously choosing your thoughts and behaviours rather than allowing your thoughts and behaviours to be a product of your world. We have to choose to be intentional. Ideas, beliefs, and intentions create our environment, experiences and circumstances. We can create a world that supports the things we value and desire, or, alternatively, we can create a life that moves us further away from our values.

Intention is the seamless connection of your present situation with your highest, most meaningful goals. It is a way of being that involves daily, conscious choices. It means living wholeheartedly, without ego or fear, in the moment and without worrying about the future. It is a way of acting, of doing. Living with intention means first and foremost making a choice. When you align your thoughts and energy with your intentions, you create an environment that supports your goals or desires. When we are intentional and choose our thoughts and behaviour, we can direct our lives and we can direct them in a positive direction: the direction we desire. We can choose our thoughts and our actions because thoughts are not outside of us, and neither are our actions. This is what it means to be in the now.

There is a difference between living with intention and choosing to live your life in a certain way to achieve short-term goals. Intention is about making conscious choices for long-term happiness, meaning, and fulfilment, and working towards those goals. But intention is about realising that happiness is possible in the present, no matter what is happening around you. It is about learning to live each day with gratitude and finding peace in each moment. When you learn to live with intention, you can be fully present and attentive to the world around you. You can choose to be fully engaged with your surroundings and the people around you.

Intention is about taking action. It is about being fully present, engaging in the moment and making each day a new beginning. Living with intention is a state of engagement that leads you to make choices that are more mindful and more aligned with your values. When you act with intention, the world comes alive for you and this helps you to create new possibilities for the life you want to live. Living with intention is a way of being in the world, it is a way of being who you are and what you do while choosing to be fully present and noticing what is happening and what surrounds you. Do not wait and worry about the future, but be fully present in the moment. When you learn to live in the moment, you will find that the world lives with you.

Through meditation and understanding the processes of the mind and how the mind works, we understand the main causes and origins of our thoughts, attitudes, emotions and actions. We can understand that our actions, thoughts, and emotions arise from our beliefs and that the messages our mind sends are often not logical. This allows us to become more aware of our thoughts and feelings, understand their origins and learn from them. We can use this knowledge to choose what we believe and thus influence our thoughts, attitudes, and feelings. As a result, we can begin to act with pure intention and live with a clear, strong, and unwavering vision that enables us to make choices that are optimal for us and bring us closer to the things we really want and value in life.

You may want to reflect on these prompts about intentional living in your journal:

1) What do you want to achieve in life?
2) How will achieving this change your life?
3) How can you achieve this? What needs to happen?
4) How far along the path are you?
5) What will you consciously do today to get closer to this goal?

Download your free 21-day course in The Path of Mindfulness. In this life-changing 21-day mindfulness journey, Dr Allan Kilner-Johnson guides you through a series of self-guided mindfulness exercises and shows you how and when to bring mindfulness into your daily life.

What is Psychosynthesis?

Posted on February 13, 2022August 20, 2022 by Allan Johnson in Psychosynthesis, wellbeing

The term Psychosynthesis refers to a process of psychological and spiritual development that takes place at the conscious and unconscious levels of the human psyche. Psychosynthesis was developed by the Italian psychiatrist, philosopher, and esotericist Roberto Assagioli (1888-1974), who was influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, with whom he was in regular correspondence. However, Assagioli’s thinking differed in several ways. While Freud focused on the impact of early childhood experiences on the formation of the psyche and Jung on the common collective unconscious inherent in human beings, Assagioli recognised that a complete approach to the mind must take both aspects into account. Assagioli developed a scientifically based psychospiritual system that he eventually called psychosynthesis, an approach to self-development in which individuals perceive themselves and the world from a new perspective. It involves a comprehensive theory of human development and a unique methodology for self-development.

Like other talking therapies, psychosynthesis emphasises the value of regular conversation between the therapist and the client about their experiences, which can help the client progress in their personal and spiritual development. The main tools of psychosynthesis are reflection, art, journaling, dialogue, active imagination, and contemplation. These tools facilitate critical awareness of the contents of consciousness, especially the motivational aspects of consciousness, in a non-judgmental and compassionate way. It encourages us to see thoughts and feelings as transient events that arise and pass within us, rather than fixed, unchanging realities, and it encourages us to enter into dialogue with these inner phenomena. Psychosynthesis also encourages dialogue with the deeper levels of the unconscious. In this sense, psychosynthesis is an approach that encourages critical self-awareness and the development of a capacity for self-observation and self-regulation.

Psychosynthesis is a complete and holistic philosophy and psychology of the human being. It includes a theory of human nature, an understanding of the development of consciousness and a methodology for psychological and spiritual self-development. Psychosynthesis approaches human development by emphasising the transformative potential of the deep self and seeks to enable the individual to live a more complete and satisfying life. Psychosynthesis is not necessarily spiritual, but it is a practical approach to looking at the human being from a spiritual perspective. It is an approach that aims to integrate the mind, body and spirit and help us develop a more fulfilling, compassionate, and meaningful life. It is an approach that seeks to help us all awaken our spiritual potential and bring it into alignment with our daily lives.

Journaling to Support Creativity

Posted on November 12, 2020August 20, 2022 by Allan Johnson in creativity, habits

I’ve kept a daily journal for almost twenty years. It’s served many different purposes throughout the years, but has always offered me many benefits and has become a regular part of my daily ritual. In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron suggests to her readers to begin each morning by writing three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing in longhand form. The topic of these ‘Morning Pages’ is not predetermined, nor are there any explicit goals or objectives for the content of the entries themselves. Rather, Cameron saw these three longhand pages as a vital way to clear the air for creative thinking, and bring focus back to the creative process.

Your entries might be completely and utterly mundane, but new insights and observations can emerge from this daily stream-of-consciousness writing more often than one imagines. Cameron also reasserts the importance of writing the Morning Pages out longhand, in order to stabilise the rate of thinking and the rate of writing, and to highlight the important physical connection between thinking and writing.

By setting aside time each day to write about and reflect on your current projects, you will immediately be bringing a new level of focus to your work that might not be achieved otherwise. Many creative professionals find it helpful to begin each day by writing an entry in their research journal. They might review what they wrote about their reading yesterday, and use their daily entry as a jumping off point, or a ‘to-do’ list for the day ahead. There is also certainly a meditative aspect to this type of reflective writing, which can help to give you the motivation and focus to tackle the next step of your writing.

Morning pages also allow you to record and analyse your own behaviours and habits as a creative. Do your entries suggest to you that you tend to do your best work in the morning? If so, then by all means examine your daily schedule and see how you can best accommodate this. Your research journal can serve to capture some subtle but very important insights about your own unique approach to the research process.

You can learn a lot about yourself and gain a lot of insight into your life. There’s something magical about writing that thinking alone just doesn’t have.

Use these tips to take advantage of journaling to gain insight into your mind and your life:

Review your day. Take a look at your day and make some notes. What is getting you down? What are the situations, people, habits, and beliefs that are causing you the most grief? Why do these things bother you? What can you do about it? What are these two things and what was so great or terrible about them?
List progress toward your goals. Writing down your goals each day is a powerful way to stay focused on them. Write your 10 most important goals each day and notice how they evolve over time.Think about your goals and list the progress you made toward each. If you failed to do anything to make progress toward one or more of your goals, note that, too.
Address your fears. Write about your fears. What are you afraid of? Why do you think you’re afraid of those things? How do your fears impact your life? What is your plan to address those fears? What’s standing in your way? List the obstacles in your life that you believe are blocking you from happiness or achieving your goals.
List five things that make you feel grateful. What are you grateful for? Make a list of several items each day and notice how your perspective on life changes.
Make a plan for the future. Aside from your specific goals, what does your dream life look like? How are you planning on getting there? Think about it and sketch out a plan.
Write about what is causing you to feel negative emotions. What is getting you down? What are the situations, people, habits, and beliefs that are causing you the most grief? Why do these things bother you? What can you do about it?

Journaling each day can take some time, but it’s time that’s well spent. Develop a routine that incorporates journaling into your life. It won’t be long before you begin noticing the benefits. Do what the most successful people in the world do and write about your thoughts and your life.