Finding happiness through Chinese astrology

Chinese Astrology - Is Happiness Measured On A Weighing Scale?

Our purpose in life is to seek happiness. This is the ultimate aim of all people. No matter what our goals, dreams or visions, they all lead to the same destination – happiness! We may seek more money, better career, good health, pleasurable time, meaningful relationship and other finer things in life. All these aspirations come with a price.

In Chinese astrology or Ba Zi, the price can come in the form of destruction, clash, harm or punishment between the metaphysical elements in our natal chart. The question is "Are we prepared to pay the price and sacrifice a part of ourselves in order to attain happiness?" Some of us are lucky to be born with a sliver spoon and live a gilded life but most of us have to make ends meet by sheer hard work. Whether we were born rich or started life at a disadvantaged, happiness is not delivered to us on a silver platter. We need to look for it. Finding happiness and keeping it is a real challenge as our journey through life is full of twist and turns. The road ahead can be rocky, long and winding. There are times when we meet with obstacles, stumble and fall, hurt ourselves and lost our directions along the way. The journey of life can inflict extreme physical, mental and psychological pain on us and it can be so unbearable that we begin to question whether the end justifies itself. In Chinese astrology or Ba Zi, the pain that we endured is reflected by the 7 Killings star which bring extreme stress and pressure.

Not everybody is created equal. At least it is not in the physical, mental and psychological dimensions. Different people have different threshold of pain or comfort zone. Some are weak and some are strong. Some are risk takers and some are risk averse. Most of us are in between. We just need to look for a comfortable level where pain and pleasure is at an optimum balance. Imagine a weighing scale with two pans and a balance where pleasure and pain weigh equally. Any excess on either side will tip the balance. The trick is to maintain a comfortable balance with neither too much pleasure nor pain. This is what we should do to maintain a comfortable balance in our lives. Our lives are like a weighing scale on which happiness is weighed between pleasure and pain. Our goal in life is therefore to seek an optimum balance within our own comfort zone. This is happiness created out of keeping a comfortable balance in our lives.

"So are we able to pay for the price of happiness?"

We only pay for what we can afford because the price of happiness is relative. It defers from people to people. Some may pay a little to enjoy its value whereas some may pay more for the same return. A poor man can be as happy as a rich man within one’s own comfort zone. In other words, happiness is status blind! It is using what we are born with, living within our means and hopefully, happiness will "see" us.

In Chinese Astrology, a person is born with innate characteristics and abilities that are elemental in nature. The elements are metaphysically represented by wood, fire, earth, metal and water. These elements are believed to be cosmic energies that radiate from the stars in the constellations and that they give birth to all living things on earth. We are infused with the energies of the five elements based on the configuration of the stars at the precise hour of our birth. Whether we are destined to live a life full of pleasure or pain depends on the elemental equilibrium in our natal chart. The secret to happiness is keeping a comfortable balance of the elements within us. This is the essence of Chinese astrology!

Article Source: Alvin Yap (ArticleBiz.com)
http://www.proactive-qi.com

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Things to make sure in preparing your resume/C.V.

How to Present Your Resume

One of the most important things you must consider when writing your resume or curriculum vitae is the design and layout.

Typeface

The first thing to consider is your choice of typeface. You want your resume to stand out, not compete with wedding or funeral announcements. Our advice is that you stick to a simple, clean typeface like Arial, Times Roman, or Helvetica. They are our choice because of their simplicity of design and clarity. Another trap to avoid is combining different typeface styles (like Times Roman and Helvetica). Each of these typefaces offers a variety of light, italic, and bold that can be used to produce an attractive visual effect.

Length

Debate among the "experts" continues as to whether resumes must be limited to a single page. Our take on this reverts to common sense:

- If your work experience is limited, i.e., you are a recent graduate or have only held one or two jobs, there is probably no reason for your resume to exceed a single page.

- If you can reasonably limit your resume to one page, do so.

- If you have held a number of positions and cannot describe your accomplishments and responsibilities on one page, then two pages are certainly acceptable. However, you do not need to provide detailed descriptions of jobs that date back more than eight or ten years, unless they add something significant to your experience and qualifications. Be sure to emphasize your most recent experience.

- Attachments, such as additional pages of publications (for writers, researchers, and academics), are appropriate.

- Exception: Consulting resumes are expected to include all relevant experience, even if they extend to multiple pages.

Layout

When you design your resume, bear in mind that open spaces make it easier to read. Avoid cramming your page(s) with heavy masses of print.

Paper

Standard office stationery is the safe choice of paper on which to print your resume and cover letter, although a quality paper stock may improve the overall effect. Slightly off-white papers is acceptable, but beware of using pastels or darker colors, which look unprofessional.

Print as many originals of your resume as you need on attractive, letter-quality paper. Never send photocopies of your resume to a potential employer. They're okay for friends or employment agencies, but not the employer with whom you want to win an interview.

Another point is that the resume you mail may be photocopied by a personnel department, and subsequently passed along to other members of their firm. Copies made from copies can lose readability. In an emergency, some professionally maintained office photocopiers may do a good job, but we think it's better to avoid such emergencies by always having "perfect" copies of your resume on hand.

Accuracy

A final word: Proofread your resume at every step in the process. Get a knowledgeable friend or colleague to help. Mistakes on resumes are embarrassing, unacceptable, and potentially disastrous. No matter how much you may pay to have your resume created, you're the one who loses if it isn't right. So be meticulous and don't settle for less than the very best.

Article Source: J.E. Burke (EzineArticles.com)
Dr. J.E. Burke is an educator, writer and entrepreneur involved in various business enterprises via Burke Publications. Please visit http://burkepublications.com and http://writer.burkepublications.com

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Happiness lies in how we balance our lives

Keeping Your Life In Balance

We all want to be happy in life, to be calm, confident and relaxed. We all want to be in complete control of every aspect of your life. Just as a car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster when the wheels are in perfect alignment, every individual performs better when his or her thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals and values are in alignment.

Nature demands balance in all things. You see balance all around you, from the most distant stars in the universe down to the individual cells of your body. Each of your billions of cells contain hundreds of chemicals, each of which is carefully regulated and kept in balance by your autonomic nervous system to ensure health and longevity.

Balance is the norm your life. Your body has natural bias toward health and energy. It’s built to last for a hundred years and to perform smoothly and efficiently for most of that time. It’s only improper maintenance and incorrect operation that, in most cases, cause your body to get out of balance and lead to disease and pain, rather than relaxation and pleasure.

Emotionally, you also have a natural tendency toward happiness and enjoyment. In fact you have an inner voice that automatically tells you when you’re doing the things that are just right for your unique personality and temperament. This inner voice or intuition is manifested in your level of peace of mind.

Whenever you feel at peace with yourself and the world around you, it means that you’re doing the very things that you’re meant to do and that your inner and outer worlds are properly balanced and in alignment with each other.

The normal, natural and healthy state of being in life is that of happiness, experiencing joy in laughter in most of what you do. How often you laugh at what is going on around you is a good measure how in balance your life actually is. The degree to which you have a positive mental attitude toward yourself and the normal ups and downs of life is also a good measure of your mental health.

People who are pessimistic and negative, and who only see the dark side of things that happen to them, are often found to be suffering from some form of mental illness. If a person is negative too long, that negativity becomes a habit pattern of thought and action, and he or she tends to see the whole world through lenses tinged with negativity and unhappiness.

There are two major areas of balance that you need to be concerned with on a daily basis. They are the physical and the emotional.

You need to adjust your behaviors in such a way that you can enjoy high levels of physical health and energy most of the time. I’m sure you’ve heard this saying many times before, “You can have all the money in the world, but it means nothing if you don’t have your health.”

You need to guard your health like a sacred object. From the time you get up in the morning to the time you go to be at night, you need to think about the things you can do to assure that you live a long and healthy life, free from the diseases and debilitating illnesses that are causing health-care outlays in the United States to be the highest in the world.

Medical studies almost uniformly identify seven ways to help ensure good physical and mental health throughout your life.

1. Eat regularly but lightly. Cut down on your intake of fat, sugar and salt, while adding more fruits, vegetables, whole grains and lean sources of protein to your diet.

2. Don’t snack between meals because the introduction of new food interrupts the ongoing digestive process and leads to drowsiness and improper food digestion.

3. Don’t smoke because it has been found to cause more illnesses alone than all the other environmental or hereditary factors put together.

4. Consume alcohol moderately or not at all. Studies show that if you do drink alcohol it is best not to have more than one or two drinks per day.

5. Get seven to eight hours of sleep every night. Not getting the proper rest at night causes your immune system to break down and makes you susceptible to a variety of illnesses, including colds, flu, and even pneumonia.

6. Exercise on a regular basis. Even moderate daily exercise daily can help you to feel better, digest better, sleep better and be a happier and more positive person.

7. Practice deep breathing every day. This helps to improve your digestion, increase the amount of oxygen going through your brain, and enable you to relax into a constant state of being alert and ready.

Deep breathing causes you to relax and makes you feel more confident and more in control of yourself and the situation. It brings your inner world into better alignment with what is going on around you.

Whenever you face a stressful situation in your external world, you can better prepare yourself to deal with it by taking a few moments to breathe deeply before you say or do anything. When you prepare yourself in this way, your words and actions will be far better considered and more effective than they would if you had just reacted when the situation came up. You will feel more in balance.

You can achieve a greater sense of balance by, first of all, determining your values in each area regarding your health, your relationships, and your work. Next, you examine your behaviors and identify the things that you’re doing and saying that are not consistent with bringing your behaviors into alignment with your innermost convictions and eliminate them. Once you do this, you’ll start to feel happier and healthier.

Just as a car with perfectly aligned and balanced wheels runs more smoothly down the highway, you also will run more smoothly down the highway of life when you take the time and make the effort to bring everything that you do and say into balance and alignment.

Copyright©2007 by Joe Love and JLM & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide.
Joe Love draws on his 25 years of experience helping both individuals and companies build their businesses, increase profits, and success coaching programs. He is the founder and CEO of JLM & Associates, a consulting and training organization, specializing in career coach training. Through his seminars and lectures, Joe Love addresses thousands of men and women each year, including the executives and staffs of many businesses around the world, on the subjects of leadership, achievement, goals, strategic business planning, and marketing. Joe is the author of three books, Starting Your Own Business, Finding Your Purpose In Life, and The Guerrilla Marketing Workbook.

Article Source: Joe Love (EzineArticles.com)

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Do you feel confident of yourself?

Confidence Building Secrets of True Winners

We all need some confidence building from time to time. Part of feeling confident has a lot to do with how we feel about ourselves. Feeling like we can accomplish things we set out to do is important to feeling confident.

Remember that we all have talents and gifts. Whether we feel confident in these skills is very much part of thinking like a winner. Here is an easy way you can train yourself to think like a winner.

Make yourself a ‘to do’ list. Before you start complaining that you’ve tried that already in the past and it didn’t work, let’s go over the rules for this list. This is a list to make you feel like a winner.

It is your job to help yourself to feel as much like a winner as possible by making a list that is fun and easy to get done. I mean super easy. Ridiculously easy, even.

Here’s a sample list:

1. Get out of bed. 2. Brush my teeth and comb my hair. 3. Get dressed. 4. Eat something. 5. Eat something else. 6. Walk to a car, bus or another room. 7. Smile. 8. Answer the phone. But only if it rings. 9. Put socks on...

Are you getting the idea? This isn’t your average ‘to do’ list. This is a sort of self-conditioning list. Seeing all those check marks or seeing everything crossed off your list will make you feel like you’ve had a productive day. You’ll gain confidence in your abilities to get things done.

If you practice this fun list making, you’ll come to think of yourself as a winner. If you forget to write the list one morning, write a ‘done’ list at the end of the day. Just list ‘got out of bed’, etc. and mark them off.

As silly as this confidence building list making may seem, bear in mind that the subconscious doesn’t care about what is real or imagined. All it will see is a list that has been checked off every day. Eventually, you’ll notice yourself feeling more confident. You can then start adding real tasks to your list and doing them with the same ‘feel good’ attitude you had when you made your practice lists.

Don’t add too many, to start. Camouflage the real items you want to accomplish with your stand-by easy ones. The reason you don’t want to do a complete shift in list writing is that feeling good is an important element of confidence building.

Just look at someone you know to be confident. Are they down in the mouth or smiling? Allow yourself the joy of having fun with life. You’ll feel like a winner!

Article Source: Peter Murphy (ArticleBiz.com)

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Can stretching exercises help you grow taller?

Grow Taller Through Stretching Exercises

High-intensity anaerobic exercise such as our grow taller stretching exercises, swimming, and cycling are shown by medical researchers to force the body into producing significant quantities of human growth hormone.

Exercise-induced growth hormone (EIG) is well recognized physiologically, and is caused from acid-base balance, catecholamines, nitric oxide, and lactate. Of these, the main causes of human growth hormone secretion appear to be nitric oxide and lactate. Both of which are produced by resistance training.

Your goal during stretching is to apply resistance-training stretches that will yield high amounts of human growth hormone secretion. Human growth hormone will thicken the cartilage, increase bone density, and make you grow taller. This is why we cannot emphasize enough the importance of the intensity you need to apply with each and every stretch to grow taller.

This means that you have to exercise for a minimum of 10 minutes with great intensity to increase your odds of growing taller. The intensity you build must be enough to lactate into your muscles for height increase. This lactate will activate growth hormone secretion even after exercise, during normal rest periods for longer than 24-hours! Your body literally becomes a growth hormone manufacturing machine to increase the possibility of any height increase!

No other method, supplement, or technique can possibly yield better height increase results than stretching exercises. All you need is to perform our stretching exercises correctly and you will grow taller.

Visit http://www.growtallernow.com for more info that will help you grow taller by increasing your height naturally!

Article Source: Cher Sern Lim (EzineArticles.com)

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Personal Core Values

Each of us has our own set of values. These are what determine which aspects of life we regard as important or beneficial. Our values help determine our tastes, our way of life, our entertainment, our social, political and religious interactions. Each of us holds many values and these values are liable to change as we grow, reach different stages of life or have different experiences or influences in life. Some of the values we hold may be ‘superficial’, transitory or fitting solely the moment in which we find ourselves. Other values are more fixed and may stay with us through our life; these are our ‘core values’.

Our values come from a range of sources. Our parents are a key influence upon our values as we grow as children. So, too, is any church or religious background we experience. Our society, our neighbours, friends and colleagues, too, can have an influence upon our values. So, too, can our teachers and our schooling.

Often, school can be a place of conflict for it is there that we experience other values perhaps for the first time. Some of the values we experience in school can be in conflict with or contradict the values of our parents. As we go through high school, we start to experience values in ourselves and our peers that conflict both with school and our parents. Conflicting and unfixed values can be a major problem for adolescent and teenage years.

As we grow in years and experience, our values become more fixed, especially a set of 6 to 10 ‘core’ values. It is these core values that determine what is really important to us as an individual. The surprising thing is that if you ask most people what their values are, many would not be able to give you an answer.

A good many people are leading lives unconnected with their core values. This can lead to a life of unhappiness, discontent and lack of fulfilment. Sometimes it can lead to conflict. Often the person does not know why their life seems unhappy, unfulfilled and sometimes full of conflict. Often, the cause is that the life they are living is not in accordance with their personal values.

For some people a conflict can arise within them because they are trying to live a life according to the values of a company, an organisation, a religious or political organisation, the values of their friends or colleagues or partner, rather than living a life according to their own core values. In doing this, the values of the other people or organisations are being met but the person’s own values are being left unfulfilled.

This is not to say that a person is always wrong to seek to support and fulfil the values of other people or organisations. However, leaving your own values unfulfilled can lead to frustration and unhappiness. A key issue in this, though, is that the person may believe they are doing the right thing by working to the values of others and yet still feel a sense of frustration and unfulfilment; -the reason being that they may be unaware of their own values or, maybe, feel guilty of their own values where they conflict with the values of others. So, if you feel your life is unfulfilled, unhappy, or maybe has too much conflict, then it could be that you are leading a life that does not accord with your core values. The question is; do you know your own personal core values?

Hiring a personal life coach can certainly help you to discover your personal values but for those who want to start the discovery for themselves, try answering the following question;

What, in life, is important to you?

Don’t think about your answers (yes, there’s likely to be more than one thing that’s important to you), at least don’t think about them at first. Just write down whatever comes into your head, no matter how strange, amusing or worrying they may seem. These first answers are probably your ‘gut’ or ‘intuitive’ answers; sometimes these are closer to the truth than answers that you ‘think’ about. Next, think about what is important in life for you. Take some time to consider your answers before writing them down in a word or short phrase. Don’t worry if the some of the same answers appear in your first list; - just write them down again.

Now you have two lists. Take a look at them; is there anything there that surprises you or anything that worries you? Sometimes people can be quite surprised by what they write down and occasionally they may write down something that shocks them or they feel guilty about.

Quite common words that people put on their list of values include ; ‘money’, ‘success’, ‘family’, ‘wife/husband/partner’, ‘growth’, ‘power’. If you find one, or more, of these words on your list, ask yourself another question;

What does (the word) mean for me?

So you may ask, ‘what does money mean for me’. To which the answer could be; money means security, or money means success, or money means freedom, or money means being able to provide for my family.

By answering the second question you can help uncover the real or underlying value for you. So for you, money is not the real value, it is ‘security’ or ‘being successful’ or ‘being independent’ or ‘being able to provide for my family’ that is the real value.

So, by doing these simple exercises, you are beginning to discover your personal core values. The next exercise is to ask your self ‘how do my life, my work and my relationships help fulfil my personal values?’ If you find that they do not help you fulfil your personal values then perhaps you should consider changing your life. To do that; get a life coach.

Article Source: Douglas Woods (EzineArticles.com)

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The Art of Self Hypnosis

If you've heard anything about the term “positive affirmations”, you probably know the benefit of practicing self hypnosis. Those who practice self hypnosis have the ability to reprogram their subconscious mind to achieve certain things in life such as gaining self confidence, losing weight, stop smoking, and anything else for self improvement.

There are four steps to successful self hypnosis: relaxing, deepening your subconscious, giving your subconscious suggestions, and termination of the session.

Relaxation: Try to physically relax your body and your mind will follow. Using your mind, travel from your feet, up your legs, to your back and neck, relaxing muscles as you think about each area of your body. Take your time doing this; relaxation is the key to performing hypnosis correctly. Normally, the first time you do this will take the longest. After you've done this a few times, relaxation should start to come naturally.

Deepening: In your mind, begin to count down from 100. Count in a slow and relaxed way, and imagine yourself falling deeper and deeper into a hypnotic state with each number. Do not “watch” for hypnosis to kick in, “watching” for it will only make it NOT happen. You've heard the saying – a watched pot never boils. As with the relaxation step, this will take more time the first few sessions.

Suggestions: Once you are in the hypnotic state, you can start thinking your suggestions that you've worked out ahead of time. These are positive suggestions that will help you to gain your goals. Some people will think “I no longer crave cigarettes” or “I will eat more vegetables in my diet” or “I am a confident person”. The goal is to reprogram your subconscious mind to accept these new ideas and to act upon them during conscious hours.

Termination: After you've completed your suggestions, it is time to terminate your self hypnosis session. If you're doing this before bedtime, feel free to fall asleep, but if you're in the middle of the day, it's a good idea to count yourself up. Think to yourself, “On the count of five, I will be refreshed, fully awake, and in a wonderful mood.” Then, count to five and open your eyes.

Using self-hypnosis takes time and practice; be patient, don't force it, and benefit from practicing it. Your mind is a powerful tool to achieving what you want in life; program it correctly, and you'll live a more fulfilled life!

For more information, visit Live-Ur-Dreams.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=AJ_Stamp

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