Category: Articles (Page 1 of 2)

Control Your Choices

June 2, 2025 / Admin / 0 Comments

One can argue that even if the decisions we make are fear based, we are still making a choice by making that decision. In other words, even if it’s a choice out of fear, it’s still a choice; but that’s not what this quote is about.

Whenever we make decisions, and behave in ways that are driven by fear, we are no longer in control, we are no longer feeling that we have a choice, we are no longer operating with integrity, and we are no longer demonstrating authenticity.

Decisions that are fear based are emotional, and therefore, irrational. They are driven by the need to survive instead of the desire to thrive, which would shift the impact of these decisions dramatically.

When we make a fear-based decision, we feel forced to make it; we feel like we have no choice. It feels like an internal coercion.

A fear-based decision contaminates intention by forcing us to fixate on threat avoidance; it clouds are judgment, and hinders our progress.

Before making a decision, ask yourself:”Is it fear based?”, and if the answer is “yes.”, delay making it until you dissolve the fear linked to it, or until you find an alternative decision that is not fear based.

-Sam Qureshi

The Root of Thinking

June 1, 2025 / Admin / 0 Comments

There are five ways that we can use to handle our negative thoughts:

1. Focusing on serving others:
By focusing on helping others, we won’t have time to focus on our own negative thoughts about ourselves. This is a form of distraction; it can help, but it doesn’t solve the problem.

2. Taking progressive action of any kind:
By focusing on doing, we would be too distracted to focus on thinking. Any progressive action can help, but the most effective ones are the ones related to the negative thoughts themselves. In other words, if the actions can help address or resolve the negative thoughts specifically, that can help reduce their intensity, but it doesn’t solve the problem.

3. Journaling:
Journaling is a powerful tool to empty our minds, and temporarily release our negative thoughts on a daily basis, but it doesn’t solve the problem.

4. Reframing:
Through role play, dialogue, and visualization, we can directly engage with our negative thoughts to understand them and reframe them. That can help lower their intensity, but it doesn’t solve the problem.

5. Dissolving the negative emotions that gave birth to the negative thoughts in the first place:
All previous ways focus on the negative thoughts instead of their origin. They are helpful, but they don’t provide a permanent solution; they only provide a way to manage the existing problem. However, by dissolving the negative emotions that created the negative thoughts, we are permanently eliminating them.

-Sam Qureshi

The Importance of Unrealistic Dreams

May 31, 2025 / Admin / 0 Comments

By choosing to be realistic, we are limiting our imagination of what’s possible.

By limiting our imagination of what’s possible, we limit the potential reality we can create. In this context, reality would mean solutions to problems, healthy relationships with others, achievement of desired outcomes, effortless engagement with the world around us, and a deep sense of safety and peace within.

When it comes to problem solving, the more permission we give ourselves to be unrealistic with the solutions we come up with, the more likely we are to break any existing limitations in that moment, that may prevent us from accessing our creativity, in a way that allows us to find a definitive solution.

When it comes to goal setting, it’s not about having a realistic dream. It’s about having an unrealistic dream with a realistic plan. In other words, realism needs to be utilized at the right time; and in this case, it would be after giving ourselves unconditional permission to imagine and internally create.

Realism contaminates goals when it interferes with our ability to unapologetically express the truth about what we want. However, if we use it to express the truth about our current reality and how we feel, and to craft a plan to achieve our dreams, then realism can accelerate our progress instead of impede it.

-Sam Qureshi

Kindness Isn’t Weakness

May 30, 2025 / Admin / 0 Comments

Kindness is not weakness. Unfortunately, many of us have learned to avoid practicing kindness out of fear of its misinterpretation.

One of the reasons for this reservation is the epidemic of people-pleasing that stems from emotional wounds that lead to this mass fawning as an adaptation.

Fawning is one of the four fight or flight responses. To be honest, it’s more of a reaction than it is a response. It’s a form of submission in an attempt to avoid the potential threat. In this case, the threat would be abuse or abandonment.

The tragedy here is because it works so well in avoiding threats, or at least minimizing the pain that may be inflicted by a threat, it becomes, unconsciously, a compelling behavior to adopt. More importantly, it’s effectiveness can blind us from seeing the gradual destructive impact it has on our mental health.

What it indirectly enables is the avoidance of authenticity out of fear of the consequences of being authentic. By fawning, we are compromising our integrity, and detaching from our authentic self.

The solution is not to avoid kindness out of fear of pain, but to embrace it in spite of the potential pain, and enforce our boundaries when our compassionate actions are misinterpreted as an invitation for abuse.

-Sam Qureshi

Actions Speak Louder Than Feelings? Think Again

May 30, 2025 / Admin / 0 Comments

When people violate our boundaries, whether it’s intentional or not, they are demonstrating pain and fear. The actions of others don’t reveal who they are; they reveal the emotions they feel.

We are emotional beings that are driven by how we feel. What we want to pursue, and what we want to avoid are both determined by how we feel.

We sometimes make the mistake of defining a person by their actions, when they might just be temporary expressions of pain.

We unintentionally condition others to repeat an action through defining them by it. An act of laziness doesn’t make the person lazy, and an act of evasiveness doesn’t make the person a coward; but the moment someone believes through social conditioning that they are what they do, their actions become their identity.

If I define myself by my behavior, then my behavior becomes my identity. Once it becomes my identity, it becomes much harder to change. The reason for that is simple: in order for me to change what I do, I now have to change who I am. As a result, change becomes a much bigger task. After all, behavior is simple and tangible, identity isn’t.

-Sam Qureshi

Don’t Let Criticism Define You: A Guide to Self-Protection

May 30, 2025 / Admin / 0 Comments

When someone continues to be critical in your presence, that can lead to self-doubt. It can cause you to start asking yourself: “What’s wrong with me?”, “What did I do to deserve this?”, “Why is this happening to me?”, or “Why am I not good enough?”.

The problem here lies in being indirectly conditioned to focus on the false reality that has been painted for you, which is “There’s something wrong with me”. It can make sense because if someone is pointing out a flaw, then it must be true, and it must mean that something needs fixing, and that something is less than ideal. However, in most cases, the flaw is false, or irrelevant if true.

This brings us to a very important point, even if the flaw is important to be addressed, it’s usually not their right to share it with you without your permission.

If someone gives you advice that involves criticism without asking for your permission first, that reveals a desperate need that they have to convey significance, which reveals an emotional wound they’re continuing to carry.

Their criticism doesn’t reveal what you need to fix, but what they need to heal. In other words, criticizing you doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with you, it just means that there’s something painful in them.

-Sam Qureshi

Emotional Damage: Why Apologies Aren’t a Quick Fix

May 30, 2025 / Admin / 0 Comments

If someone affected you emotionally in a negative way, it would be in one of two ways: neglect or abuse. Abuse can be verbal, nonverbal, physical, or sexual. Unfortunately, people can underestimate the emotional impact of verbal and nonverbal abuse.

Let’s say that someone has been verbally abusive to you, that would be similar to them smashing the windshield of your car.

If they then come up to you an apologize, it might feel good, you might feel a bit better, but that does not change the fact that the car needs repairing.

When it comes to emotions, most of us would receive the apology, and continue to drive the car despite the presence of a smashed windshield.

If we believe that the apology would repair the damage inside of us, we would no longer be able to see it, but we would still be affected by it. After all, receiving an apology for what happened does not eliminate the emotional impact of what happened.

What’s interesting here is that most people
do not care about repairing the car as much as they care about receiving the apology. The reason is that they believe that the apology would resolve the conflict and heal the wound, which is not the case. An apology can help in resolving the conflict, and can help in healing, but it does not heal the wound.

In other words, what drives the need to receive an apology is the emotional pain we feel because of what happened.

-Sam Qureshi

Beyond the Comfort Zone

May 29, 2025 / Admin / 0 Comments

We feel safe, when we are not threatened, but what’s fascinating to me is that we can feel threatened in the absence of an existing threat.

For example, if we feel scarcity, incompetence, lack of clarity, loss of control, incongruence, resistance, stagnation, or the presence of a consequence, we may no longer feel safe; and what’s the place that we know can give us our safety back? The comfort zone, and here’s why…

Comfort distracts us and temporarily isolates us from the consequences that await us beyond it.

It’s just a sedative, but an extremely effective one. It’s so effective that many of us use it so frequently, that it ends up becoming a destination instead of a vehicle to escape the pain of the journey.

We all have different ways of accessing it, but the way it distracts us is not my main concern here. The real problem of comfort lies in the way it shapes our relationship with the unknown.

Here’s what I mean, comfort is the barrier that separates us from the unknown. Whenever we are separated from something, it could mean deprivation or protection, but regardless of the reason for the separation, the unfolding detachment shapes our relationship with what we have been detached from.

In this case, we’re either being deprived of the unknown, or protected from it. However, the illusion of safety, that comfort provides, suggests to the unconscious mind that what we are separated from is a threat.

In other words, we have learned to perceive comfort as something that can protect us from the unknown, and whatever we need protection from will be perceived as an enemy, which is how comfort can create a false sense of safety within us.

That is one of the biggest lies that we were ever told.

-Sam Qureshi

She sat at the back and they said she was shy

May 29, 2025 / Admin / 0 Comments

She sat at the back and they said she was shy,
She led from the front and they hated her pride,

They asked her advice and then questioned her guidance, They branded her loud, then were shocked by her silence,

When she shared no ambition they said it was sad,
So she told them her dreams and they said she was mad,

They told her they’d listen, then covered their ears,
And gave her a hug while they laughed at her fears,

And she listened to all of it thinking she should,
Be the girl they told her to be best as she could,

But one day she asked what was best for herself,
Instead of trying to please everyone else,

So she walked to the forest and stood with the trees,
She heard the wind whisper and dance with the leaves,

She spoke to the willow, the elm and the pine,
And she told them what she’d been told time after time,

She told them she felt she was never enough,
She was either too little or far far too much,

Too loud or too quiet, too fierce or too weak,
Too wise or too foolish, too bold or too meek,

Then she found a small clearing surrounded by firs,
And she stopped…and she heard what the trees said to her,

And she sat there for hours not wanting to leave,
For the forest said nothing. It just let her breathe.’

Becky Helmsley
📷 – Platon Yurich

HEALTH

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