The Power Women Principles E-Book

Katja Garcia

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 205

Beschreibung

Do you sometimes feel drained, aimless and don't know which way your life should take? Then I would like to invite you to join me on a journey that will show you new ways to find a happier and more content life. The great thing is: Everything you need for this; you already have with you! You just must discover it! Become yourself and realize what's inside of you - with the 7 Power Women principles. In this book I show you a path with many practical exercises that will accompany you on the most important journey of your life. I am looking forward to you!

Leseprobe

This book is dedicated to my daughters Alicia, Vanessa, Selina, Leonie and my son Rafael. I am very proud of you. You are my source of inspiration.

With love, Mom

Table of contents

The First Power Women Principle: Meditation and Mindfulness

The Second Power Women Principle: Your relationship with yourself

The Third Power Women Principle: Love, Forgiveness, Vulnerability

The Fourth Power Women Principle: Happiness, Gratitude, Letting go

The Fifth Power Women Principle: Motherhood, Raising children, Partnership

The Sixth Power Women Principle: Recognize the meaning of life

The Seventh Power Women Principle: Cultivate the spirit of a power woman in yourself

Dear Reader,

I would like to welcome you. My name is Katja Garcia and I would like to take you on a journey.

But before we start, I’d like to ask you to pause for a moment. Try to imagine that I am sitting across from you at this moment, and the two of us, like two friends, are chatting while sitting together comfortably.

We are laughing, crying, and enjoying our time together. Keep recalling this familiar and beautiful feeling as you read, because I want to create a personal dialogue between the two of us and show you that you are not alone. I wish I could have this dialogue with you in person, because I know you would have plenty to tell me. I want you to always know and feel that we are in this together.

I would also be very happy if you told me about your own experiences, you are welcome to contact me through my website anytime.

In this book I don’t want to lecture you or be perceived as a know-it-all. That’s why I will describe my views and experiences again and again throughout the whole book. They are supposed to reflect reality. I will show you our common goal on this journey and explain to you where I stand personally and why I may not have achieved some goals yet. I firmly believe that in the end it’s all about one thing in life:

Finding your personal path to fully realize and live your individual potential!

Only then you can love yourself and shine in full greatness. I hope to be able to give you some suggestions and new ideas through this book, so you can find your way and become happy. My ideas and insights, my knowledge, and everything I share with you comes from my personal life experiences and from countless books, trainings, and personal development seminars that I have attended. While reading you may come across things that sound familiar, because you’ve already read or heard them from someone else.

My goal is not to reinvent the wheel, but to give you this knowledge, because it has also helped myself to develop over the years. This also includes certain insights from authors, therapists, people who accompany or once accompanied me in my life. I would like to thank them at this point, because without them I would not be where I am today.

I am a mother of five children and have been working as a coach and naturopath for years. Self-reflection, development, and psychology in general, have been with me all my life. I am fascinated by looking at and understanding the bigger picture, and life. For this reason, I decided years ago to start writing this book. I want to share my experiences, my knowledge, and my insights with you, so that you realize you too are a power woman!

I was born in Zurich in 1975. My mother was originally from Haiti and my father from Switzerland. Since both agreed that I should not remain an only child, I got a little sister. At a young age, life held many challenges for me and I was looking for answers and opportunities to develop. I discovered my passion for books at a very early age, because I found many answers while reading. Books helped me to always develop myself. At the age of twenty-eight, after the birth of my twins, I began to write. I already had a child, my oldest daughter was just under three years old at the time. At first, I was already overwhelmed with the thought of being a mother of three, however, at that time I already knew that every challenge in life offers an opportunity for growth. And therefore, I just tackled it, trusting that I knew exactly what I had to do and would be able to do it. After my three daughters, I had another daughter and finally, at the age of thirty-six, my son was born.

Five children, four of them girls, this was and still is an enormous challenge. It wasn’t always easy, and I had to overcome some struggles, but today I can say about myself that I made it.

Back then, when I started writing this book, a lot of it was primarily about being a mother and so I have summarized a lot of what I wrote back then in the chapter “Being a mother”. But life has taught me so much more, so I constantly added my newly gained insights. First I started writing this book for about three years, but I put it aside from time to time.

Then, two years ago, I decided to rewrite everything and added many additional experiences and components to the book. Today, almost twenty years after my first lines, you hold my experiences, insights, and my convictions in your hands. Twenty years in which I have experienced many ups and downs which are written down in this book. To be confronted with the act of writing itself has given me many insights as well as broad and deep knowledge.

With this book, I would like to pass on as much of this knowledge as possible, so that it helps you to better understand the larger connections of life and yourself. You can apply this knowledge in everyday life, that is, in your own life. My lines are a wake-up call to you and your life!

It is not the kind of book which, after reading, will make you realize that you are out of order in some way.

This book is about giving you strength to stop judging yourself, doing yourself wrong, or feeling inadequate.

It is about learning to love ourselves just as we are. The book wants to help you be the best version of yourself, so that you can live and develop yourself fully.

For some time now, I have been following my inner voice, which has become louder and louder in the recent years. A voice that told me to pass on my experiences, insights, and thoughts to other people, to bring about transformation. This has become a firm vision for me. I want to enrich, inspire, and infect you with everything I share in my book. I firmly believe that there is so much positive energy behind what I do which automatically attracts the right people. The attraction is enormous, and the universe is always working for you- never against you.

I have been exposed to women’s issues all my life. My family in Haiti is characterized by strong, independent women who have ‘rocked’ their lives. They are a great inspiration to me, because despite high stresses, they have always found a way to deal with obstacles in order to be happy. In addition to raising their own children, they all launched many political projects that are now enshrined in history books. I am proud to be a part of this circle of women. They have my back every day and give me the courage and strength to continue following my vision. I have experienced a lot in my life. I have been richly blessed and I am infinitely grateful for everything I have been able to experience so far. At this point, I would like to thank my family and friends for always believing in me. You have always given me strength in moments of despair. For that I thank you from the bottom of my heart!

The Power Women Principle is a philosophy that will give you a new perspective on life and on being a woman. The principles I am sharing with you are meant to inspire you to go on an inner journey. A journey on which you can get to know yourself better and perhaps also reinvent yourself. Again and again, I will ask you questions. For this, it is best if you take a personal notebook or notepad, because this is the best way to record your own development process. My questions to you serve to make you think and to take you into an active process of self-reflection, or to initiate it. Only if you are honest with yourself, you can change something in your life and come to new realizations through which you will develop sustainably. It will be challenging and upsetting, but don’t worry, I will be with you along the way. We are taking this journey together, with all the ups and downs.

I wish you lots of fun and hope to inspire you with my thoughts.

May this book give you advice, support and new awareness. I look forward to our journey together.

Yours,

Katja Garcia

The First Power Women Principle: Meditation and Mindfulness

For a long time I’ve been thinking about where to best start our journey together.

For me personally, the power women principle of meditation and mindfulness is one of the most important chapters in this book, because I see it as the key to more happiness, contentment, and balance. So, right away let’s start our time together with meditation and mindfulness.

What is meditation?

Many people have a certain image in their mind when they think of meditation. They think that you must sit still for as long as possible and not think about anything. In my experience, many don’t meditate for this very reason, because it is a challenge to sit for five or ten minutes, sometimes even longer, and think of nothing or do nothing. First, I want to dispel these preconceptions and tell you that meditation is not about sitting still and thinking about nothing for as long as possible. We cannot – not think. It’s simply impossible, because our thoughts form all by themselves. The only question is whether you get stuck with the thoughts that arise and let them linger on in your mind, or do you let them move on like clouds in the sky that just pass you by?

You’ve already gotten an important answer to the question, “What is meditation?”

Through meditation we learn the passing and non-attachment of our thoughts. In everyday life, this realization helps us not to cling to problems and certain thoughts, but, as in meditation, to look at them from a distance and sometimes just let them pass us by.

With the following lines I would like to give you a better understanding of what meditation is and what it can do. Meditating is a wonderful skill that we can acquire, because it works like a muscle. The more we practice, the bigger and stronger that muscle can become. The more we practice, the better we become at it.

If you ask me what meditation means, I will answer the following in short:

Meditation is an activity that enables us to live more consciously in our daily lives. It enables us to detach from attachments and opens the space to go through life easier and calmer. Meditation teaches us to be mentally balanced and helps to have more energy available for the body, because meditation activates our self-healing powers.

Meditating is like a beautiful journey of life! It never ends and is full of surprises. There are many different types of meditation, so I encourage you to try which one is right for you. There are guided and silent meditations, or ones that are accompanied by music. Find the meditation form that suits you. Doing so sometimes takes some time and patience.

Please give yourself this time, because every form of meditation needs some practice to internalize it. Also pay attention to the fact that certain meditations work one day, but not another.

I have had this experience myself, so I recommend that you keep adjusting the different forms of meditation. Experiment and try, it is really a lot of fun! I have been meditating for over fifteen years now and I have made it an experiment. I’m always picking new types of meditation and see how it works for me.

I have also been teaching meditation for several years, specifically in my workshops, because I firmly believe that it is an important part of personal development. I want to give my participants the opportunity to find the right kind of meditation with my help, and I always encourage them to experiment. Because basically all meditations are about creating awareness for yourself and your body. With the right kind of meditation, you learn to activate your inner observer. We all have it in us, and it is very important, because it is a neutral friend at your side who is non-judgemental and helps you to recognize yourself.

Due to high stress in my personal life, I suff ered a burnout in 2014. My rocky road led from therapy to therapy and I learned that conversational therapies could not really help me. In classical psychotherapy, on one hand, the cause is sought to be found in the past, and on the other hand, one tries to minimize the patient’s stress with this method. This makes sense, but in my opinion, it takes more than that to heal a burnout long term.

At that time I didn’t know all these things so I, like many other patients, followed the conventional therapeutic way. I spent hours, weeks, and even months mentally traveling into my past to find the cause of my state of exhaustion. In doing so, I reactivated my history repeatedly. My body no longer distinguished between reality and history, because the same stress hormones were activated over and over again.

I will go into more detail later about the stories we tell ourselves repeatedly. I, however, was permanently in a physical state of emergency at that time, as if I was reliving all my traumas and stories. This massively increased my stress level and unfortunately did not lead to any healing. I don’t want to say that a retro perspective into the past doesn’t make sense for someone. On the contrary, in some processes it can even be very helpful. But I am firmly convinced that it must stop at some point, because none of us can change the past. It has already happened and will never come back. Therefore, it should only be looked at as far as it is useful to us at this moment. Learn to distinguish between events from the past that help you, and those that do not and you should let go of. This is the only way healing can take place.

In this context, I would like to share with you a very well-known serenity prayer. This prayer has accompanied me in many diffi cult situations and has always given me strength and courage.

Give me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, the courage to change things I can, and the wisdom to distinguish one from the other.

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) US theologian and philosopher

The Serenity Prayer works, because it directs our minds to what we can influence. Thus, it automatically frees you from the victim attitude and leads you to a self-determined life. You cannot influence the past, because it has already passed. For this reason, I encourage you to let it rest. The ability to accept things that cannot be changed is a milestone in the personal development of every human being. Accepting

what cannot be changed is not always easy. But letting things be as they are, is saving an incredible amount of energy. It means finding our way back to ourselves and taking good care of ourselves. Courage brings us into action and gives us the feeling that we can influence things through our own actions. This strengthens self-confidence and self-esteem. Try to incorporate this prayer into your daily life, and whenever you feel you need help, close your eyes for a moment and say it softly. It will calm your mind and allow you to open up. This is how you find more serenity over time.

During my talk therapies, in addition to all the coping with the past, they also looked at my everyday life with the goal of reducing my stress level. The doctors advised me to take time off for at least six months. It was obvious that my daily life as a single mother of five children, and my training as a naturopath was a big challenge to overcome. The only short-term solution I could see was to put my education on hold for the time being. But I could not and would not withdraw from the other tasks concerning my role as a mother. I saw the urgency in reducing stress, but every mother will agree that you will do anything to be there for your children. Instinctively I knew that without time off, I would have to find a way to regain my strength. But the most important question was, “How am I going to make it happen?”.

Let’s explore this question in more depth in our dialogue. Even if you are not currently suffering from burnout, you will learn many important things about your body and psyche in this book.

As a first step I want to show you the most important effects of stress, because all of us must deal with it in some form. Some more, some less. You may have read or heard that there are two different systems in your body that regulate your stress level. Primarily the sympathetic regulatory system is activated when stress occurs. The parasympathetic system on the other hand only kicks in when we relax and the excitement subsides. Stress is unhealthy, because it creates mechanisms that are not good for your body and soul.

I have listed mechanisms for you that are automatically ramped up in stressful situations on the following page.

The regulatory system of the sympathetic nervous system:

Increased heartbeat

Blood vessels constrict

Blood pressure increases

Stomach/intestines are affected, digestion is inhibited

Pupils dilate

Highest concentration

Increased sweating

Increase in energy dissipation

The regulatory system of the parasympathetic nervous system:

Heartbeat slows down

Blood vessels dilate

Blood pressure decreases

Stomach/intestines are affected, digestion is stimulated

Pupils dilate

Reduction of concentration

Normal sweating

Energy build-up

Expansion of blood vessels

It is important that both systems are in balance, because only then the body stays fit and healthy.

To keep this exact balance is very difficult in today’s world, because most people live in permanent stress day after day. For the body this means that it is in permanent survival mode. When we are exposed to high levels of stress daily, the body gets out of balance more and more and becomes busy triggering regulatory processes. This primitive nervous system works according to the principle of “all or nothing” (fight or flight behavior).

Let’s go way back to a time when we were still living as cavemen. If we were being chased by a predator and we found ourselves fleeing, we didn’t invest fifty percent of our energy to escape but one hundred percent. After all it was a matter of survival. In survival and stress mode your body taps into your resources and that’s a normal thing for a short time. But in today’s world, we are no longer being hunted by a predator. Stress comes from being constantly available via cell phone, email, or social media services. Someone constantly wants something from us, be it the boss, colleagues, partner, friends, or children. These stresses are not of a short-term nature, they are permanent, and our body constantly feels as if it is being hunted by a predator. Another problem with this is that the body activates the primitive nervous system and releases adrenaline (a surge of energy). Over time, a real addiction to adrenaline and the resulting energy kick can develop.

To keep getting that energy boost, the subconscious mind uses problems and beliefs to satisfy the addiction.

In other words:

We need the bad job or the bad relationship, because it makes us feel something. When stress hormones are addict ive and we use our circumstances to reinforce our addiction to an emotion, we can become addict ed to a life that we basically don’t like.

In nature the zebra is chased by a lion, but when it has managed to escape, half an hour later it is back in its homeostasis. But when we humans experience one stress reaction after another, we are permanently in a highly excited state. No organism can survive in this state for any length of time, because it will eventually collapse under this pressure. If we turn on a stress response, but cannot turn it off again to regain our equilibrium, we are heading for a sick body. The biggest problem with this is our thoughts, because by constantly thinking about our problems, we keep putting our bodies into these stressful situations. We think about our circumstances and imagine the worst future scenarios. This is how we activate our stress hormones, just by imagining. It is important to know these things, because only with this knowledge can we realize what power our thoughts have over us.

Many people succumb to the belief that they must change something on the outside to feel better. They think that their lives will improve if they buy themselves pretty things, or if they blame others for their own dissatisfaction. But change must happen on the inside! If you realign your thoughts, values, and norms, everything on the outside will work out for your good! It works, because that is exactly what happened to me. With the help of meditation I managed to restore my energy level despite everyday stress!

The bottom line is:

We can learn to use the energy around us and within us “properly” by directing it into the right direction.

In order to accomplish this we need practice. This is exactly what we learn in meditation.

Where you direct your attention, that’s where your energy goes, because energy follows our attention!

When we wake up in the morning and think of people we are going to meet or our job (all our familiar things), we are busy with our familiar environment. This environment gives us security and gives us a familiar feeling. The side eff ect of it is that our energy automatically fl ows there (into the Known). Wherever our attention goes, that’s where our energy flows automatically, and the more energy that flows into a thing, the more importance that thing has in our lives.

If you direct your thoughts in the same direction repeatedly every day, each day will always be the same (you will produce the same result every day). So, I want to encourage you to try new things. Break your little daily routines and train your mind to be more creative and free.

Get up on the other side of your bed in the morning, take a cold shower, not a hot one, and listen to different music than usual. Train the unknown and you will discover completely different sides of yourself. I know it sounds trite, and you may be wondering right now, exactly what this is supposed to do. This is a legitimate question. You will achieve a lot, because you will expand your mind and train it to new undreamt-of possibilities. It will thank you with creativity, joy of life, and energy. Small changes in your daily life will also help you in your meditation practice, because only a flexible mind is open for a new consciousness. If you want to make a change in your life, start by breaking your small and big routines and do things differently. Dare to, you can only benefit from it!

The first step now is to make small changes to your daily routine. Redesign your day by eating at a different time, for example, or starting the morning with a coffee or tea instead of a shower. Basically, it doesn’t matter what you do differently. The main thing is that you change something. You will see that your newly designed, everyday life will suddenly become an adventure.

Let’s go one step further, because from our previous examples you now know that we can influence a lot with our thoughts. To be able to create a change, you will now learn focused thinking!