It is great that you are basically positive and wish to take yourself forward when it’s easy to settle down in a comfort zone. You can actually tone down the positivity and ambitions when you do the thinking. Surprisingly there is discipline needed in positive thinking too! Think and change the way you do your thinking. Take the same ideas and shift your way of thinking. Lower the expectations you set up. These expectations though exciting are also overwhelming you and so bringing in fears – the fear of being able to fulfil them, the fear of failing or sometimes even a fear of succeeding. We fear that people will judge us if we set about to do something and we cannot manage. We fear that if we are successful we will have to be tied down to that project or responsibility of maintaining something one has started. We fear the work that will be needed. We fear that we would lose our free time. Thus we are stressed. See your ambition as not about success or failure but as a way of enriching experience and adding to skills and practice. You are giving yourself a possibility and an opportunity not a threat.

How can one get out of the strap? First there are no rights and wrongs – it is all about how you present your own actions to yourself! First your positive thinking and ambitions can stop being proof to you that you are ‘good’ or ‘great’. You can have faith in yourself as having integrity whether you manage to do more or not. The results do not define you. Another way of reducing the stress of positivity is pacing ourselves... Reducing our bigger plan to small steps one at a time... Once we plan the small step we can support ourselves with plan A, plan B and plan C that could take care of eventualities not happening. Or we can support ourselves that we will go ahead with the risk of the step and keep some safety measures to reduce the risk. So we may spend on a less expensive study course such that we do not feel over burdened financially. We may make clear to ourselves and others that whether each step leads to the additional business or not we will benefit from the new knowledge or experience it gives. Thus each step is recognized as meaningful in and of itself too which it normally is, not that it is meaningful only if ‘x’ result happens. If you take part in a race the only success is not the medal, the success is also in the experience of running, of being part of the event, of having trained your muscles for running, of having improved your talent, of having inspired others, of having met new people such as the other runners and the organizers. Finally you can remind yourself that you have the possibilities to be thoughtful and flexible with your decisions with any new information you discover along the way too that you are not stuck with your first step to a commitment which may feel untenable.

Healing work for your fears is also helpful to manage your positivity and the additional tasks and uncertainties that positivity brings with it. Use calming and energy balancing breath-work and meditations when you work on your ambition and temper the materialism down with spiritualism.

Fear of death is heightened at two stages in life. For children when they realize consciously around 5 to 7 years of age and at old age. Health problems begin and the confidence one felt about one self takes a jolt. Peers are in the same boat and there is a tendency to talk about these things in amore sensationalized way with each other as everyone tries to show conversationally that they know something worse! This creates a belief system that illness can come out of the blue. However there will be aspects of wellness that the person has ignored in their life and that has led to the problem.

Actually we are dealing with the uncertainty of our health all throughout life. The principle of ‘beware!’ is unsettling and same needs to be transformed to ‘be aware’ and awareness prevents much of our problems. There is much he can do if he were to accept he can aim to be calmer. The naturopathy centre might be good whilst there, with full focus on health but at this stage all awareness messages becomes fears! So the doctors can be told to reduce the gravity of messages which for other people who are too light hearted about health they try to emphasize. The main concern for you is how to cope with such a worried anxious person.

Restoring faith in wellness is the key rather than rushing for tests. If he begins to accept that best way to stay safe and healthy is to increase calmness and do regular breathing and exercise – everything in balance then this can help. Discuss the very thing he fears that is ‘death’ with him and his beliefs about it. Just being philosophical and discussing philosophies of life and stories of how people handle situations can be useful. Remember not to moralize with him only have these conversations.

Arguments make people believe more in their point of view. So leave some matters with an agreement that you think differently and he needs to help himself if he thinks that way and is worried. One person deal with him at a time rather than all trying to convince him which makes him attached to the attention he begins to get.

He may grumble no one cares but show him caring by other routine gestures and do not fall into going along with it all. Ignore some requests and ignore him when he is worrying. Give him attention when he is reading or doing other things and have conversations on other issues. Make him do things for himself – if he is stressed let him call the doctor – do not take over the job of organizing all check-ups. Go along with him as a disinterested party for some of the doctor visits if you have to and refuse to really engage in too much talk about the aches or the worries. Change the topic and if at give generalized philosophies in a light friendly manner – ‘all a part of life.’ If this kind of anxiety persists and one cannot get the person to engage in any therapy, you can contact a psychiatrist who would prescribe anti anxiety medication that can then help.

Did you feel like this before your heart surgery? Then you may need to work on your approach to life and some core issues to change these current issues. On the other hand if you feel this is a personality change after surgery you may explore this accordingly. Sometimes post a surgery or other stress our energies become imbalanced. In any case doing an inner exploration of this feeling of restlessness and being ‘chained’ through regression and energy cleansing methods can help. Also recognizing and healing the grief and shock of having such a health issue at an early age and especially when you feel you have been living healthy can be useful. Many times we can go through a traumatic experience in a perfectly positive coping fashion and such health issues can feel traumatic. Later we can feel agitated and restless as the feelings of shock and grief have not been healed and released and are now coming to the mind. They come up later when coping with crisis is over. This is called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD.

This is a difficult place you are in – experiencing loss and betrayal so it becomes more disheartening. Healing and therapy can help you to make sense of the whole experience. Falling in love is one thing; the more difficult one is maintaining the love. As you come closer your expectations increase and simultaneously you can see more of each other’s shortcomings. Being prepared that closeness will make faults exposed with any person we can help ourselves stay in a relationship that is reasonably working well. Our capacity to handle differences and conflicts with tolerance, assertion and negotiation are needed. The person outside always becomes more attractive against the one we are in relationship with. Your ex-girlfriend may lack this capacity to hang in there with some stress tolerance to be able to sort out issues. Instead she has chosen to walk away into another relationship.

You may also need to understand that the small fight was not small for her. When a person starts avoiding we start pursuing instead of dialoguing and problem solving. With pursuing you are either being controlling and insisting the person comes back to you by right or you try to get them back with emotional distress that appears as emotional blackmail or you give relentless apologies. And that convinces the other that you just don’t understand or get it what has upset them. So the relationship actually goes to a break up where it would have been better to do more relaxed, less hyper problem-solving talk.

In any case the relationship is over as she is now with someone else. You may make your choices to her request to still be friends. You may find it better to cut off and keep only the professional relationship or you may want a short period of cut off to calm down before you can keep the friendship. You can let her know accordingly. You may also let her know she did not give the relationship the chance it deserved and this has been unfair and that you too are now moving on. We cannot get over a relationship as we feel we have been foolish whereas all of us can be fooled – it is part of the risks of all business and all relationships. The story changes along the way and a person who was sober can begin to get used to you and take you for granted or get demanding. Give and take has always to be monitored in a healthy relationship before it becomes too extreme. Forgive yourself and your limitations – we all have them and everyone hides them as emotions are like that. Appreciate your strengths in handling this and in the qualities you see in yourself in this experience. Take some learnings in what you could do differently and slowly help yourself to let go and move on to the next part of life’s journey. Know that you did have a good relationship and you can keep that experience as one you enjoyed. The betrayal was more a change of heart that happens sometimes for no reason and more often when we and our partner missed watching out for it, have missed handling conflict and differences in better ways both verbally and non verbally.

You may contact California Hypnosis Association of India (CHII) – lot of the courses are mentioned in Life Positive and take the risk of trying them out keeping your awareness of what to use or not use.