Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Tai Lopez uses an analogy that really talks to me. He says that we need to be like a soup. Our knowledge, our lives needs to be like good soup.
What does it mean to be a good soup?
You can’t make a good soup with just a few ingredients. You need a lot of ingredients to make a soup that you don’t have to make edible by crumbling crackers into it, or bread.
Some poor man’s soups, onion soup, garlic soup, ‘rue’soup in Hungary, are so uninteresting that you can’t eat it without putting bread in them. The versions with poached egg, cheese melted on top, etc. are the restaurant versions of the same soups… but the soup itself is a poor man’s soup. Poor as in not having much to give.
Not surprisingly, one of my all time favorite fairy tales is the Stone Soup, in which the man gets the ingredients needed for a good soup from the good people of the village… I don’t care where you get the ingredients… just get them! lol
A good soup is like that stone soup I wrote about yesterday, a symphony of tastes, smells, and every new piece you find in your spoon is a new delight and a surprise. A great analogy for life. NOT your life right now, but for a LIFE WORTH LIVING.
Of course if you have a chance, listen to what it sounds like BEFORE the symphony when the musicians just tune their instruments and just play what they play: cacophony…
And most people’s life is two things: cacophony and boring. No delight. This is why you are here… tell the truth!
Now, what does having a life like a good soup mean to you?
If you want to live a life worth living, you need to stop doing a few things and start doing new things or old things in a new way… It is all about the HOW.
You, I say, live an impoverished life. You live through words, and you live through wanting and not wanting. Liking and not liking. Looking at others to see how to live. And the different areas of your life seem to belong to different people…
And you are also no fun.
You are no soup, you are water with some stuff floating in it. No flavor, no harmony… ugh.
You, for some reason, resist every new thing and every new way that would make you a soup…
You know what you want. You want to be a billionaire. You want to be an artist who makes a living with art. You want to be a realtor. You want to be free. You want, you want, you want. You want some end result. Some feeling. Some experience.
Some undead game piece in a board game, hellbent on getting to the goal.
You are like Trump. For some of you this feels like a compliment (if so, what the heck are you doing on my site reading this?) and for some of you this sounds like an insult. The rest of you don’t even understand what I just said: you haven’t even looked what Trump and his life is like.
No one has asked what is Trump’s soul correction, which tells me you are either not trusting soul correction, me, or you are not curious in the least.
Trump’s soul correction is 31… Meaning he is a ‘Finish What You Start‘… read the analysis at the link.
Impoverished, I would say, but you have never been rich. Impoverished would mean that once you were rich and now you are poor but you probably were never rich, In terms of life…
Probably every single one of you has more money than I do. But your money didn’t bring you life. You are postponing living to when you have achieved what you want to achieve… I’ll be happy when I have what I want!
The grass doesn’t grow where you tread.
I have a student who is having a hard time setting a direction in which to move. I want to suggest to her: How about becoming someone who, when she walks, the grass grows bigger, happier, livelier, greener?
I watch people clamor for the weekend, clamor for the vacation: But their weekends cannot be richer than their work days, because they are not a nice soup…
So the desire to be yourself ends up in a disappointing soup that needs to be filled with crackers… because the soup that you are has no substance, has no flavor, it’s boring.
Admittedly, going from thin uninteresting ‘soup’ to full bodied soup will take work. And some of that work is going to be hard. Hard for you. And most of you will refuse to do it… you’ll opt for the cracker-filled ‘soup’.
Even a simple split pea soup, split peas, onions, salt, water, a piece of something smoked… mouthwatering. Not you… 🙁
One of my problems with America is that people have no idea how to eat well. How to cook well, How to enjoy what they are eating.
Most have never learned to feel, to taste, to delight. No distinctions. Thus the high level consumption of salty or sweet or over-spicy… They need a jackhammer to trigger some feelings.
I am an empath, and people who say they can’t feel are lying. They do feel, as an empath I feel what they feel, but the feeling doesn’t become conscious… there is a wall between their senses and their consciousness. Blocked.
The world’s riches only reveals itself through feelings. Feelings of taste, feelings of touch, feelings of temperature…
If they don’t get conscious of what they feel… they also don’t have words for it. And unfortunately to them, their life (the soup) cannot be richer than their vocabulary. Vocabulary of feelings. Feeling words.
To paraphrase the coan of the old Forum: For you everything feels the same as everything else, except that not always. You need to learn feelings, or you will remain the walking dead, hellbent on having what you want… except even when you have it: nobody is there to enjoy it.
I listen in to people’s conversations, and I am appalled. And bored.
Your conversations show how narrow, how shallow, how thin a soup you are.
I want to teach feelings, because without feeling your feelings you are not in touch with yourself… but I am afraid that you can’t learn…
I watch what you read… how you read, what you do with what you read… if you read at all.
Here are the types I am seeing:
- You are a curiosity seeker, you read everything that looks interesting. You eat nasty stuff that you don’t chew, it goes through your stomach undigested… and becomes toxic. You call it food… but you are not nourished. You read to avoid living, you read to avoid thinking, you read to avoid boredom. The boredom with yourself, because you are a two-bit soup: water and salt…
- You know what you want, and you read only that. You want to read romance novels: His lips, her hips, his hands blah blah blah… And that’s who you are: a puppet on the desire trap… Nothing, no person, water and sugar… is that soup? Ugh.
- Oh, you are much better… you only read non-fiction. You dutifully read all the books on Tai’s list… but when you speak, when you write, it is clear that all went through you without nourishing you, without making any difference.You are still only about yourself, about what you want… All that reading has not connected to you, connected you to life, to reality, to other people… you remained a two-bit soup…
- And then there is you: who shows some hope. You are starting to have some inkling that there is more to life than to become what society wants you to become: a cog in the machine, a wanting machine. You are still trapped, you are still on the mouse wheel, but you are starting to awaken, the more steps you listen, the more you ponder about your life, the more ingredients you are putting into the soup that you are.
And then there is you, the biggest surprise. You who I had no hopes for becoming a tasty interesting soup. You, who nowadays teaches me stuff I wasn’t able to see myself. Through reading you start connecting to people. To humanity. You teach me that through reading you become part of life, and your isolation, your separateness dissolves, and once you are connected to people, you can connect to All-of-it… and to the magic, the divine, to Life.The most interesting and telling how you, through the seemingly simple act of reading, activated now nine spiritual capacities.But there is a difference between reading and reading.
When you read for confirmation: you activate nothing, other than your good marker feelings: I am so smart. or ‘I already knew that’When you read for entertainment, you activate nothing.When you read for knowledge, in order to… you activate nothing.And how you do anything is how you do everything. Because the you goes with you, wherever you go.- And lastly, there is the last you, whose main move is resistance. You are the most interesting of all the soups: your capacity to hold stuff is so limited, that in order to put carrots in you, you need to get rid of the onions…
No capacity to have. It’s either this or that. Going from thin soup to a different thin soup. Too afraid to have a wider cone of vision. To put stuff into your soup and see how it turns out. No, it has to be regimented. Rigid. Just so…
As you see, my job is to help you become a good soup, no matter what soup you started out to be.
The bridge, the path, the stumbling block to get over, is feeling. Feeling what you feel.
This, feeling my feelings, happened for me in 1996.
I was driving home from a Landmark Education course… The session, a Friday, was about language.
Language as words, language as non-verbal.
The assignment was to observe the conversation our butt was having with the seat, our hands with the coffee cup, our lips with the coffee.
My drive home from New York City was over an hour long. I was experiencing all those conversations, the butt, the hands., the air on my face The language of feelings. And it changed my life.
I didn’t rush to attach words to the feelings. I allowed the feelings to speak their ‘feeling-language’. Feeling don’t speak with words, the mind does.
When you jump to words, you jump away from the feelings. You’ll have words to REPLACE the feeling… the words are a stand-in, an impostor.
When you can observe, wordlessly, the conversation between your butt and the seat, the chair, the bed, the underwear… you get in touch with what is the same between you and things, between you and other people. You get your individuality through your sameness.
You open up the capacity of empathy…
I know what your butt tells the seat. We share that…
Feel as barriers between you and the world, between you and others fall away, and maybe for the first time, you become part of humanity.
Feel the fear in your chest, how it rises to your arms to make the arms push it all away.
Just feel it. Don’t just read the words… feel it. You can.
And then feel as the pressure goes away and you can now breathe…
Good. this is an important step in the right direction if you ever want to LIVE as if you were alive.
Let’s create a vision of the soup you are… so it is richer and more satisfying than who you currently are.
Let’s work on a vision that lights you up!You become whole and complete by being willing to hang out with what is… without running away, feeling what there is to feel, learning what there is to learn, being who you are fully… without trying to escape it. Hearing what the mind chatter says… and not go with it, not go against it, just hear it. It is there…
None of it means anything. Nothing to do. Just be. Breathe. It’s OK. You weep? no problem. Your chest hurts? No problem. Just don’t try to escape it.
PS: I paid 2000 dollars for that course. Nowadays it cost more than three thousand. I learned two things in that year long course that have remained with me forever, and both are about feelings.
The one about the butt and the seat… that was priceless.
The other was truly distinguishing the little voice in my head that talked about me as if it were me. And everything it said made me feel bad, made me feel bad about myself and my life. also priceless.
It was so priceless that I did that course twice, and then I coached it again for good measure.
But does everyone learn what I learned? Not at all. I have a ex-student who is in the course right now… She got none of that… She feels with her ego only… not with her body. Still.
PPS: In an upcoming Saturday webinar I’ll teach the language of feelings. It’s one of the main pieces that’s missing for you.
