Is it worth it? Is it worth the bother, the effort, the work? Will it get me finally what I want?
One of the reasons people don’t like to try new things is because they cannot judge whether they can do it or not. Whether it will be easy or not. Whether it will be pleasant and enjoyable or not.
How come? Why is it so difficult? Life is complex, and most of us have no tolerance for complexity. Complexity, ambivalence, ambiguity are normal, but the capacity to hold them becomes available to you in only at a certain brain development age… If you got stuck in young child brain development, that is most people, you have never developed the capacity.
Can you develop this capacity now? Of course you can. What is preventing you from doing it? Your low TLB number… you are a Twitchy Little Bastard… and you can’t deal with complexity, confusion, or looking long enough to actually see something.
Some of my students, when they learned about my habit of looking long and more than just once… as a way to deal with my dyslexia, have started to practice the same… and their ability to hold controversy and ambivalence has increased… because of that practice. But if you fancy yourself smart, quick, etc. Looking long and hard is going to be difficult, because your precious I will tell you that only stupid people look long and hard.
Actually the opposite is true: your precious I is deceiving you and keeping you… eh… stupid. In the stupid as the stupid does sense.
Developing the capacity of allowing mistakes, failures, feeling stupid, feeling confused, controversy and ambivalence will instantly raise your vibration.
Why doesn’t everybody do it then? Because of the VOICES that tell you whatever they tell you… that it’s not worth it, that you don’t need it, that you are already OK, that you shouldn’t have to change… etc.
These are the voices we learn to hear as noise in the Amish Horse Training. 1
Confused is a high state. The lowest state is certainty.
Confused means that you allow complexity. Confused means: to question your assumptions, question your worldview. You get confused because the information in front of you conflicts with what you know. But what you know got you where you are.
Complexity and confusion are unpleasant, and if you have a TLB 1 score, if you are a Marshmallow Eater, you shy away from it. You want everything to be the way it has always been, except you want your results to be better. But that is not possible… Newton’s first law says that an object will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless compelled to change its state by the action of an external force. This external force is the effort you make to make sense of a confusion… and to change your mind about something you were certain about.
We, humans, consider ourselves, or our Selves to be the sum total of things we hold true for ourselves, aka our worldview, and we protect that precious I for dear life… even if it is clear that what we believe is likely wrong or harmful. So giving up a false assumption, a wrong belief, feels like giving up who we are. 2
The lighter your grip on your worldview, on your Precious I, the more you increase your brain power, the more you grow, the more you become.
A tight grip on your I keeps you stuck.
Your I is a construct, it is not who you are. 3
Putting yourself in situations where your Precious I can be reevaluated, even if it feels like de-valuation, is a courageous thing. That is is what allows for growth.
I am always in training… No matter how high I climb on the Tree of Life
I have had three months of that. I have been learning and practicing typing Hungarian and Hebrew.
The alphabet is drastically different, and the letters are at different locations on the keyboard.
This has been a total retraining of my I, and an excellent method to create new and more flexible connections in the brain.
I have revisited the story of the British Novelist who died of Alzheimer’s. She wrote lots of novels. But she did everything in the exact same way… (She wrote longhand…)
Using the keyboard of different languages with different letters, different alphabet exercises the brain and makes it less likely to descend into dementia of any sort.
Learning languages that use the same keyboard challenges your brain differently, and probably doesn’t prevent dementia.
Almost all my students have opted for Spanish… Same keyboard… no brain challenge.
Yesterday I looked at taking French with its funky accented characters… Alternatively I am looking at taking on drumming. Scares the bejesus out of me. Because of its left-right similarity to typing on a different keyboard… near impossible for someone with my type of Dyslexia. Or alternatively I may take on Mandarin.
If you look closely at what I am doing, you can see that my whole methodology is to confuse the brain so it can build new connections. So it can true itself, like the Daruma doll, or the Russian standup doll.
For decades in my life I was, I felt attacked by everything. Everything threatened me with drama, falling down, depression, etc.
I took on the spiritual practice to be like the Russian standup doll… the words I used is “I bounce back”. Many times a day.
It was probably the most constructive way for me to build a network of new connections in my brain.
Here is what I gained: When later (in 1998) I had a massive brain damage, my brain could discover the holes, the dead parts in my brain, and rebuild itself through this rich network of connections I had built.
The brain assigned important functions to other parts of the brain. It could do it because it had a rich and dense network of connections. I am proud to say: I built it.
It didn’t happen fast. It took years. But by now I can even add numbers and not make many mistakes. That function was the last one to come back.
Could you just be proud that you have a degree, maybe even a PhD and do nothing?
Had I sat on my laurels, doing the same things day in and day out, even if they are high intellect actions, I vwould have created major thoroughfares and all the unused, unexercised connections would die off. It’s called pruning… The brain carefully moves towards economy. Brain function is expensive to maintain.
So I challenged and still challenge my brain, daily, even hourly, even though it is work, takes planning, takes forethought, and takes discipline.
Here is a funky thing I do: I have nine wall clocks, and half of them I keep on winter-time… I need to cause the brain to wake up every time I look at them, and try to resolve the cognitive dissonance: they don’t show the correct time.
I know what happens in the brain by projecting what happened to my hip.
For decades I sat nearly all the time. I set by my computer. I sat in the car. I sat around… And I read in bed always lying on the same side.
The right hip stopped serving me. Walking became painful. Even getting into a car was a challenge, because the muscles refused to lift my right leg. Lying flat on my back, with straight right leg became torture, near impossible.
I hated myself, hated my life, hated the chiropractors whose adjustment didn’t do me any good.
One day I said: pain is good. Pain is welcome. I will go for the pain. I will use it as an indicator where I need to go to work. This was in October of 2016.
I can report today that walking is a whole lot easier, that lying on my back is now near painless, and lifting my right leg to get in and out of a car is no big deal. 4
All this comes from realizing that it is not what I know for sure that is me… what I am up to is really me.
Who I strive to become is who I am.
If I have to live, I want to live with ease. Even if living takes discomfort, confusion, challenge… daily.
I have been even welcoming to feelings: the feelings of people that don’t feel good… And use that as a challenge to tell myself apart from everyone and everything else… The NOT ME.
All my life I wanted easy and smooth… and I realize that it’s the worst thing to want. Because it means, the easy and smooth, that I don’t have to learn and grow and expand. Shrinking.
Which means being dead before actually dying. Too Soon Old Too Late Smart
No, thank you, I am not interested.
PS: once you are good at something, it doesn’t do you any good to keep doing it. It may be what you are paid for, but it is also killing your brain cells. Now that I can type in Hebrew, and in Hungarian, I am looking for a new something that creates an imbalance in my brain again… typing in those languages is now easy and almost smooth… useless.
Because I am dyslexic, and my dyslexia is a spatial issue, at least for me, left-right, up-down, north-south, the best exercises for me are physical exercises… Typing is a physical exercise. Learning folk dances… doing anything with others… drumming… even playing the piano.
I am thinking of learning to ride the bicycle. I am breaking out in cold sweat. It’s a good sign. I think I am going to do it.
PPS: Try before you buy
I bet you’d like to try out of you would enjoy working with you, if you would enjoy doing the steps in the 67 steps coaching, or other of my products.
This is a program that asks you to grow. Every day a little bit. To be uncomfortable, and grow. You may not know yourself… so I let you try before you buy… You may get surprised, and find out that you love growing… under my tutelage.
I am working on the logistics to make it happen on most of my products.
Try the coaching program before your buy it
You will have to work with me, as if you were a fully paid participant, for a month. You would normally pay $60. You can cancel any time, and I may cancel any time.
If I can’t see that I enjoy working with you, I cancel our agreement and refund your trial payment.
Click here to Check it out
You are only risking a little money to gain a lot of certainty.
- I have given a free webinar answering the most burning questions on the Amish Horse Training… click here to watch the recording
- I deal with this issue in the Playground program. When people can see all the ways they are rigidly insisting to remain the same while hoping to have a different life experience, they more often than not are willing to change their minds.
- In fact in the Amish Horse Training I want everyone to practice, you listen to the inner voices and separate the “IT” voice from the I voice. The IT voice is only about IT… not about you, not about life, not about beauty, goodness, or even usefulness. It is always petty, argumentative, whiny, or angry. Self-pity. Accusative. Doubtful. Belligerent. Taking you to the slaughter… The you, the real you… is can let go of mistakes, can let go of hurt, can let go of taking things personally. The real you is striving to grow. That is your real nature. To want more life. To do more, be more, feel more, to love more…
- I started with an exercise class and climbing up the steps that lead to my house. Then I added climbing the stairs every day, weather permitting. It’s working.
