Beware the barrenness of a busy life. ~ Socrates
There is never a time when new distraction will not show up; we sow them, so several will grow from the same seed. ~ Seneca the elder
You better train yourself to manage your attention. Focus determines the quality of your life
These above are all quotes… We read them we nod, or not, and we continue not having a clue why our life sucks.
Your experience is what you agree to attend to. Not necessarily with words: you agree with your actions, what you pay attention to.
Your attention determines the experiences you have, and your experiences add up to the life you live.
You mostly pay attention to what you don’t want… we can say: you have an antenna for it… you even invite it, while you only pretend to pay attention to what you claim you want. If you wanted it, really, you would work towards it.
By the way, this is where the gap between your ambition and your desire show up. Ambition is what you are willing to work for, and desire is what you want to get without working for it.
You can have both ambition and desire in many areas of life: social standing, other people’s opinion of you, fitting in, making money, notoriety, fame, fortune, love, affinity, health, vitality, power.
You want to get lots of these without earning it… and you are pissed when you don’t get it… even though you KNOW you don’t deserve it…When I ask you if life were perfect if you got what you wanted… you descend into a deep and long silence. ‘No… not really’, you say when you finally emerge.
At the end of yesterday’s Playground, a long program with approximately monthly group sessions, more frequent now during Covid season, just before saying good bye, I asked the students, as has been my habit, to share the one thing they take home, take away from the session.
It was a three hour long session.
Picking the one thing that you are going to work on, your takeaway, is the ‘art and science’ of learning. Learn one thing, and bring it to your life. Implement. You’ll grow. Try to work on everything… you’ll never grow.
This is really the key to implementation.
Depending on where on this journey the participant is, they saw some one thing different for themselves.
What they’ll implement from in last night’s Playground, where their attention was, will give them the quality of their life…
Do you have your attention on how the world should treat you? You are going to have a sh*tty life, guaranteed.
You want the world to treat you like a prince, while you are cowardly, meek, or demanding, complacent, a fuckup, a never do well?
The bigger the distance, the bigger the discrepancy between how really are and how you want to be perceived as, your precious I the more miserable your life is. The real you, the one who is just a person, doing things, poorly, or avoiding things, or lying, sneaking, etc. has to be hidden behind that precious I.
Your tone of voice is almost always a giveaway… ugh… I can hear where your voice is generated from, and I can hear the fakeness… the superiority, the bombastic self-image, the haughtiness… ugh ugh and ugh again.
It was interesting to watch how willing people are to admit of being ordinary, maybe even being ordinary on the bottom region of ordinary… having behaviors and attitudes that are ugly and unseemly. They felt like suddenly not having to pretend was a relief… like when you take off a too restrictive piece of clothing, like a tight bra, or tight pants… Haaa! now I can breathe. Or reach for that forbidden food you need to pretend in public that you don’t eat.
Authenticity is being authentic about your inauthenticity… says Werner Erhard.
We all have two selves… one who we really are, thinking, feeling, doing in the world. The other is a construct: how we hope we can look good and make it in the real world. Make it, and maybe make it big.
In practice, authenticity is to stop making airs, and FIRST tell the truth about what you are pretending not to be, and THEN say what you need to say.
Have a hidden agenda in a conversation? Say it so it is not hidden any more. I want to sell you something… I want you to listen to me… I want you to tell me that I am OK…
For me, authenticity has meant
- stepping off my high horse, and telling the truth about being just a normal person who has done more work than you… but is not special… in any way.
- Or say: I am judgmental…
- Or say: I don’t like you but I want to help you anyway.
- Or say: You are driving me crazy, but I help you because I want your son to have a decent mother.
- Or say: I love the money you pay me, but I can’t help you, so good bye.
- Or say: I am tired and I want to go back to my book…
- Or say: I probably have more shameful things I have done in my life than you.
Most people pretend to be more than they are, better than they are, and demand special treatment. But because it is a lie, they are not fulfilled when they get that special treatment.
- I wanted to be considered smart. But whenever someone told me I was smart… it meant that they were not smart enough to see that I wasn’t… ugh.
- I wanted to be loved… but when someone loved me, it felt like a prison… and no value to me.
I had one-on-one calls for a couple of months with one of my students… for free. He was using me, and ‘enjoyed’ the special treatment. Then I kicked him out and told him, angrily, that he was using me to feel and look important… at my expense. He went into self-examination, and instead of disappearing, he doubled up on the work, and now he is near the top of the class. He got freed up by being unmasked.
That gap, the gap between what you say is due to you, and what is actually due to you, is where cancer grows. The gap between the two selves.
Spiritually, energetically, cancer is an opportunistic disease: it fills that gap you create between your pretend precious I and your real ‘I’.
The Big Bundle is an energy audio that nudges Consciousness to connect to the brain. Consciousness can also be called ‘The Witness’.
It’s been my experience that this connection eliminates cancer that hasn’t taken over the whole body yet. Directly. Whacking it out lide a weed-whacker.
I hail from a relatively unpretentious culture… Judaism. If you compare the Old Testament and the New Testament, you’ll see why.
God of the Old Testament is a jealous, vengeful entity, ready to annihilate the enemy. The New Testament teaches to turn the other cheek… Or love your neighbor as yourself… Sawing the seeds of pretense… All pretense is against nature against Life. No animal or person should be forced to do pretend…
So cancer runs lower in my kind of people… but, of course, not all. Politicians are always an exception: they are all pretentious no matter what culture they come from. And the traditional Jewish worrywart will be likely to get colon cancer…
Depending on your position in life, some or many people will be fooled, but as a rule, people interact with your real ‘I’ while you expect them to interact with your precious I. And then you get upset. lol.
People, for example, see that you are a f*ckup, a bumbling idiot, a liar, an ignoramus, a poseur. And unless you have made it president of the United States, they will not say ‘Yes, Mr. President’, they will say ‘cut the bullsh*t’
And if your attention is glued on demanding the treatment you want that would match your Precious I. the treatment that your real ‘I’ never earned, you’ll have a miserable, sorry, unproductive life… guaranteed.
You know… you know how you are.
In the integrity statement, it says: be true to your standards and ideals… but you aren’t.
Start there. Either lower those ideals and standards, or grow yourself so you can fulfill them, so you can be true to them. And consider yourself a person on the journey… but to be on the journey: you must start.
I am not sure what other people teach you, but my experience has been that none of my students have even considered YET starting that inner journey to become a match to who they want to be perceived as.
After all these months… It is not that they haven’t given lip-service to it.
I want to become a producer. I want to do complete and thorough work. I want to bring a good attitude to my work. I want to be present with my children. Yadda, Yadda, Yadda
All talk… Because until you get that what you are needs to grow up to match what you want isn’t possible until you become authentic.
Let me say it differently: authenticity is the key to unstuck you.
For me the key moment came when a coach told me that I was a gossip.
I had never considered myself a gossip. I told her, the coach, that I only said thing about other people, but I only said things that were true.
She then explained to me that gossip is what makes another person lose esteem in the eyes of the people who hear the gossip.
The trick was, for me, to get that putting another person down made me appear higher. And that was the inner dynamic: I felt less. My precious I wanted front and center, maybe on a pedestal position… And I got that twist in the belly… and have been fighting wanting to gossip, wanting to feel front and center ever since… occasionally successfully. Occasionally.
When I measure, the gap between my real self and my precious I is 7%… and all of it is caused by this feeling less, wanting to put other people down.
Obviously it is better than it was before. When that impromptu coaching happened on the phone, I think 17 years ago, my gap was 60%. And I was miserable, and dirt poor, earning my living in not very honorable ways.
Start where you can. Start with what you can see.
One of my students in a ‘solo’ partner call saw that she wants what she wants, and she doesn’t care what anybody else wants.
Right now a red headed woodpecker is crossing in front of my window… Life is beautiful… because life is beautiful inside me.
Outside: not so much. The weather is sh*tty, cold, rainy, last week we had lots of snow.
But what gives you your life is mostly your inner experience, being OK with yourself. No money, no sex, no good food, no thriving economy can cause that.
I am going to run a What’s the truth about you workshop regularly… and I am going to charge for it.
It will be a combination of my ‘what’s missing’ workshop and the process I did in this last Playground session. It will leave you with lots of options in the end, instead of giving you an answer, a relief likr the ‘what’s missing’ workshop ordinarily did.
I will raise the price from one workshop to the next… It will start low. You will have access to all previous workshop recordings… not available for other people.
We’ll alternate between topics: health, money/work, relationships.
My thought is to start with health, but given that how you do anything is how you do everything… the results are always the same, just the starting point is different.
If you suggest we start with a different topic, because you have an urgent need, please let me know in the comments or email.
It’s a good idea to have your health measurements and your starting point measurements before you come to a workshop. It will show you how your hidden true self is correlated to the numbers there.
This workshop may become my flagship product… we shall see.
Why am I charging money for it?
Simple. Anything that is free has no value for you, so you won’t implement… and therefore it is energy that fizzled out…
I am not interested in that. I am interested in implementation… Implementation is the key to growth, even simple change.
OK, here is the link to buy
What’s the truth about you?
