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Want an easy life?
Whatever you put your attention moves towards you.
If that is true, then you and your easy life are in trouble. If you want an easy life, that means you don’t like effort, discipline, you hate anything that is not easy… And guess what? Unconsciously that is where your attention goes… and that is what is moving towards you.
What!? I am glad I got your attention.
That statement is really about your UNCONSCIOUS attention… the place your mind wanders to without you even noticing it.
Like you I also craved an easy life… a life with no bumps in the road, a life that was flowing, gently. like a river.
I had affirmations, mindmovies, hypnotic audios all saying: my life is calm, and smooth… but what was coming to me is just the opposite…
Turning Point
Then some 30 years ago I was asked to invent the purpose of my life from the biggest complaint of my life, which was, obviously, that my life was like a roller coaster, always on the edge. It was nerve wracking. I hated it.
The assignment said: turn your biggest complaint upside down and shape it into a purpose… I did that and the result was inspiring: I managed that by making the way my life was useful, a tool, a contribution.
This is how it sounds:
The purpose of my life is living on the edge, generating distinctions for transformation for humankind…
I was inspired, so I made a commitment. I committed my life to that purpose, to cause transformation, mine and others… through living on the edge.
Obviously I didn’t do it to make my life easier, and but interestingly it got easier regardless. I committed to it to make my life make sense to me, to have an organizing principle for my life, a context that inside that things made sense.
Suffering for no reason, efforting for no reason, don’t make sense to me.
I have been living in this context for all these years. Because that ‘event’ was so momentous I still remember the date: November 25 1991.
What does this purpose has meant to me on a day to day basis?
I have this ‘buddy’, I call it Source, that guides me to the edge… to places I don’t want to go… so there I can experience what is there to experience, feel how it feels, look how it works, look under the appearances. And what there is to say about is done come back and share with you.
For that, of course, I need to keep my eyes open, even thought what is happening on the edge is never pretty. What I come back to share is the hidden dynamics, and also, most importantly how you can recover and live a good life in spite of the edge. what edge? For example, the economy… or breakup… or disappointment.
We are going through an economic and political upheaval. What may be on people’s mind is fear of poverty, loss of income, so that is where I was taken this morning by Source.
I need to be able to see what you need me to teach you.
What you need. Whatever is an issue for most people, I need to go there and experience it myself, feel the fear, feel the anxiety, feel what you feel and transform it. Observe clearly how I did it, so I can teach you how to do it, so you can transform the same for yourself.
Transformation doesn’t change the thing, it changes what you see, how you see it, what you say about it… And therefor your inner state. The WHO, that is responsible for the WHAT, the actions, the feelings, the speaking.
We have no power over anything outside of ourselves, not over the economy, not over the weather, not over other people… but we can have complete power over how we look at things.
Here is an example: the moment you notice that your thoughts, your imagination go to the thing that you don’t want, don’t like, what you fear, like losing your job, being destitute, or being sick… you can take your attention and take it somewhere else. But where? The opposite is just as bad.
I have one reliable move: I look at the purpose I invented… and keep my eyes on that… the contribution.
Trouble, fear, worry will try pull away your attention. It is how it works, for everyone.
If you don’t have something fixed to bring your attention back to, the attention won.
At any moment you either direct your attention or your attention directs you. There is no between.
The difference between winners and losers is to what degree they are willing to be the one who directs their attention… or act like victims of their attention.
Losers act like they have no power over their attention. Winners also experience their attention wanting to direct them, but they pull the reins back, own their power, and the second they notice their attention is wondering like a stray dog, they take their attention back, and direct their attention to a place of their own choosing (mine is always my purpose!), and they stop sleepwalking.
It’s a percentage thing… No one is 100%… Most people hover around 7%. With 10% you can actually get things done. With 30% and ambition you can become a millionaire.
Sleepwalking is an unconscious state where you where the dreamlike vision takes you. The vision can be good or bad… but no matter what it is, it is a vision, and no matter what, you’ll wake up to reality and you are in trouble.
I once had a client who spent much of his time daydreaming of success… instead of paying attention to what he was doing. That daydreaming was a reaction to the fact that he didn’t like his job. He was thinking where he would rather be…
But of course daydreaming about success is not how you get successful.
The more time you spend sleepwalking and daydreaming the more trouble you get into.
You say: Sorry, I was in my head… But you were sleepwalking…
Manifestation is real… but you manifest only the bad things, the things you fear, but why?
Because the visions of bad things are automatic, whereas the visions of good things take effort.
Visions of bad things need no creativity, they are fueled by fear. Visions of good things require imagination, energy, creativity… and a lot of energy, I say.
So your most important job is to manage your attention.
It feels hopeless in the beginning, because you have never exercised that muscle. It feels like you can’t… But if you are willing to stick with it, be relentless about it, you’ll eventually start experiencing that you are the boss and the attention is the servant…
If you are not relentless, like any servant, the attention will run circles around you… so BE relentless.
I measure it in your Starting Point Measurements how much control you have over your attention. The average person has 7% control. You want to raise that number, little by little, to where you are clear that you are the boss.
What ‘exercise’ can you practice it on?
The important move in this, with regards to controlling the attention, is pulling it back.
When you notice that the attention wonders, like a dog on a leash, by the way, you pull it back to stay at heel.
So reading is an excellent exercise. Watching a movie, listening to an audio, any conversation…
If you are a woman: sex… lol.
The trick is to notice.
Don’t expect the subject matter to do the trick… it is really up to you, only.
The mind wonders, mostly to what the mind is afraid of, concerned with, the mind cannot easily stay in the present moment where he reading, the movie, the audio, the conversation is.
So ultimately attention training is mind training.
How long will it take to get good at it?
It depends on the frequency and the efficiency of your practice.
Any kind of success in life, whether it is in the area of health, money, or relationships depends on your ability to control the mind, control your attention.
Especially in hard times.
And don’t be mistaken: we are living in hard times… and it is getting harder, I say.
It is really the difference between winners and losers… and there is no middle ground.
What can you do to train the muscle of the attention?
You can start with guided meditation if you have time. One of my clients, William from Ireland can help you with that.
My favorite ‘tool’ is books, whether on the kindle, on the desktop, or physical books, you will need to practice pulling your attention back when it wonders. This wondering attention is the reason most people don’t read, and even those who read don’t remember much.
If your attention span, the percentage I measure in the Starting Point Measurements, is very low, you will have a hard time to learn anything: you are an emergency case. I have a client who doesn’t take guidance well, and never practices… And in spite of all her efforts, all her desire, she is an underperforming ne’er do well.
But I have found that unless you have set a purpose to your life, you won’t stick with any spiritual practice, because nothing fuels it… nothing gives it continuous energy.
In the next Saturday webinar on June 5 I will work with you to create a purpose the way I did.
If you want to be in that webinar, start writing down your complaints about life, so you get a good start.
Be prepared: an invented purpose is like a power station in your mind: very powerful…
Another way to prepare yourself is to get rid of some of the ballast you have been carrying: the thinks that you abandoned but no given up on, the things you have left unfinished… they act like ballast so you can never take off and do in your life what your really want to do…
No energy… it is all tied up in the stuff…
I teach how to get rid of this ballast in one session of the Integrity workshop, and to prepare you, I will give you just that one segment… as a bonus for signing up to the Purpose webinar.
The earlier you start the more energy you’ll have to formulate and COMMIT to your new purpose.
You see, most people have one puny purpose: to look good and make it through life. The more energy you have the bigger purpose you can have…
The bigger your purpose the more alive you can be… the more you experience life as living, being alive. And, of course, you’ll sleepwalk less. A lot less.
The challenge of the purpose creating exercise is this: there are many axes around which you can turn the complaint around. The knee jerk reaction for me would have been that my life is smooth and comfortable. But that is NOT turning it upside down… that is saying the opposite. If you have been afraid to do thing, the purpose from that could be: the purpose of my life is to use fear to go higher and higher… instead of the opposite: I am not afraid.
This is why you need help formulating it… the mind wants to do away with what is not comfortable, what is not easy… but that is the opposite, and not inspiring at all.
An uninspiring purpose will make your life feel dead… And most of you have an uninspiring purpose already. Survival is not inspiring. People who just wanted to survive were the ones who dropped dead in the concentration camps of the Nazis.
Unless you want to live FOR something, your life is flat… like coke that was left open. Ugh. No bubbles.
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