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I had this weird question this morning: what would I miss if I were ‘torn’ away from ‘home’?
I would miss playing Freecell. Maybe I would miss my first cup of tea in the morning. I would miss writing an article. I would miss talking to you.
Citizen Kane missed being young. Sliding down the hill on his sled… the rush of the slide, the freedom of winter, the yelling…
When I look back, leaving a country is a lot like that.
I had snow-sledding in my childhood, but I don’t miss it. I had a family, but I don’t miss it. But I do miss driving almost on the level of the Danube and seeing the sky reflected in the water… The sky made the Danube blue… even though if you looked from a different angle, you could see that it was dirty… brown.
What would you miss?
When you go away from something you are almost always going towards something. Something new… and there is a road… until you get there.
Today I imagine death like that. Not a void, but a new place… and I feel I am sitting in a train looking out at the fields… on my way.
Does what I would miss strong enough to keep me here?
It is a useful exercise to ask these questions, so you can, maybe, make some changes if there is not enough to keep you playing this game of life.
Are you playing, or are you the ball that life plays with?
Thanksgiving, says life, and you dutifully overeat. Christmas, you dutifully buy the gifts you are supposed to buy. Deck the halls… Life is using you as a ball… Life is having fun. Do you?
There is a brilliant question a psychologist asks women on the verge of wanting a divorce.
She said: Ask yourself this question: When it was the best: was it really good?
When I look at what I miss, I miss what was really good when it was the best. The rest: meh.
But it is really up to you. Even the relationship. Even sex.
If you expect Life, or others to give you something to miss, you won’t have anything. What makes something memorable, what makes something worth missing is what YOU put into it.
You could, like me, slide down in the snow, and say ‘meh’.
You could, like me, participate in relationship halfway… and say ‘meh’.
The quality of your life depends 91% on what you put into it, and only 9% on others, or on the circumstances or what you HAVE.
I know you hate me now. But if your life is not spectacular. And I doubt you would read my articles if it were. It is not spectacular because you put in the ‘meh’.
And when you put in ‘meh’, you get, at best, a ‘meh‘ life. If you put in ‘I have to‘ then you get a life that is drudgery.
There is a huge misunderstanding humanity-wide. That what you GET is what matters.
But because life is energetic, because humans are energetic by design, you only experience the energy of what YOU GIVE. What you get you don’t feel. You, maybe, feel your reaction to getting it, but it has nothing to do with the energy you got.
And if I am any way like you: I don’t feel love, caring, coming to me. My reaction to what I think is love or caring is at best ‘meh’, but more often irritation. Huh? Yeah. Irritation.
But when I give love, when I give caring, it feels like heaven. It feels soooo good.
I know, you don’t know how to give. Or you are like most people: you feel that if you give you’ll have less. You live as if life were a zero sum game… so you withhold, you withhold yourself, your love, your caring, your energy, hoping that that way you’ll have something.
And to your utter surprise you are empty, and you FEEL empty.
While I don’t. And I am a giver.
A year or so ago I suggested to one of my students that he sets out to make me proud. And promptly he stopped doing what would make him successful, what would make me proud.
When we looked, he didn’t want me to feel proud of him. He felt that making me proud would leave him feeling like just a tool…
He didn’t get that when you make someone feel proud of you, the real winner is you.
This is also your relationship with your parents.
A decent parent and about 90% of all parents are decent people. A decent parent wants one thing for their children: that they turn out. That they make it in life. That they are happy.
So what you do to defy your parents is that you fail. You stumble. You don’t turn out, or if you do, you withhold that fact from your parents.
You eat the poison you mean for them.
My niece even died to make her parents wrong.
When 30 years ago my mom visited me here in the United States, one night she asked ‘Was I a horrible mother?‘ And maybe, in a way she was. She beat me to a pulp, regularly. She said horrible things to me, she didn’t want me to sit at the dinner table, she didn’t want to take me home from the hospital, so yeah, in a way she, maybe, was a horrible mother.
But I took a moment to weigh what would make ME feel good about myself. Complaining, or being proud of my achievements.
And I chose the second.
I answered: ‘You must have been the perfect mother for me, because I’ve turned out.‘
And in a lot of ways I had. I made a living in a foreign country where I didn’t have a soul to help me. And I had a business I loved. So yeah, I turned out.
I put her mind at ease. When she died she said to my older brother: ‘Nobody needs me, so I can go‘.
Had I said: my life wasn’t working, she would have had no permission to die, until my life worked… or maybe she would have died a failure.
You are cruel to your parents, thinking that it makes you better.
But what allows you to have abundance, is giving. Giving abundantly. The more you give the more you have.
Not stuff, mind you. Stuff is a zero sum game. So not stuff. Love, caring, generosity. Making people proud of you. Making people feel appreciated around you. The more you do that the more you have.
And when I ask you, or you ask yourself: what would I miss if I had to go, you would have GIVING on the list. The feeling of the kind of giving that makes you feel abundant.
I know I am getting my job done with my students when they, spontaneously, feel gratitude towards me. When they don’t treat me like a parent.
But here is the rub: if you have nothing to appreciate, nothing to be proud of, nothing you produced, expressing gratitude is empty words. So cut it out.
Our biggest week in this regard was this past week. More than usual number of my students turned what they got from me to something to be proud of.
The secret, muscletesting says, has been the IDEA of intention.
When you have learned to turn on intention, surprisingly just the idea to intend activates it.
And once your intention is ‘on’, you start seeing, you start being in a new way… new ways that you can be proud of. The experience of being alive changes, and you become abundant.
But before you can get there, you really need to learn to activate, to turn on, the flip the switch of intention. The mechanics.
It is not hard, it is just unusual. Different. Feels unnatural. Just like all the moves of connecting to Source.
But once you have it in muscle memory, nothing is more natural… it is as easy as swallowing… even though the baby first needed to be taught to suckle. But once the milk was in the baby’s mouth: swallowing was an of course… not.a.big.thing.
I teach the mechanics in the Intention webinars. You can buy the recordings. If you don’t feel it was enough for you, you can book a short private teaching session. But I’ll do a private session only if you have done the work by yourself. That is the rule with all the private teaching sessions.
If you don’t do the work by yourself, you forfeit your right for a private session… even if you paid for it.
OK, here is the link to buy the training:
Learn and practice the mechanics of Intention
