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Are you stingy with yourself? Do you say you don’t deserve?
You may be. And you may be right.
One of the obvious signs of stinginess with yourself is that you don’t give yourself enough time to do what there is to do, enough time so you could actually ENJOY what you are doing.
I call this ‘homework attitude’, where you are more interested in checking an activity off your todo list than actually doing it, enjoying it, savoring it.
And to no one’s surprise, you can do everything with this homework stingy attitude. Sex. Conversations. Dinner. Reading. And, of course, the 67 steps.
The consequence of stinginess is that you end up with nothing, or mighty little for your effort.
Apropos, effort.
There is a misconception, a misunderstanding, a propagated untruth in language.
They imply that deserving’s currency is somehow innate.
That you deserve because you are… whatever… deserving? This concept of ‘deserving’ has 70% overlap with entitled… entitled just because you are…
But Life is Life… and it has its rules. You deserve nothing for nothing… Just like you are not entitled to anything.
The currency Life has for deserving is effort.
But not any odd effort, but effort that EARNS you something. And it gives you what it earned.
Not more.
If your efforts go for something immaterial, irrelevant, not nurturing, not worth efforting for, you still get what your efforts went for. Immaterial, irrelevant, not nurturing, not worth having.
No one really taught you, or if someone did, you just didn’t want to believe, that what makes life worth living is having health, wealth, love and fulfillment, the four pillars of Eudaimonia.
And you are NOT entitled to any of it. Not health, not wealth, not love, not fulfillment. And unless your efforts create it, you didn’t deserve it.
I can hear you groaning… and while you are groaning you can’t hear anything I say.
When you look at a person, you don’t know what they are doing, or not really. So you don’t know what they intend, you don’t know in what direction their efforts go.
Reality is 90% hidden from your view. You can readily see the 10%, but deserving, the earning what somebody wants is in the 90%.
You intend to model after people’s 10% visible, and you don’t get the results they get. Because what is visible is not what earns the result: health, wealth, love and fulfillment. The 10% is the gross movements. The visible.
And the invisible, the how, the ‘to what end’, the who, the context, the backdrop, the motive power are all in the invisible…
It is easier to demonstrate this with reading. Or the getting up. Or cooking and eating.
Let’s look through reading.
You want to read fast, because you heard somewhere that successful people read a lot. And they must read fast… right?
If you read slow, I want you to slow down even more.
I will specifically talk about reading fiction. Reading fiction will add colors to your colorless world. It will improve your reading ability. And it will earn you pleasure. It will improve your conversational skills.
But not what is on the other side of reading: having the knowledge in your brain. No. The process. The doing of it. The efforting.
Alas, getting the information, saying ‘I’ve read it’ gets you nothing.
And you are getting the feeling of anxiety and wheel-spinning. Not what you wanted? But that is what you earned! Darn.
We are talking about the desires to have read a book, vs to read a book.
Both earn you something, but one is not enjoyable, and the other is.
And if you live your life where doing the things you do is itself not enjoyment, then you live a life you cannot love, because you don’t live it powerfully.
The difference between the two states and the life they earn is, of course, in the invisible. In the 90%.
We can call it your attitude… The ‘what for’, or ‘to what end’. It will also give you your ‘how’. And your ‘who’. And your life…
But, and listen up, this is important, to get to where your efforts learn enjoyment, you need to get good at it.
You only enjoy doing the things, expanding your effort, at things that you do well.
If you don’t do anything well, then start with just one thing. And learn to do it well through doing it with the right attitude until you do it well.
And don’t expect effort to be pleasurable from the start. It isn’t.
This applies to everything.
Most of you for reasons your own, have NEVER done anything long enough to do it well, so you don’t enjoy it.
My stingy friend I have written a lot about had one thing she did well: driving. And that one thing is still her life’s backbone: she drives old people to shop, to doctor’s appointment, etc. She is 82 years old.
You know your activity is giving you pleasure, because anxiety isn’t there.
I have never become a good enough driver to enjoy driving.
But I have a ton of activities that I did get good enough to enjoy. I enjoy chopping onions. I enjoy making different kinds of soups. And I enjoy making my tea, writing, reading, using language, rolling out of bed without hurting my back, using energies, experimenting, playing Freecell, etc. etc.
So if you want to start on living a life you love, a life you life powerfully, you want to pick one thing first to get good at.
- Reading fiction would be high on my list, if I were where you are.
- Cooking… knife skills…
- Walking. Walking with proper posture.
My most successful student
My most successful student is becoming good at having set an attitude and coming from that… hers is: be quiet, attentive and interested.
He is also getting good at doing the 67 steps… squeezing as much enjoyment and as much value out of listening and then reporting as she can.
I bet she doesn’t start by wanting to ‘having done’ the work…
I first learned about this attitude back in 1987, when I was in an evening seminar called Sex and Intimacy.
From people sharing I found out that people have sex to have an orgasm.
And none of the people shared that the activity of sex was enjoyable. They only focused on the prize… not on the activity. The unfolding. The feeling of skins touching. Feeling the movements. The intimacy.
None of that.
When I said: your colorless life, your colorless world is in every area of life.
Life happens moment to moment, not only in peak experiences, or not only in the ‘orgasm’.
And you see, your stinginess everywhere renders you stingy with yourself!!!!!!
So make 2023 the year where you’ll be generous with yourself, and start bringing moment to moment color, moment to moment enjoyment into your life.
Whatever you say you ‘have to do’, start doing it with the intention to do it well… and start enjoying it, moment to moment. The activity. The feelings. And the movements. The intimacy.
Life is like sex. If you only go for the goal, you have an empty life.
Doing what I suggest will make you weird for your friends. They won’t understand you.
But if you have the courage to be different then you’ll reap the results.
You earned it. And that is the meaning of ‘deserving’… earning it.
The easiest, I say, course to become deserving, is the 67 step coaching. Or doing the 67 steps as if you were coached, if you don’t want to or can’t pay for my involvement.
If you choose to be coached, my MAIN JOB is to remind you to do it for doing it… not to ‘have done it’… which is your tendency to do. To get it done.
No, pay attention to how and what way it gives you pleasure.
If you don’t experience pleasure, then slow the hell down… you have the on/off button… savor it…
My job is to slow you down…
If you have the audios, you can use my reclaim site to do the work, to post your reports. The reports are your digesting process… without it nothing will happen… 240 thousand people had nothing happen… don’t be one of them.
OK, here is the link to buy.
Learn to slow down and enjoy the ride
