Become all you can become with Sophie
He that won't be counselled, can't be helped
A disproportionately large percentage of “knowledge” available on the internet is false.
So given the amount of crap, it is you who needs to be a “truth seeker”.
Not “The Truth” but truth… Continue reading “Your success depends on seeing seeing cause and effect”
It was my shopping day yesterday…
Through bad design, I have my webinars on the same day as my shopping day.
And yesterday I felt creamed by the experience.
I dragged myself through, slept like a baby, but I am still exhausted today.
The difference for me between tired and exhausted, is my breathing. If my chest is not willing to expand, I call that exhaustion…
Anyway, I went to lie down about an hour ago, and opened a new book, 10-minute mindfulness, or something like that… on my kindle.
Five minutes into it I suddenly I realized what happened, what I didn’t do…
OK, first I am going to tell you what others teach you to do to be more present in life and less swept up in the drama of the day.
Then I will tell you what works… what I normally do, and what I didn’t do yesterday. OK? Continue reading “Mindfulness? No. Meditation? No. Meditative living? Yes”
There are two planes where existence can be experienced: the horizontal plane and the vertical plane.
They are not different places, they are different dimensions of the same thing, different ways to look at them, from different places in reality. Continue reading “The bucket of crabs… Are you allowed to grow?”
This article may be the most important article you’ll ever read… This is not an exaggeration. Any day is a good day to wake up, but around these weeks of greed and herdlike stomping to get more stuff, it is especially a good time. So, as you understand, this is a wake up article…
We all say we hate complainers. And we all complain.
But is there any form of complaint that is not a downer, that is not a racket, that is a good thing?
I like to watch entire series of television shows on Netflix. If I don’t like it, I just start another one. No commercials, no TV needed, easy.
I watched Foyle’s War, a British series, and I was encouraged: well written, well played. So I started to watch a Swedish series, Wallander. Five stars… must be good.
Continue reading “Not all complaints are created equal plus a funny story to wake you up”
We, here, call Mr. Hyde IT… The VoicesI have been awakened by the same “dream” again and again: you have an idea, you plant it, nurture it, and see what comes out of it: a bug or a plant? If it is a plant: is that plant worth watering more? Is it going to bear fruit?
And that process… idea, plant, nurture, evaluate… again and again…
So this morning I just had enough of it. I got up early just to shut the guidance up. Because I didn’t know what to do with it.
Since getting up, I have taken care of quite a few things… and now I am sitting in front of my computer, scared from the tropical downpour and the lightning that is hitting too close to home.
But suddenly I get an insight: I live as if there were two people in me: one who does what I say to do, and the other who doesn’t know that… and is utterly unhappy with me for not doing what I teach.
No voices that I can detect. It is more shoving and pulling and tugging and tossing me about.
Continue reading “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in me, you, all of us.”
Awareness
I don’t miss much. It’s normal for me.
I think one of the big lessons I needed to learn, needed to get aware of, is that your world is different.
It’s been a lifetime challenge. No matter how resistant the world, people, have been to my ideas, until I could identify, with pinpoint precision, what was there that I didn’t have, or what was it that I had that they didn’t have, and therefore didn’t value, I remained ineffective, misunderstood, and not valued.
Everywhere, on every level of communication.
Continue reading “Awareness or joyless blame…”
I am reading Osho, specifically his collection of talks on freedom.
He didn’t actually write any of his books, they are collections of his spontaneous daily talks in his ashrams to his devotees, answering questions.
One of the most intriguing concepts is this:
You want freedom. Freedom of choice.
And you find out that once you have chosen, anything, the scope of freedom gets reduced, diminished.
He suggests this experiment:
Stand up. Now raise one of your feet and stand on the other leg.
Now lift the other leg…
You can’t, can you?
This is how choice and freedom are connected.
Continue reading “Choiceless freedom? Choiceless choice? Choiceless Awareness? Is Osho right about that?”
Here is a quote from Rob Brezsny’s weekly newsletter to illustrate that “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong”.
Answers that sound like solutions… but aren’t… they just hide the problem deeper… so we get further away from the truth.
Our ability to pursue our dreams can be inhibited by four addictions:
1. an addiction to what other people think of us;
2. an addiction to creating melodrama in a misguided quest for excitement;
3. an addiction to believing we’re imprisoned by what happened in the past;
4. an addiction to negative thoughts that fill us with anxiety.
(Thanks to success coach Tom Ferry for these ideas.)The good news is that it is your birthright to beat all four of those addictions. The work won’t come fast or early, and it may never be perfect. But it’s quite possible
The above is an example of how coaches teach us. It’s all surface. Simple, easy, and not true. 99% of what you find in books on the internet, in articles, is simple, easy, and not true.
Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong. H.L. Mencken
Continue reading “FOUR ADDICTIONS or why people whose job is to help you, can’t and won’t”
I’ve been weeping for an hour or so. It is the tears of the soul.
The trigger: thinking of Billy Elliot, well known to many: where the spirit had a chance to fully express itself through a human: a rare phenomenon: we seem to have a hard time hearing the gently nudging of the spirit. By spirit I really mean the soul: I use the words interchangeably. In Hebrew: ruah, neshama, nefesh: they are different states of the same soul: expressing where the soul is with regards to its correction, with regards to becoming like God. 1
The other movie is “Together,” a 2002 Chinese movie about a young violinist, whose father, tirelessly grooms him and pushes him to be a top performer. We, together with the boy, find out that his father is not his father. The man who brought him up since he was a few days old found him at a train station with a violin next to him. He searched for the mother in vain, and he took it on himself to bring up the boy the way the mother seemed to have asked him: to become a violinist. 2
Continue reading “How Does The Universe Get To You? Are You A Truth, A Beauty, Or A Goodness Person?”
I have had people, ex-students, who tried the 67 steps and decided that it is not the way to learn… no matter what Sophie says… They knew better.
I could not put my finger on the attitude. I could see that it didn’t work, I could see that it didn’t serve them, but I didn’t have a word for it.
Until today, through listening to Step 4 of the 67 Steps.
This step, step 4 is about learning through mentors. Mentors are teachers, but not classroom teachers. One-on-one instruction where the teaching is tailored to you. Where you learn through osmosis. You emulate their whole being, how they approach issues… it is largely nonverbal.
By the way, it’s took me 16 months to seriously consider picking a mentor or two… to emulate. In every other area I had some results… in this one I just got to considering it… this is an 18 month schedule, not instant results…
