Updated: Does Meditation raise your awareness? Your ‘worth a damn’ factor

awareness-meterDoes Meditation raise your awareness?

There are lots of interpretations of meditation, so I am going to share mine.

Meditation is a practice to increase awareness.

Awareness is a transitive word: it has a direction. Awareness of what? And therein lies the mischief when people use the word.

  1. Awareness is always directed.

    When some of my students meditate, they go into la-la land… they literally become unconscious. Although after a long life of busy mind that is blissful, it is not useful.

  2. Awareness, and therefore meditation is useful.

    Continue reading “Updated: Does Meditation raise your awareness? Your ‘worth a damn’ factor”

The story you so vehemently protect… that you die for…

not-pretty-enough-smallerThe single reason most people don’t want to work with me is this: I will rob them of their sob story.

What’s a sob story?

Well, everybody has one… It was born after an incident in early childhood.

Something happened, and you made a decision about yourself, about the world, about your mother.

Some people have interlocking decisions, making the sob story as strong as a Greek myth. Continue reading “The story you so vehemently protect… that you die for…”

Narrow cone of vision and your health

narrow-cone-vision-health-adviceImagine having to find your way through a maze without seeing past the tiny circle a flashlight can illuminate?

“Luckily” you only have to look at your life. Your health, your money, your love life.

You ARE living your life, a veritable maze, by the light of a flashlight.

You read an article here… yay, I see may way. A sound bite there… yay, I see now… But it is still the tiny flashlight method: you don’t see the big picture, you don’t see your way to the good life.

Seeing the full picture, the big picture capacity, looking with consciousness that can see everything, is like turning the ceiling light on: you’d be seeing a lot more, wouldn’t you? Making less “narrow picture” mistakes…
Continue reading “Narrow cone of vision and your health”

If nothing has worked for you… you are still as stuck as ever

If nothing has worked for you… you are still as stuck as ever

Let’s look at the role of discovery in growth… your growth… if there is no growth, there has been no discovery.

All the steps of the 67 steps program are nudges for you to discover something that you haven’t seen.

Of course, like with everything, your tendency is to go to your head for the answers, and not look at all outside of your head.

The step (Step 5) where the homework is to list what you see about poor people and rich people is a great step to show your relationship to growth.

If you think you are rich, you go and tell me how what you do, how you think, how you feel is the way to be rich. No looking, no discovery.
Continue reading “If nothing has worked for you… you are still as stuck as ever”

Sometimes it’s hard to see past the trouble in front of you

Thoreau_what-mattersSometimes it’s hard to see past the trouble in front of you

I heard this sentence in a Netflix film… and wrote it down quickly. 1

Anything that threatens your well-being, anything that threatens your reputation, anything that threatens your self-image shows up as trouble, and fixates your view, in an ever narrowing way on the threat. And you stare at it, and see it with the exclusion of everything else.

The challenge is to just look, and allow the urge to do something, to run, to say something, to explain, justify, fix, to just be there…

When you can do that, when you can just look, you are able to bring conscious awareness to what you see.
Continue reading “Sometimes it’s hard to see past the trouble in front of you”

I was looking at trust, the intangible capacity to trust… and its role in becoming a winner

no trust - no winningIn the past four months that I have been able to turn on individual capacities for people, I have received no request to turn on trust.

Why is that?

After all people, rightly, asked me for self-trust. But self-trust won’t be enough.

So what can be the current worldview with regards to trust, that trust doesn’t come up as number one to turn on.

Because, whether you know it or not, without trust there is no winning. Without trust there is no flow. Without trust there is no fulfillment.

When I measured some winners in life, for whom it took years to hone their skills with which they won, money, recognition, admiration… trust was there, fully open.

As you probably already know, I use playing Freecell as my laboratory. It is much the way Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene author used the computer simulation “Prisoner’s Dilemma”… very enlightening for me.

So, what I saw today, and it’s only 6:45 am, lol, that without trust you can only play for keeps, or without trust you can’t open your eyes wide, and take steps that will only pay off 20-30 steps down the line. Continue reading “I was looking at trust, the intangible capacity to trust… and its role in becoming a winner”

How to become worth a damn?

how to become worth a damnCan someone who listens to an audio, watches a video, reads a book, or even comes to one of my workshops, change?

Long sentence, eh? The answer to this question is this: it depends.

NO input can cause change by itself. The change comes from trying to apply what you read to yourself. Even if the application is just answering one question that requires you to look.

I am finding, that the program I so love, the 67 steps, is completely and absolutely wasted on you, unless you do the looking it takes to answer the one or two or three questions that come with each session.

Why? Because looking, attempting to answer the question, causes a state change. 2 The state inside which you listen is: I agree, I like it, I knew that, interesting, etc. Narrow cone of vision. Sitting in what you already know… undisturbed, untested. Sitting in who you already know yourself to be… undisturbed, untested.

Attempting to look to answer the question from your own life is where the magic happens. When you have to widen your cone of vision to include what you never look at.

It is happening to me in spades. I am at segment 19… Continue reading “How to become worth a damn?”

You are run by a machine. The machine is put together of genes, and each gene wants its own survival.

survival of the one that can changeThe title could be said differently as well: You are a survival machine. You are put together for the survival of your genes. (Richard Dawkins: the selfish gene theory). You have hundreds, maybe thousands of genes. Each gene is a code, and the genes are strung together on your DNA. Some genes are recessive, or dormant, but can be turned on by your behavior, by your thinking, or by an energy person, like me. 3

These genes put together, each concerned only about its own survival is your DNA, and we could say that the machine is what we call the ego. Of course it is not a good way to put it, but at least you are cursorily familiar with the phenomenon of ego.

Ego wants to survive the genes.
And it deals with what it needs to deal with to be successful at it.

The mind interferes with the machine, culture interferes with the machine, religion interferes with the machine. All your misery comes from this interference and how you choose to deal with it.
Continue reading “You are run by a machine. The machine is put together of genes, and each gene wants its own survival.”

Self-involved or self-aware? Centering is the biggest difference.

involvedbeingmeWhen I am looking at winners, they are involved with something worth working for… involved, as in action about.

When I am looking at you, I see you being self-involved, 90% of the time. 4Self-involved… I haven’t been able to find a definition I agree with… so let’s be crass: you are self-involved if anyone would think or say: dig your head out of your ass… please…, or you have your head up your ass… or nobody home…}}

And even when you look not so self-involved, your actions, your blaming, your finger-pointing belies the underlying self-involvement… you feel that you are a superior person when others seem smaller.

As long as your biggest concern, expressed in your attention and actions, is yourself, you will be miserable, guaranteed.

Did you notice that I didn’t say: expressed in your words, in your facebook posts… no, your words lie a lot.

I meant: you’ll have your attention on yourself, and your actions will be irrelevant, not building anything, not growing anything, including you… leading you to be split, and miserable.

The “self” your attention is on, is your small self… how you are perceived by others, what you want, what you don’t want, what you like and what you don’t like, what you are afraid of.
Continue reading “Self-involved or self-aware? Centering is the biggest difference.”

Innovation vs fixing… how can you have any circumstance and still be happy?

cartoon_personal_innovation

Innovate yourself out of the problem

If you are here, reading this blog, you have a complaint about life… something you’d like to fix. Even if you are pretending that you are “just” curious… all humans living on Planet Earth have something they don’t like and they’d like to fix it.

That is the first inclination of everyone. You have an itch: scratch it. Have a problem? Find a solution.

Solution is a code word for fixing.

But we all face a problem, like the dog who scratched his skin so now it is raw and is going to get infected.

The solution is the next problem, usually bigger than the original problem.

So what can you do?

If Tai Lopez is any indication, Sir Richard Branson said: “Innovate yourself out of the problem”.
Continue reading “Innovation vs fixing… how can you have any circumstance and still be happy?”