Become all you can become by raising yourself higher on the Tree of Life

FOUR ADDICTIONS or why people whose job is to help you, can’t and won’t

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”

Your core strength and spiritual growth

I am 70 years old… or to be exact, will be in two more months.

The biggest concern for older people is falling. Falling and not be able to get up. Or break a bone. My sister in law broke her thigh bone…

So many communities across the United States offer free exercise classes to older people to make us more self-reliant and not fall easily.

The exercises are directed at strengthening the core and the leg muscles.

I am mentioning this, because the work of becoming a human being needs a strong core. Otherwise one may get dizzy, scared, or fall.

Just like in real life.

What keeps you from having a strong core?

1. Fear. Fear makes you narrow your cone of vision and either start pretending you are blind, or fixate at your feet… missing where you are going.

Continue reading “Your core strength and spiritual growth”

When the empath is stumped… or what is love? Can seals love?

Seal Finds Toy Version Of Itself, Can’t Stop Hugging It

I have been looking at the pictures of this seal treating the plush version of itself with obvious feelings and every time I shake my head and say… “no, animals can’t love”.

But what if what we see on these pictures is what love is, and not what we have been calling love on the Tree of Knowledge? What if?

I have a stuffed toy, a tiny bean bag tiger, I have been acting the same way as this seal. And the feelings I feel myself, and the feelings I feel from the seal are exactly the same.

So what is love? What is the seal feeling, what am I feeling?
Continue reading “When the empath is stumped… or what is love? Can seals love?”

If it is about winning… you have already lost.

Life is not about winning. Life is about how you play…

It is impossible to win. Life is not a winnable game. And wanting to win is setting you up for misery.

So what is this ‘wanting to win?’

It is an agenda. And like any agenda, it creates a narrow cone of vision, and a forceful ignorance of anything outside of that narrow cone.

This results in three things: Continue reading “If it is about winning… you have already lost.”

Become someone who is living a life worth living

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…

Continue reading “Become someone who is living a life worth living”

How babysitting your children, your business, even yourself alters how you feel

Context is decisive…

I found a great article that described what has been the most important spiritual shift in my career as a teacher and a coach.

I trust that you’ll be able to see how it applies to you and how it can transform your life, and create a spiritual shift for you too.

Here is the story:

The Day I Pretended to Babysit My Own Kids
By Chana Bitton
Emotionally exhausted. This is how I was beginning to feel on a regular basis. Everything my kids did that wasn’t “perfect” got on my nerves. If they argued with each other, I yelled. If they didn’t listen to me the first time I asked, I yelled. If they had a complaint about dinner, I got annoyed . . . and yelled. Why was I reacting this way? Why couldn’t I enjoy my job as a mother, and see the beauty in raising a family?When did parenting become such a burden?
It was something I thought about regularly, because I knew that the way I was being was not the kind of parent I wanted to be. I wanted to rediscover the enjoyment in parenting, but I needed to dig deep to figure out how to find it again.
One night during bedtime, as I was putting my 6-year-old to sleep, I began having the same agitated feeling. She kept asking questions, not listening, squirming—basically, being a normal 6-year-old. I hated the way I was feeling, and decided to play a little mind game with myself. Continue reading “How babysitting your children, your business, even yourself alters how you feel”

Why I need to be some kind of criminal to really help you

Yesterday I listened to step 4 of the 67 steps. I heard something… and turned the audio off. I didn’t want to forget what I heard.

This is the step where Tai talks about the DNA that makes us able to learn, no, makes us have to learn to become human.

He uses language as an example.

Every human has the capacity to learn their mother tongue so they can communicate with the people around them. But there is no separate gene for English and Serbian, for example. There is the capacity to learn language.

And so is with hundreds of abilities. Continue reading “Why I need to be some kind of criminal to really help you”

How do you know if you have a fixed mindset or a growth mindset? And how do you get out of the fixed mindset, really?

I doesn’t matter what you think you believe.

I am starting to notice that what you say you believe is one thing, what you actually believe is expressed a lot more truthfully in your actions and in your reactions.

One of the most useful distinctions I learned from Hungarian author, Margoczi, is the distinction of “devaluing of your ‘I'”

If you have an I that can be devalued, then it must be fixed.
If you compare your I with anyone else’s, and you are higher and you feel smug about it, or your I is lower and you feel bad about it, then you have a fixed mindset.

Continue reading “How do you know if you have a fixed mindset or a growth mindset? And how do you get out of the fixed mindset, really?”

The only way to affect real change: change the root cause

The Three Great Mysteries: air to a bird, water to a fish, mankind to himself
~ Hindu Proverb

We live in an age where, we could say, are poised to move our inquiry into areas where it could make a difference. Not yet… obviously.]

I say in every area of the mystery that we call life and Universe.

In health. In well-being. In climate change and caring for our planet. In evolution, genetics, and feeding all these people. In psychology. In human growth and self-actualization.

We are still on the surface, and everything you buy, everything you read, everything you can think is still not cause, and doing it won’t make a difference… except…

Some ideas, some theories are closer to the source than others. Continue reading “The only way to affect real change: change the root cause”

The Integrated Good Life & The Four Pillars Of Eudaimonia

Eudamonia: the fulfilled life. The satisfying life. It’s a how… It’s about how much life you have in your years. Fulfilling the potential that you are.

It’s impossible to have “the Good Life” without Integration… but… ¹

One of the hardest steps for students to complete in the 67 step coaching is the step about creating an integrated life.

Why? Because on the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, there is no such a thing as integration.

Continue reading “The Integrated Good Life & The Four Pillars Of Eudaimonia”