Sometimes undoing is as important and difficult as doing and takes as much time. Sometimes people who seem to lead average lives are actually working to transform themselves from within. Sometimes learning what you are not is as important as learning what you are.
Self development may be subtle and within, like an underground current. Don’t give yourself hard time that your actions are not external, do not bear visible fruit. Do not think you should instead focus on something more ‘tangible’. You are doing important and difficult work and it will manifest itself one day, like water against rock. Keep going.
Buddha had nothing when he died. By modern standards he was destitute and homeless. Yet he died not being afraid of death (and isn’t it the life’s biggest achievement?). He died in peace. He made a huge difference in many lives and his name would outlive him by centuries. Minimalism, subtracting rather than adding (in any area of life, not just material wealth, eg thoughts, emotions, wants) is often a great way to purify oneself and focus on what’s important.
Jack Black studied and coached extraordinary, very successful people for a long time. In the process, he narrowed down their success to 5 characteristics, one of them being an unshakable positive mental attitude. Jack then shared a simple, yet very effective technique, inspired by a famous golfer Seve Ballestero, that will help you maintain your positivity throughout the day no matter who you are dealing with.
It’s great when you have no choice but to deal with negative people (family dinner, upset boss, etc) who you know won’t be open to benefitting from your positive energy and will drain it instead. The moment your negativity alarm goes off, imagine that you are in a bubble. Be creative – your bubble can be anything, mine is a scifi metal contraption that snap shuts in sections. Retreat into your bubble and your positive energy is safe.
Check out Jack’s Mindstore programme here, some modules are free. As he puts it, it only works.
From Dr. Elaine Aron, psychologist and author of the international bestsellers The Highly Sensitive Person and The Highly Sensitive Person in Love. I recently contributed on Kickstarter to her new documentary because I am an HSP and I liked her first documentary.
So many years spent pondering the direction, the why, and here such a simple advice, in a couple of lines. Eureka moment indeed. Golden words. Now what is it you are most afraid of right now?
Grace and Frankie on Netflix is a hilarious, but also very smart show. It’s there that I’ve seen Frankie use video blogging to self analyse and get to the bottom of things. It’s used privately, a bit like writing in the diary, just that you are talking into your phone camera. It works the same way – helps structure thoughts, clarify or reveal what you were unaware of. I tried it, it did not work for me, but a version of it – audio recording, did work magnificently. Actually it worked so well I have not touched it since. So if you are lost, confused or in need of self introspection, here is a tool to try. With Frankie showing how 🙂
I’ve recently been to the book launch event – Alain de Botton, one of my favourite opinion leaders, a modern philosopher with a melancholic outlook on life snippets of which he shares on his Twitter account, wrote a new book titled ‘The course of love’. I had to be there.
The book is about love and specifically marriage, about ‘happily ever after’. De Botton bravely probes unspoken sore points and dissects the elephant in the room. His study is akin to the encyclopaedia of love: choice of a partner, children, sex, waning desire, fear of mortality, monogamy, infidelity – nothing evades his studying eye.
Some ideas were new to me and I’ve followed him on Twitter for years. To anyone new to de Botton, the book will be a revelation. It’s extremely quotable. I emailed my husband a photograph or two of the book pages that particularly touched the nerve (on sulking and why we hurt emotionally our nearest and dearest). The main achievement of the book for me though is leaving one with the liberating feeling that they are not alone – with the final page of the book turned, and a cheeky tear wiped, you drop the burden of the big questions, you breathe out and you think, jeez, I am not the only one in this mess. Continue reading
I continue to quote Lissa Rankin’s The Fear Cure, the book that taught me a lot about fear. I’ll start with this one:
Studies show that most emotions last no longer than 90 seconds unless we attach stories to them.
This applies to any emotion, not just love. If you are angry with someone and you let the anger pass, it’s gone. However if you cling to it and tell yourself, in your mind, a story about how this person is so and so, and this is ruining your life, etc – as soon as you create the thought trail, activate the thinking treadmill, you have assigned a story to your anger, and now it’s a living part of you. Some people can not let go their emotions (usually negative, as they are easier to stick by) for a lifetime.
In application to love, you can fall in love with a complete stranger by… you got it! thinking about them. Again, a storymaking machine that is your mind whirrs into action and poof! you are gone into the land of fairies and butterflies. You are not here, you are not present, you are living out a fantasy in your mind. Continue reading
Here’s what the Ego believes:
1) Death is real. The Ego believes that our existence is defined by our physical flesh. When the body dies, we die. There is no life beyond life.
2) Time and space are real. The Ego is analog. It believes that to get from A to Z we have to pass through B, C, and D. To get from breakfast to supper we have to live the whole day.
3) Every individual is different and separate from every other. The Ego believes that I am distinct from you. The twain cannot meet. I can hurt you and it won’t hurt me.
4) The predominant impulse of life is self-preservation. Because our existence is physical and thus vulnerable to innumerable evils, we live and act out of fear in all we do. It is wise, the Ego believes, to have children to carry on our line when we die, to achieve great things that will live after us, and to buckle our seat belts.
5) There is no God. No sphere exists except the physical and no rules apply except those of the material world. These are the principles the Ego lives by. They are sound solid principles.
Here’s what the Self believes:
1) Death is an illusion. The soul endures and evolves through infinite manifestations.
2) Time and space are illusions. Time and space operate only in the physical sphere, and even here, don’t apply to dreams, visions, transports. In other dimensions we move “swift as thought” and inhabit multiple planes simultaneously.
3) All beings are one. If I hurt you, I hurt myself.
4) The supreme emotion is love. Union and mutual assistance are the imperatives of life. We are all in this together.
5) God is all there is. Everything that is, is God in one form or another. God, the divine ground, is that in which we live and move and have our being. Infinite planes of reality exist, all created by, sustained by and infused by the spirit of God.
From “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield
I was going to do it a while ago. Below are the top quotes from Lissa Rankin’s The Fear Cure, amazing book on how to overcome fear, carefully selected by me and arranged in 3 clusters – Fear, Acceptance and Love. Today – Part 1, Fear.
FEAR AS A GUIDE, NOT SOMETHING TO RESIST
Courage is not the opposite of fear. The opposite of fear is joy.
Courage is not about being fearless; it’s about letting fear transform you so you come into right relationship with uncertainty, make peace with impermanence, and wake up to who you really are.
In order to avoid change and its accompanying loss, we are willing to tolerate stagnation, to let our souls die slow deaths in order to avoid uncertainty and loss.
The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe. Living in a purposeful universe means that you have faith in a guiding force that is navigating life with you. You know that you are not alone, and this inner knowing offers protection against fear.
Fear is the gateway to freedom.
This is a blog about happiness, so why on Earth have I put ‘death’ and ‘happiness’ next to each other? For me, death and happiness are inextricably intertwined – we spoke before about how fear of death is a defining force in our lives. My approach – the more you face and accept death, the happier you are. You can’t be oblivious to it and yet be truly happy long term.
Below is not a case for euthanasia, although it could as well be. It’s an exercise in facing reality and realising that the likelihood of a ‘good’ death is slim and so we should prepare ourselves for a more likely scenario. May seem grim to some, useful eye opening stats if you ask me.
Timely reminder that it’s not all about take – we have to remember to give too. And it’s good to pause and think whether you are doing what you were born to do. Easier said…
