This post on Facebook helped me finally nail how I define success and why I made career choices in my life that I made. It’s not about title or money, it’s about whether you made peace with yourself. Buddha had nothing materially but he also was the richest man spiritually. And this lightness that he achieved, this inner peace in his heart is what I consider a life worth living.
I am totally procrastinating with my blog. At least I am spending this time usefully (huh?), or so I think. I watched another great documentary and am self coaching using The School of Life cards.
The one I want to share today is from their CALM series. Indeed, no one is mean, everyone is just worried… Here is a beautiful documentary on Buddha that I watched recently to instantly bring you calm and peace.
Namaste, my dear nomads!
WordPress are doing this new programme Blogging 101. I’ve been blogging for a couple of years now but we always learn, so I am taking part.
The first assignment looks quite interesting – reflect on and revisit the mission of the blog and why you are doing this, specifically the following questions:
Continue reading1. Why are you blogging publicly instead of keeping a diary?
2. What topics do you think you’ll write about?
3. Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
4. If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what do you hope to accomplish?
Simple, yet powerful advice. More on Chris’s method here.
Lissa Rankin has been setting my mind on fire recently. She is my mentor, my spiritual coach. Her book The Fear Cure, her blog posts and now this talk at the World Domination Summit that I want to share with you have been taking me in a totally new direction of growth. It’s one of those rare talks which gives you the goosebumps. Do check it out.
Her talk is about 2 things – overcoming our default fear settings and being happy, and finding our true calling, purpose in life. Both themes are very important and urgent for me. Let me talk about overcoming fear first.
In her talk (and in her book The Fear Cure) Lissa says that 4 basic fears, deep rooted beliefs plague most of us. I have memory of a fish so I abbreviated them into DULL to remember easily:
D – universe is dangerous
U – uncertainty is unsafe
L – we are all alone, loneliness
L – loss is an inevitable part of our lives
Most of our fears and anxieties come from, and most life decisions are made based on! these 4 default fears and we may not even be aware of having them and the role they are playing. To overcome these fears, Lissa proposes to reframe and replace them with positive beliefs:
P – universe is purposeful
P – uncertainty is possibility
O – we are all One
G – loss is natural and can lead to growth
Lissa’s original slide is below, I re-arranged these to match the DULL abbreviation, but the order does not really matter.
Changing your default beliefs and fears is not a one off process of course, and some will need to start by becoming aware of having these in the first place. It’s a mentality shift, you need to meditate on this, to reprogram your thinking and your real-time responses to be based on these next time you catch yourself feeling fear.
To help you on this journey, I really like Lissa’s idea of pronoia (as opposed to paranoia) – a belief that everything in the Universe is conspiring to support you. Next time you feel alone, scared, unsafe, stuck or are going through loss – try and think about this, about fears based on DULL beliefs and whether you could use one of the four courage cultivating truths to change your perspective.
The team I am in at the moment is not the friendliest bunch, at least to newcomers. Everyone is polite of course but there is not much caring or bonding going on. Everyone to their own.
We went to get lunch, I fell behind and as I was trying to catch up, somewhere in the middle of the industrial estate in the northern town, walking behind and watching their backs, I felt more than ever that I did not belong with these people. I did not want to belong with people who did not care.
Continue reading
This gallery contains 20 photos.
https://vimeo.com/143898227 To complete the last instalment of our extensive coverage on Banksy’s Dismaland, here is a thirty minutes documentary we had the pleasure to host, a Red Tower Films Production in cooperation with ARTE Creative TV. Big thanks to Banksy and…
Another fascinating talk from the Science of Happiness programme on edX.
Megan Feldman looks at the act of not forgiving, of holding to one’s grudges as an act of committing violence, to oneself or the world. What impact does non forgiveness have? Our health, our relationship, peace around us and on this planet. Wars are still there because we do not forgive enough.
So how about becoming compassionate instead. How about taking small steps to forgiveness by becoming aware of those moments when we decide to not let go, to resist, and instead change perspective, expand our outlook and to surrender to what is. Easier said than done, and almost unimaginable in a situation like one Megan described, I understand.
Ultimately it’s our choice. Do we forgive or do we carry on harming ourselves and everyone around us by not letting go? Megan calls on us to forgive, for our sake and the world’s.
I’ve stepped up my efforts in completing the Science of Happiness course on edX. I am glad that the course is getting more interesting as it progresses and that it manages to provide both new insights into happiness and a solid academic background on the subject. As a full time working parent, I struggled to find time to study (despite getting up at 5am), I finally managed to do it – edX have a mobile app, so I listen to videos during commute and with a bit of preparation and discovery of the Speech option on my iPhone, I email myself and have papers read by an electronic Apple robot voice while I walk. It works!
This week I discovered 2 very powerful videos, as part of the course. They are both on forgiveness and however cliche this subject may have become these days, forgiveness is still a powerful happiness tool. People who don’t forgive live in constant stress, agony even, inflicting damage on their health, putting blinders on their eyes and missing out on life. By not forgiving, we hurt ourselves first and foremost.
After a hard work week, why not start the weekend by letting go and forgiving others and/or ourselves as much as we can. In his eye opening talk, Fred Luskin defines forgiveness as the ability to make peace with ‘no’. This ties in nicely with the ‘love crush’ theme we’ve been exploring on this blog. Ready to forgive? Here you go.
I’ve just discovered that my search for one passion, one big goal, one purpose my whole life was futile and unnecessary. I am not lost, I am just different. Suddenly all limits are removed and everything is possible. This is a life changing talk.
I have made a big breakthrough in the study of my love addiction. This was a result of extensive and painful self analysis that took me years. If it’s your first time on my blog, do not be alarmed, I do not have psychopathic tendencies, I am just a person prone to falling in unrequited love the reasons for which puzzled me greatly for at least a decade. You can find my previous reflections on the subject here. I think I finally got somewhere in terms of an answer and a cure.
There are lots of things that make me happy at the moment.
Fall. I used to take it rather unwell – fall used to signify the end of summer, chills to the bone, greyness and death. These days ‘September is a new January’. Fall breathes of new beginnings and I intend to focus on its beauty by heading to the nature and observing the change in seasons. A glass of 12-year Jimenez oloroso sherry in hand – my idea of welcoming fall 🙂
Letting go – I finally burned bridges with the people who are still dear to me but whose connection I had to let go of to move on. Continue reading
