Tag Archives: being present

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Don’t try and change what exists. Instead create a new space for your dreams.

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Each and every one of us has the option to live as an Extropist, someone who steps powerfully towards chaos and transforms the energy into a usable form. The Extropist often is working towards creating their purpose, as purpose is one of the greatest motivators that we can use to materialize our dreams. However, many of us have spent much time chasing dreams only to find that they constantly slip through our fingers. Why is it that our goals can be so slippery, and what can we do to help our chances in realizing these elusive manifestations in our life?

One thing that may help you along your path is the fact that everything that you see has already happened. That sounds a bit confusing, so let me further explain. The time it takes for light to bounce off an object to reach our eye and then be processed by our brain is milliseconds past the actual occurrence of the event itself.

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This is important to note because what it means is that you will always be one step behind the event you are trying to change. This is why it can be so difficult to catch a rabbit with your hands, because the goal you are trying to reach has already moved. Therefore, don’t try to change what already exists. Instead create new conditions to move into.

The hunter knows not to chase after the rabbit but instead to create the right conditions in which the rabbit will come straight into his grasp. This is the same for catching your dreams. Know what things you need to do to have your dream come to you. If you are attracting a partner, don’t chase them around instead create the person that you need to be in which the partner will come to you. What type of person do you need to be to attract your dream partner into your life? If it’s a job, if you simply turn up to job interviews, chasing any open position, the job will already be gone by the time you arrive instead, what are the things you need to do to be an employ at your perfect job? What do the other employees of this job do? What is the company passionate about and how can your actions better create an inspiration of similar interests?

We can create changes in our lives to use our energy efficiently and effectively so that we can harness the chaos that surrounds us and use it to our advantage. This is further emphasized by the famous physicist Niels Bohr, who said, “Nature abhors a vacuum”. He meant that if there is a condition in the Universe where nothing exists, the Universe will work with great urgency to fill this space. This works all the way from quantum states and the zero-point field to more classical Newtonian states such as diffusion. What this means to our story, is that by setting up the right conditions, the Universe will actually push our dreams towards us in ways that not only seem improbable but actually impossible. But this is how some of the most amazing and magical loves have been ignited and baby businesses have boomed. It is all by setting up the right conditions within oneself and the entity than trying to chase down an elusive goal.

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When you know what your dream is, instead of spending the time running around chasing it, spend some needed time to understand what conditions you need in yourself and the situation in which you can allow the dreams to come to you. Start with a piece of paper and write down exactly what your life will be like when you are living your dream. Then try and action as many of those conditions as possible so that you are beginning to create a space for your dreams that needs to be filled. In this way, Life will turn on its axis in the most unusual ways to have you realize your dreams in order that it will fill the space that you have created.

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Dream Big, Think Small

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So often we find ourselves asking the question what does it all mean? Why am I here and what am I doing? We usually find ourselves asking this same question in the same place. A place that is the most relevant to be asking and more often than not the most depressing space, and that is… our job. So often our careers are the most dissatisfying element of our lives, yet they are where we spend the most amount of time. We spend in fact, outside of sleeping, the majority of our day at work. So what is work and what can it be for us? It can be that which truly fulfills and nourishes who we are inside. It is not just a proxy to our dreams, it is the real thing. Our work is the space where we can step forward and fulfill our purpose. This is a very important idea, because it answers the age-old question why are we here? Well each person is here to answer their own question. Another way of saying this is that there is no meaning to life except for the meaning that you give it. That meaning is your dream!

The bigger the dream you choose the harder it will be to fulfill, but also the more meaning you will receive from life. Taking meaning from life fulfills you as you step towards that dream. For instance, if your dream goal is to make $1000, you will work towards it and reach that goal and then what? You will have to make another goal. There is nothing wrong with this and it is actually a very effective method, when you know what the FINAL outcome is. The big dream that you are trying to reach. This may be daunting to think what this dream could be, but once you select it you can then begin to take steps towards it. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the father of optimal functioning, said initially the goal justifies the means but ultimately the means justifies the goal. What this means is that while you originally thought the luster of the treasure at the end of the rainbow is what will give you the satisfaction in life, in fact it’s the journey that you went on to get to the that makes the dream and the life all worthwhile.

So why tell you all this? It’s because while you have to dream big you have to also think small. Because if you try to contemplate the magnitude of your dreams you will become overwhelmed and literally become nauseas from the great heights you will have to climb. What I mean by ‘think small’ is only focus on the step in front of you and give everything you have to that one step. Think about everything that you will need to do and break them up into smaller packets of events. If those seem too big then break those down. Each one is like a brick in the wall. Instead of focusing on the wall and the thousands of bricks you have to lift up and put in place only focus on the brick itself and make sure that you really put it in place properly. If the brick is too big break it up. It’s more important that you can handle the brick than get to your goal quickly. As my friend said to me, “you don’t have to eat the elephant in one go”.

Remember what Aesop told us about the hare and the tortoise. Life is not a race, you are running only for yourself. Find patience and pace yourself by what you need to accomplish to reach the finishing line of your dream. If you compare yourself with those faster than you, you will be overwhelmed and doubt yourself and your chances. If you compare yourself with those slower than you, you will become arrogant and sloppy. Focus only on the tasks in front of you and give to them. You won’t waste your resources thinking about other people or your performance capabilities. Keep your attention outside on what you have to accomplish.

Slow and steady wins the race.
Aesop (Greek slave & fable author, 620 BC – 560 BC)

What does this mean in a real-life application? If you were talking about a dream job? What are the things you need to do to get the job? Know the job you want. Know the person you need to be for that job emotionally, mentally and physically. See yourself in that job and understand the things that you will do. Know the reason why you want the job. Understand that it is in your planning that you will become clear on who we need to be now to reach our dreams. Sun Tzu (Chinese General – The Art of War, 500 BC) said “Now, the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought.”

We must understand the person we need to be for our dream. Whilst we have patience for the dream we have to embody the person that we will become. We have to take an active role in our transformation of becoming the hero of our journey. To take the planning further and create a greater belief of the hero in you. So know what you will do when you get the job. Know who you will tell and how you will feel. Know what this job means to you and write it down. Write it all down and take action where you can. Take action and give powerfully to every life detail of your big life dreams. Life wants you to take the reins and give the meaning that only you know it can have for you, because when you are the main actor in your life… Well then, all the world is your stage!

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Understanding the Truth of your Roller-Coaster Life

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“Life is a roller-coaster”. Like we’ve never heard that before. But there is more to this roller-coaster ride than meets the eye. Yes, there are the ups and downs. That goes without saying. But there are also the subtler qualities that we don’t normally look at. It is these parts of the ride that I am more interested in.

Life is relative. Our great Einstein showed us this truth. This means that things depend on the perspective from which you look at them. I met a man, who told me about the passing of his son a few years ago. He conveyed his story with such a wealth of wisdom and profundity that I was curious how he gained so much from such trying times. He told me that he learnt to appreciate the small things because sometimes that’s all you have. It is from this idea that I learnt about the relative quality of the roller-coaster we call life. When we are reaching a peak time of our lives we feel great. We continue to feel elated, like a balloon ever rising, however without us even being aware, within a blink of an eye, we have stopped and we are on our way down. Arms up in the air, hearts filled with terror we plummet downwards screaming. None of this would feel all that different from the typical roller-coaster story, except when we begin to think about what happens when we finally reach the bottom. We more often than not, don’t reach our impending doom. We inevitably go up again.

There is always an upside that comes from every down side. We often forget that there is always an ‘up’ again once we reach a ‘bottom’. Instead we become overwhelmed by the idea that we will be going down forever. However as quick as everything can turn bad, so too can we find unexpected joy amidst the darkest moments. The slightest upswing and we can feel as joyful as if we were millionaires. When that glimmer of hope of fortunate possibilities can be seen on the horizon, we immediately feel better and notice that emotional lift again as if we had never been through the past turmoil.

We have been given a gift of respite, a flotation ring, in which an order has washed over the world that felt out of control. Order is emergent, it comes over time and we often just need to find patience to allow a change of fortune. Think about the chaos that existed in the entire evolutionary history of the Earth, it was over a great deal of time that successful strategies eventually emerged to create the order that we know today. This is the relative world that we live in. This is indicative of the relative creatures we are. My friend who lost his child, and himself, in the pit of despair, eventually found that with time, hope and faith his life got better and as he began again his upward trajectory he gained many new joys from the small things that he had in his life. It is so often what we lose that gives us the most because it provides to find just the smallest things that we took for granted. These small things eventually lead to bigger things and finally we find new ways of experiencing life and happiness even amongst all that we had been through and lost.

We can find these relative joys by changing our perspective, or in Einstein’s words, our speed. We are often moving too fast, trying to reach some far out goal as fast as we can, trying to be some ideal version of ourselves now. However, our stress and despair comes from the resistance we feel between the relative distance of where we are and where we think we ought to be. We must endeavor at these times when we feel overwhelmed to break our goals up into smaller parts in order that we can find them more manageable. My friend, who lost his son, endeavored to remember to appreciate the smaller things in life. That just being able to share time with someone you love can literally be the greatest experience in life.

Many spiritual traditions have found great joy in the simple life. By removing the complexities that lead to unnecessary overwhelmment, both physically and mentally, they were able to find a joy from vast discrepancies that exist from who we are to who we want to be. This doesn’t mean don’t aim high, instead it means give to your task in a way that doesn’t highlight the limiting discrepancies of focusing elsewhere but the present moment. Like the great the roller-coaster there is always more than one loop, bump or obstacle on the ride but each one is dealt with as it is presented. Terror is a fleeting physiological but despair lingers as it is made from the mind. Despair on a roller-coaster or great journey arises when we consider how much further is left to go and this is the truth for all experiences in life.

A great saying from a Buddhist monk states, “When you are chopping the carrots, chop the carrots. When you are peeling the potatoes, peel the potatoes.” This highlights that you must be present with what you are doing, wholly and completely. Give everything to the task and you will give your best. When you set such high goals for yourself and hold high standards, the only way to get there is to put one foot in front of the other and don’t focus on the distance between you and the top of the mountain. Know your goal and that you will reach it and that is all you need with it. It is important every once in a while to stop appreciate where you are on your journey. Even in your darkest hour, when you think you are going backwards, find patience and acknowledge how far you have come. With time order, and answers will emerge. Trust in life to present you with an opportunity and yourself to continue managing your obstacles effectively. You will make it and champion your dreams; all you have to do is make sure to enjoy the ride.

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The Stress-Free Present

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Often we lose control of our thoughts like a runaway train. We simply notice something, a feeling, a thought, and within a blink of an eye that thought has built up to some moment of impending doom. The momentum is so powerful that you are left feeling so overwhelmed by the power of this thought, that all you can do is take it as truth. But something deep inside you knows that this thought isn’t real – that this thought is one of a trillion possibilities. So why do you want to give this thought any more power than it already has?

It’s time to bring this illusion of the overwhelming thought to a stop. It may not necessarily happen as a grinding halt but there are ways that you can help yourself relax into a place where you can get a handle on your thinking and ultimately your reality. First and foremost, you can relax by bringing your mind back to the present. The present is a present to you. Take a deep breath and focus on that breath. Feel the air rush in and out over your lips. Feel your belly flow with the to and fro of the moving tides of your breath. With each breath cycle in and out, count that as 1, and then do it again for a second time all the way to 10. Then repeat this cycle of 10 breaths ten times for a total of 100 breaths. We take around 30,000 breaths a day, so you don’t have to feel overwhelmed by this, but just do as many as you can.

It is with presence that you find your power. When you allow your mind to move out to all the infinite possibilities of things that may or may not happen, your evolutionary nature will typically focus on the negative in order to help you be able to pre-empt future threats. The problem with this is that our mind often believes that our thoughts are real. This unintentionally leaves you stressed about things that don’t actually exist like when you were a child and believed there were monsters in your cupboard. Breath is the most powerful way to create space for you to blow away the conjured illusions about the fog of the futures impending doom.

Science has begun to provide clarity to this process of thinking by exposing what are called mirror neurons. These neurons help to create the same physiological experience you may have by thinking about something as you may have if you were actually experiencing the event in real life. For example we wince when we see someone get hit in a boxing match because our mirror neurons have us partially experience what we are observing. This is what also helps us build relationships and be the social animals that we know ourselves to be.

So it is important to remember that these thoughts are not real and that you will be more powerful in your creating if you bring your mind into the present. Emotional stress often causes the creative centers, which are also known as the executive functions, of our brain to shut down. Cognitive inhibition happens so that we can allocate the most amount of mental resources to protect ourselves, which involves either fighting with, or taking flight from the danger. Neither of these reactions typically help us deal with a problem in the most desired manner when we consider our current lifestyle and stressors. Therefore we often result in less than desired creations and outcomes when dealing with stressful situations.

SO again I ask you to bring your mind to the present. Focus on your breath or the things around you that you are grateful for and this will help change the perspective of that which stresses you to that which simply is. By looking around and noticing all the great things that surround you it helps you change your focus to that which you have control over and that which you love.

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Seek happiness and success will find you – 21 days to retrain your brain

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We are constantly seeing, hearing and reading about people having break downs, how our friends are feeling sad, celebrity couples ending their relationships and the world generally dissatisfied with their lives. Even Heidi Klum and Seal broke up. Seal ended it with a woman who has been consistently thought of as the most beautiful women in the world. How can someone not be happy with the most beautiful woman in the world you may ask?
We know what happiness feels like, because we have all had it but then it just seems to slip away and we are left dealing instead with stresses and pressures rather than basking in the glow of the glory of our happiness. So what is it that constantly leads us to our state of disillusionment with the world? The answer is… The view!

We keep on looking outside ourselves for happiness. Jobs, partners, possessions. However our external world only has about 10% to do with our happiness. Where we need to be looking is at the 90%. This is where the real view is: our inner world. We spend all our time trying to fix up what we see in that outside 10% and leaving the large majority of how we see the world from the inside as unkempt and in disarray. How do we beautify and create an amazing internal landscape? How do you change your thinking?

Oddly enough your happiness and success doesn’t really have anything to do with your head, it has to do with your heart. Back in medieval times the heart was considered the center of consciousness and there may be good reason to start giving some thought to that again. 75% of personal success and happiness has been shown to be accounted for by three things: 1) Optimism, 2) Social Support and 3) Your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of a threat. These three things are what you need to be looking at rather than your bank account and the car you have or the job title or partner that you are showing off currently. This is where our focus is backwards.

Every time we reach a success, we are aware of an even better goal that we want to reach. Got a job, want a better job. Got a car, want a better car. Got a trophy, want a bigger one. The end points are constantly shifting, like trying to catch a rainbow. Happiness seems to be sitting on the other side of that rainbow but this is really a hamster wheel that leaves you eternally chasing. The real truth about happiness is the exact opposite to what we think it is. We have to reach happiness first in order to find success. And lucky for us psychologists and scientists have found some simple exercises that utilize those three elements of optimism, social support and reframing stressors in order to retrain our brains to be able to look at the world and change the view to leave us happy and in control of our lives.

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. Albert Schweitzer (1875 –1965) Nobel Peace Prize Winning Medical Missionary

Change you brain in 21 days

Every evening, for the next 21 days:

• Write down 3 things you were grateful for. This starts to retrain your brain to begin to look for those things that leave you feeling good.

Every morning for the next 21 days, rotate each day between these following 3 things:

1) Write a journal entry recalling something good that happened the day before.
• This allows you to relive and remember that your life is filled with good experiences.
2) Meditate – Sit cross-legged with your back against the wall for 15 minutes and only focus on your breath going in and out your nose. Notice as your mind gets caught on a thought and then bring your mind back to your breath.
• This allows to teach your body that behavior matters and helps train your mind to focus on one thing rather than your mind bouncing around.
3) Perform a random/ conscious act of kindness – Send a friend in your social circle a thank you note. Buy someone you don’t know a coffee. Invite a friend out to lunch.
• This will remind you that you are not alone in this world, but that you are loved and you are a relevant member of society. By giving you will open yourself up to receive and you will gain much greater insights into your life and your happiness

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How to Make a Mistake

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Often we feel overwhelmed by a situation. We have done everything right but still our plans go awry. We look around us and blame it on the world. This person screwed me; the conditions were not right; etc. And saying this is fine. Sometimes it might be smarter to drop something and forget about it. But sometimes it may be worth stopping for a moment and looking at the situation, and asking yourself whether you can take responsibility for what happened?

Taking responsibility reveals the lesson

It is only when we take responsibility for something do we provide ourselves the opportunity to change the outcome. If you refuse to look at the outcome and say it was someone else’s fault you will never be able to properly see what went wrong and understand how to solve the problem and learn the lesson. It has been said that “What we resist persists, and what we look at goes away”. So maybe you can see that as you open yourself to something rather resisting it, the problem might fall away when you realize that maybe it wasn’t a problem. Maybe what happened was exactly what needed to occur in order for you to move forward and grow into the person that you dreamed of becoming. We live in a society where we have been taught that to make a mistake is “bad”. We spend our whole lives trying to be right but here is something we all need to learn, being right all the time is actually “bad” and learning how to make a mistake in a constructive way is actually so right you wouldn’t believe.

Mistakes you want to make

It has been shown that taking yourself to the limit where you make mistakes is the greatest way to learn, if you deal with the lesson appropriately. Instead of reacting, slow down. Don’t take the mistake as a failure, as a personal attack on your sense of self-worth, but realize that this is one step closer to reaching your goal. This mistake is not an error but instead an opportunity to learn. The more our minds and bodies create impulses that experience and overcome difficulties, the better we will be able to handle these problems in the future. The better we handle problems, the faster we can deal with them to the point where they are no longer problems but a momentary challenge, just like the way a baby learnt to walk. At first even crawling was a serious problem but eventually the baby learnt how to crawl, and then how to steps. Walking suddenly became only a challenge and ultimately it was so automatic that not only did the baby not have to even think about walking, but as the child grew up it could do things like running and surfing as easily as breathing. Without these mistakes the baby would have never made it past the first step.

Outside of now

So ask yourself could this problem be a part of your lesson in order to reach your goals. Try looking at the situation from a higher perspective, one that is outside of only the present moment. Instead think about what this experience means to you in a year’s time or five years time. Now look back and look at how relevant this problem in the scheme of your life that has been. By looking at the problem at hand as a lesson to learn rather than a mistake, you create your space as the actor not the reactor of your life.

Acting or reacting

When you react, you are reacting from an emotional space. There is a difference between feelings and emotions. You actively generate your feelings. Feelings guide your actions powerfully and are the best space to make decisions from as they come from a place of control and clarity. Feelings can take form when you practice gratitude. Give thanks for what you have and where you are in your life and give thanks for your dream and what you are trying to create. Even try and appreciate yourself. Name five things you are thankful for about yourself. (Learn more about gratitude in “Gratitude gets you Zen Continue reading How to Make a Mistake →

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Shifting paths – Shifting lives

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With any relationship, we walk beside that person on our own path. Often these paths will ride along each other adjacently, but over time these paths will eventually change and diverge as the people creating these paths change. We see them over yonder in the distance but it can be so tiresome yelling the whole time so that they can hear and often so much gets lost in translation by something as simple as the wind catching our words and carrying them away. We can often be resistant to change as the familiarity is so easy and safe. We become used to this concept of who we are in relation to that person and wrap ourselves in that fabric of “this person’s partner” or “that person’s friend” so that we can then present ourselves to the world in such a way that we feel good about.

It is important to note though that as the paths get off track we have a choice: we can either acknowledge that the path has changed and we will feel to work to build new paths that will bring us back together or we can acknowledge that we don’t feel to put the added energy into building the path to be walking side by side again. The point is that either way is fine and that as long as we can see the person for the amazing person that they are on their path, and that it doesn’t necessarily reflect the direction of your path, you will not hinder yourself from creating a pathway to a life filled with friends that may be going the same direction as you now. By resisting that person you will find that you wont move forward to creating a life of new friends as you are spending your time focusing on that relationship that didn’t work. It is in this that you will then naturally create a cycle, a pattern of relationships, which you have unconsciously created in your life so that you can finally be fine to let them go or resolve. The point is that you can only create anew from the present not the past. The past begets the past the past, the present begets the future. We don’t need to regret the past but embrace it for it both helped us be the people that we are today and at the same time it know longer exists. So why not cherish the experiences that you shared for all that they gave you and you grew through.

I have included this video of Christian the Lion as i feel that while the characters of this amazing story had to go there different paths they truly retained their love for each other from all that they gained from each other.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btuxO-C2IzE&feature=related]

The final point I would like to make is that we assume that our friendships are old because we have known someone for a long time. We assume that we know that person. But every time we come back to that person we are creating a friendship completely anew because we are completely different people. When we try to maintain a relationship on the falsities of the past rather than the reality of the present we will ultimately lose our way with these partners because we take them for granted and miss out on seeing who they are now as they can do with us. So look into your friends eyes and see who they really are today and acknowledge and appreciate them for that. You will see who that person is today and if you look deep enough you will see from this present moment, who they will be tomorrow.

Hope this helps 🙂

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Truth has no answers for you

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Truth has no answer. There is no form that Truth can take. Truth exists in a space outside of form. It can only be realized in the silence.

It is in this infinite potential of Truth that we see resemblance of the universal structure. Truth (akin to and interchangeable with the words Love and God) is formless and infinite. It is Absolute and ALL. It cannot have form because the second we give it form it collapses into a single perspective and Truth cannot have one perspective it can only have all perspectives. This infinite multitude of perspectives is needed because consciousness is always evolving and changing. Advancing and growing we take one truth for a while until we drop it for another. It is the freedom of Truth that affords growth and movement. So what we typically conceive of, as “the truth”, is really only an element of truth from a particular perspective, in a particular place, at a particular point in time. Thus, all life and its truths are really a subjective experience.. We try to tell ourselves that life is objective by getting many people on our side to look at the piece of truth from our perspective. Because we have all these people now agreeing with us, we determine that this is the real Truth because everyone agrees with us. Over and over again we have seen throughout history that what we believed was the Truth, and agreed upon by others, really was the truth of a group of people until it wasn’t. Whether it was that the earth was flat, the center of the universe or that races are superior to others. Time and time again these truths are shown to be untruths. Please watch the video to have this illustrated for you.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBqgr5xZLz0&feature=related]

It is our minds that creates the fracturing of Truth into relativistic perspectives. The mind operates serially, from a linear perspective, one point in time after another, after another, another and so on. This means that ultimately our mind creates the conscious experience of our relative world, in which things are defined as different from each other. This difference is what gives things lines and a timescape in which events can be before some and after others. It affords us definite answers, but it slows down our processing, when we work in a world built on lines. What happens when we shut off the conscious mind? Let us consider a person in a state of extreme danger. Their body will release adrenalin; their body and mind is completely centered in the moment of now for survival. This is apparent in the mind, as there is no chatter, no mind that exists outside of the moment (this is often evidenced by the person unable to recall what happened during the actual escape). The person will experience many different perspectives simultaneously and the world may have a warped feeling of time.

This is different from our normal lives when we have the space to think. Our mind chatter can exist outside of the moment. This chatter takes you into the future or feeds back to the past. It is here that our resources are divided and dwindle as we assess how to handle the situations that may or may not occur in the future or ruminate on the past. Our cognitive energy is spread out thin into many directions unfocused and ineffective. It is this chatter, this activity of the mind that gives form to Truth and limits the perspective our true self can take. The true strength lies in our focused energies of our feelings in the now. Trust in the intelligence that will appear from the silence felt in the space of only the now.

We can see the mechanics of Truth in the comparison of the quantum world with the physical world. Every possible perspective exists for a photon until we measure it; because once we measure it we define it in space and time, which gives it form. The second the photon collapses into a physical form, by being observed, it is forced to have a particular perspective of the universe. The photon now only knows the universe as one element of the universe in a particular space. This photon is now only a single element of the Truth. The reality for that photon is akin to the form each human consciousness takes. Consciousness collapses life and concepts into a relative form in order to give a perspective of truth. When we observe ourselves and our existence we immediately collapse our perspective into only a single element of the truth. Our consciousness affords us only a limited perspective of the world, it observes the world like a flashlight that can only see and comprehend the elements of the world that are illuminated by conscious thought and attention. When our minds look into, and acts from, the potential of the future or perspective of the past, it immediately collapses those times into a form that exists in space and time. It has been recently shown by a group of Harvard scientists that people spend 50% of their time mind wandering outside of the moment and the task in which they are meant focused on. This mind wandering outside of the present has been shown to typically leave people unhappy and unsatisfied. The mind is best used to allow for the experience of the moment and trust in the outcome. Therefore the trick is to exist in the moment in silence.

It is in silence that we can have a greater experience of Truth because silence is experienced not in the mind but in our feelings. Our feelings, unlike our mind operate from that which is called our subconscious mind. This mind does not follow the same relativistic rules as our mind does, in that it processes experiences not serially, as one event after the other, but from what is called a parallel process. This means that there are many different lines of information being processed that are coming in at the one time. This subconscious mind therefore doesn’t have to obey the rules of time relativism but can experience the past, present and future all at once. It is worth noting that our subconscious mind is extremely logical and powerful to the point of being more than ten thousand times more powerful than our conscious mind. This superior processing is due to the parallel processor but it has one limitation. Words are too limited for the subconscious mind to communicate with the conscious mind so it uses feelings and images (a picture is worth a thousand words) in which to convey its understandings of the world.

Feelings and intuitions are very subtle and this is why we need the silence in order to properly hear the greater wisdom from our deeper selves. Therefore it is here in our feelings that we may truly connect to greater perspectives of Truth not forcing us to view the world from a particular place but instead from a much higher parallel perspective. It is from this higher space that we can see all people’s perspectives. That we can experience empathy. That we can show compassion. That we can love unconditionally because our view of the Truth is not limited to one particular perspective but is able to see from all sides. Our heart is the metaphorical and energetic feeling center of the body and enables us to utilize the full power of our beings. It is through our feelings and their higher perspective that we can live to our full potential. It is not the physical form that our answers come in but the shape of our feelings that give us true insight to what we need to know from the questions we ask ourselves.

We realize our true self when the mind is aligned with, and centered in the body, and its happenings in that moment. The moment of Now. It is here when our mind is in the space of now that it allows for the silence of our heart to be heard by our body. It’s the body’s enactment and activation of the full potential of the holistic organism that we can then enter into these ultimate states of our True self and really know the meanings of the TRUTH.

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The Space Between Space: The Wisdom of Silence

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This inspired film by Jeff Scher is an example of silence. It’s funny how even in silence we find noise, but many a time the only way we can find silence is to have noise. So why silence? And why noise? Lets start with silence. But first please click on the image and explore this short and powerful piece.

Silence is the space in between all our thoughts. Like the space between the rain drops and the sound between the notes of a piano. Silence is where our wisdom and intuition reside. This wisdom is the collective power of our whole body system, and thus is the accumulated efforts of our subconscious. The subconscious is infinitely more powerful than the conscious mind, because it is not restricted to form but instead understands the universe in a logical, but non-linear fashion. It doesn’t require lines, labels and definitions of the forms that it is working with. Anything and everything exists in all time and space and so it is in silence that our complete biological system realizes its full potential of the computing power of its entire energy structure which enables it to fully understand this world.

We recognize this world through our feelings and subtle images, not through the incessant self-talk that churns through our thought space, distracting us from a greater thought. This incessant talk is noise. But it is a chaotic noise; it is a reaction to our experiences. A noise without structure it bubbles up haphazardly from the stories we have of ourselves from our multiple identities of who we believe ourselves to be. These stories constantly reaffirm our reality, ensuring that we keep to the illusion of who we are. We have these identities so we can feel safe, so we can be in control, so we can know what is and what isn’t. But this noise does not serve us. We need noise to give shape to the world and help us know what is from what isn’t through the use of words and thoughts but often this is merely a distraction and for the most part a farce. Noise forms us but doesn’t necessarily serve us. However noise has another role if we condition it through our breathing, through a mantra, a repetitive motion or any other meditative form you desire. By using this structured noise we can quiet the chaos and create a space in which we can connect to the silence. We remove the typical overbearing chatter that drowns out the subtler feelings that contains so much wisdom.

Silence exists in the present moment. Whenever you are thinking of the past or the future you are in a space of thought. Thoughts of who you were and who you should and could be. In the present moment you can create a white place; a clean slate. It is from this place free of the untangled world of the past and the future that there are no preconceptions, existing forms and ideas that you have to adhere to in order to create. Instead your canvas is free to create afresh and anew any world that your deepest self dreams to be true.

This space, induced by structured noise, is often associated with slower frequencies in our brain. When considering sleep, the slower our frequencies get the deeper we are into sleep and the less our conscious faculties are in play. Early on in sleep we often reach a stage in which our waves slow to what is called Alpha frequency. This stage is a powerful stage as it has been to show that we can operate powerfully without the use of our conscious mind getting in the way. We often use our conscious mind to understand things, which are great for when we are first learning something so we can build the necessary neural connections, but then we continue to rely on this conscious mind rather than trust the wisdom that exists beneath this conscious process. A much more powerful processor. There is research which shows how mind when wandering or day dreaming we often reach our greatest moments of inspiration, so too in that period just before we wake, where we look at the world in the borderland of our sleep and waking worlds. It is in this space that we are in the Alpha wave state and it is in this period where we have shut down enough of our conscious faculties to open ourselves to the power of silence.

Find a moment to yourself when you are ready to discover yourself or something in your life. Take a breath and then take another and listen and feel what happens in your breath and between the breath. Listen to the rain and see the rhythm of it in motion or stop for a moment and play this piece and find the peace you need to move to a powerful place. So don’t think you need to think your way through life all the time, but instead take a moment and access the space of silence. And remember, “Silence is Golden”.

ELEVATE

Flow is for everyone in everything

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Here is a video that is not only inspiring to the point of tears but teaches us something about how connecting to our passion allows us to realise the highest sense of our selves.  This is currently being explored in modern science under the term “Flow States”, however it is more commonly known as being “in the zone”.  In this state people are able to perform at their optimum level along with experiencing a series of other impressive phenomenon. The amazing thing about Flow is that it is accessible in any and all activities that people undertake. Its simply about finding a way to truly connect to the moment, where you are completely immersed in the activity and all your resources are being focussed on that task in only the moment of now. Watch this video and see how the power of Flow can help us overcome any limitation.

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After watching this and other films on Autism as well as my own personal experience interacting with autistic kids, it makes me think that while we can all have limitations in expressing our true selves, there is always an avenue that can overcome them and truly tap our connection to life. It’s just about finding what makes that connection flow.