“Amateurs let adversity defeat them. The pro thinks differently. He shows up, he does his work, he keeps on truckin’, no matter what.”
—Steven Pressfield
Think & figure out your dream.
& take action toward it.
Now is the time to Do The Work.
Self-Help
Fall Seven Times & Rise Again
“For though the righteous fall seven times, they rise again, but the wicked stumble when calamity strikes.”
—Proverbs 24:16
You’ve stumbled. You’ve fallen. But you won’t let this keep you down. Not again. Not this time.
You’ve been created on this planet with a purpose. Some people find their purpose & live it out, while others contribute to purpose without knowing.
To find and live your true purpose requires a righteous pursuit. On this path you will fall much more than 7 times, but you will continue to rise and be stronger with each comeback.
You can go through your entire life with your eyes “closed”, or you can open your heart, mind, and soul and find the treasure that it waiting for you.
It’s your choice.
& Rise again.
Comparison is the thief of joy
Theodore Roosevelt is given credit for the quote: “Comparison is the thief of joy.”
But that really doesn’t matter.
What’s important is what you do with this information.
Because how much time do you spend comparing your life to others? Or others’ lives against others’?
What’s better than comparison?
Inward reflection & gratitude.
Change Happens Now
Everything is happening right Now.
Transformation is happening in this Moment.
Now is where everything happens.
For example, reflect on yesterday. Everything you did yesterday was happening in the moment. The same is true for today.
Everything is literally happening right Now.
What are you doing Now?
The Power of Your Imagination
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.”
-Albert Einstein
Einstein knew it.
Buddha knew it.
Jesus knew it.
& not only did they know it, they realized & embodied it – Imagination.
They of course had their own unique methods for sharing one of the most misunderstood truths within humanity, but they shared it.
It baffles me sometimes that we never learn about this in school – The Power of Imagination. We are almost always taught the opposite – Conform. Don’t question your teachers & adults because they are right! yea, that’s a big joke.
Ego has dominated the 20th century but it is loosening up in the 21st century. What we need now is Soul. Real Soul. & it’s happening.
Imagination comes from the Soul – True Imagination, & all the great spiritual teachers & great scientists understood this. That Imagination is not just some surreal & futile function of the human mind, but that it is playing a huge role in the manifestation of humanity & the lives of all beings.
“The human mind is our fundamental resource.”
— John F. Kennedy
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
— Romans 12:2
You have been gifted with the power of imagination. You can let it go to waste or you can learn more about it & play a role in the evolution of humanity.
The choice is truly yours.
What are you waiting for?
How much time do you spend waiting?
Waiting for someone else to do it.
Waiting for answers.
Waiting to feel better.
I’ve spent a lot of time waiting for these things to happen until I realized it is my responsibility to make it happen.
I am in the driver’s seat of my life just as you are in the driver’s seat of your life.
We can hitchhike & wander all our lives or we can learn how to drive.
Where are you going?
What are you waiting for?
FEEL your way to SUCCESS
What does success feel like to you?
Feelings are powerful.
What we continually and strongly feel, we manifest.
So what do you want to manifest?
Begin here:
First, define success.
Second, define what success specifically means for you.
Third, dwell upon the feeling of if you already have what you defined as success.
Four, persist, believe, & remember that you will fail, but through your failures continue to remember & dwell within YOUR feeling of success.
Five, your success is dependent on you & not anyone else. Take responsibility for it.
Define success before feeling it, and be specific.
The universe responds.
Insights from Alan Watt’s book, What Is Zen?
I was pulled into Alan Watt’s What Is Zen? book this week. Like really pulled into it. Into the present moment, as Zen does.
This book reminded me to take life one step at a time rather than multitask as I sometimes try to do. The multitasking usually only leads to unfocused thinking and un-productivity. Can you relate?
Anyway, the term Zen translates to “meditation”. And although I don’t always practice meditation, I find that when I do, my life improves.
Maybe it is for you, and maybe it’s not. If you’re interested in learning about Zen, I highly recommend Watt’s What Is Zen? Here are only a handful of insights from the book.
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“Zen cannot really be taught, but it can be transmitted through sessions of contemplation or meditation, called zazen, and through dialogues between student and teacher, called sanzen. In the dialogues between the student and Zen master the student comes squarely up against the obstacles to his or her understanding and, without making the answer obvious, the master points a finger toward the way.”
“Many hold Zen to be at one with the root of all religions, for it is a way of liberation that centers around the things that are basic to all mysticism: awakening to the unity or oneness of life, and the inward — as opposed to outward — existence of God. In this context the word God can be misleading because, as will be seen, the idea of a deity in the Western religious sense is foreign to Zen.”
“When Buddhism first came to China it was most natural for the Chinese to speak about it in terms of Taoist philosophy, because they both share a view of life as a flowing process in which the mind and consciousness of man is inextricably involved.”
“It is not as if there is a fixed screen of consciousness over which our experience flows and leaves a record. It is that the field of consciousness itself is part of the flowing process, and therefore the mind of man is not a separate entity observing the process from outside, but is integrally involved with it.”
“The practice of Zen is to experience the overall pattern directly, and to know one’s self as the essence of the pattern.”
“Zen is really extraordinarily simple as long as one doesn’t try to be cute about it or beat around the bush! Zen is simply the sensation and the clear understanding that, to put it in Zen terms, there are “ten thousand formations; one suchness.” Or you might say, “The ten thousand things that are everything are of one suchness.” That is to say that there is behind the multiplicity of events and creatures in this universe simply one energy — and it appears as you, and everything is it.”
“The practice of Zen is to understand that one energy so as to ‘feel it in your bones.’ Yet Zen has nothing to say about what that energy is, and of course this gives the impression in the minds of Westerners that it is a kind of “blind energy.” We assume this because the only other alternative that we can imagine in terms of our traditions is that it must be something like God — some sort of cosmic ego, an almost personal intelligent being. But in the Buddhist view, that would be as far off the mark as thinking of it as blind energy. The reason they use the word “suchness” is to leave the whole question open, and absolutely free from definition. It is “such.” It is what it is.”
“That is why Zen has been called the “religion of no religion.” You don’t need, as it were, to cling to yourself. Faith in yourself is not “holding on” to your-self, but letting go.”
“Then what follows from that is the question, “How does a person who feels that way live in this world? What do you do about other people who don’t see that that’s so? What do you do about conducting yourself in this world?” This is the difficult part of Zen training. There is at first the breakthrough — which involves certain difficulties — but thereafter follows the whole process of learning compassion and tact and skill. As Jesus put it, it is “to be wise as serpents and gentle as doves” — and that is really what takes most of the time.”
“In each culture, it is quite definitely the same experience (the “spiritual experience”), and it is characterized by the transcendence of individuality and by a sensation of being one with the total energy of the universe.”
“I remember a dinner once with Hasegawa, when somebody asked him, ‘How long does it take to obtain our understanding of Zen?’ He said, ‘It may take you three minutes; it may take you thirty years.’ And, he said, ‘I mean that.’”
“There are two sides to this question, and it strikes me in this way: It’s not a matter of time at all. The people who think it ought to take a long time are of one school of thought, and the people who want it quickly are of another, and they are both wrong. The transformation of consciousness is not a question of how much time you put into it, as if it were all added up on some sort of quantitative scale, and you got rewarded according to the amount of effort you put into it. Nor is there a way of avoiding the effort just because you happen to be lazy, or because you say, “I want it now!” The point is, rather, something like this: If you try to get it either by an instant method because you are lazy or by a long-term method because you are rigorous, you’ll discover that you can’t get it either way. The only thing that your effort — or absence of effort — can teach you is that your effort doesn’t work.”
“And so, one of the essentials of Zen training is, to quote a certain parrot from Huxley’s Island, “Here and now, boys!” Be here. And in order to be here, you can’t be looking for a result!”
“To sit in zazen in order to perfect a technique for attaining enlightenment, however, is fundamentally a mistaken approach. Sit just to sit. And why not sit? You have to sit sometime, and so you may as well really sit, and be altogether here. Otherwise the mind wanders away from the matter at hand, and away from the present.”
“People have difficulties with these simple forms of meditation. Thoughts and feelings come up: ‘Is it only this? Is this all there is? Nothing seems to be happening. What’s going on? I feel a little frustrated, and I don’t particularly feel enlightened. There’s just nothing ‘special’ about this at all. Do I have to do this longer in order for something to happen?’
But nothing special is supposed to happen.
It’s just this. This is it, right here.”
27 Empowering Quotes from Don Jose Ruiz’s Wisdom of the Shamans
1) Are there any areas of your life where you want to inflict your own beliefs on others? Do you try and control others? For instance, do you think the path of the shaman is the way for everyone? It isn’t. Other people are on their own paths and moving through life in their own time and at their own pace.
2) One of the hallmarks of a shaman is that rather than adopting the beliefs of others, the shaman looks inside herself for the answers that are already there.
3) The shaman follows her own path, not one that was laid out by others.
4) The story of our initiation also demonstrates how some shamans can commune with nature in a way that cannot be explained.
5) Despite the great interest in these miraculous occurrences, my father has never let these phenomena distract from the primary message of shamanism and his teachings: find your own personal freedom, heal yourself from the addiction to suffering, be of service to others.
6) A power object, or what could also be called a totem, is a sacred object or symbol that a shaman forms a relationship with, which enables her to call upon the power of whatever the object represents.
7) Animals live in complete awareness of the present moment without mitote or the parasite, and therefore they have direct access to silent wisdom.
8) As I have been driving home throughout this book, the path of the shaman is about following your own truth, and yours will be different from mine.
9) Am I honoring my own personal truth, or am I trying to live up to someone else’s ideals?
10) For those of you who are unfamiliar with this term, self-domestication occurs when you take the beliefs of others and punish or otherwise coerce yourself into following them, even when they go against your own personal truth. With self-domestication, you no longer need the domesticator to be in your life, as you have taken over that role.
11) Finally, when he looked deep within himself and admitted his own personal truth, a massive weight lifted from his shoulders. All the internal struggle of trying to be something that he wasn’t disappeared.
12) I don’t know if my grandmother knew any of these similar stories, but I do know that she was clear about one thing, and that is that God, the Great Spirit, the nagual, or whatever word you use to describe the Divine, resides in all of us.
13) While we can’t do anything to change the dream of others, our own dream is entirely within our power.
14) For instance, how do you treat people who don’t share your political or spiritual beliefs or other viewpoints you consider important? Do you try and subjugate them to your own perspective? Do you try to domesticate them to your way of thinking? By attempting to domesticate others, we feed our own addiction to suffering.
15) One practice to reverse this within yourself is to consciously focus on the divinity in the human sitting in front of you, respecting their choices and point of view, and acting toward them from a place of love.
16) If you want to have a sacred interaction with another, the first step is to really listen to them.
17) Listen without judging; listen without thinking about what you will say next. Just listen. By doing so, you will find out what this person’s message is for you and experience the sacredness of that connection in the process.
18) …After many years, on the anniversary of his death, the woman began to make her customary pilgrimage, but this time, when she reached the top there was a great shaman sitting next to the waterfall. The shaman said to her, “It is wonderful to honor the dead, but who is it that you are honoring?”
The young woman was confused.
The shaman continued, “If you want to honor the dead, you honor the wrong person. Look in the mirror. It is you who are dead. You aren’t allowing yourself to go on with your life. Anyone who lives chained to the past lives in fear and grief. Regret isn’t living; it is dying.”
19) During the Day of the Dead, we imagine a loved one coming from beyond the grave. They see how you are suffering, and they tell you, “Hey, you are alive! You are not dead, you are alive! C’mon, wake up and celebrate life! Stop being dead.”
20) So often we search for our own personal freedom with such diligence and seriousness that we forget that the shamanic path is also about having fun.We can get so devoted to our inner and outer work that we forget that a strong belly laugh is one of the best cures for the mind’s addiction to suffering.
21) Enjoying life and doing things for no other reason than to have fun is a part of maintaining balance.
22) In shamanism, celebrating life means having an open and grateful heart for all that life brings us. This open heart is what allows you to see beyond what the mind typically labels as “good” or “evil,” enough or not enough, even happy and sad. When you reside in the nagual that exists in all things, you find that you are able to keep your heart open even in the face of terrorist attacks, natural disasters, or any other nightmare in the Dream of the Planet.
23) The alternative is to let these situations draw you back into the addiction of suffering, and that’s how the cycle of negativity continues.
24) Celebrating life doesn’t mean you won’t experience the normal human emotions of sadness and grief. One of the beautiful things about being human is that we can have multiple emotions, positive and negative, at the same time. It means you feel those emotions without fighting them, without turning them into the emotional poisons of anger, a desire for revenge, or hatred. Embracing tragedies with an open heart is one of the most difficult practices to undertake. It takes great courage even to attempt to live in this way.
25) So often we hold on to those old ideas of vice and virtue, enough or not enough. This is one of the things that cause us to live as though we were dead. In order to celebrate our perfection, we must give up the idea that we are a project waiting to be fixed or a goal that needs to be obtained. You are not damaged goods. You are perfect just as you are.
26) There is nothing wrong with you, and this includes when you are in suffering or creating suffering. Suffering does not mean that you are in any way deficient or not enough or incapable.
27) Here is what is important to remember, a message directly from my heart to yours, truth to truth: You are perfect, my friend, exactly as you are. Celebrate it!
Tony Robbins Free Resources
Tony Robbins knows how to bring out the best in people.
He’s been a huge source of motivation throughout my life and continues to inspire.
Two of my favorite books come from Tony — Awaken The Giant Within and Unlimited Power. He also inspired me to share his message on six human needs and why we all do what we do, here.
Tony offers a range of free resources to awaken the giant within you, inspiring action toward a more self-empowered life, as they have done for me. Find them on his site here.
“We can change our lives.
We can do, have, and be exactly what we wish.”
– Tony Robbins
With Ken Thompson 