Create your Destiny

Since you are reading this blog I’m going to assume that you have at least a passing interest in personal development. I’m also willing to bet that you’re probably more considerate and respectful than the average Joe when it comes to your relationships. How am I doing so far?  Am I an intuitive genius or what?  In fact, I’ll even go out on a limb and make the assumption that you have a life filled with people you love and care about. Now if I’ve got you all wrong and you’re nothing but a lowdown piece of crud, click here.

All kidding aside, a real trap that well meaning people can fall into if not careful is that of consistently putting themselves last. I’m not talking about little things like holding the door open for someone or being nice to people in general. What I’m saying is that neglecting your needs and priorities on a habitual basis to cater to the needs of others means that you sacrifice your personal growth, put your own dreams on hold, and eventually begin to lose your unique sense of identity. Think about it. If your life is defined by everyone’s needs but your own, how do you define who you are outside of the context of anybody else? When you are all alone, who are you? If you’ve dedicated the bulk of your existence to serving others, you might find this to be a very difficult question to answer.

Ok, so I’m not saying that you should body slam little Joey at the family picnic to get his place in line for the last bologna sandwich. I know that special circumstances in life such as caring for an young infant, or a spouse suffering from illness, can and most likely will occupy more of your time. The danger I’m speaking of occurs when, as a pattern of living, you consistently put yourself last regardless of circumstances. When it becomes so ingrained in your personality that you never dare to voice an opinion on where to go out to eat because you want to make sure that everybody else gets what they want, all of the time.

Everyone is Shortchanged

You have wants, needs, and desires that no matter how hard you might try to ignore will never go away. When your life’s focus is predominantly on others and away from yourself, you will begin to neglect your own desires to either make or keep others around you happy. If this continues, you will eventually wind up resenting yourself, the people you seek to make happy, or both.

Because not enough attention is paid to self, personal growth stops, and you start becoming less instead of more. Life is dynamic, not static. As you become more resentful and have less to offer you may even wind up being less pleasant to be around. Everyone is shortchanged, including those you are seeking to please.

The Solution

There is nothing wrong with a life of service. Simply bear in mind that to lift up others you must maintain your strength. You do that by tending to your own needs and taking excellent care of yourself. You add value to others and the world around you in proportion to the extent that you are a well rounded, self actualizing human being. You will experience the greatest joys of giving when you give from your abundance, not from your lack. So take care of yourself, tend to your needs, and purpose to live out your dreams!

It is from this state of what some would call selfishness that you are best suited to be truly selfless. There is nothing selfish about striving towards your highest potential, enjoying life more, and in the process sharing the best of who you are from an authentic perspective of happiness, inspiration, and love.

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The other day I went up to the highest mountaintop to visit my favorite guru. Living in Florida that didn’t take too long, as our tallest mountain in the state would barely gain notoriety as a speed bump in Texas. Heck, you can ride halfway up an elevator in New York City and be higher above sea level than my favorite local guru ever gets. Well anyway, after ascending to the peak and dropping some cash in his hat (most gurus aren’t free you know), he proceeded to dispense the following nuggets of wisdom:

What you resist, persists
Don’t struggle against the tide
Fully embrace the moment
Wax on, Wax off

Having offered such revelation, the guru appeared quite pleased with himself and trotted off towards his cave. Yes, there was a cave on top of the mountain here in Florida…work with me a little. Anyway, off he went, and pretty quickly too. This guru didn’t even have a beard or a cane, just a number 8 t-shirt and a billy club.

Not completely satisfied I’d gotten my monies worth, I stopped him dead in his tracks. “Wait a minute”, I said. “I’ve seen ‘The Secret’, cant stand Alabama football, have already read Eckhart Tolle, and I must have watched ‘The Karate Kid’ several times growing up. I came all the way up here with my bottle collecting money just to hear you recite a bunch of tired old quotes?”

Suddenly, his eyes lit up with a sparkle. You would have thought I’d just offered him a ride to the Burning Man festival on a magic carpet - mood altering substances included. He stops and stares me down. “Words are meaningless!” he says. “Understanding is everything.  What do these words really mean to you?”

Put on the spot, I began to spout off all the latest mumbo jumbo I could remember from one of the positive thinking books I had been reading and some of the new age movies I had recently seen. Unfortunately, Mr. Guru wasn’t impressed. I began to sweat. Did I come all the way up here just to get told off and be made a fool of?  Hell no!  I was mad, and I was going to let him know about it.

But then something happened… I remembered something from all of those self help books and their advice on maintaining a positive state and not letting the ego take over. Darn, I was messing things up and of course I of all people should know better. I began to criticize myself inside my head for having messed up, and then congratulated myself for recognizing the error and taking appropriate action. It was actually quite a conversation. I thought I was having it to myself, yet Mr. Guru was watching me the whole time and had this to say immediately afterward:

“You fool, you have just proven that you haven’t understood a single thing! All those self help books have been wasted upon you. Better they were used as kindling for a homeless man’s fire pit!”

As I nervously looked on, he began to explain. “You may think you know a little about enlightenment, yet your actions speak otherwise. Lets take a look at that list again:

What you resists, persists.
Fully embrace the moment
Don’t struggle against the tide
Wax on, Wax off

“My words to you are as applicable inside your mind as they are in the outside world. All except the last quote, of course. I just threw that one in to see if you were listening.”

“If you are angry, do not seek to deny it, but rather acknowledge your emotion of anger as part of what is. Your anger is real in the moment, and only through acceptance and acknowledgment can you discover what it was that brought on the emotion in the first place. From there you are free to choose your response. Yet you subverted your anger and then became angry at yourself for being angry in the first place. Judgment. You completely lost touch with the moment and whatever it may have had in store for you. You threw good after bad. Finally your ego took over and told you how wonderful you were for ‘understanding how the process works’ and getting your mind back on track. You were so lost in your thoughts I could have tied your shoes together and pushed you over the mountainside and you never would have noticed.”

Next, he said: “That brings me to my points about embracing the present moment and not struggling against the tide. Don’t ever think that things have to be a certain way in life. They don’t. However they are, they just are. You can never change the past by your actions in the present. Similarly, you can never undo your emotional responses by your internal criticisms of them. Whatever emotion you feel, acknowledge it fully and listen to what it is trying to tell you. If it is laughter you feel, then laugh. If it is gratitude you are overcome with, don’t wait until it is time to meditate or pray to show your appreciation. Life is not so much about understanding as it is about being. Remain present in your internal dialogue and cease to place judgment upon it or to deny what is. Embrace your thoughts, overcome them if necessary, learn from them and enjoy them, for they are real and now is all there is.”

The guru, satisfied with his response to me, asked me if I had any more questions. I told him that I did indeed have one more.

“Go ahead my son, ask away”, he said.

So I asked him: “What… is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow (sans coconuts)?”

He pondered this for a moment.

While he was lost in thought I tied his shoes together and pushed him down the hill.

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I saw an interesting show on PBS last night. The title was “Prescription” by Deepak Chopra, and his topic of discussion was happiness. I found it highly interesting and want to share some of the things he discussed.

Deepak starts with framing the traditional method of thinking that is so ineffective and yet so highly integrated in Western society; the mindset of conditional happiness. “I’ll be happy when” and “I’ll be happy if” are the two most common ways that we deceive ourselves.

How often have we said things to ourselves like I’ll be happy “when I get that job”, happy “when I meet that special person”, or I’ll be happy “when I change careers”? Sometimes we even tell ourselves things like I’ll be happy “if I am healthy”, or “if I have better relationships” etc.

Deepak makes the simple yet profound suggestion that we turn this relationship between conditions and happiness around as if looking at the equation in a mirror. Starting from a position of happiness as your default state is much more likely to provide you with the conditions you are seeking, as opposed to waiting upon those conditions to occur so that you can choose to be happy. If you choose happiness first, you are more likely to be healthier, more likely to have better relationships, and more likely to have a successful career.

He then goes on to explain that there are 3 things that determine our overall happiness:

Our Biological Set Point

This is the default way that we perceive the world around us. Deepak explains that there is some basis in genetics here, but that we can change our “set point” via meditation or cognitive therapy. Neuro-Linguisitc Programming (NLP) is also very helpful in this area, specifically within the context of reframing negative and/or limiting beliefs, and helping one to explore and potentially change one of their maps of reality.

Our Life Situation

The studies he cites indicate that this is a relatively minor factor in a person’s overall happiness, saying that only about “8-15%” of our overall happiness level is dependant on this. People who dispose themselves to the notion of being happy will be happy, while those who place conditions upon happiness will typically always have some sort of outstanding condition that remains unfulfilled.

Our Voluntary Actions

The choices we make are the biggest determinants in our overall level of happiness. Broken down within our choices are the ones that give us pleasure and the ones that provide us with a sense of fulfillment.

Pleasurable choices are things we choose to do that cause us to experience feelings of happiness, such as eating food, listening to music, having sex, drinking wine, etc. All of these are rather self explanatory.

Fulfillment choices are the things we choose to do that provide us with a sense of accomplishment and contribution to the world around us. They encompass how we express our creativity in ways that benefit and bring happiness to ourselves and society as a whole. Deepak notes that as spiritual beings (regardless or religion), the best way to experience fulfillment is by making choices and doing things that make others happy.

He then goes on to explain that happiness and enlightenment are not one and the same. You can experience happiness without enlightenment, you will probably experience some level of unhappiness and frustration during your search for enlightenment (should you choose that path), and that you experience the greatest level of happiness upon attaining an enlightened state. I will be writing more about this in subsequent postings.

For those of you who have TIVO or a DVR and haven’t seen this program, I definitely think it’s worth checking out.

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Most people have a rather strong opinion about this. Do you believe that it is ever OK to quit? Or were you taught growing up that “winners never quit” and that to do so is a sign of weakness? As you read this right now, you can probably recall a time in your past when you were faced with such a decision. What did you do and how did it work out? It may even be that you are faced with such a decision in your life right now.

Many people struggle over the question of quitting or moving forward at various points in their lives in issues ranging from relationships, career choices, hobbies, to membership in religious organizations, social clubs, etc. Often times making the decision to quit or continue on can become so clouded with emotion and prior conditioning that we fail to objectively consider the choice based upon our goals, priorities, and values as they currently exist. Of course, to do so you need to be aware of what your goals, priorities, and values currently are to be able to consider them, and most people don’t normally keep track of them over time to notice weather they have changed along with them as they have evolved. Pursuing outdated goals or trying to live to outdated values that seem incongruent can be a rather pointless and frustrating endeavor. Yet turning your back on a worthwhile pursuit because you are weary, worn out, frustrated, or temporarily defeated is equally unlikely to make you happy. Indeed, giving up on something and later realizing how close you were to success can be quite demoralizing and leave you kicking yourself for having done so.

So, the next time you are faced with a decision to quit or push on, here are some helpful questions to consider. They are by no means exhaustive, yet thinking about them can start the process of objectively considering weather on not to keep on doing what you’re doing.

Questions to ask Yourself:

1. Is my current course of action likely to bring me the outcome I desire, regardless of weather the journey is currently pleasant or enjoyable?

2. Am I still interested in obtaining the original outcome?

3. Should I modify my desired end result in any way?

2. Is it the only the end result I’m seeking, or is the journey equally important?

4. Am I frustrated and seeking to quit only because I like things easy and they’ve now become difficult?

5. Do I need to consider another approach to achieve the same outcome?

6. How have my values changed since I undertook this objective or made this commitment?

7. Am I just being lazy?

8. Is my desire to (quit/continue on) primarily to make someone else happy?

9. Whose idea was this anyway? Is it my goal I’m pursuing?

Questions not to ask yourself:

1. What will my (friends, parents, neighbors, etc) think if I quit now?

2. What will people think of me if I try my best but still end up failing?

3. Why can’t I just be more like ______?

When you need to stick it out

If you’ve determined that the outcome in mind is your own, is consistent with your values, and you are pursuing it because you genuinely desire the end result you are most likely on the right track. You may currently lack sufficient direction and have discovered that there are resources you need to acquire - you might even doubt yourself a little bit. But because this is something you really want, giving up is most likely going to make you feel much worse. There’s nothing wrong with stepping back and reevaluating, then making a concentrated effort when you’ve regrouped and are ready to go full speed again. If fact, it can serve to invigorate you and send you off again with fresh motivation and perspective.

When to consider moving on

There can be a lot of guilt associated with giving up on something that you put a lot of time and effort into. Society may look down on you. People may talk about you. You may even put yourself down for being a quitter. If however, you’ve identified that the outcome you’ve been pursuing doesn’t mesh with your values, is not taking you where you want to go, or worse yet is taking you further away, then it may be time to consider quitting and moving on. Yes, I said the “q” word. Sometimes it is OK to quit.

You may find that there are crossroads in your life when you begin to realize that your values have changed, your priorities have changed, and you are not the person you once were 5 or 10 years ago. You have evolved. If your goals and pursuits have not taken that same journey with you, it may be time to put them aside for ones that better serve you.

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Does life ever seem too hectic? Like there’s time for everything except for enjoying yourself and doing the things you’d like to get done?

Regardless of your individual circumstance, be it rich or poor, single or married, parent or childless, you have choices available to you in each moment that determine how much enjoyment you get out of your life. The great news is that the choices are up to you and no one else. Your life is experienced and eventually defined by whatever you happen to be doing in each given moment. Sure, some people are more fortunate than others in what options they have available to them, but in each and every moment of our lives we get choose what meaning we assign to our experiences and how we choose to feel about them. You really do Create your Destiny. As you go through your day, consider how the following suggestions could help you live a simpler, more contented life:

Prioritize. Figure out whats most important to you and begin to live you life accordingly. What people? What personal goals? Career goals? If we’re not careful we can end up spending way too much time on non-essential busy work and neglecting the things we feel are most important. Refuse to get caught up in the minutia. Begin to let the petty but urgent stuff fall by the wayside in favor of the longer term things that will bring you the type of life you really love.

De-commit. You really can’t do it all if you jam your day full of commitments, so why set yourself up for failure? Diligently examine each task you undertake to see if it is something that serves your life purpose, is absolutely necessary, or brings you some level of happiness. If you are someone who feels as though lots of people depend upon you and therefore in many cases you couldn’t possibly say no, I’ve got news for you. If you died tomorrow the world would somehow manage to go on without you. Really it would. It’d be one heck of a funeral though, and if you were there to see it you’d be mighty impressed. Seriously, I’m not talking about abandoning your commitments, but rather examining each one and determining where they fit in terms of your priorities. Do what is necessary to live according to your values and then start paring away at the rest.

Slow things Down. I know you’d love to but you just can’t, really I do. But if you really can’t, then who is really in charge of your life? That can be the subject of another post entirely, but the bottom line is that you have more choices than you think. My suggestions: eat slower, drive slower, and be present in whatever it is that you are doing. If you stop the constant rush to get on to the next task or the item on your must do list, you may begin to realize that life is ALWAYS experienced right now, in each moment, during whatever it is that you happen to be doing. Right now is always all there is. Stop trading now for later, be present, and explore what there is to appreciate in each moment. There might not be much, but it sure beats grumbling and complaining (usually).

Carve out Some Alone Time. Spend time alone with your thoughts in quiet and stillness. Listen to yourself. What is your body telling you? What are your dominant thoughts? Get to know yourself and discover what it is that truly makes you happy. Meditation is a great way to experience this if you haven’t tried yet. If you haven’t, don’t knock it until you do.

Reward Yourself. Take a moment or two each day and reward yourself for the efforts you’ve made to take control of your life. A dessert, A mental pat on the back, a cold beer or a hot cup of tea. Whatever works best for you – you’ll know what it is. Take the time to enjoy yourself and show yourself some appreciation for the great job that you do being you.

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Your intuition is part of you. It is not some outside entity or a spooky voice that lives inside your head telling you to pour maple syrup all over old Aunt Thelma and throw birdseed at her in the park on Sunday morning with whilst blowing into a bird whistle. Well, at least I hope not. Your intuition is simply a part of your consciousness that has access to information beyond the range of your 5 senses.

Your intuition helps guide your mind in the direction of your most dominant thoughts and deepest desires. So if you’re a creep then your intuition will probably be pretty creepy. But if you are a positive minded person with the best in mind for yourself and others, then using your intuition will help you make better decisions along those lines. However, your intuition is of no use to you when it is ignored. So, here are some simple steps you can take to begin to develop your sense of intuition.

Let go of the Need to Know Why

Remember, intuition deals with information your brain has access to beyond the range of your 5 senses. Trying to gain a complete logical understanding of why you have a certain “hunch” or “feeling” typically won’t work. While you would certainly want to check out your intuitive hunches by logically forecasting any foreseeable consequences such as safety to yourself and others, over analyzing and stalling can cause your window of opportunity to close, leaving you further confused and probably feeling pretty frustrated. So, once you determine that acting on a particular hunch is safe even if you may be logically uncomfortable with it, you must move on to the next step of

Taking Action

Like any other skill you develop or any muscle in your body, your intuition becomes stronger and more reliable the more often you use it. It may not always be right, but are you typically 100% right relying on logic and reason alone? If you could improve your decision making ability even 10-20% by learning to trust your intuitive instincts and blend them in with conscious reasoning, wouldn’t you consider yourself better off for having done so? What if you could do even better?

Learning to Trust

To develop trust in your intuition, you can start keeping track of how often it turns out to be right. It probably won’t be close to 100% initially. In fact, it may never reach 100% accuracy. Don’t be dismayed. Practically no one has gone through the trouble of tracking the accuracy of their “normal” decision making process, therefore you won’t have any basis of comparison on which approach is more accurate . Rest assured however that your conscious decision making ability isn’t quite 100%, else you wouldn’t have bothered to read this far into this post. The whole point of keeping track is to give your logical mind less reason to doubt intuitive responses because it now has some empirical data to latch onto. Feel free to skip this step if it doesn’t resonate with you. In fact, if you can skip this step you are probably one step closer to using your intuition effectively.

Summary

In summary, your intuition is a part of your consciousness that is able to see the whole picture, taking into account both sensory information and some mysterious spooky logic that makes people run around naked in caves chanting mantras to statues of strange looking animals while drinking a frothy homemade brew that must surely include eye of newt, hair of bat, and other such tasty things.

Seriously, remember when I wrote that our 5 senses constantly filter out much of our reality so that our conscious minds can process the data effectively to accomplish the task at hand? Your unconscious mind has access to all the raw, unfiltered information that you were exposed to, and your intuition uses the data that was screened out in ways that are helpful to you and that you otherwise would have missed. When it picks up on some pieces of information that you had screened out or otherwise disregarded but that is of importance to you, it lets you know in the form of a feelng, a hunch, or a lingering thought. That’s basically it. Paying attention to, trusting in, and acting upon your intuitive hunches gives you more data to work with and helps you make better decisions. Well, that and channeling the space aliens from planet Kitmankoo of course. I gotta go, ’cause right now they’re telling me to go make some pizza. Yumm, pizza.

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Why do we regularly ignore the wisdom available via our unconscious mind (our intuition)? I believe the 3 main reasons have to do with ignorance, ego, and fear.

IGNORANCE

Most people never come to understand the power available to themselves via their unconscious minds because they’ve never take the time to seriously consider it. Thus they live entirely by means of reason, prudence, and logic. These are people who say things like “I’ll believe it when I see it” and so forth. Most people of this variety consider themselves “down to earth”, “realists”, and “practical” in nature.

Ignorance disappears whenever what it is you are ignorant about pops up on your personal radar screen. You didn’t have a clue about it but now its there. At this point, you can either choose to pretend it’s not so (deny it), refute the the new information (doubt it), or accept it as a new aspect of your ever changing environment. Quite often, we go through that exact progression when adopting new beliefs:  Denial - Doubt - Acceptance.  Its entirely normal, and is something many people had to deal with once Galileo figured out the sun didn’t revolve around the earth, and when Columbus made it back to Europe without falling off the edge of the planet.

EGO

Our identification with the human experience resides within our ego. If we’re all a part of the collective unconscious, then it is our egos that help us stand out from the crowd. Through our egos we express our individuality, our smartness, our sexiness, and our coolness. Our egos are what make us “us”, and this is not a bad thing at all. Lose the ego completely and you become very spiritual, very knowledgeable, and also probably very boring to others. Gurus on mountaintops aren’t usually very busy on Saturday nights, though admittedly neither do they care.

The key is to find a healthy balance, yet many people resist accessing the collective unconscious via use of their intuition. Why? Because it requires us to think differently. Thinking differently may generate new ideas, and some of some of these new ideas might threaten our established self image. For the ego that’s a big no no. On the whole we’re very proud of who we are and resistant to change how we identify ourselves. Our ego’s sense of self identification finds comfort in stability, even if the stable nature of our lives is uncomfortable. Its much easier to resist new information at first and later accept it only when it becomes blatantly obvious. The ego only begins to acquiesce to intuition after we fall flat on our faces one too many times relying solely upon our senses and ignoring how we feel.

FEAR

Our fear of trusting in our intuition resides in the idea that it somehow seems too nebulous. We assume that what we can see, smell, hear, taste, and touch must be “real” and have “proved” this to ourselves too often to believe otherwise. At one level this is a good thing, because pretending a brick wall isn’t in front of you and attempting to run right through it typically doesn’t work out too well. The problem with trusting exclusively in our senses is that we filter all of our sensory perceptions in order to understand what they mean. So what we think is “real” by virtue of our senses is still largely a matter of perception.

Trusting in our intuition can seem uncomfortable. We’re afraid of making important decisions while feeling uncomfortable about the process and often retreat back to the familiar safety of our senses. After all, if we make a decision and fail based our senses who will blame us? We acted on “legitimate” information. But if we trust in our intuition and act upon a “hunch” that doesn’t work out, we might look downright foolish to everyone around us. That scares us, often enough that we don’t even bother to try.

So, how can you learn to trust in your intuition? Stay tuned and check out my next post titled “Trusting Your Intuition”.

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