Friday, June 28, 2013

The courage to be Happy

It's difficult not to wish things to be different. We wish for a better job, for a better partner, for a better body, for a better brain, and the list goes on. But it's exactly when we get stuck on what we wish to change, that change doesn't happen. Instead, when we start appreciating what we have, that's when we get closer to our wishes. So the trick to change is to focus on what we do, have or feel, that makes us happy, and wait for those things to grow bigger inside us.

When those things start to be seen from the exterior, people start noticing our change, but that shouldn’t ever matter. If you wish to continue growing free and constantly peaceful, you can’t take anything personally.

Meaning that, what others are seeing or saying to you, only tells you about them, not about yourself. What you feel and wish is your thing. Practice not to be attached to recognition or outside opinions, but follow what makes you feel good.

Words are very powerful, and most people don’t give the necessary attention to what they say, so sometimes we get hurt and that hurt can last a lifetime. For example, you tell a friend or a parent that you’ve found a new job in a bookstore, something you had always secretly dreamed off, and they say something like “oh... well, but it’s only temporary right? until you find a better job”. They care for you, they want what they think it’s best for you, but they’re not living your life or your own feelings, or you spiritual call. For you it might be important to hand out books that matter to people that need them... we have so many own self reasons to choose what we choose that no one should ever try to change us. If it’s a negative pathway someone is choosing you can help them, but not through criticism, instead choose to bring up what there is of good inside them.

We need to be doing things, and rebuild, for "Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy." - Dale Carnegie

What we need is people with confidence and courage to be happy.


Thursday, June 27, 2013

unrestleness... and then Quiet.



“Take an interest in your pain and your fear. Move closer, lean in, get curious; even for a moment experience the feelings beyond labels, beyond being good or bad. Welcome them. Invite them. Do anything that helps melt the resistance.”
  
Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap

“Live in the nowhere that you come from, even though you have got an address here.”

 Rumi

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Carl Jung

Make an effort...

“Sometimes one touches on a very painful spot where one is almost too shy to look into it, but somehow one still has to go through it. And by going into it, one finally achieves a real command of oneself. One gains a thorough knowledge of oneself for the first time.”

Trungpa Rinpoche




“you will find your way.
it is in the same place as your love.”
 
seek, nayyirah waheed


What are we made off, she asked.

“Your essence is gold, hidden in dust.”

Rumi



There we were, with all the time in our hands and the warmth of a peaceful late afternoon. Seated comfortably in two cosy papasan chairs, sipping on a fresh lemonade.

The sweet sound of the wind curling around the leaves and the beautiful chirp of blackbirds was our soundtrack. Some old tunes were playing inside, left forgotten after a long lunch of sharing our favorite flavors and songs.

Feeling such great communion, she asked me: what are you made off?

Maybe it was the immense peace I was feeling inside, maybe the deep relaxed environment just had quiet my constant chattering mind, what I can only say is that the question neither frightened or surprised me. It sounded as such a natural thing to ask. What am I made off?

It felt good to be asked that and before I had no idea how much I wanted to be asked about it. My heart felt embraced, and I felt at home.

She had the softest look and I could see that her mind was already traveling along in that blissful space we had created. Before I could even think of an answer my lips were already throwing words to the open air. I was speaking with no mind into it, only my heart. I was speaking from a place of no fear.

From what I remember I said I was made of everything. I was made of air, water, fire, and earth. I was the North, the South, the East and the West. I was the seed, the plant and the animal that eats it. I was here and everywhere else. I was Love and hate, Forgiveness and guilt. I was all that we know and beyond that. I said, I am you, and you in me.

If you’re everything and everything is you, do you have a purpose?
Yes, I do.

She looked at me, grateful for my answer. She said that so very rarely has anybody replied with such confidence that they had a purpose. She said, thank you with a smile and I said thank you for your love.

It was so easy and pleasant to stare at each other’s eyes.

We were only able to open so much of ourselves because we were sharing from a place of Love. A place of no judgement, no criticism, no opinion. Both of us could just be everything we were. Ignorants, naives, misguided, insecure, silly, but positive and interested, curious and open. Nothing was being taken personally, for all that I knew was complemented by what she knew and the other way around. We were both part of the same big Universe. Nothing really separated us.

As I continued, the closer we got.

I said that my purpose was to do whatever I could do really well and with the most joy. My purpose was to share that joy and multiply it. My part in this beautiful World was to help whenever I could by rebuilding Dreams and Hopes. I was here to facilitate, to teach and to learn. My purpose was to be both the Teacher and the Student. To be either the parent or the son. I was to be the storyteller and the actor. My purpose was to change any negative feeling into a positive and loving one. My purpose was to hold someone’s hand and say I Love You, with absolute sincerity, from this place where these words are coming from.

And so I reached for her hand and said it with the most beautiful, intense, and infinite sensation: I Love You, and I know you Love me, and that’s not only our purpose but it’s what we’re made off.

Friday, June 21, 2013

Have a nice weekend...

On this 23rd June, remember to look at the BIG rounded Full Moon!


"How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard."
-
Winnie the Pooh


Thursday, June 20, 2013

_
Author, SeanWes : )

Take control and learn to let go...

(...)
Less important than the physical act of purchasing that plane ticket was the statement I made to myself and the universe with that decision. Instead of continuing to be a passive participant in my own life, I decided to deliberately take control. And in that moment, the world looked different to me.
“…new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him, or the old laws will be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense…”
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
_
in, http://blog.escapethecity.org/categories/if-one-advances-confidently-in-the-direction-of-his-or-her-dreams/

Right...


Step outside your/our "cave" ...

“As long as our orientation is toward perfection or success, we will never learn about unconditional friendship with ourselves, nor will we find compassion.” 


Pema Chodron

In order to be free from our thoughts we need to let them go as only words and images created from a fabricated reality. We need to become the awareness behind them. We need to believe we're not those thoughts but instead we're something we cannot explain it's origin or it's essence. What we are is something that it's greater than our individual mind. Because we segregate from all that we think it's not us, there’s always a feeling of non-belonging, of non-fitting. We're not what society and our dearest educators said we are, we’re much more, or we’re very different.
Unfortunately, when you start creating a new language that resonates with your spirit, our mind gives us the guilt, the repression and the shame of not being like everyone else. We’ve been always told to look at what others are doing and to copy them, so when we try to think we can live Life with a different outlook, outcome, with different goals and priorities, it’s too hard not to feel like we’re outsiders, tramps, Alexander’s Supertramps (as in the movie “Into the Wild”). Not only will others repress us, but worst than that and more powerful than that is our our repression, over and over again... We believe too much that we don’t deserve to be easily happy, we believe too much that Life is hard and as a theater, has always present a judge, an audience and a victim, the poor actor.
Remember Plato’s Cave? Socrates suggests the prisoners would take the shadows to be real things and the echoes to be real sounds created by the shadows, not just reflections of reality, since they are all they had ever seen or heard. They would praise as clever, whoever could best guess which shadow would come next, as someone who understood the nature of the world, and the whole of their society would depend on the shadows on the wall. When one of the “prisoners” escapes one day, first is blinded by the big fire that illuminates those shadows, and of course we thinks - inside the cave I could see clearly, but here I’m blind!

“Socrates next asks Glaucon to consider the condition of this man. "Wouldn't he remember his first home, what passed for wisdom there, and his fellow prisoners, and consider himself happy and them pitiable? And wouldn't he disdain whatever honors, praises, and prizes were awarded there to the ones who guessed best which shadows followed which? Moreover, were he to return there, wouldn't he be rather bad at their game, no longer being accustomed to the darkness? Wouldn't it be said of him that he went up and came back with his eyes corrupted, and that it's not even worth trying to go up? And if they were somehow able to get their hands on and kill the man who attempts to release and lead them up, wouldn't they kill him?" (517a) The prisoners, ignorant of the world behind them, would see the freed man with his corrupted eyes and be afraid of anything but what they already know. Philosophers analyzing the allegory argue that the prisoners would ironically find the freed man stupid due to the current state of his eyes and temporarily not being able to see the shadows which are the world to the prisoners.”

Doesn’t this allegory says it all?
We’ve learned how to live according with everyone else’s point of view because we’re too afraid of not being good enough for others to accept us. When one of us changes course we judge them, or we punish them, or we punish our own selves. Some people can punish themselves in such degree, that even if someone else hurts them physically, they believe they deserve it...

If we want to feel better with our own nature, we need to step outside and face the bright sun. Most of the ideas we know come from school, parents, kings and kingdoms, witches and priests. When you stand alone, in nature, and you let go of what you have preconceived to be, you’re finally walking away from your cave.

So this is why books can be such comfort for the mind or enlighten us. Like Lou Reed sung “If you’re going to read, just watch your soul”. And go for long walks, just for yourself and for nothing else. Leave everyone else behind. And when you come back, have the compassion of not trying to change anyone, but instead, use that warmth of the bright sun you’re now carrying within you to brighten someone else’s life.

Thank you.


Deconstruct all you know. We're made of many thoughs, most of them not ours.

“We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”
 
Alan Watts


Wednesday, June 19, 2013

“All your seriousness is about sandcastles. And you yourself will leave them one day, trampling them down, and you will not look back. The people who take it seriously miss the beauty of playfulness.”

Osho

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

so true...


(cont.) Domestication...

(...)
Children are domesticated the same way that we domesticate a dog, a cat, or any other animal. In order to teach a dog we punish the dog and we give it rewards. We train our children whom we love so much the same way that we train any domesticated animal: with a system of punishment and reward.
We are told, "You're a good boy," or "You're a good girl," when we do what Mom and Dad want us to do. When we don't, we are "a bad girl" or "a bad boy."
When we went against the rules we were punished; when we went along with the rules we got a reward. We were punished many times a day, and we were also rewarded many times a day. Soon we became afraid of being punished and also afraid of not receiving the reward. The reward is the attention that we got from our parents or from other people like siblings, teachers, and friends. We soon develop a need to hook other people's attention in order to get the reward.
The reward feels good, and we keep doing what others want us to do in order to get the reward. With that fear of being punished and that fear of not getting the reward, we start pretending to be what we are not, just to please others, just to be good enough for someone else. We try to please Mom and Dad, we try to please the teachers at school, we try to please the church, and so we start acting. We pretend to be what we are not because we are afraid of being rejected. The fear of being rejected becomes the fear of not being good enough. Eventually we become someone that we are not. We become a copy of Mamma's beliefs, Daddy's beliefs, society's beliefs, and religion's beliefs.
(...)
The domestication is so strong that at a certain point in our life we no longer need anyone to domesticate us. We don't need Mom or Dad, the school or the church to domesticate us. We are so well trained that we are our own domesticator. (...)  We punish ourselves when we don't follow the rules according to our belief system; we reward ourselves when we are the "good boy" or "good girl."
(...)
During the process of domestication, we form an image of what perfection is in order to try to be good enough. We create an image of how we should be in order to be accepted by everybody. We especially try to please the ones who love us, like Mom and Dad, big brothers and sisters, the priests and the teacher. Trying to be good enough for them, we create an image of perfection, but we don't fit this image. We create this image, but this image is not real. We are never going to be perfect from this point of view. Never!
Not being perfect, we reject ourselves. And the level of self-rejection depends upon how effective the adults were in breaking our integrity.
After domestication it is no longer about being good enough for anybody else. We are not good enough for ourselves because we don't fit with our own image of perfection. We cannot forgive ourselves for not being what we wish to be, or rather what we believe we should be. We cannot forgive ourselves for not being perfect.
We know we are not what we believe we are supposed to be and so we feel false, frustrated, and dishonest. We try to hide ourselves, and we pretend to be what we are not. The result is that we feel unau- thentic and wear social masks to keep others from noticing this. We are so afraid that somebody else will notice that we are not what we pretend to be. We judge others according to our image of perfection as well, and naturally they fall short of our expectations.
We dishonor ourselves just to please other people. We even do harm to our physical bodies just to be accepted by others. You see teenagers taking drugs just to avoid being rejected by other teenagers. They are not aware that the problem is that they don't accept themselves. They reject themselves because they are not what they pretend to be. They wish to be a certain way, but they are not, and for this they carry shame and guilt. Humans punish themselves endlessly for not being what they believe they should be. They become very self-abusive, and they use other people to abuse themselves as well.
But nobody abuses us more than we abuse ourselves, and it is the Judge, the Victim, and the belief system that make us do this. True, we find people who say their husband or wife, or mother or father, abused them, but you know that we abuse ourselves much more than that. The way we judge ourselves is the worst judge that ever existed. If we make a mistake in front of people, we try to deny the mistake and cover it up. But as soon as we are alone, the Judge becomes so strong, the guilt is so strong, and we feel so stupid, or so bad, or so unworthy.
In your whole life nobody has ever abused you more than you have abused yourself. And the limit of your self-abuse is exactly the limit that you will tolerate from someone else. If someone abuses you a little more than you abuse yourself, you will probably walk away from that person. But if someone abuses you a little less than you abuse yourself, you will probably stay in the relationship and tolerate it endlessly.
(...)
Each of us is born with a certain amount of personal power that we rebuild every day after we rest. Unfortunately, we spend all our personal power first to create all these agreements and then to keep these agreements. Our personal power is dissipated by all the agreements we have created, and the result is that we feel powerless. We have just enough power to survive each day, because most of it is used to keep the agreements that trap us in the dream of the planet. How can we change the entire dream of our life when we have no power to change even the smallest agreement?
If we can see it is our agreements which rule our life, and we don't like the dream of our life, we need to change the agreements. When we are finally ready to change our agreements, there are four very powerful agreements that will help us break those agreements that come from fear and deplete our energy.

- Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements


Domestication and the Dream of the Planet

"What you are seeing and hearing right now  is nothing but a dream. You are dreaming right now in this moment. You are dreaming with the brain awake. Dreaming is the main function of the mind, and the mind dreams twenty-four hours a day. It dreams when the brain is awake, and it also dreams when the brain is asleep. The difference is that when the brain is awake, there is a material frame that makes us perceive things in a linear way. When we go to sleep we do not have the frame, and the dream has the tendency to change constantly.

Humans are dreaming all the time. Before we were born the humans before us created a big outside dream that we will call society's dream or the dream of the planet. The dream of the planet is the collective dream of billions of smaller, personal dreams, which together create a dream of a family, a dream of a community, a dream of a city, a dream of a country, and finally a dream of the whole humanity. The dream of the planet includes all of society's rules, its beliefs, its laws, its religions, its different cultures and ways to be, its governments, schools, social events, and holidays.

We are born with the capacity to learn how to dream, and the humans who live before us teach us how to dream the way society dreams. The outside dream has so many rules that when a new human is born, we hook the child's attention and introduce these rules into his or her mind. The outside dream uses Mom and Dad, the schools, and religion to teach us how to dream.

Attention is the ability we have to discriminate and to focus only on that which we want to perceive. We can perceive millions of things simultaneously, but using our attention, we can hold whatever we want to perceive in the foreground of our mind. The adults around us hooked our attention and put information into our minds through repetition. That is the way we learned everything we know.

By using our attention we learned a whole reality, a whole dream. We learned how to behave in society: what to believe and what not to believe; what is acceptable and what is not acceptable; what is good and what is bad; what is beautiful and what is ugly; what is right and what is wrong. It was all there already — all that knowledge, all those rules and concepts about how to behave in the world.
When you were in school, you sat in a little chair and put your attention on what the teacher was teaching you. When you went to church, you put your attention on what the priest or minister was telling you. It is the same dynamic with Mom and Dad, brothers and sisters: They were all trying to hook your attention. We also learn to hook the attention of other humans, and we develop a need for attention which can become very competitive. Children compete for the attention of their parents, their teachers, their friends. "Look at me! Look at what I'm doing! Hey, I'm here." The need for attention becomes very strong and continues into adulthood. (...)"

- Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements


Monday, June 17, 2013

“Don’t you see that it is your very search for happiness that makes you feel miserable? Try the other way: indifferent to pain and pleasure, neither asking nor refusing, give all your attention to the level on which ‘I am’ is timelessly present. Soon you will realize that peace and happiness are in your very nature and it is only seeking them through some particular channels that disturbs. Avoid the disturbance, that is all.
 
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj


Sunday, June 16, 2013

“It’s funny that we think of the voice in our head as our own and that we tend to believe it and value what it says, when so often it’s contradictory, unhelpful, and unkind…We are so much kinder and more courageous than this voice, which is often fearful and upset with life.”
 
Gina Lake, Trusting Life



Friday, June 14, 2013

Step by step

“Don’t let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment.”

Eckhart Tolle










Wednesday, June 12, 2013

So you think this whole thing about Happiness is...

it’s just for shallow people, hippies, people with no self-esteem, people that don’t read newspapers or listen to the news, just for people who believe in unicorns and rainbow’s kingdoms...

More than 70,000 people have been killed in Syria. Everyday there're bombs exploding and you know what kind of business is the most profitable within civilians? Ice cream shops... That says a lot about the human being. Whatever is going on, in the end the most important thing is to find a glimpse of happiness and move on.

That’s why talking about happiness and sharing it is actually more important than mastering all the media info that is flushed upon us as unchangeable truth.

Rebel, and go for what makes you smile.

Check it out:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22847539


Tuesday, June 11, 2013

More on Breathing... so important!

"How I breathe really effects my physiology, when I breathe deep and slow, I get more focused and can definitely climb harder."
-
Paul Robinson


LOVE yourself... (1st step)

"You cannot be lonely if you like the person you're alone with."
_
Wayne Dyer

Pema Chodron said, "Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know."  (...) “The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.”
_
Pema Chodron


If you think too much about fear, it will control you.

Become strong by building strong foundations: train; study; practice and meditate. When you're ready GO, but don't think twice about it or you will fall... Commit.


Friday, June 7, 2013

The mind is constantly trying to figure out what page it’s on in the story of itself. Close the book. Burn the bookmark. End of story. Now the dancing begins.

Ikko Narasaki 


Thursday, June 6, 2013

When I think about really changing my Life,  I'm afraid of losing, or disapppointing. But, if there's a continue feeling that this is not the Life I'm happy with, I must change. I must go through a changing process that will open my mind to new experiences and a new, happier me. So...



Breath Positive Energy. Change your Thoughts.

Rone - Parade from InFine Music on Vimeo.

Find your truth, your unique vibration, your Power.

Expand yourself by knowing yourself. Allow yourself to step into your power. To be the best version of You. Listen to your inner voice by wrinting down some of yout thoughts and dreams. Think about what is trully important to you.



(...)
"And it was from this cause and effect, stimulus-response daily conditioning that we wove the fabric of our life. Even in our first few days out of the womb, we could sense whether our behavior generated smiles or frowns, and we began to practice and reinforce what would bring us more pleasure and comfort & less pain and discomfort.

As children, we learned behaviors and habits from our peers and the adults in our life in school, in the neighborhood, at camp, in church, and at home.

The tools of reward and punishment were often emotional and sometimes physical as others’ opinions and reactions to us became a very strong force in the habits we created.

“A belief is only a thought you continue to think. A belief is nothing more than a chronic pattern of thought, and you have the ability – if you try even a little bit – to begin a new pattern, to tell a new story, to achieve a different vibration, to change your point of attraction. ” ~ Abraham-Hicks


Each day, we SELF-domesticated ourselves as we created agreements in our mind of who we should and shouldn’t be, and what we should and shouldn’t do. And at a certain point that became engrained into every muscle in our body – every fiber of our being – as we lived a life and reinforced it based on others’ opinions and expectations of us.

In this process of domestication it turns out that the choices we make and the life we live is more driven by the opinions we learned from others than if we had grown up in isolation with no one around to tell us what was “acceptable” and what was not.

But if you want to be happier…you need to step into your power and take the reins of your life so you can be the writer, the main character, and the director of your life. And right now – in this moment – you get to turn the page and write the new chapter of your life."
_
From http://www.davidji.com/

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

“Once you’ve become aware and start to realize how insanely conditioned a lot of people are, their opinions wouldn’t matter anymore. But it doesn’t mean that you stop loving them. In fact your love may now be coupled with deep compassion, for you’re beginning to profoundly understand the true meaning of the words “forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
-
Anonymous

 As it is with ourselves. Our mind is not only a chemical factory of feeling good substances with feeling really depressed, but we are also a mirror of what we saw in our parents when we were growing. Did we se love or criticism? Did we see forgiveness or lingering pain?
That’s why, we shouldn’t judge so much, and instead accept things as they are. Believe that you’re safe in yourself. Believe that you can take care of yourself, even if you feel as an outsider (from your family; society; friends). There’s in this world lots of people capable of loving you and you loving them. And that’s the best feeling of all!

Let go.


One very funny to do list!

Are you brave enough to play one of these jokes? It's good to be a pranksters once in a while. Keeps our soul young and happy.


Been away because of work. Returning home.


Saturday, June 1, 2013

To be so close & to feel so close.


“But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.”

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

What do you believe?

The basic "Law of Attraction" states that you will attract to you those things that match your state of belief.