Electrical Blog
The purpose of life is to be happy – at least according to the Dalai Lama. Unfortunately, most people aren’t quite certain what happiness actually means. Is happiness having loads of nice things – nice house, holiday home, flashy cars, nice clothes, cool holidays? Because, it seems that over the last few years, a lot of people fell into the trap of judging their happiness based on their possessions – and of judging their happiness by comparison to what others had. I actually had a client ’phone me a while back to tell me that his wife was going to leave him because and I quote ‘The neighbours go on better holidays!’ Say goodbye, I said!
Happiness is not related to having plenty of nice things – it doesn’t exclude them, but they are not the be all and end all. Happiness is about having happy times or, as I keeping saying to my clients, ‘being gurdy!’ It’s a feeling you get when all is well with the world – with your world. It is a feeling of wanting for nothing – not not wanting to venture further on the sensational adventure that is life’s rollercoaster – but simply of not wanting for anything right here right now.
Happiness is a now thing. Sadly, the normal mind is not present now, so it simply cannot experience happiness. Psychology confirms that the normal mind is stuck in the past (in particular on the childhood experiences that have made us who we are) and focused in the future (either looking forward to a bit of excitement yet to come, wanting for something that we don’t have or worrying about something or other that we’d prefer not to happen). Given all the facts it’s pretty much impossible to be happy – other than very sporadically.
To be happy, you simply have to be abnormal. Normal people don’t bother to turn up to their own lives – and there’s more than seven decades of research to prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt. To achieve effortless happiness (which includes effortless success) you’re going to have to turn up to the present moment – the only place and time that life is lived. You’ll need a focused and attentive mind to be present – there are many different ways of developing your focus and talent for paying attention. But your happiness and success depend upon it – they are directly linked to your ability to pay attention – again something that the normal mind will never master. You must relearn how to pay attention – you could do it effortlessly as a child when you experienced everything new with every one of your five senses. To be happy and successful you have to come to your senses all over again. When you do, you won’t have to go in search of happiness – it will simply find you.
Tags: happiness, Meditation, personal development, Self Improvement, success
Posted in Meditation · July 27th, 2010 · Comments (0)
Have you got crap in your head? Undoubtedly you have – we’ve all got it. But if you’re paying attention to the crap in your head, you’re just creating the crap that you have in your life. You are what you think. Unfortunately, it’s not just the thoughts that you’re aware of that create your life, it’s a little more subtle than that. In actual fact, more than anything else, you are what you’re thinking subconsciously. Your subconscious mind rules – or ruins – your life. All of your behavior, everything that you do, all your reactions and every single interaction with others – with people who are close to you, your mates, workmates and even with people who you don’t even know – are all dictated by your subconscious. And the really big problem is that, because of the way you’re wired, it all just happens automatically.
However, there’s an even bigger problem. Your subconscious mind is full of crap. It’s crap because it has nothing to do with who you are or what you should be doing right here, right now. All this crap is a hangover from your childhood, when you were young and impressionable – from what we all know as our formative years. And, even though all the automatic behaviour happens subconsciously, every so often you actually know that this crap is ruining your life. Sometimes you might feel down, stressed, negative or depressed. You might feel that you’re useless, shy or inadequate. At certain times, or in some situations, you can feel anxious or nervous. Perhaps you feel that you’re lacking self-confidence or that you’re suffering from low self-esteem. But this is just crap created by crap! This is the crap that has your life on hold – and you let this happen by paying attention, whether you’re aware of it or not, to the crap that’s wedged in your head.
This crap won’t go away – but you can decide whether or not you pay it any attention – either consciously or, in actual fact, subconsciously. This is what personal development or self improvement is all about. Because, as a grown up, you can actually take control of your mind – decide, in each moment, what you’ll pay your attention to. So you’ve got to choose to turn your attention to reality instead of letting your subconscious mind just lead you by the nose into an ever deepening vortex of crap. The only thing that’s really real in your life – the here and now. The now is where you can really be the best you if you could only stop paying attention to all that crap. Start paying attention to now – to what you see, feel, hear, smell and taste. This focus will drag your subconscious (sometimes kicking and screaming) away from its natural obsession with all the unreal crap. Normally you don’t actually experience anything real because you see it through a fog of crap. You must clear the fog – it won’t clear of its own accord because it’s your personal fog. Clear the fog by understanding that it isn’t there at all! There is no fog.
All that’s here is what is here now. So train yourself to experience your five senses – make sense of the here and now instead of nonsense. It’s life changing.
Tags: mind power, personal development, psychology, Self Improvement, success
Posted in Self Improvement · July 27th, 2010 · Comments (0)