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Titanic Realities

Scott McPhersonLeave a comment

1050-relax-and-succeed-a-ship-in-port-is-safeYou keep trying to improve your life by making adjustments to the outside, but that’s a bit like trying to fix the Titanic by softening the iceberg rather than just getting the current Captain to pay more attention and steer around it. Likewise, if you manage your life from the outside your results can sink you.

Precisely because you get some good feelings from some things you like, it appears to confirm what you’ve heard so you’ve never looked to see if you get good feelings from things you don’t like. Everyone tells you that the things you like are better than the things you don’t like so it all makes sense except for the part where you’re not happy enough.

Part of the problem is that you’re looking for happy instead of satisfied. Happy sounds like it should be better doesn’t it? If we put life on a ladder, happy would be higher up than satisfied, wouldn’t it? But that’s thing; we’re not on a ladder. This isn’t a one-directional space. Yes, you must move forward relative to yourself, but not relative to the universe. Forward for you can be wandering all over the place for the universe. And likewise, satisfied for you can turn out to be what you expected happy to be.

1050-relax-and-succeed-whatever-the-present-moment-containsThe way this works is that satisfaction done in this way is complete satisfaction. Rather than being satisfied with my entire life I can be satisfied with everything about the moment I am in. I can have left tragedy and be moving toward disaster, but if I am satisfied in between then no one can ever take that away from me. That time will have been lived and I will have been profoundly satisfied. The idea is to win as many of those little time-squares as you can.

Consider every moment like a quadrant on your voyage through life. Each quadrant contains your thoughts and actions. If the box presents a problem like an iceberg then you can enjoy the action of finding the solution, or you can resist finding a solution by thinking about the problem. One will feel good one will feel bad. The bad one tells itself that it should already feel better and it goes about what it’s doing. The good one is grateful it knows how to be better now and it makes changes.

Doing all of this is a lot easier if you stop reconsidering every moment in your past and stop worrying about every potential moment in your future. If you do that you have no mind left to find the solution in the current moment. You can’t be so worried about the schedule of the passengers that you start ignoring the icebergs.

1050-relax-and-succeed-i-am-not-afraid-of-stormsNote that above I say “find the solution” and not “fix your problem.” You’re only fixing it if it wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place and no one ever made that deal with you. If anything we made the opposite deal. This is the North Atlantic. Everyone has to steer past icebergs. No one’s boat is that good.

Abandon your expectations for this day. Look into yourself for your hopes and your beliefs and your wants and know that those guarantee you nothing. Everything changes, it’s only a matter of when; and were you appreciating it before it did change? Because if you were in the act of appreciating then that felt good, and if you accepted that feeling could go away then you would immediately shift to rewarding thoughts about its presence. Gratitude for gratitude. It works every time.

Rewarding thoughts can include things like being grateful that you know how to create the solution that is required in the new moment. And if you don’t know the solution, then you get to use the subsequent moments to learn and expand yourself so that you might then have a solution within you for the future. Either way you’re winning.

1050-relax-and-succeed-ships-dont-sink-because-of-the-waterIt just depends on what you’re focused on; your happiness that you’re able to help, your happiness that you have the ability to learn it and then help, or your happiness about having an appreciation for the fact that it does no good to flog a dead horse, so you’re happy to move on to something else worth appreciating. It’s not like the universe is stingy with those unless you get picky about the one you want.

Do not expect, do not become attached, manage your reactions to change instead. It won’t be classically good or classically bad in a health state of mind. It can be happy to be working on a solution or direction change with gratitude; or it can be painfully wishing for what you expected and got attached to. One hurts, one feels good. Your choice. Either way, you create the reality you live in.

Find today’s attachments. They’re inside you. Find ways to manage them now so that when they come up you have an actual strategy you believe in to execute, because those feelings originate inside of you, meaning you have total control over them. Trying to fix the external world, on the other hand, is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Forget the outside. Become your own Captain. Take control of the inside. You have places to go.

peace. s

Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organisations locally and around the world.

Graceful Reactions

Scott McPhersonLeave a comment

Winner: 2016’s Blog of the Year #4

892 Relax and Succeed - Kindness is always fashionableAs you move through these exercises keep in mind that you are in fact meditating. You don’t have to be cross-legged in robes going Ooohhhmmmm. You can just be consciously working your awareness to increase its scope. So the value in thinking about others is ultimately that it prevents us from creating a me.

We started off the week by giving someone unpleasant some positive verbal feedback. Then we shifted to doing something nice for someone even if you don’t like them, and today we’ll focus on how you react to challenging people in real time.

The key to your meditation is to remember not to take people’s behaviour personally. This can be challenging when they’re standing there doing it, but in reality they are not talking to you. They are talking to an idea of you, and a transient one at that. And don’t blame them for that, even you have these about yourself. Just think back to who you were five years ago. Different person, right?

892 Relax and Succeed - Don't be surprisedWhen someone’s upset with you they are upset that their expectations weren’t met. Of course, you had no knowledge of their expectations nor could you ever hope to keep track of everyone’s, and even if you could do that, what would you do when they conflicted? If one friend is upset with your neighbour and they want you to support them, but you also want you to be that other neighbour’s friend too, how can you meet both expectations?

No, your job is not to try and meet people’s or society’s expectations. They can have them, but people go outside of those lines every day. Those expectations are their issue just like yours are yours. It’s even worse when you’re really attached to that expectation. Ouch. It’ll hurt even if you’re talking to the nicest person in the world if they can’t give you want you want.

When someone’s upset it’s because they want something, rather than listen to their words personally try listening to them for the want. Maybe you can meet the want happily or maybe you can’t. Maybe you can ease their loss by giving them something else instead–like when they’re heartbroken they missed seeing someone before they left so you hug them to help them feel better. That works too.

892 Relax and Succeed - Anger is a misdirected pleaDo not think angry or upset people are talking to you. They’re talking to the world. You just happen to be in front of them, whether it’s the first time they met you or if you see them every day. They’re innocent in that desire. They’re just like us when we’re upset and blaming someone else for an unmet want of ours. We’re all like that. We should just stay as conscious as possible so that we’re not like that often, and when others are we like that we should forgive them as we would like to be forgiven.

Take the next negative person and just absorb the karma they’re trying to dispel, or convert it to positive energy if you can. Just don’t take it personally. Just be kind by being patient and understanding. That’s one of the most valuable kindnesses you can extend. The happy people never do need a lot of help. Now go create a wonderful day for yourself. 🙂

peace. s

Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organisations around the world.

Emotional Attachment

Scott McPhersonLeave a comment

As you may have guessed from yesterday, your attachments and your Dominant Emotions are closely tied together. The stronger you feel about something or someone–positively or negatively–the more you will think about them.

879 Relax and Succeed - Turn your face to the sunThe more you think of those thoughts the stronger the feelings you get. Think lovingly about someone all day and you will fall in love. Think angry, bitter thoughts about someone and you will develop the opposite attraction: hate. Both kinds of thoughts tie you to the other thing, person or event. Your words are like binding ties that hold you down and keep your psyche trapped.

You can only sustain those thoughts as long as they are being peddled by your mind. The trouble will be, when you’re not pedalling love and admiration quite so strongly, then the other person will appear to have changed for the worse. All that’s happened is some negative thinking eventually finds its way into your thought stream and you slowly de-link yourself from the other person, all the while building a narrative about how your partner is unsatisfactory.

This is easy to note in conversation. When someone first falls in love we hear so many good things about the other person, but often in time we hear very little that’s good and instead there is a new focus on what needs to be changed. Again, that shift will get blamed on the person place or thing, but it’s not them: you’re that way because of the illusion the Buddha talked about. Because people don’t change like that–but you can place that illusion over them via your judgmental thoughts.

879 Relax and Succeed - When we are holding on toYou know how you can give super simple advice to a friend and you just can’t figure out why they can’t do this simple thing? You would do it easily and end the relationship and yet they can’t bring themselves to do it. Of course that’s only because we’re talking about an area they discuss all the time, and you rarely do. So it’s easy to give advice and be confused about someone not following it. When people do that to you that’s because now you’re in an area where you think a lot and they don’t.

In essence then your “friends” are people who come into the least conflict with you because they think very similarly. You have compatible Dominant Emotions. You can both can feel negative but they don’t see it as deeply as you because for them changing isn’t really required–they already think healthier thoughts about that subject so they just have to activate them, whereas you have little experience with them at all–and vice versa.

Take your Dominant Negative Emotion and find the attachments that connect to it. The more you do these meditations the easier it will get to look inside. It’s by watching your inside react to your outside–almost as though you’re separate people–you get the sort of distance that allows you to watch a horror on TV and still somehow enjoy it. It’s why I like my life so much.

This is an important exercise. Find your attachments. Open the door to your freedom. And have and have an awesome day.

peace. s

Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organizations around the world.