Thanks for your patience with the blog’s occasional irregularity. My parent’s activities are still in pandemic mode, so the blog will sometimes be impacted. Also, in preparation for some new programming I’ll be doing, you may experience minor issues with the website as I go about making improvements. If there’s any particular programming or website element you would like, send me an email at scottis@relaxandsucceed.com. Thanks! Now back to the blog…
Ask yourself this intentionally binary question: are you currently in the act of giving birth to yourself? Or are you in the act of dying? Because if we strip our lives down to needing to fit into one or the other of those categories, a lot of murky things can suddenly become clearer.
If we’re suffering we’re dying. Like some kind of misguided chemotherapy drip, we dose ourselves all day long with the biochemistry for stress and sadness, and all of the other emotional tones that we were never designed to spend a lot of time in.
Those suffering feelings are unpleasant for that purpose—to motivate us to take action to change things. They exist to motivate us to see a doctor, take a course like mine, or even read a book, or change your schedule, or life in some meaningful way.
Too often, people wallow in negative feelings, as through they washed over them like an inevitable tide. In reality we are swamping ourselves with thoughts being created within us, in series, throughout our lifetimes. They are not dead ends. It is the story of our lives.
No feeling except our last one is a dead end. All current feelings will be followed by other feelings. And countless times in life we will switch from negative to positive and vice versa. So the switch is absolutely possible. But we must become more conscious if we want to make those shifts to happen at will.
Do become more conscious we must investigate where our minds go and why. If we do, we’ll routinely find ourselves investing valuable life-time in painful and pointless thoughts that create that damaging drip into our system. It feels bad and it debilitates us physically.
Contrary to that, we can embrace life. We can love learning new things, meeting new people, and having new experiences. We can do all of those things with any kind of healthy personality. And by trying things, improving, and growing, we are in a state of perpetually giving birth to a new and more expansive, capable and happy self.
Do not spend your life slowly destroying its value. Not when you can use that same ability to go in the opposite direction, where you can find a richer, more productive and enjoyable life.
Maybe consider putting the question into your schedule, so that every 23, or 41 days or something, an alarm asks you: ‘over the last week, have been primarily spending my time living, or dying?’ That will help keep that idea more conscious, and that alone can affect our decision-making in very positive ways.
Don’t commit slow motion emotional suicide. Be conscious. Dive into life. It is always waiting for us to forego all of our thinking, and to just live it instead.
peace. s
A serious childhood brain injury lead Scott to spend his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and identity. It made others as strange to him as he was to them. When he realized people were confused by their own over-thinking, Scott began teaching others to understand reality. He is currently CBC Radio Active’s Wellness Columnist, as well as a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB where he still finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.