difference

Rewarding Discomfort

Scott McPhersonLeave a comment

1072-relax-and-succeed-the-reason-people-awakenYesterday we did a meditation that was designed to help you recognise that you and everyone around you is viewing things from a perspective. Without even noticing it, you too belong to a perspective group. Even if you’re in one of the most popular groups, that’s still includes fewer people than you might think.

Even with someone from a very different background or culture, you will have a lot more commonalities than differences if your perspective is similar. A very aggressive and social personality that lives in rural Zimbabwe will have more in common with an aggressive, social, urban Japanese person than they will with a fellow rural Zimbabwean who’s passive and introverted.

Can you see that for this reason, when you ask people for advice only a small percentage of people will say anything truly useful? Most people will tell you what a mind like theirs would do, but that’s based on their own experiences and the resulting capabilities. They can’t really tell you what you should do. It’s still good to hear other ideas regardless, because those do help you find the one that’s truly yours. But don’t look at some great person and think you should do what they did just because they’re great. You don’t get great by being a certain way, you realise your greatness by being courageous enough to be yourself.

1072-relax-and-succeed-never-stop-lovingWhy do people need courage to be themselves? If you’re not out there actually trying to physically harm anyone and you’re not trying to undermine loving relationships, then what made you think that the way you are is unacceptable?

Because most people don’t know what it is to act without the social fear of not belonging. Societies are set up to give you some lines to walk between. Every society has their own lines, but the group you want to get yourself into starts to ignore the directions of the lines and instead they focus on why you or anyone else is going the way you are. They don’t care if you’re lined up with the lines anymore, you only care if you actions are loving or not.

Today your job is to find times where you were courageous and times where you were cowardly. You’re not a better person when you’re courageous, but when you’re courageous you will act more naturally. It’s our nature to be loving, so you can see how the ego-view can be confusing if it overlaps with a societal rule.

1072-relax-and-succeed-the-primary-teachingIf you view people from an ego perspective, nice behaviour can appear loving when really it’s just professional or possibly even a performance for others. That kind of niceness eventually turns into a poison because it’s motivated by abstract ideas like duty or correctness, rather than being like the core of all spirituality, which emerges from love.

You may never have noticed it, but if you’re in alignment with the Tao even you can feel pretty good about failing as long as it’s in a loving direction. At worst your loss is poignant. But you can do the right thing as far as the rules are concerned and still you’ll be tortured if you didn’t follow the Tao. No matter how technically correct he or she is, it’ll still be painful for a Detroit sheriff to throw out an unemployed single mom and her kids because she owes on her water bill.

1072-relax-and-succeed-the-world-doesnt-want-to-be-savedToday’s meditation asks you to find four instances in your life: two where you did something technically correct but it felt terrible, and two where you broke the rules but it felt right. And as with all of these meditations, the idea isn’t just to find them and write them in like test answers. The value is in really looking at the event from your new perspective. Revisit these times that you wouldn’t have were it not for these meditations. Look at them closely. Recognise your own courage. See it’s value.

Two each. Look for the big ones. The ones that stuck with you. They can be big or small to the outside world, but these are the ones that bring you shame or a healthy sense of pride. See that those feelings are not actually aligned with society’s lines. See that those feelings are aligned with you, because you are aligned with something much more significant than some lines in the sand.

Have a wonderful day everyone.

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.

The Horns of a Dilemma

Scott McPhersonLeave a comment

1020-relax-and-succeed-this-wayIn every life people will reach big moments where they have to choose between two very different opportunities that are mutually exclusive. It could look like a great new job in your old field versus an entry-level job in an industry you’ve always want to work in, or maybe you have to decide between a job opportunity and love. Maybe it’s between having a baby or not. There’s lots of ways we can be stuck trying to decide the undecideable.

To decide comes from French and before that, Latin, and it essentially means to cut off. So you have reached a point in a path of life where one path necessarily cuts you off from another. It’s either this or that but never both. We think what is painful is our inability to see far enough down the path to know which one works out better, but just that thought means we believe that a decision today will determine the rewards in our life later, when that’s just not true.

The notion of a path to success and a path to failure misunderstand what it is to succeed and what it is to fail. Your life is a set of experiences, not a set of gradings by you or anyone else. No one can tell an elementary school teacher who loves their job that they should have chosen something more valuable, because they are the one enjoying their job. That joy is a feeling they experience, it isn’t a theoretical gain in people’s imagination. Being called successful isn’t the same as feeling a real connection to your own life.

1020-relax-and-succeed-if-you-cannot-do-great-thingsYou being important happens in other people’s heads, your daily joy is in your head. How others–or even a changing you with your fluctuating priorities–view your life choices from a distance isn’t as important as how much you enjoy those choices in the individual moments you’re in. So it’s not the path that’s good or bad, it’s your walking of it.

There’s a lot of people trying to improve their life through better life-choices at key moments rather than trying to improve it moment by moment. Even terrible marriages that are better abandoned will still have a lot of fun and joy in them, that’s why they happened in the first place. So a “failed” marriage can have been largely good, but that bad part might still be serious enough that the person may still have to leave the relationship. But that doesn’t erase the parts of it that were or are good, it just makes the payment worth more than the benefit. So you leave, but not because the other path was bad, but rather because it was unwalkable, which is like having no choice at all.

The agony we feel at these times of choosing is based on our thought-based bouncing between two very nebulous, ambiguous ideas. The truth is, each path will contain it’s own unknown opportunities for suffering and it’s own unknown opportunities for joy; we won’t know what those are until we live those moments, which is why the style of our walking is more important than the choice of our path.

1020-relax-and-succeed-hold-onWhat will make any path bad is constant comparison to any road not taken. Our imagination regarding what would have happened is just an uninformed guess. Whatever we think we know, we’d have to be there to be sure. People tend not to advertise the downsides of their choices lest they look bad to others, so we never really know what a life feels like until we live it. But if that’s the case, then there’s no point in torturing ourselves over a dilemma. We’d literally be better to flip a coin, choose, and then dive back into the world’s individual moments with our eye pointed toward joy, because looking for it is how it’s found. It’s not the path you’re on, it’s the perspective you take while you’re on it.

What path are you on that you’d like to be off? What’s making the current path bad? Is it really bad, or are you just trapped in a state of wanting when deep down you’re not even really sure what you’d get if you got what you want? Because no matter what path you’re on, nothing will make it feel worse than wanting to be on another path.

Be where you are. Live consciously. Maybe the job or spouse or choice you’ve made really is a great choice. Maybe you just haven’t realised that because you’ve been too busy wanting something else instead. Either way, you never really have to worry about going the wrong direction because your life happens in your consciousness where there are no paths, there is only presence or want, and you are always in control of which of those two states you’re in.

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.

The New Ism

Scott McPhersonLeave a comment

910 Relax and Succeed - Out beyond ideasA lot of people have a lot of ideas about how other people could be making the world better. One of the keys ways to improve it would be to simply get rid of all of those other people. The real trick is how you go about making them go away.

There are a lot of people who would strongly disapprove of racism or sexism or ageism that would very publicly and aggressively practice what I would call prioritism. These differences arise when people do not share priorities, as is the case when some people value natural resource jobs and others prioritize the environment, with most people ultimately being in a fluctuating bell curve in the middle.

Protecting community assets is what government and regulation were built for. So there is no need for hatred or fights, people are better to focus their energy on the systems that exist and use those to change regulations (or even governments) if they have concerns. There literally is no problem if you’re busy working on a solution that just doesn’t exist in time yet, but holding angry or worried feelings in our hearts is not good for us any more than if we were hating a race or religion. It’s our heart that carries the hate.

910 Relax and Succeed - When you talk you areToo many people are seeing the world in a very simplistic, binary way because the media presents it to us in short soundbites and then only discusses those as though they represent all of the actual interpretations. Their very job is to create conflict where there isn’t any, so we cannot use the media as a basis for us to experience outrage on a personal basis. That’s an expensive and toxic emotion to experience so it should only be undertaken when there is an upside to the person paying the price.

Opening our minds means we must avoid slotting people into categories. Not because you can’t use other categories to defend your categories, but because categories only exist in the ego-world. You want to start connecting with people in that other world–that uncategorized, undefined open space where all people are equal and there is no separation between the individual members of a group or even between them and the thing being done. This is what any good band will do when they’re feeling on. They’re connected.

If you find a lot of they, them, me, you, and I in your speech or self-talk then you know you’re not connected and you’re invested in binary thinking. People need to be defined for those temrs to make sense, but what’s best is to forget the definition of the person and focus respectfully on their statement, action or creation. Drop me and them thinking. Just deal with the issue. It’s a good place to be clinical. Let your motivations to work on the solution be emotional, but let the work itself be as rational as it is positive.

910 Relax and Succeed - Raise your wordsThere are a lot of beautiful, very well-intentioned people who invest enormous amounts of time in very negative and combative approaches, all in an attempt to force solutions on the world. Since that naturally creates resistance, just diverting that energy to more positive approaches will absolutely be felt by all of us. Do not invest in fighting. Look for opportunities to build bridges and create greater understanding. That is your route to a  better world.

Positive actions will lead to a positive situations. Take your opportunities to remove energy from negative thinking and turn it instead into positive action. Both you and the world will be better for it. So go make friends with someone on the other side and get them to teach you about why they’re on that other side. It will do you both more good to talk than to shout.

Enjoy your day.

peace. s

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

Where You Go

Scott McPhersonLeave a comment

887 Relax and Succeed - If you think you're too smallYesterday you did two tiny things that were kindnesses to yourself that should be easy to keep doing and that should do nothing but contribute to your self worth. Eating even slightly better food is clearly an improvement, as is respecting yourself enough to want your space to reflect a healthy interior. Now that you’ve treated yourself well you want to stop thinking about you and start thinking about others again.

Today we’ll add two more tiny things to your day. These will often seem too small to matter to people but again, I remind people that buckets are filled with drops. Waiting for huge changes takes up a lifetime. Making small incremental ones is that slow and steady progress that wins this non-race called life.

The first change will be to your environment for the rest of your day–where you go to work, where you volunteer etc. You need to find a kindness there. Maybe it’s bringing in high quality coffee for the staff machine so everyone is enjoying their morning just that little bit more. Maybe it’s hanging a piece of art, or getting everyone involved in a charity. Some small positive change at work, that’s it. It can even be as small as you making sure you greet everyone with eye contact every day.

887 Relax and Succeed - The person who saysNext you’re going to tackle your environment. This can set a great tone too. Maybe it’s about the health of the environment. I saw a man in a suit stoop down and grab a paper cup in a parking lot and he threw it is in the trash on his way into the mall. Behind him an unrelated little boy of about four saw him. He then found a piece of paper and he then mimicked the man by putting the paper in the garbage. I see this sort of leadership all the time.

Do you see how this positivity chains out? That one guy’s decent action lead to another one. The kid ended up inspiring me enough that I went out of my way to find some trash to throw away too. My city has a million people in it. How amazing would it look here if every single day just half of those people managed to garbage 500,000 things–a day?

That would obviously add up to a huge difference. Even if you take out weekends, that’s 130 million pieces of trash. What would that weigh? Clearly that would matter right up until people were so used to it being cleaned that they never threw anything down in the first place. In which case we can then shift our change-a-day energies to something else. Now this change can be something like picking up one piece of garbage a day, or it can be doing one small favour in traffic per day.

887 Relax and Succeed - Mark Bustos worksAgain, just imagine: half a million or so drivers all doing one small favour per day. We would feel that. Every city would feel friendlier. Everyone would get to work in a better mood. And like with the kid with the garbage, it will chain out. People will see one person do it and they will too.

Decide for yourself. They can literally be anything. But your assignment today is to find and enact your two commitments–your two ongoing changes. Let one person into traffic, always offer to water the plants at work. Or pick up one small wrapper, and then offer to run the Corporate Challenge team. Give someone your seat on the bus and then collect and ensure that no one’s birthday gets forgotten about at work. Start making a list of your tiny changes and makes sure you hit each one each day. You will start to feel good about that.

It doesn’t matter what you choose–that’s the point, we’re all individuals and we’ll all do different things based on our own histories. But all of those actions done in your city and elsewhere are what adds up to a better world that’s easier to feel good about. Get your oar in the water. As I’ve said before, if we all sweep in front of our own door, the whole world can be clean.

Assignment: Two things. One for co-workers or schoolmates, the other for fellow citizens. Two every workday. Go.

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.