improvement

Falling For Your Life

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If you feel like everything is going wrong you can relax. If you’re worried you’ve made some terrible decision that will doom you, you haven’t. You just tend to think that feelings will stay when feelings are bad but no feeling is final. They just keep piling up until they make a big pile called your life.

That makes no sense to you because you want to know what to do, how to improve, how to grow and repair and fix and change. You wonder why you’re not enough, or why the world is the way it is, and yet everything is perfect. You imagine perfect as where everyone gets along, but that would be a boring life. You watch no movies or TV about everyone getting along perfectly because that would not interest you.

What interests you is overcoming. What you overcome is largely irrelevant, but your spirit punishes you for sitting still and it rewards movement and creation, and so your spirit naturally feels enthusiastic about movement. So live more of your life and plan less of it. Being aware in the moment will do you more good than an ideal plan.

Remember the Kierkegaard quote I noted a few weeks back? Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards. Your job isn’t to consciously understand why your flake of snow landed here or there, your job is to just pile up into your natural life; your job is to just stay awake and react naturally from there. Yes, naturally will include “mistakes” and naturally will also include “improvements” you’ve made on previous “mistakes” but that’s more an evolution than conscious change. You want to stop being so conscious of your self-judgments and more conscious of your actual life.

The truth is you can’t go wrong. What feels wrong is when you don’t yet understand looking back, the life you’ve already lived going forward. But those are two separate processes. Stop expecting them to align. The living is always ahead of the understanding. That’s not things going wrong, that’s things going perfectly.

Stop complaining about where you are and who you are and what you’re doing. You don’t even know where you’re really going. So surrender your need for specific outcomes. Instead, anticipate that, whatever comes, if you live with awareness and allow your wisdom to flow, your next step will make itself apparent, even if that step seems crazy at the time.

Every life is a crazy path. But don’t ignore yours because it isn’t matching your expectations. Frankly, your expectations would be too low. Your life has greater intentions for you than that.

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.

MoK: Converting Anger

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1107-relax-and-succeed-mok-sorryEveryone gets angry, it’s just some hide it better than others. But passive-aggressiveness and yelling are both disruptive to human relations. It’s important to remember that you do have the chemistry within you to create anger for a reason. It does serve a purpose. But everyone gets tired, everyone gets hangry, everyone has some easy days and some that are particularly challenging.

Today’s acts in our March of Kindness are simple and straightforward. The first thing have you have to do is identify when you last got angry towards a specific person, then contact the person immediately after you’ve identified them and offer an unequivocal apology.

The most valuable apology is in person, looking the person in the eye, offering zero excuses, just responsibility. Next most valuable is a phone call, where they can hear the sincerity (and possibly discomfort) in your voice that signals your willingness to suffer a bit for what you feel is important–namely respecting that person.

1107-relax-and-succeed-mok-never-ruin-an-apologyOther electronic forms of apology are less personal and less effective but at least they’re a step in the right direction, so if you don’t have the courage for in-person then the next best option is a clear email that outlines your understanding of the lack of respect you’ve shown, that expresses your sincere regret, and that makes a commitment to do better in the future.

Text or instant messenger apologies are the weakest but again, are still far better than no apology at all. If you do this you can increase the value somewhat by also apologising for the fact that your sense of guilt makes it difficult for you to offer the apology in a more personal form. Own your weakness, don’t add it to the insult to the other person.

And finally, apologies to friends are critical to ongoing friendships, but the world is improved when we add people to the number we’re prepared to respect, so in many ways an apology to an opponent or enemy can be the most useful type for society overall. It models good behaviour and reduces tension in both parties.

1107-relax-and-succeed-mok-the-first-to-apologizeIt’s better not to overthink these. Just define the person, choose the form and then do it. It’ll take a few moments and the only suffering you’ll do is between your own ears, within the confines of your own consciousness. The harder it is to do, the better you’ll feel once it’s over. And who knows, maybe you’ll even get one yourself.

If we want to grow as people we must be willing to function outside our own comfort zones. The fact that this feels awkward is directly related to its value to the other person. Let’s start making apologising more common, because it’s human nature to eventually get tired of apologising for the same mistake and that’s usually what leads to us actually changing.

Do it, and do it ASAP. The March of Kindness needs your kindness to be active.

And 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.

Kaizen

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898 Relax and Succeed - KaizenKaizen is a modern Japanese concept that was co-opted in the 80’s and 90’s into a term to describe the way small and continuous improvements create differences between Japanese and Western company structures and the successes of, particularly, their assembly lines. But these “improvements” always only involve efficiency or things that directly impact efficiency, which means we shouldn’t take the concept into our lives without examination.

We certainly don’t want our life to feel like an assembly line so please don’t see spiritual growth as a demand. Wanting spiritual development is just as painful as any other wanting. And there is nothing in your life that exists outside of our basic framework for being so you don’t even need something from outside yourself to advance in that way. You are already complete, you simply don’t know it yet.

Our spiritual development is very much connected to our life development. If you want to know how spiritual you are simply ask yourself how contented you are? If you are content, kaizen is not continuous improvements of us, it is a continuous improvement of what we do. In a healthy mind there is no you, there is only an action (or inaction as action), and those actions add up to who you will have been.

898 Relax and Succeed - The Pursuit of excellenceDo not see yourself or the world as needing fixing or being broken or having anything wrong. I know it’s incredibly compelling to see it that way because all the egos agree that there are some terrible things going on and to ignore them places us in peril. But we have the choice of focusing our energies on the peril, or on creating solutions.

For essentially every single problem on Earth there are lot of people working on solutions. That’s impressive and it’s why the world has changed so much. Yes, we got a bunch of stuff that only half-worked, but that’s how learning goes. You try something, see if it succeeds or fails and then build off what you’ve learned. There doesn’t have to be failure or improvement in that. It can simply by an action: attempt, observe, adjust, attempt, observe, adjust. At no point are you wrong, instead you are simply in a constant state of kaizen, which means you are never actually judging yourself.

The meditations you’ve been doing over the last three months will have made a difference, but that difference will depend on how earnestly you undertake the tests to your awareness. It’s one thing to read about lifting weights, but until you move some you really can’t fully grasp the value in doing it. Same with our attention.

898 Relax and Succeed - Aging is an extraordinaryWe can read that it’s not good to focus on your weaknesses but most of you still do. You don’t see improvements as opportunities, you see previously untaken opportunities as failures. It is important to understand Kaizen not as a rigid practice about moving you up some invisible ladder. It instead is a very aware state of mind in which new, quality ideas can naturally emerge. We don’t invent good ideas out of pressure as much as we focus on our work and improvements simply occur to us. It’s intentional in a completely different way. It’s how you learned to walk.

Do not want to be better. Do not want to be different. Do not want to be like someone else. But you can improve. You can change. And you can observe and listen to others for guidance, but nevertheless you ultimately have no obligations. You could theoretically just surrender your way into a mental institution where people fed you and looked after the base of Maslow’s Pyramid for you. Why don’t you? Because you’re naturally creative, and you life is your ultimate work of art.

It is important to remember that the full value of your life’s work of art doesn’t even get considered until your funeral, so you won’t even be around to see if you won or not and none of the judges were present for much of your performance anyway. You’re here for the creation but not the competition. So don’t waste your life on meaningless doing as a way of achieving. Egos compete. Souls are complete. But it will take your life to make the journey through your abilities, so stop worrying about what others think of you and instead spend this week focusing on actions that grow you.

You’re not a herd dog keeping your own unruly flock in line, you are the herd and you’re naturally moving to where you naturally feel like being. That is your way. Now go.

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.

You and Your Ego

Scott McPherson2 Comments

202 Relax and Succeed - Think of something
It’s so easy people can’t believe it. In their imagination they create all sorts of complex reasons as to why it can’t be as easy as I say it is, and they ignore that they did all of that in their consciousness, which just proves my point.

What you’re doing, who you’re doing it with, and where you’re doing it are actually kind of strange ways to think of your life. Because what you do is a part of other people’s experience, but it’s not really what you’re doing. If you’re like 99.9% of people, you’re thinking while you’re taking those actions. And thoughts create how we feel. So it’s our thoughts we should be focused on steering. That is where the rubber meets the road in our experience of the world. That’s our experience of life; what we think.

You truly have to break that habit of trying to make your life better by moving things around outside of you. You don’t need to date anyone specific, you don’t need to live anywhere specific, you don’t need do anything specific, nor do you need any specific label applied to you. But if you want to enjoy your life you absolutely do have to think enjoyable, appreciative thoughts. Fortunately, you can do that any time you choose.202 Relax and Succeed - Maybe you are searching
To be able to make the choice though, you have to be in a headspace where your chemistry is freely flowing—where you don’t have opinions in the way. That way you can freely reinforce the wonderful feelings that motivate our direction in life. That is their purpose. It’s a steering mechanism. Like low water looks for low ground, your consciousness should look for pleasurable feelings. Because if you’re safe and healthy and fed, and you have good companionship and the ability to procreate, you have everything you need to exist and 100% of those things feel good.

Pay less attention to traditional success. Watch over your thoughts instead. Realise that they are not you, they are what the real you is doing. Just by watching them you are becoming the real you. As an observer of them, you become separate from your thoughts. That’s all you need; now you’re half-witnessing them, half-creating them. As you get better at watching them, you get better at reaching in and changing them because the real you starts to feel more meaningful than the egoic thought-you. Your waking life starts to look like a lucid dream. And that’s because it sort-of is.

When you’re tortured by thoughts about something you cannot change, and those thoughts are not productive in any way, then free yourself by simply changing your mind. Because the only thing that’s stopping you is the thought—the belief—that it can’t be that easy. You simply can’t make it better if you believe life is harder than that.

201 Relax and Succeed - Very little is needed
You’ve seen the posters, read the books. Life is a challenge. Yeah. Okay. So? You still feel it as emotions. So as often as possible, go out and grab whichever chemicals you want, by thinking whatever you want, because that’s going to create your experience of life. That will decide whether you are happy or sad or laughing or angry. So stop trying to get other people and things to cooperate with your imagination, and you start cooperating with it. It’s your superpower. Use it to do good. Use it to create a better world for you to live in.

Be happy. It’s a verb. It’s something you can do. But it’s important to remember that you have to not-do that to be able to do-that. So when you’re not happy you’re really just helping yourself remember that you prefer happiness. That’s why it feels bad. It’s encouraging you to re-choose happiness as quickly as you’re able. That’s all that happy people do. They just keep getting happy in each new moment, and that’s actually very easy to do when that’s your agenda, rather than external “success.”

Stop trying to be cool, or liked or loved. Start respecting yourself to the point where you’ll intentionally go create a wonderful life experience simply because you know you can. That basic comprehension of what truly counts is at the heart of living a profoundly rewarding lifetime.

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.