Narrative

Good For You

June 22, 2017June 26, 2017Scott McPhersonLeave a comment

Good for you. Have you ever stopped to really think about that phrase? Think about when you say it; it’s always when someone’s had something good happen in their life. And the more they had to do with their success the more enthusiastic we are. We’re happy for lottery winners, but we deeply admire those with the talent to create success, and our admiration increases in proportion to how hard they needed to work for it.

Good for you. It’s a double entendre. On one hand it means that whatever has happened is good news for you and that you are to be congratulated. On the other hand it can also note a well-earned victory means that notable successes are drawn from notable efforts. All of that hard work is good for you, so the earned victory not only impresses us, it inspires us.

It is in these moments in which we can feel our interconnectedness. Our happiness for the other person is an experience we have within our consciousness. The other person doesn’t even experience that. They see someone in the act of loving and that in turn inspires them to essentially love our love for them. It’s like a feedback loop of love.

And who is unpopular? An ego. An ego considers only itself, just as an insecure person doesn’t consider themselves enough. You want to balance on humility, where you get to selfishly be you, but you’re developed enough as a soul that you understand that nothing is better for you than what is good for others.

How then should this impact our days? If we know an open channel can generate opportunities for valuable connections, and we know closing ourselves off selfishly creates a feeling of separation and emptiness, then why not watch for the former and ignore the latter?

Most people spend most of their day in their head, talking to themselves. And when I say, “talking to,” what I really mean is attacking, reminding, debasing, criticizing, and fearfully undermining their own sense of self.

Why fill your head with all of those busy negative words when you can treat your consciousness more like a Star Trek tractor-beam? You just lock onto something you know you want and you pull it closer. And closer doesn’t mean in a possessive way, it means in a oneness way. It means you start to feel the same happiness they’re feeling but it’s about something that happened to them, not you. That’s connection. We live for that.

So today, like everyday, you’ll go through life switching between the creation of personal narrative that confirm your egocentric impression of the world, or you’ll engage in a very active silence that seeks to pull in the universe in an act of loving awareness. It’s why on a “good day” almost everything seems sweet or beautiful or wonderful or kind, and on a “bad day” it seems like the world’s filled with jerks.

Don’t try to stop your thinking. Switch the energy you use for thinking into being. Reading is thinking another person’s thoughts. A picture isn’t that different from reading, and an actual face isn’t so different from a photo of a face, so it isn’t a huge leap to move from you thinking your personal painful thoughts, to thinking an author’s thoughts, to studying a portrait, and then on to looking at an actual face. That’s all reality, not your opinion about reality.

Thoughts can get so busy they can lead to us feeling like we’re drowning. Reasons to feel good are laying all over the place and they buoy us up. Your day is filled with moments. Take as many as possible, and fill them with the fruits of your observations rather than waste them on yet another stream of unpleasant, unproductive thoughts.

You only have so much time on this Earth, so stop trying to impress everyone else and start living as though your life is actually yours. Because nothing will impress people more than how loving you’ll be once your egocentric, wanting thoughts are quieted in favour of you engaging in loving appreciation.

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.

Making Sense

May 3, 2017May 3, 2017Scott McPhersonLeave a comment

Order. Pattern. Sense. Understanding. Meaning. Our lives emerge from these things. In fact, you yourself are a pursuit. You are an action through the universe that skips and jumps and hops from here to there, all in an effort to construct or weave a life story that either makes some kind of sense to you, or that you will continue to work on in an effort to make sense of it.

It’s as though everyone is sitting around together weaving, and the threads are made of words that are then stitched into concepts that combine to create a life story. It’s like we weave the whole thing just to show it to other people who did the same. We’re just hanging out together, and yet what we weave takes on a life of its own.

It’s one thing to weave a lonely disconnected character but it’s another thing altogether to think that you are what has been woven. You are the weaving; not the weaver, not the thread, not the needle. You’re the action of weaving. You aren’t a dancer, you’re a dance.

That would be all well and good if you didn’t spend so much of your life wandering from person to person asking them what you should weave, and asking them to explain their own weaving. They will tell you what they’ve learned from their weaving, but only the basic principles are common to all weavers, so it’s not like they can really help you. Your job is to let go and weave what only you would weave, you’re not supposed to become some expert on weaving. Do you understand?

Look at how cloying your brain is about comprehension. You hate not knowing. You dislike confusion, or uncertainty. Your mind seeks order. It wants to understand. But the problem is the wanting, not the understanding. Your life is just a steady pursuit of understanding, but too often people are standing back looking at the shape of that pursuit as though it’s something to be judged. The path and the walker are one.

The good news is, this means your route through life has been neither good nor bad. It was merely the life that emerged from the choices you made, either consciously or unconsciously. Where it went in the end is irrelevant. What counts is that you felt the experience of being alive.

All great dramas are made of many kinds of characters and all play their critical role in the larger plots. Strangely, there is no more merit in playing the hero as there is in playing the villain. We need them all to feel like anything happened, and we will all take a turn (many times) in both roles.

As the comedian Andy Kaufman knew when he created a wrestler for everyone to hate, what we really love is the story. If we can learn to accept that we’re here to weave stories and not to do something important, then we can get on to the important act of weaving, just as Kaufman voluntarily became someone for you to despise. He wasn’t being a jerk. For our benefit, he was just playing one in the drama that is our collective lifetimes.

Stop looking for meaning. Like water, just flow naturally to your own low ground. The pool that forms will be what reflects your life exactly as it should. So stop striving, trying, or wanting. Simply be instead. Let yourself be yourself, and accept who you are, no matter what. Regardless of what your thinking says.

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.

Self Harm

February 8, 2017February 8, 2017Scott McPhersonLeave a comment

This week we’ve discussed spiritual and psychological violence. You’ve worked on altering your external discussions to remove that sort of violence from what you say; you’ve worked on your internal discussions regarding how you judge others; and today you’ll work on the most damaging version: attacks on yourself.

The concepts of cutting or self-sabotage can be difficult for happy people to understand. But it is possible to use internal violence against ourselves so effectively that we also begin to believe we deserve physical pain as well. We start to use the pain to divert our attention away from the even-more-painful thinking. The point isn’t to stop the cutting, it’s to stop the thinking.

The illusion that there is something wrong with us is created through comparison. If your parents were verbally hard on you then they would have taught you to be hard on yourself within your thoughts and there will always be a comparison. If we’re not careful we can start to think the training for our thoughts is actually who we are, but just because someone judges you as something doesn’t mean that’s what you are, it just means that’s their style of judgment.

The trick is, you can’t get back into a healthy mode by trying or changing or effort because it’s all an illusion. Everyone is naturally psychologically and spiritually healthy, but we can be convinced–and then we can continue to convince ourselves–that somehow we are not worthy unless we do this or that thing.

As strange as it seems to the person who’s made a habit of doing it, there’s nothing wrong with them other than they’re currently engaged in painful thinking. That’s why they still have friends and family that love them and are often confused. None of it makes sense unless you’re the person thinking the thoughts. They still see the same old lovable, potential-filled you.

When you look in mirror you don’t see you, you see a jumble of judgments about you. When you consider who you are, you don’t look at yourself very thoroughly; you’re more likely to cherry pick out all of your biggest challenges. But if you didn’t have those challenges you’d be perfect and that would be boring. You’re here to move around all that, not overcome it. Mountain climbers don’t chisel the mountain out of existence, nor do they want to stay on top. Their life’s joy is just trying a life of different routes.

Today’s meditation is to compete with yourself or your partner to catch yourself internally using the words I and you, because that’s the two words you’ll often use when you talk to yourself. (e.g. If I don’t get this paper written I’ll fail this class; come on Sara, you can do it.) Keep in mind you do this all day every day so there will be lots of opportunities for you to catch yourself.

Just like you did yesterday with another person, today you do that with yourself. You listen to that criticism and then you find a way to rephrase it to yourself in more positive, encouraging terms. This can feel silly and meaningless, but that’s because you think your big problems need big solutions, but really you don’t have big problems, you just have an overabundance of counterproductive thinking.

Don’t stop altering your external conversations; keep shifting those to be more positive as well. For every interior criticism you have about someone or something, rewrite it to be most positive. And today add interior and exterior criticisms of yourself. You’ll feel like you’re getting away with something or you’re letting yourself off easy, but in reality it’s that easy. Don’t add another layer of argument about that. Just do it.

Your reality is not made from things it’s made from ideas. The ideas that are real in your world are the ones you believe. Start believing in a stronger, more lovable version of yourself, because despite your very real concerns, that’s the real you. Believing anything else will continue to be a painful denial of that much larger spiritual reality. Bottom line, the universe doesn’t make mistakes and the universe made you. Anything else is just thinking.

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.

Beefs and Bouquets

January 23, 2017January 23, 2017Scott McPhersonLeave a comment

Friday’s meditation made you uncomfortable. It was awkward trying to act and think like you were sin and fault-free. Isn’t that sad? You’ve been taught to treat yourself as though you don’t deserve the same unconditional love that you bestow on the imperfect people you love the most. Why do you think your closest friends and family love you?

Those closest to you are aware of all of the challenges that you present just like you’re aware of theirs. But like you they don’t really care because you’re so easily worth it. You’re not supposed to get rid of your faults, you’re supposed to accept that everyone has ways of being and there are times and places where those ways are ideal, and there are times and places where those ways will be unsuitable for creating success. That’s not a fault, that’s just being an individual.

Everyone around you is doing this. Stop for a second and think about that. Whether you realise it or not, everyone around you is wrestling with things they call faults. What they really mean is that instead of doing something meaningful in the moment they are in, they’re instead busy sitting still so that they can think up an internal argument against themselves.

What a giant waste of time. Why is anyone even bothering if no one is thinking about you anyway? They’re all just as worried about themselves as you are about you. That’s a whole lotta invisible brain-yakking for no good reason.

Can you imagined if we filmed a busy street and you could see and/or hear what everyone was saying? It would look crazy as we all passed each other trading useless barbs and comments with ourselves and others when all of that energy could have been applied to the sort of internal silence that is very healthy, or an external activity that is, in response, more enthusiastically engaged.

People in pain are stagnant. People who are creating new daily experiences in an active way are better off, even if their circumstances are worse. It is the lack of thinking that’s at the core; what naturally fills that gap is creativity. Sometimes that’s creating a healthy meal. Sometimes that energy goes toward some enjoyable time with friends, or studying to grow. But if all of your energy is spent worrying and judging, you won’t have much left for actual growing or living.

You need to get more comfortable with seeing yourself as you, rather than as an imperfect potentially perfect person, (wouldn’t we all have a different idea of what that would like for you?). You are awesome at criticising yourself. You do not need my help in that regard. But you seriously have to start exercising the self-appreciation part of your brain.

This isn’t you being a narcissist, this isn’t you having some huge infallible ego, this is just you seeing yourself as the person your friends routinely see. You’ll all have different ideas about each other, but as long as those are positive then good things will emerge from those friendships. But only you can learn to look at yourself and truly see a worthwhile, capable, unashamed person who is deserving of love and respect.

Today’s assignment is a competition. You and your partner keep score. The idea is that you get -1 point for criticising yourself or any other part of the world, and +1 point for giving yourself some entirely deserved credit or for noticing something nice about the world. Keep track on your phone, on a post-it note, whatever. At the end of the day, you compare scores.

That score will be informative in some ways, but it isn’t nearly as important as your intention to win. That very intention creates the focus that allows you to filter reality through your intention, meaning you’ll see more things in alignment with that intention. This is otherwise called, going with the flow. Minus one and plus one. Whatever your score is it is. But be aware. Keep score.

Even your general frame of mind and the events that happen around you will have a lot to do with your score. As you count your constructive things and criticisms; you’ll catch a tiny percentage of them right now, but that’s fine. Doing these exercises each day is like building up part of your mind. So watch for your insights, because they’ll congeal out of nowhere.

Now go have an aware and awesome day.

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.

Evaporating Ego

January 9, 2017January 9, 2017Scott McPhersonLeave a comment

The only reason you’re even undertaking a resolution is because you’re unsatisfied with yourself the way you are. You’ve operated under the assumption that you need to improve when in fact you need to understand. Your real self is already beautiful, capable, valuable and worthwhile but your ego doesn’t believe that. When you talk to yourself all day? That’s your ego.

Mental health, clarity and confidence emerge quite naturally when you quieten and disengage from your internal story. That’s why kids are so confident and can learn to walk and talk so fast. Until you can talk to yourself–no ego! So there’s no voice limiting you. You’re brilliant, enlightened and free.

Most people try to stop the negative voices and switch them for positive voices but frankly that’s people who are pretending to understand this stuff. If your teacher is recommending that as your ultimate goal then they can’t teach you this because they don’t know it. Yes, a positive voice is better than a negative one, but that’s like saying you want a holy ego. That’s not really what to shoot for. Again: you want to understand. And that’s a big thing, so we’re doing it in little pieces.

We’ll start with attacking the credibility of your story. You think you’re talking to yourself about yourself but you really aren’t. You are a story telling itself a story, so in no time you’re totally lost inside the thoughts. When you first hear that voice in your own head it’s so startling that a kid will always ascribe the voice to a toy or an invisible friend. Then before long the invisible friend is comfortably living inside you. Worse, your ego soon has roommates. [Insert foreboding music.]

Telling your invisible friend to go away seems like a good idea until you realise that it’s your invisible friend saying that. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. Rather than argue with it, you want to evaporate your ego by being indifferent to it. And we can take a big step toward that today, because you actually think you’re ego’s talking to you about you.

I’ve been teaching people for 25 years that they should ignore their internal story because it’s a lie. Not a little lie. A total lie. You are a complete fiction. Can you see if you can come to truly grasp that, that you are instantly much better off? It would be like if your ego was your child and all of the school reports about the child’s behaviour came from a chronic liar. In the end you have no idea how good you are unless you’re being someone intentionally.

For now we’ll skip the intentional part and we’ll focus on recognising the lie. Your identity is only a memory of who you believed you were, just as your worries are your fears about who you might be. But not only do you believe things about yourself that are unfair, you believe things that never even really happened.

If you ever studied this as intensely as I have this is quite obvious. People believe all kinds of things about themselves that aren’t true so how do you know who you need to be if you don’t even know who you are? And if you doubt this, just as with everything I’ve taught, science always catches up because frankly I learned it through experiments too. It’s just no one thinks a a five year old with a head injury would be doing brain and thought research all day because no one else that age spends their entire life thinking about thinking.

A scientist from near my home and who now lives in Britain has done what to you will be shocking research. I’ve noted it many times before in this blog, but below is an short video of her explaining how she proved that you really are a fiction. I doubt she has any idea that you’re 100% a fiction, but we’ll start with some doubt. That’s actually a pretty decent achievement. So watch this video and then I’ll give you today’s exercise.

Are you starting to get an inkling of how big and serious this is? Your ego is your history and you have almost no idea what yours or the world’s history really is.

Why pay attention to a story if you can’t be sure it’s true? Rather than making it go away, why not just ignore it the way you ignored people that you don’t respect? If someone has zero credibility with you are you offended by their insults? No, because you don’t choose to believe those because you don’t trust the source. You have to stop trusting your own ego.

So here’s exercise one: Before the end of the day you and your partner(s) in pursuing peace of mind are going to compete to see who can find the most examples of you making a past belief-shift. This would be examples where you could say for instance, “I kept wondering what I was doing wrong in my marriage and then I realised I’d innocently married the wrong person,” or “I always thought I was stupid because my Mom said so, but then I had a great teacher who showed me that I had a specific kind of intelligence.” These are when you changed your story.

To be clear, your new story was also a lie, but by recognising that it’s always changing it’ll feel less powerful and you’ll start to see why some cultures don’t even name your identity. That voice is always an opinion and even that comes from someone just as confused as you.

Find your examples of when you changed from someone into someone else and then use your thinking usefully; to meditate your ego away. Use that close inspection as the heat that evaporates your ego. It doesn’t matter who you are today because you clearly change who you are anyway.

Make your list. Meditate on each example. This is no small thing. This is proof that you are an ever-changing fiction. Make your list. Evaporate your Self. This is step one. I’ll see you tomorrow.

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.

Who Have You Been?

January 4, 2017January 5, 2017Scott McPhersonLeave a comment

When you started this year you may have wondered; where are you going to get the energy to do all these great things we’re talking about? But don’t worry. You’ll have plenty of energy once you quit wasting it by talking to yourself incessantly about the past and future.

That self-talk eats up a ton of your life. Way more than you can imagine. And it’s an Opportunity Cost as well. Not only are you hurting yourself with all of that thinking about yourself, you’re also doing that instead of enacting your health. That’s how it works; you either move forward or backward, but there is no sitting still in life. It ticks by whether you’re spinning in place or boldly exploring.

To get the life you want we have to get you to expand yourself; and to do that you need to leave your comfort zone to explore new ways of being. Rather than another year of bashing yourself inside your own head just start each week here. Every Monday I’ll create a simple weekly objective. Those little tests and meditations can then act as signposts along your journey to become less of a self-talking ego and more like inspiration in motion.

This process will be way less painful and far more rewarding than what you’re doing now, so you can sleep well tonight knowing that you’re taking action. And you can be comfortable knowing that these assignments won’t be overwhelming. In fact, often they’ll seem surprisingly easy. That’s how we change these things. Not all at once. A little bit at a time. We’ll make you so good at healing yourself you’ll end up healing others too.

The real question now is, do you really want to change? That might seem a strange question to someone suffering, but it’s valid. Lots of people start things like this over and over and yet never get anywhere and when you’re clear headed you too will be able to see why. Those people fall into a pattern of failure because because they want to.

A lot of people’s entire lives are built around sympathy. Everyone has stories about themselves that involve suffering but some people spend most of their time relating these stories, or reading or watching things about their story. They’re experts on their own story and all the damage it’s caused. And they pay for that expertise with suffering, which in turn creates the need for sympathy and you can see how the circular addiction forms.

This will be an enjoyable process, but take today and be a bit hard on yourself. Call, or even better write (they’ll be more honest), to some close friends and ask them; when I’m negative what does that look like? And then ask them what kinds of things bother you. Ask them what makes you angry, what makes you sad, what scares you. Look for the stuff they mostly agree on. That’s your psychological set point. That’s what we’re going to move.

If you have honest enough friends you should get some answers that surprise you. Learn from them. Look at what you focus on. Understand that they see it as something you would do, meaning it’s not something they would do, meaning it’s a choice. You can make better choices, but before you try it’s a good idea to see what kind of choice-picker you’ve historically been.

The friends you ask to help you are your friends for a reason. The qualities you’re asking about are the ones they’ll easily accept because you’re worth it. If they can accept those things and love you then so can you. And when you can finally love yourself as you are, you’ll open yourself up to more complete love between you and others. So go find those good friends and spend today trying to really profile how it is you get sad or angry or scared, and then we’ll show you how to turn those little defeats into victories, and how to make this year better than last.

Onward and upward. See you tomorrow.

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 Friday Dose #121: In Other Words

August 12, 2016August 13, 2016Scott McPhersonLeave a comment

A lot of different perspectives created a lot of different cultures. They ate different foods, they sang different songs, they faced different weather, terrain, seas and they all had different temperaments. Languages grew out of various groups and the words those cultures needed suited the way they saw the world.

I’m not sure what you’ll each feel about each word but it’s interesting that these are often the only cultures that will have this word, and in some cases they can be the only people in the world who even have a basis to discuss certain subjects. It really shows us that even right in front of us there are big differences. Someone speaking another language will live in a different reality because while you might not be, for them the entire world in front of them could be either masculine or feminine.

I’m a big fan of Marija Tiurina’s work, and I would encourage you visit her site and see how her style has evolved from the ones presented below. Art is subjective but most of you will be very impressed by what you’ll see. As as an expression of the differences that can exist in language, here’s a few of Marija’s wonderful examples. Enjoy.

Again, her name is Marija Tiurina.

Slow your mind down, slow your life down, pay more attention to art. Breathe. And have a wonderful weekend.

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.

Relax and Succeed

Behaviour and Mood Management

Good For You

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Making Sense

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Self Harm

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Beefs and Bouquets

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Evaporating Ego

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Who Have You Been?

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The Friday Dose #121: In Other Words

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