When I eat too much late at night I don't sleep well. This poem is the result of my latest .
------
FUCKUP, AGAIN
Yeah, you fucked up, again
It would have been better if you hadn't
done what you did, said what you said,
but you did
again
All you can do is start where you are
again
You can lie there in the dust,
kicking yourself in the head,
again
for having fucked up
again
or you can re-apply yourself
again
to the job of fixing whatever broken parts there are inside yourself
Rebuilding your own engine
Replacing your own dysfunctional gears,
mostly dysfunctional thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, cravings and aversions,
that don't mesh with health and happiness
Replacing them with healthy, functional parts
Useful, functional thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, equanimity
that work to create health and happiness
All you can do is start where you are
again
every moment of your life
-------
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Healthy Practices, Unhealthy Beliefs
here is the latest installment of my personal growth manual
----------------------------------
Certainly yoga, organic food, etc. are healthy practices, yet so many people seem to have unhealthy beliefs and attitudes underlying them. For example:
if you have the underlying belief that you are the victim of toxins in the environment, and that you must live really healthy just to counteract that, and perhaps the further belief that even then it may not be enough, and perhaps the belief that these poisons in the environment, which are affecting YOU!, were put there by other, unconscious people, often bad, selfish people motivated only by making money, who don't care who they hurt
(notice all the judgments and assumptions)
well, although you may be minimizing the physical toxins you are directly taking in, you are certainly creating a lot of poisons in your mind, poisons which will impact your body as the result of stress, if nothing else.
Further, if you have an attitude such as "i'm better than other people because i do this stuff", that attitude itself is also a poison, creating a sense of alienation in yourself, poisoning your relationships, because people can sense your judgment and condescension, and, perhaps worst of all, that attitude keeps you in the illusion of separateness, cutting you off from the higher, some would say highest, spiritual truth, which is that we are all One.
Another example:
if your unconscious programming, self images and beliefs about yourself, perhaps picked up in childhood, is that you are
--bad, weak, unhealthy, undisciplined, damaged or wounded. Do you deserve to be happy,
seor whatever your negative programming is--
then you may find yourself constantly fighting a losing battle against the unseen foe of your unconscious/subconscious negative self images and beliefs.
If you are trying to change or accomplish anything in your life, you need to look inside at what your self images and beliefs are. The most important part of positive change and accomplishment, is releasing the dis-empowering self images and beliefs and replacing them with empowering self images and beliefs. At the minimum, the belief that you CAN change and grow, and if you can, add easily.
Can you tell that i am writing from personal experience. I wish that i were the only person that this applies to, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
Furthermore, what are your less personal beliefs. For example
*What are your metaphysical beliefs, the framework, the lens through which you view everything, about the nature of the universe. the rules of the game, so to speak, and about other people and "humanity".
Is the universe inherently a loving, hostile, or neutral place. is there enough for everybody, or not"
Is there some sort of God, Great Spirit, or whatever. What are your beliefs regarding that, and how it affects your everyday life.
Do you "create your own reality", and to what extent. How much, or how little, ultimate control do you believe that you have over your own life. Are you totally at the mercy of greater forces, such as the unemployment rate, or do you have some input into your own situation, and how much.
*What are your beliefs about people and the society you find yourself in. This is a big one.
Are people inherently good, bad, or whatever. Inherently selfish or unselfish, conscious or unconscious?
Are you at the mercy of your genes?
Etc.
All these deeper beliefs really do affect, in a big way, your experience and your possibilities in your life.
----------------------------------
Certainly yoga, organic food, etc. are healthy practices, yet so many people seem to have unhealthy beliefs and attitudes underlying them. For example:
if you have the underlying belief that you are the victim of toxins in the environment, and that you must live really healthy just to counteract that, and perhaps the further belief that even then it may not be enough, and perhaps the belief that these poisons in the environment, which are affecting YOU!, were put there by other, unconscious people, often bad, selfish people motivated only by making money, who don't care who they hurt
(notice all the judgments and assumptions)
well, although you may be minimizing the physical toxins you are directly taking in, you are certainly creating a lot of poisons in your mind, poisons which will impact your body as the result of stress, if nothing else.
Further, if you have an attitude such as "i'm better than other people because i do this stuff", that attitude itself is also a poison, creating a sense of alienation in yourself, poisoning your relationships, because people can sense your judgment and condescension, and, perhaps worst of all, that attitude keeps you in the illusion of separateness, cutting you off from the higher, some would say highest, spiritual truth, which is that we are all One.
Another example:
if your unconscious programming, self images and beliefs about yourself, perhaps picked up in childhood, is that you are
--bad, weak, unhealthy, undisciplined, damaged or wounded. Do you deserve to be happy,
seor whatever your negative programming is--
then you may find yourself constantly fighting a losing battle against the unseen foe of your unconscious/subconscious negative self images and beliefs.
If you are trying to change or accomplish anything in your life, you need to look inside at what your self images and beliefs are. The most important part of positive change and accomplishment, is releasing the dis-empowering self images and beliefs and replacing them with empowering self images and beliefs. At the minimum, the belief that you CAN change and grow, and if you can, add easily.
Can you tell that i am writing from personal experience. I wish that i were the only person that this applies to, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
Furthermore, what are your less personal beliefs. For example
*What are your metaphysical beliefs, the framework, the lens through which you view everything, about the nature of the universe. the rules of the game, so to speak, and about other people and "humanity".
Is the universe inherently a loving, hostile, or neutral place. is there enough for everybody, or not"
Is there some sort of God, Great Spirit, or whatever. What are your beliefs regarding that, and how it affects your everyday life.
Do you "create your own reality", and to what extent. How much, or how little, ultimate control do you believe that you have over your own life. Are you totally at the mercy of greater forces, such as the unemployment rate, or do you have some input into your own situation, and how much.
*What are your beliefs about people and the society you find yourself in. This is a big one.
Are people inherently good, bad, or whatever. Inherently selfish or unselfish, conscious or unconscious?
Are you at the mercy of your genes?
Etc.
All these deeper beliefs really do affect, in a big way, your experience and your possibilities in your life.
Monday, February 4, 2013
Personal Growth
Personal Growth-A Work in Progress
A few years ago i started writing a personal growth manual, which is still very much unfinished. Here are my latest additions, which at some point i will integrate into the main file.
-------------------------
BECOMING MORE CONSCIOUS
The path of personal growth eventually becomes the path of spiritual growth. We start by working on healing our healing our wounded human selves, which starts by simply becoming conscious of the wounded parts of ourselves, and sooner or later, this lifetime or another, we journey on to becoming aware of our higher selves, the Self, as it is called in the East. Joel Goldsmith (1892-1964), a great modern American mystic, speaks of this in all his books.
Plan of Action
We become aware of, through paying conscious attention to:
1) Our bodies, our somatic selves. Awareness of sensations in all the different parts of our body. Our left big toe, right ankle, skin of the upper back, etc. This is not just awareness of the body; it is said that our consciousness is not just in our brains, but in fact is spread all through our bodies. It is also said that we have memories, emotions, traumas locked into different parts of the body. This is one of the reasons why, when getting a massage, people often go through emotions or have memories come up.
2) Our thought-awareness of thoughts, control of thoughts is one of the key practices of the East, and also of much of what is called the new age.
3) Awareness of our emotions. At every moment, we are experiencing some e-motion, yet how many people are aware of what their emotion is at the moment.
How many people are fully aware of all this? I'm certainly not, though this has become my life's work, to be as fully conscious at all times as i can.
My belief, based on some minor experience, is that as we become more conscious we begin to experience ourselves as part of a greater whole, as a kidney cell might, at some point, become conscious of itself as a part of Dick or Jane.
The journey is from the small self, the selfish me i got mine who cares about you self, to the Self, which ultimately knows in the deepest sense that we are all One, and acts accordingly.
----------------
SOLVING OUR PROBLEMS
Are our problems just problems, or lessons and opportunities to learn and grow from? The answer we give to that question makes a huge difference in our experience of our lives.
Everybody wants the same things.
A short, general list
Love and good relationships of all sorts; connection with others
Health
Prosperity
Pleasure
Success in one's chosen profession
A sense of meaning and purpose
Self Expression
Home
Who doesn't want those things?
So we all do what we can to get them: work, exercise, go out on dates, etc.
We believe that
happiness=getting what we want,from external stimuli
but does it?
Some people get what they want and still aren't happy. Some don't get, and are happy. Getting what you want does not guarantee happiness.
Distinguish between pleasure, ego gratification, happiness and joy.
How much of our unhappiness is based on the belief we have that "I can't be happy without ____", rather than the actual experience of our lives (not speaking of survival needs).
What if happiness is a state of consciousness, perhaps a state resulting from clear energy flows in the body, that has nothing necessarily to do with external stimuli, even though it seems it does.
What if
our levels of happiness and our sets of problems are the results of our level of consciousness,
including the openness and condition of our chakras and our meridians, the level of our intentions and aspirations, and the degree to which we have cleansed ourselves of psychic poisons such as fear and hatred and have healthy self images and beliefs, and at the highest level, the degree to which we have realized the Self?
Each level of consciousness has a different set of problems that go with it, just as children have different sets of developmental problems at each age. What if raising our consciousness would result in problems solving themselves, and of course the new level of consciousness would have a new set of issues to solve.
What if states of consciousness are like frequencies on a radio dial, and through practices and releasing internal static we develop the ability to tune in to higher frequencies, frequencies with progressively more happiness and less suffering?
A basic part of raising our consciousness is clearing the garbage and negative programming out of our psyches and replacing it with healthy material.
According to (in my understanding) NLP (neuro linguistic programming) and Louise Hay and other teachers, our unconscious self images and beliefs run our lives. If we have negative unconscious/subconscious self images and beliefs of ourselves such as- i am damaged, wounded, weak, bad, undeserving, etc., then as much as we may struggle and work on the conscious level, it's going to be very, very hard to get results. Some people have unconscious fears of having what they want, for example women who are overweight very often have fears of the negative attention they would receive if they were more attractive, perhaps a fear of being attacked. Often the fears are much more complex.
So much of our lives are based on thoughts of the future, "when i get (this or that)", but the only time we ever live is now. It's always now, and if happiness is an experience, the only time we can have that experience is now.
I am not saying be a hedonist, not saying don't make plans and work towards goals, not saying don't live in the world and have sex and make money. I am very much saying that don't just think achieving your goals will make you happy. You will almost certainly get a momentary rush, but real happiness is a state of consciousness, an energetic experience, not a winning scorecard.
You expect at work that if you work the hours you will get a paycheck of money. Well, if you work the hours of personal/spiritual growth you will get a paycheck of higher consciousness.
I would like to mention a point that Goldsmith stresses very much in his writings, a point made in the Eastern traditions: If you are seeking to realize the Self just for purposes of health, pleasure and prosperity, you will never realize the Self, never experience the real thing. Desiring/needing consciousness keeps you from the highest. It's an apparent contradiction, because as human beings how could we not want health, relationship, pleasure and prosperity. My best understanding at this time is that we usually have mixed motives, and it is important that ones' primary motive be to experience the Self, not the worldly goods, that it's a long journey, and we start where we are.
Motive is something that can't be faked. I think that probably, over time, ones' motives get purified through doing the work. To me this is maybe the toughest question of all, that of motive. We can work, meditate, do yoga, and all the other practices, but how to purify motives and intentions is not so clear to me, yet in my own life it has just gradually happened, not that i'm so fucking pure, but a lot more than i used to be.
People put lots of hours into making money and working out, but how much time do most people put into working on themselves, the effort which would produce the greatest results?
some reading, a very short starter list
NLP-the new technology of achievement
Louise Hay-You Can Heal Your Life
Joel Goldsmith-Practicing the Presence (or any other title by him)
Marie Manuchehri-Intuitive Self Healing (about the Chakras)
Bhagavad Gita
Aldous Huxley-The Perennial Philosophy
A few years ago i started writing a personal growth manual, which is still very much unfinished. Here are my latest additions, which at some point i will integrate into the main file.
-------------------------
BECOMING MORE CONSCIOUS
The path of personal growth eventually becomes the path of spiritual growth. We start by working on healing our healing our wounded human selves, which starts by simply becoming conscious of the wounded parts of ourselves, and sooner or later, this lifetime or another, we journey on to becoming aware of our higher selves, the Self, as it is called in the East. Joel Goldsmith (1892-1964), a great modern American mystic, speaks of this in all his books.
Plan of Action
We become aware of, through paying conscious attention to:
1) Our bodies, our somatic selves. Awareness of sensations in all the different parts of our body. Our left big toe, right ankle, skin of the upper back, etc. This is not just awareness of the body; it is said that our consciousness is not just in our brains, but in fact is spread all through our bodies. It is also said that we have memories, emotions, traumas locked into different parts of the body. This is one of the reasons why, when getting a massage, people often go through emotions or have memories come up.
2) Our thought-awareness of thoughts, control of thoughts is one of the key practices of the East, and also of much of what is called the new age.
3) Awareness of our emotions. At every moment, we are experiencing some e-motion, yet how many people are aware of what their emotion is at the moment.
How many people are fully aware of all this? I'm certainly not, though this has become my life's work, to be as fully conscious at all times as i can.
My belief, based on some minor experience, is that as we become more conscious we begin to experience ourselves as part of a greater whole, as a kidney cell might, at some point, become conscious of itself as a part of Dick or Jane.
The journey is from the small self, the selfish me i got mine who cares about you self, to the Self, which ultimately knows in the deepest sense that we are all One, and acts accordingly.
----------------
SOLVING OUR PROBLEMS
Are our problems just problems, or lessons and opportunities to learn and grow from? The answer we give to that question makes a huge difference in our experience of our lives.
Everybody wants the same things.
A short, general list
Love and good relationships of all sorts; connection with others
Health
Prosperity
Pleasure
Success in one's chosen profession
A sense of meaning and purpose
Self Expression
Home
Who doesn't want those things?
So we all do what we can to get them: work, exercise, go out on dates, etc.
We believe that
happiness=getting what we want,from external stimuli
but does it?
Some people get what they want and still aren't happy. Some don't get, and are happy. Getting what you want does not guarantee happiness.
Distinguish between pleasure, ego gratification, happiness and joy.
How much of our unhappiness is based on the belief we have that "I can't be happy without ____", rather than the actual experience of our lives (not speaking of survival needs).
What if happiness is a state of consciousness, perhaps a state resulting from clear energy flows in the body, that has nothing necessarily to do with external stimuli, even though it seems it does.
What if
our levels of happiness and our sets of problems are the results of our level of consciousness,
including the openness and condition of our chakras and our meridians, the level of our intentions and aspirations, and the degree to which we have cleansed ourselves of psychic poisons such as fear and hatred and have healthy self images and beliefs, and at the highest level, the degree to which we have realized the Self?
Each level of consciousness has a different set of problems that go with it, just as children have different sets of developmental problems at each age. What if raising our consciousness would result in problems solving themselves, and of course the new level of consciousness would have a new set of issues to solve.
What if states of consciousness are like frequencies on a radio dial, and through practices and releasing internal static we develop the ability to tune in to higher frequencies, frequencies with progressively more happiness and less suffering?
A basic part of raising our consciousness is clearing the garbage and negative programming out of our psyches and replacing it with healthy material.
According to (in my understanding) NLP (neuro linguistic programming) and Louise Hay and other teachers, our unconscious self images and beliefs run our lives. If we have negative unconscious/subconscious self images and beliefs of ourselves such as- i am damaged, wounded, weak, bad, undeserving, etc., then as much as we may struggle and work on the conscious level, it's going to be very, very hard to get results. Some people have unconscious fears of having what they want, for example women who are overweight very often have fears of the negative attention they would receive if they were more attractive, perhaps a fear of being attacked. Often the fears are much more complex.
So much of our lives are based on thoughts of the future, "when i get (this or that)", but the only time we ever live is now. It's always now, and if happiness is an experience, the only time we can have that experience is now.
I am not saying be a hedonist, not saying don't make plans and work towards goals, not saying don't live in the world and have sex and make money. I am very much saying that don't just think achieving your goals will make you happy. You will almost certainly get a momentary rush, but real happiness is a state of consciousness, an energetic experience, not a winning scorecard.
You expect at work that if you work the hours you will get a paycheck of money. Well, if you work the hours of personal/spiritual growth you will get a paycheck of higher consciousness.
I would like to mention a point that Goldsmith stresses very much in his writings, a point made in the Eastern traditions: If you are seeking to realize the Self just for purposes of health, pleasure and prosperity, you will never realize the Self, never experience the real thing. Desiring/needing consciousness keeps you from the highest. It's an apparent contradiction, because as human beings how could we not want health, relationship, pleasure and prosperity. My best understanding at this time is that we usually have mixed motives, and it is important that ones' primary motive be to experience the Self, not the worldly goods, that it's a long journey, and we start where we are.
Motive is something that can't be faked. I think that probably, over time, ones' motives get purified through doing the work. To me this is maybe the toughest question of all, that of motive. We can work, meditate, do yoga, and all the other practices, but how to purify motives and intentions is not so clear to me, yet in my own life it has just gradually happened, not that i'm so fucking pure, but a lot more than i used to be.
People put lots of hours into making money and working out, but how much time do most people put into working on themselves, the effort which would produce the greatest results?
some reading, a very short starter list
NLP-the new technology of achievement
Louise Hay-You Can Heal Your Life
Joel Goldsmith-Practicing the Presence (or any other title by him)
Marie Manuchehri-Intuitive Self Healing (about the Chakras)
Bhagavad Gita
Aldous Huxley-The Perennial Philosophy
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