Life Advice from Brilliant Minds
Stillness has power. By being still, you gain the power to think your thoughts more clearly. You gain the power to separate the right thoughts from the wrong ones. And this gives you the power to do the right action, and say the right words.
Artwork
There is a wonderful part to each of us – as well as at least 200 pounds of psychic toxic waste burying that wonderful part. It is necessary for us to learn to draw nourishment into the core of all that – into what is wonderful – and slowly cultivate it and allow it to emerge.
This will happen as we operate in an environment of love and respect. It requires an attitude of service, which in no way depreciates us.
Rather, it uplifts everybody because we are clear-headed, practical and coming from and understanding of the unity of life.
Excerpt from
Featured art work
William Blake (1757-1827)
The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun
c. 1803-1805
Watercolor, graphite and incised lines
43.7 x 34.8 cm
If you agree and believe that the way you think has some effect on you life, than changing the way you think is the only real solution for transformation.
In order to become better versions of who we are for a better life, we must change our personalities.
How Our Personalities Are Formed
We have around 60,000 to 70,000 thoughts per day. That’s an average of 2500 – 3,300 thoughts per hour. Out of those 60-70 thousand thoughts that you think, 90% of those thoughts are the same thoughts as the day before.
If you believe (like I do) that your thoughts are some how connected to your life, then the same thoughts always lead to the same choices, which eventually lead to the same outcomes.
Thoughts for Change
Since the same choices always lead to the same behaviors, the same behaviors create the same experiences.
The same experiences produce the same emotions.
Those very same emotions drive those very same thoughts.
A vicious circle and a predictable life.
Your thoughts, fueled by emotions effect your entire life, including your biology, your neurocircuitry, your neurochemistry, your neurohormones, and even your genetic expression. It is all equal to how you think, how you act and how you feel.
How you think, how you act and how you feel is called your personality and your personality creates your personal reality.
Art by Robert Jahns
You know you need to repair your routine when you start the day all full of fire that burns out faster than a stick of Palo Santo by 11 am. Nothing is going to change if you don’t. Yes you are on a track, but is it the best track? The one that will propel you forward to expand your awareness? To elevate your consciousness? To move you further towards the life of your dreams.
Doing the day a little differently will help curb the habits that are holding you back.
Build Morning Inspiration & Motivation
You know what I am talking about. You’ve journaled, meditated, gone to the gym, consumed something healthy and you’ve created a “to do” list – you’ve set some goals for the day and then bam, hello, it’s 1 pm and you’ve done everything but what you set out to do.
Frustrated, the best advice is to become more open to being blown off course. Why? Perhaps the course you are choosing isn’t the one you are suppose to be on. Moving through our days a bit more loosely will also remove the limitations we begin with when we try to define the day in it’s entirety.
Where to start? Your true life starts when you remove the mask. A poem by Shel Silverstein
8. UNDERFACE (Every Thing On It)
Underneath my outside face
There’s a face that none can see.
A little less smiley,
A little less sure,
But a whole lot more like me
Masks by Richard Jonkman
Fuel Your Focus with a Mid Day Reset
Take a pause, gain some perspective. Is this really the day you intended? Recognize the obstacles. Where are you procrastinating? How is your body disconnected from your mind’s desires? How is your thinking trapped in a tunnel?
Haruki Murakami // “What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world.”
Ethan Hawke // “Pay attention: what you need to know is usually in front of you. There are no secrets, just things people choose not to notice.”
Wind down Wonderfully for Rest & Recovery
Develop a wind down ritual. Examine the day and explore the darker regions of your heart. What could have been addressed by a better version of you?
Frida Kahlo // “At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.”
“If you have strength of character, you can use that as fuel to not only be a survivor but to transcend and thrive. You must use an internal alchemy to turn something rotten and horrible into gold.”
“An individual has not begun to live until he can rise above the narrow horizons of his particular individualist concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. And this is one of the big problems of life, that so many people never quite get to the point of rising above self. . .so they end up the tragic victims of self-centeredness.” MJK jr. Read the entire brilliant thing here.
Take note: this post was inspired by the King himself and the incredible speech above and another interesting dude, Jocko Willink, decorated retired Navy SEAL officer, author of the book Extreme Ownership: How US Navy SEALs Lead & Win.
Not Dead, Don’t Quit
Serving with Honor and Integrity On and Off the Battlefield, Jocko believes we can all benefit from creating our own code of conduct. Call it what you will, standard procedure, a moral code, rules of road, your manifesto. . .Jocko and Martin Luther King Jr. had me thinking about what I aspire to be less and more of.
Note: two habits I have recently adapted into my daily practice of MJ’s experiment in human development include . . .
If you’re feeling stuck and struggling to make the progress you want, take a look around you. Most people adapt to whatever environment they find themselves. They have what psychologists call an “external locus of control,” where they believe factors outside of them dictate the direction of their lives.
No they do not. YOU CONTROL THE DIRECTION OF YOUR LIFE.
A Warrior Queen’s Creed
(hey, this is a major step up for me, I use to be a worrier queen)
A Warrior Queen knows that she is a tiny, vulnerable being riding on a blue dot in space, not the center of the universe. (this is the money right here).
A Warrior Queen is always willing to help others rise up and become the best that they can be. Even when she mistakens a friend’s call as an interuption in her day.
A Warrior Queen knows what motivates her, for she is very self aware, to the point of calling bullshit on the lies she tells herself.
I am the Warrior Queen.
“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” Tony Morrison
Asylum Art sketches Januz Miralles
Because I am more prone to incessant worry about future events than I am to anticipating good outcomes, or pleasant surprises, I continue to struggle with my pessimism bias. That is I tend to exaggerate the likelihood that negative things will happen in the future.
This morning, walking back from the gym, I had a thought drop in from the sky. A simple little question just popped into my head. The question I pondered. . .
or better said by Alan Cohen . . .
Here, a cheat sheet to the many cognitive biases that keep us stuck.
Featured image “Open mind” ceramic series by Johnson Tsang
Elizabeth Carlson “I am Falling in Love with My Imperfections“. A poem to learn from.
The more time I spend with the aging and the dying, the more I am beginning to understand what really matters each day.
Their regrets become my wisdom and the important lessons to win tomorrow, while there is still life to be lived. This is the stuff I should’ve learned so long ago and the lessons that should be taught in school.
For so long I made a pact with myself to seek the truth, until I realized, that . . .
There are many realities. There are many versions of what appears obvious. Whatever appears as the unshakeable truth, its exact opposite may also be true in another context. – Amish Tripathi
Embrace the ability to see all things as they are and not as we ‘think’ they are. Reality in all it’s forms, is our friend.
You may think your “story” is boring, ordinary and not worth sharing, but you are wrong. Very wrong. You have some experience with life and someone out there can learn from your mistakes. You hold the power to lift someone up with a single sentence, a lesson learned. Share your lessons with strangers.
To play our roles in life well – whatever the roles are, brother, father, husband, wife, mother, sister, daughter, friend, mentor. . .we simply must be and do that which is right at the moment and do it with patience and kindness.
So listen deeply to friends and enemies. Listen quietly for all the missing words, the things they don’t say. All of it can teach you as well.
And remember, fear not the angry and rageful. To see compassionately how others may be in pain.
Stay soft and available always. Yes, you can train, practice and prepare for the future, but most importantly, be adaptable, flexible and ready to pivot, detour and move on when things aren’t going well.
Sharing our gifts, bringing our best and leaving those we encounter feeling stronger and more inspired after we leave them.
Be emotionally free, while letting go of all resentment and anger. Forgiving all.
Speaking fewer words, owning less of everything, accomplishing more by doing less. Every so often, it is our duty to cleanse our emotional baggage and past hurt. Heal our pain and fix our faulty parts by becoming more self-aware while understanding the genesis of our emotions
Balance out the days with enough sleep time, intimacy time, work & focus time, time in (self-reflection), down time and play time. Live each day as if it was your last.
Remember this, when it all falls apart or there’s a heavy cross to bear and the storm is on the horizon. Learn to adapt and adjust daily.
“Amid a world of noisy, shallow actors it is noble to stand aside and say, ‘I will simply be.”
― Henry David Thoreau
“Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.”
― Allen Ginsberg
“The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself.”
― Lao Tzu
I was seeking the truth about why my words contradicted my actions. Why my good intentions were backfiring. Why I would say “I want to achieve this and I want to achieve that” all day long- but I never really met my goals head on. I got some half-assed results. Whether it was ” I will never let anyone treat me like that again,” as I jumped into bed with my ex or “I’m not eating another piece of fattening bread again,” as I smeared a slab of butter on the dinner roll. Contradicting myself all the time. Oh to be human.
I would set myself up each day for success, at least in in my mind, but by dinner time, I was right back where I started, sometimes even worse off. Self-sabotage. Overpromising too many people, including myself and underdelivering and setting myself up for failure.
It came to the point where I just couldn’t trust myself at all any more. I’d say things to myself like “I’ll start saving money soon,” as I continued to rack up my credit cards at my favorite boutiques, restaurants and cafes.
I’m working on building my trust back. Honestly, how can you trust anyone else if you don’t trust yourself?
Read: 21 Signs You Don’t Trust Yourself
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: First Part
Trusting Only The Good Parts of Ourselves
Personally, I have found that self-trust starts with self-forgiveness and taking the time to understand why we are so self-deceptive. I took sometime to think back on all the terrible, selfish and thoughtless things I have done to myself and to others throughout my life. Then I read the list. God that was hard. Then I waited a day and thought about more bad things that I did and added to the list. Oh, to take a good look into the guiltiness of it all. It was so damn painful. The crazy thing is – I would write down something I remembered that I did that hurt someone and then I WOULD MAKE AN EXCUSE FOR WHY I DID IT. Really??
The point I am trying to make here is that we can’t just trust some parts of of ourselves. Like the good parts with the good emotions. We have to trust our whole entire being. The good, the bad and the ugly. This starts by not abandoning yourself. You abandon yourself every time you don’t allow yourself to be completely honest, feel badly and sit with some of the pain and sadness you have brought to your own life. Don’t dwell there, just become more aware.
“Self trust is the essence of heroism.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“But I think that because they trusted themselves and respected themselves as individuals, because they knew beyond doubt that they were valuable and potentially moral units — because of this they could give God their own courage and dignity and then receive it back. Such things have disappeared perhaps because men do not trust themselves anymore, and when that happens there is nothing left except perhaps to find some strong sure man, even though he may be wrong, and to dangle from his coattails.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden
