Expectations

Phew but 2016 was a tough year! What made it tough though? Well, normally the amount of emotional pain you feel is roughly equal to the distance between your expectations of reality and reality itself. In other words, if reality does not meet up to your expectations of reality, emotional pain results. This is so true for relationships as well.

If you had to take all your expectations of your partner and have them embodied as a person, you would be presented with a demi-god! So near perfect would this divine creature be. The reality is that you get a flabby, belching, farting, forgetful, complaining, grumpy human being. In just about every relationship, the reality of what is received is far removed from the expectation of what is wanted.

This is the main source of pain in your relationship, that feeling of “This is not what I ordered!” The truth is that relationships are not made to order, you will always get what you need (in order to grow and become a better you) and very rarely what you actually want. So how about this year you embrace what you have, warts and all, and let go of your unrealistic expectations? Let’s be real, you don’t match up to your partner’s expectations either. No, you really aren’t that perfect.

Perhaps it is for you to learn and grow from what you have. How would a stronger, healthy you handle the relationship you have? Is it time to say “NO!” to that abuse? Is it time to receive the love you are being given and give up on that notion that you are unlovable? Only you know what it will be.

The truth is that expectations are usually wrong. Whether you are expecting perfection and getting a human, or expecting to be mistreated and getting real love instead. Let’s make 2017 the year that you let go of these expectations and start living in the real world!

Mind Games

How many times have you personally felt in your relationship that you were expected to be a mind reader? You were expected to just know what the other person was thinking or feeling, or know what you (according to the other person) have done wrong. It’s easy to start thinking that your partner is playing mind games and is just being vindictive. After all, they surely know that you can’t read their minds? Come on, they can’t read yours so how can you be expected to read theirs?

I challenge you, for the sake of your relationship to consider that this isn’t the case after all. Think about it for a second, when you know something is true, when something is very obvious to you, you assume that it is so for everyone else. This is why other people’s behaviour bothers you so much. We tend to think that everyone shares our beliefs, and has their moral compasses set the same way as ours, so when someone behaves in a way that you wouldn’t, you feel offended. Surely they know better? They don’t. If they did they wouldn’t behave that way, and who says what is better?

So now think about your partner in those moments when they get upset over something YOU did, and expect you to know what it is that you have done wrong. They are falling into the very same trap that you fall into on a regular basis, now you know that they probably aren’t playing mind games and really do believe that you know exactly what they are thinking. Let them off the hook.

How do you deal with this, though? Most people just attack the other person and it becomes one of many fights. You won’t like the answer, but it is the way forward. In that moment when you feel like attacking, take one for the team. Wait until cooler heads can prevail, and then when the moment has passed you can discuss it CALMLY and RATIONALLY. Don’t think you can deal with it in the heat of the moment, no one ever thinks straight in the middle of a furnace.

http://www.imaginelifecoaching.co.za

The Best of You

Does your partner still get the best of you, or does he/she just get your frustrations and bad days, your fears and your temper? Are you giving your relationship your “supreme effort” or the dregs of what is left?

“Familiarity breeds contempt”, so the old saying goes. Perhaps we don’t grow to despise the person we are with, but over time we just take them for granted and stop making the effort. If that person isn’t going anywhere, then why should you work at it? “Life is full of stress and demands,” (we say to ourselves) “And I give my best to everyone else, when I get home I just want to dump my clothes on the floor, put on my slippers and stop caring!” You start to notice the effect of this thinking when you start snapping at each other for no real reason and when disagreements just turn into arguments that have no real point to them.

This is what happens, mediocrity in, mediocrity out. You are getting back what you are putting in. What you no longer feel you need to work for – you no longer work to keep! It isn’t like you woke up one morning and decided to stop working at it, it happened over time. Just like when you got that new car and you were pedantic about keeping it clean and safe, and then one day all that didn’t really matter that much anymore. It is human nature, but the fact is that if you want your relationship to continue being successful after 5 or 6 years, then you will need to work against that nature.

You have forgotten (as has your partner probably) how incredibly lucky you are to have found each other; you have stopped seeing the value of the other person (you once thought of them as a prize to be won); you have stopped being intentional about your relationship and you think it can survive on auto-pilot. So, if you are wondering why things are just not as good as they once were, ask yourself if your partner is still getting the best of you.

http://www.imaginelifecoaching.co.za

The Observer Created Reality

A belief is nothing more than an assumption about reality, this is why there are so many of them, and they can change with the discovery of a new fact. Beliefs are nothing more than our observations, the judgements we bring to our responses, the meanings we add to the things we encounter. Quantum physics has gone a long way to prove that we live in an observer created reality,  which basically means that it is the assumptions we hold about life that shape our reality. The judgements you hold about other people will make them so in your experience, as I have said before, reality is nothing more that energy arranging itself to match your beliefs. It also means that if you change your assumptions/judgements/observations/beliefs about reality then the reality you are observing will change.  

It is quite possible that you have held the opinion for most of your life that your reality is something separate from you and you are subject to its whims, this is how it appears to you. When you sleep through life, your reality is created by default but as soon as you become aware then the magic begins.  I have had the delight of seeing client’s change their circumstances noticeably by simply shifting their observations. Some people simply can’t accept this as a fact because they have lived so long as a victim to their circumstances that those circumstances just seem like brutes that they can neither control, change, or overcome. Their experiences certainly seem to back up their belief, but what they don’t know is that it is their beliefs that have given them those circumstances. This idea that reality is an absolute deal, and you are either lucky in life or very unlucky, is firmly entrenched in their neural pathways, and when something is that entrenched it is the law.

What I am saying about the true nature of reality, according to Quantum Science, will be to some people what they idea of a spherical earth to the “flat earthers”. People get burned at the stake for presenting ideas that go against entrenched laws. As we have found through time, just because it is widely believed, does not make it so. So how do you change your observations? Life will give you plenty of opportunities. Let’s use a test case, you have been standing in a queue for a while and someone pushes in front of you, how do you react? You see most people go through life reacting and they spend a lot of time justifying those reactions. What judgements would you bring to this situation? How would you judge the other person? Do you find yourself being “pushed in front of” a lot?

The problem with a reaction is that it deals with the content of a situation. Something happens to you and you attach meaning to it. “That person pushed in front of me and that means they are rude,” or “People always push in front of me and that means I am invisible”. All these meanings have to do with the content of the event, and you will find that you will be given a lot of opportunities to judge people as rude, or feel invisible. It will be an ongoing cycle; your reality will confirm your beliefs for as long as you hold them. 

So what if you looked from a contextual position instead? What this basically means is that you look outside of the content for possible meanings for the event, and believe me there are more possibly meanings that you can come up with. “The person is from a culture that doesn’t queue,” “They didn’t notice the queue,” “This is an opportunity for me to meet a new person”, how about, “This is a delay designed to keep me on the perfect track,” or, “I needed to meet this person and I wouldn’t even have known about them if they hadn’t stepped in front of me.” Any one of those can shift your reality, and even in some significant ways. You see nothing is good or bad until you place judgement upon it, but how you judge will determine how reality unfolds for you.

Think for a moment about the last long trip you took, you were very certain about the destination, but how uncertain was the actual trip? There were, no doubt, some minor delays and other things you didn’t expect. Have you ever heard anyone remark on how they were delayed and then came across an accident and realised that if they had left on time it could have been them. You can see life as conspiring against you, or you can see life as working with you to get you where you want to go.  Guess what, if you feel the life is conspiring against you then conspiracy is what you will experience, but, if you think life is helping you and guiding you on the best route through the uncertainty then you will experience benevolence.

Work with what comes up in life, if you need to change then change, if you need to move then move, if you experience delay of some sort then be thankful because you cannot see the potential dangers ahead. It is a moment by moment practice, and it takes awareness. The question for you is are you going to just react the way you always react, or are you going to take a moment and respond in a new way and break the cycle? Your dream life could really be just as far away as deciding to see life in a new way!

Namaste!

The Free Will Myth

Last week in Johannesburg, South Africa, just up the road from where I live, there was a road rage incident. A driver and a motorcyclist lost their cool and had a shoot out, leaving one in hospital and one dead. It amazes the calm people that angry people don’t ask “What am I expecting when I pull this trigger?” It made me realise that free will does not exist. All of your choices, behaviours, beliefs, and values are not yours to choose. Every decision, from who you vote for, what you wear, who you are friends with, to who you marry, is not yours. I know what you are thinking, you are pretty convinced that you have the freedom to choose, and indeed you do, but you still aren’t the one making the choice. The bad choices you made weren’t yours, but neither were the good. You should feel no shame and take no credit.

How can I make such a ridiculous sounding statement? Because, like the two men who had the shootout, and certainly would never have “chosen” to do what they did, everything happens within a context. The truth is that nothing happens in a vacuum, and you are inseparable from your environment. Still to say that your choices are not really your own is to suggest that you are a puppet, a glorified robot.

Let’s take a closer look, a simple (for some) decision, what to wear today. You stand at your wardrobe and think about it. The choice is yours, so you think, but when you consider all the influencing factors you realise that it really isn’t. What are the influencers? What you are going to do that day, what you personally prefer (which has the entire history of your life behind it), who will be seeing you, who you will be seeing, what has been said to you, what you have worn before that got attention, and so the list goes on. Change any one of those influences and you will make a different choice.

Consider that red shirt that you love to wear because it suits you, what if someone said it looked ugly on you, would you make a different choice? Probably. So it goes for all the choices you make, your ego based fears are possibly the biggest influencer. That person you marry – is he just like your father? Does she feel like a safe choice? Does she have your tastes? Is he accepted by your friends and family? There are boxes that must get ticked, but change a box and the choice changes.

The entire history of the world happened the way it did so that you would make the choices you make. This is what makes religion (not spirituality) such a strange thing, your religion is chosen for you, if you consider what your parents do, what you have been taught, what your friends do, what will get you the most acceptance, you realise that there really wasn’t much of a choice at all. This is the thing though, our choices are usually those that we think will give us the most shine, get us the most acceptance, or on the other hand, the ones that will keep us safe, another way of putting this is that we do what we do to either get pleasure or to avoid pain. Even these motivations are wholly dependant on history – our experience and what we have been taught.

Think of each decision and behaviour as the outcome of complex theorems, or the result of a computer program, then you realise that your decision making process is not as free as you once thought. The chances are that if the variables stay the same, then you will make the same choice. So you are where you are by design, as a result of your history and programming, but you are far from helpless to do anything about it.

This is why prisons fail though, why drug addicts relapse, why children stay unruly, and why your own attempts at behaviour modification always fail. So many personal development things fail because they are an attempt to fix the result and not the programming or environment that causes the result.

So how do you fix things? Well here is where your free will comes into play, forget trying to change decisions or behaviour right now,if you try to do that I will guarantee that you will hear yourself saying, “I never meant to say/do that!” You need to realise that your decisions and behaviour are a response to, and a result of environment and influence. so in order to change things you need to focus on feeling good. By feeling good I am referring to that, “all is right with world, I am at peace” feeling. I am not talking about a hedonistic “If it feels good then do it” way of living, but a way of living that seeks for balance. Eating to support life, exercising to support life, pursuing spirituality to support life, relating to others in a life supporting way.

The way you feel when you make life affirming choices results in the kind of “good feeling” that I am talking about here. Hedonism (the pursuit of pleasure for pleasure’s sake) ironically is not life affirming, but rather seeks to avoid that which is life affirming. Hedonism is a direct response to the pain of life itself, an attempt to distract oneself or an attempt to just rip the tops of the weeds off leaving the roots intact.

When you make life affirming choices in all you do (choices that build and don’t destroy), you face the cause of the pain head on, you tackle the roots.  In other words choices that increase health in all aspects of life, this will lead to a feeling of wellbeing, when this is your context, the content must follow. Surely one of the most life affirming choices you can make will be to surrender that which is cause you so much “death”?

You cannot fix the self, as the one doing the fixing is the very self that needs fixing, but what you can do is surrender the obstacles to this wellbeing. I will teach more about raising consciousness in posts to come, raising consciousness is about changing the context which will change the content, so forget about behaviour modification and the like, it might work in the very short term but not in the long term. You will be amazed at how quickly your behaviour and decisions change as you change the context (internal and external context).

Here’s to raising consciousness,

Anthony.

Sleeping Giants

It is a handful of people who make a quality decision to change their lives, and commit to that ideal. I take my hat off to the small percentage that does that and sticks with it. In my coaching practice I have clients who commit and see it through, and clients who give up early on for whatever reason, and go back to the life they know. There is always a valid excuse, be it time or money or just plain old “naafiness”. If you don’t know what NAAFI means, it is simply a state of “Ambition and F**kall interest”. The thing is about excuses is that they are lies wrapped up in reasons.

Let me break some news to you, you are going to fight to stay in that comfort zone that you are stuck in, no matter how badly you want to get out. Comfort zones are always comfortable after a fashion, and here is why: There is a little almond-shaped collection of neurons in the brain called the Amygdala which has the purpose of managing and maintaining your comfort zones. A comfort zone is nothing more than a condition you have accepted as normal in your life, and the Amygdala is there to ensure that you stay within what is “normal” because “normal” is predictable, and predictable is safe, supposedly. When you start to move out of your comfort zone your Amygdala goes to work and orders you body to release hormones that make you feel all kinds of bad, and following those feelings come the rationales that it would indeed be better to just simply go back to what is “normal”, and you are seemingly powerless to do anything about it. In fact, the Amygdala succeeds in making your comfort zone look good and preferable to change.

Change is simple, but it isn’t easy, and that is why so few people do it. We are forgetful creatures, and it is so easy (thanks to the Amygdala) to just forget that you are in a bad place. “It’s not so bad after all,” you tell yourself right before you fall back asleep. This is why it is the rare individual that breaks free and shines, while the rest of the population calls them special, admires them, and goes on sleeping.

If you think this brief stint on earth is simply “A job, a car, a house, a grave,” then you are mistaken. There is nothing wrong if you want just that, but it is a tragic waste. Still it is your choice, stay asleep or wake up.

So where are you now? In his book “Power vs Force” Dr David Hawkins states that there are 17 levels of consciousness, ranging from shame to enlightenment, here is the list from bottom to top:

1. Shame
2. Guilt
3. Apathy
4. Grief
5. Fear
6. Desire
7. Anger
8. Pride
9. Courage
10. Neutrality
11. Willingness
12. Acceptance
13. Reason
14. Love
15. Joy
16. Peace
17. Enlightenment

Personal power only makes an appearance at level 9 – courage. It is my experience that a great majority of people are somewhere between levels 1 and 8 inclusive. Hawkins confirms in his book that upwards of 85% of the world’s population is below level 9 and than any meaningful human satisfaction cannot even commence until level 10 where personal power (or self confidence) begins to emerge. It’s no wonder then that people stuck between 1 and 8 inclusively can’t change their lives; there is no power to do so.

When a client comes to me, they are usually stuck on one of the lower levers, and coaching helps them to move to level 10 – neutrality, this is where the client becomes flexible and non-judgemental towards life.  Once personal power makes an appearance the client starts to become their own coach, once the client reaches level 11, then my role as their coach becomes supportive and the client is now their own life coach.

If the client quits before then, and it is quite easy to do so, they will likely just go back to where they were before they made the decision to change their lives (the place where the problem wasn’t yet too painful) until the pain of existence increases and they feel the call to move again.

You can move yourself forward though, and at least get to a place where you let yourself be helped, and stick with it! Recognise that all the junk that you are experiencing is symptomatic of lower level consciousness, it offers you an opportunity because once you recognise that dissonance, that experience of what you don’t want, then you can declare what is it that you do want, and if you don’t know what that is then just say the opposite of what it is that you don’t want. Make a commitment to yourself that you are ready to do whatever it takes, write your desire and your commitment down – “I declare that I no longer want………What I want is………And I am prepared to do what it takes to get there!” Of course, there is no guarantee that you will stick to it; in fact you might not, so it will take a few more moments of recognising the dissonance and declaration. I would strongly recommend coaching, but that is only for people who really want to change their lives and that isn’t you, is it?

Here is to waking up!

Anthony.

http://www.imagineif.co.za

Spirit Man

The discussion went like this: “Imagine if we all live as if we were God, wouldn’t that make the world a much better place?” to which the well-meaning religious zealot replied, “That’s the most ridiculous question I have ever heard. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin all thought they were God and look at the damage they did.” Now, putting the judgment aside, I would say that both people are right in this discussion, but for different reasons.

There is a huge difference between the statements “I am God!” and “I am, God”. Now on paper it is just a simple case of comma placement, but the difference between these two statements is that one proclaims “I am superior to everyone else so I will set myself above all men,” and the other proclaims, “I am one with my creator, therefore I have the power to love and serve all men who are my equals, brothers, sisters, and one with the creator too.” The religious man’s concerns are valid, when the ego sets itself up as God then disaster follows. Why? Because the ego’s sole motivation is fear, and what it does it never does for the benefit of mankind but for self-preservation alone. A dictator might start out with good intentions, but in the end he does what he does not to make his people’s world a better place, but his own.

Why is the other person right though? Because what he is talking about is living a spirit-based life. The spirit knows no fear and is not corrupted in any way at all. The spirit is that part of us that is God, so living as if we were God would be to live from a place that is pure and loving. It all sounds wonderful though, but it does sound like it is something that only has a place in religious practice, but to believe that would be a mistake. The lie of the ego is that living from the spirit has no place in a secular society, nor does it have a place in our work sphere. As a result of this very little is taught about what living from the spirit would look like, or even how you would go about doing it, and it has been relegated to the ranks of the “warm fuzzy” and “mystical”.

There is nothing particularly cosy about living from the spirit, but there is also nothing that is as rewarding. We do so much in an attempt to find fulfillment, and nothing seems to really work. The only key that fits this lock is living from the spirit, since it is at the core of your purpose as a human being you are not going to live your purpose unless you learn to live from the spirit. Many have tried the opposite and failed.

The myth is that living from the spirit means taking a vow of poverty, wearing sackcloth, and meditating on a mountain for hours a day. Yes, that is one way to do it, but there are many, many, many other ways. As a wise guru once said, “Some people choose the easy way to reach enlightenment, they sit on a mountain and meditate. Others choose the more difficult path, they get married and have kids.” The truth is that you need to pick the spirit centered live that is going to work for you. I can however give you some practical tips on how you can start doing it right now in the place you are in.

I have decided to focus my coaching on helping people rediscover and live from their spirits, but so many people reject the idea outright. Why? Because they have been burned by religion, which is sad because religion has little to with spirituality. Religion can introduce you to spirituality, but it isn’t spirituality itself. Man made rules with the fear of punishment as a lurking threat is not the true face of spirituality. Spirituality, in essence, is a personal journey of discovery where one progressively sheds the ego and rediscovers the forgotten divinity that exists in us all. You can only ever be given guidelines to follow, but your personal spirituality will be yours alone. Your own brand.  You are a unique individual, why should your spirituality be any different?

Are you really happy? Truly content? Absolutely at peace? Or are these things something that you are still pursuing? The world of ego is a place of fear, and is wanting of these things. They cannot be found in that world. Even if you get a taste of them, there is still a sense of quiet desperation that lurks underneath. The world of spirit is your true home, and that is the place of all fulfillment and abundance. Now this is not a call to religion, to become a this or a that. It is a call to acknowledge that there is much more to this universe than your physical senses can experience, and that you are indeed a part of something great and are not separate from it.

Your greatest teachers on the spiritual path are going to be everyone around you. You can learn to love the hard to love and forgive the unforgivable, be kind to those who least deserve it and patient with the infuriating. To say that the spiritual way has no place in the workplace is to miss the greatest place of learning and the best place to practice it. So where do you start? Right where you are. It is a journey of rediscovery, of returning to the wonder of childhood, and finding out that the universe is about play, not work.

I think one of the most powerful pieces of advice if you want to discover the power of spirituality and move away from the awful grip of ego comes from that amazing poet Rumi, “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” The path to spirituality begins here.

You can be religious without being spiritual, and you can be spiritual without being religious. It is about living an authentic life that embraces the true wonder of what it means to be alive. How easy it is to forget that in this difficult world though.

Shall we begin?

The 79th Organ

There are 78 organs in the body, that’s what medical science tells us. Today I want to tell you about the 79th. The trouble with medical science is that much of it is based on Newtonian physics, that is to say that the human body is a machine and it is separate from the environment that is in. There is you and then there is everything, and everyone, else “out there”. It is strongly suggested that there is no real connection between you and what’s “out there”. Thankfully not all science agrees with this, and the rest of science is slowly catching up. Spiritual traditions have long taught that there is no “out there”, and that may in fact be true.

How do you know what is “out there”? How do you know what your reality is all about? How do you get to experience it? What you “see” is information in the form of light entering the eyes and then being passed on to the brain for processing. What you “hear” is sound entering the ears and the getting passed on to the brain for processing. What you “smell” is particles coming in through the nose and then being passed on to the brain for processing. What you “taste” is particles coming into contact with the tongue and then being passed on to the brain for processing. What you “feel” is contact with the skin being passed on to the brain for processing. Basically it all happens in the brain.  We call the result of all of this processing “perception”.  “Out there” is actually all happening “in here” so to speak. Your experience of reality is nothing more than perception, and it all happens in the brain. It is next to impossible to prove that what is “out there” is really “out there”. It is possible to hallucinate, to imagine, to dream, in such vivid ways that it is believed to be “out there”.  I can only take your word for it that you really exist, but I cannot prove it beyond reasonable doubt. My entire experience of you is nothing more than what my brain is processing, you are really just “in my head” so to speak.

Two people can experience the same thing in different ways. One person can love chocolate ice cream, the other prefers vanilla. Your perceptions are truly unique, they are what makes you “you”. Perceptions are made up of your beliefs and get developed over time, they are capable of change and are constantly evolving. If perceptions are the product of our beliefs and reality is determined by those perceptions then reality must perfectly match our beliefs. If those beliefs are changed then reality must change as well. I propose that the the working of our perceptions make up what I call the 79th organ.

Imagine for a moment that reality, as you know it, is an organ in your body. I could assume a number of things from this. Like any other organ in your body your reality can be healthy or sick. Your reality can be affected by the health of the rest of your body. Your reality has certain requirements if it is to be healthy. Your reality also serves a vital function that is crucial to the wellbeing of the rest of your system. Your reality contains so much information but it will require you to slow down and stop in order to learn from it. Like zipping down a highway you miss so much that you drive past, but being in the passenger seat in a slow moving vehicle makes you go “Wow, I never saw that before.” I have a wonderful metaphor that will help you understand just how your reality is simply a part of you and not really separate from you.

You are reading this blog on some sort of computer right? What you see on the screen is not the computer, but a representation of what is going on in the computer. If you had to look at the raw data it wouldn’t make any sense to you at all, it would look like this 1011011000111010110101101….except in electrical form. Yet on the screen you can see information about the health of the computer and you can even use the information given there to diagnose and fix the computer. So it is with your reality, it is a representation of your personal energy presented to you in a form/s you can understand. Or, should understand. The trouble is that we have been taught that reality is separate from us and outside of our control. We have been taught to fear it, and rely on it for our happiness. In truth, you have learned to serve your reality, when reality should actually be serving you.

Reality is information. It is there to serve you and lead you to a life of well being. The trick is learning how you use that information. When you get an error message on a computer then it is either a problem that can be fixed in the software (on the screen) or it is a hardware issue (a physical repair). This means that reality will give you information that will lead you to change your beliefs or change your lifestyle. There are changes that will specifically affect the way you think and changes that will have a specific impact on your physical body. We can look at this another way as well. Driving is all about safety and peace, but there are things that can alert us when this is not so. Perhaps there is a light on the dashboard that tells you that you need petrol or oil, or the car is overheating. Perhaps the traffic is bad on the route you are taking and you need to go a different way. Basically, you will either need to work on an internal matter or change something externally.

In life you will be faced with all kinds of situations, you can either choose to use this information to improve your life, or you can be a victim and cry foul. Guess which one will serve you better? If you choose to use the information then you will always have one of two choices: work internally or change something externally. Here is an example: Your boss is always irritable with you. Most people would complain and grumble, but if you use that information then you could do something like this:

Is my boss irritable with me or is he irritable with everyone? If it is everyone then he may have problems I don’t know about and I can choose to not let it affect me and show some understanding. Let’s face it, we all go through stuff and behave badly sometimes, that’s not to excuse bad behaviour but a little tolerance for the human condition please. If he is just irritable with me, then I either need to fix my behaviour or I need to fix something in the situation – perhaps confront the boss or get a new job.

Sounds incredible simple doesn’t it? We do you know how to change a belief or fix a behaviour? Do you know how to constructively confront someone? Do you have the courage to quit your job? It may just open up a world of learning for you.

Nothing is ever wasted in nature, not a single thing. Everything is used for growth and well being. Since you are a part of nature it would serve you well to live like this too. Most people sleep their way through life and miss what their reality is teaching them, and then they get stuck and wonder what has happened. When you understand that reality is there to serve your highest good, no matter how terrible you think something is, then you can stop reacting, slow down, and pay attention to what is being communicated. You are only ever where your decisions have taken you. Wake up, accept the help being offered, and start paying attention. Your life awaits.

Keep the shiny side up 🙂

Anthony.

Need help?….go to www.imagineif.co.za.

Tune in to my weekly radio show – www.blogtalkradio.com/imaginationstation , it’s like this blog on steroids!

 

What’s Love Got To Do With It?

Love has been given a bad name, it’s not love’s fault as love didn’t do any of what love has been accused of doing. It’s more a case of mistaken identity. If it looks like love, sounds like love, feels like love, and smells like love, then it must be love right? Trouble is, it still isn’t love. We have confused love with neuropeptides, and put the cart before the horse.

Remember that I mentioned last week that the “Law of Attraction” is a group of laws working together to produce a result? I also said that knowing the laws is one thing, how to work with them is another. Love is the thing that makes it all work, so if you don’t understand love, then you have a problem.  Before I tell you what love is, lets look at what love isn’t.

How do you know you love someone or something? The answer would seem simple, because of how you feel. We have even coined the phrases “to fall in or out of love”, and we can declare that the spark is gone, we don’t feel the same way anymore, or we get tingles, feel light headed or as some doomed lover once declared we feel like “the king of the world”. Euphoric and goose bumpy equals in love, miserable or indifferent equals out of love. You will hear songs about how he still gets goosebumps ten years later when he sees her, or how he is like a pill that makes her ill. Some guys will scale mountains or swim oceans, some girls get restraining orders. Mostly its starts out warm and fuzzy and ends up with complaints that the romance has died. Sounds like I am talking about the rise and fall of love, but I am not. None of this is describing love anymore than the feeling of contentment describes the pizza I just ate. Love is not a feeling. Love sometimes results in a feeling, and often it doesn’t.

Still think that the feeling is love? I don’t blame you. TV says it is, the radio says it is, the magazine says it is, the gift shops makes a fortune on Valentines Day saying that it is. Feelings are powerful things, they can start wars and unite nations, but here is why love isn’t a feeling: It can so easily go away. Look closer at what a feeling really is and you will wonder how we could reduce love to such a basic biological response. First of all let’s refine our definition. When we are talking about feeling love, we are really talking about an emotion. The feeling is how the emotion makes itself known to you. Let’s take happiness for example, the emotion you call love and the emotion of happiness both have their source in the Limbic System, without going into too much detail, happiness is nothing more than neuropeptides that get released in response to a thought and connect to the trillions of cells in your body, resulting in the feeling. That feeling you call love is essentially the same thing, except that it is a cocktail of hormones and peptides that converge to produce a powerful effect. What you call love is nothing more than a naturally occurring and highly addictive cocktail the works within the body to elevate mood and inspire irrational behaviour. It is nature’s way to fool you into procreating. The love between a parent and child is nothing more than a supremely powerful instinct, some parents don’t have it.

It might take a little while for the shock to wear off, the truth is you have been crowning an impostor. You have based the health of your relationships on the presence or absence of a feeling that ironically is not designed to last, certainly not in the way you experience it at the start of a relationship. You have also allowed yourself to base your sense of self worth on the presence or absence of this feeling.

So what is love then? God is love. Ok, that might not fly with you, so let me explain. If you want to know what love is, then you will need to buy a plane ticket and fly to South America, trek deep into the Amazon Jungle and find a place that has not been interfered with and just watch for a season or two. If you can’t do this, here is what you will notice: Effortless abundance. This is achieved by an unseen force that manages the balance of the ecosystem: Something dies, something is born, something hunts, something flies, something is poisonous, something is edible, sometimes the rain falls, sometimes it doesn’t. All of these seemingly random acts occur so that there might be balance – so that there might be abundance. Love is the force that works to maintain the balance that results in abundance.

Understanding this is crucial to repairing the mess we make in our lives. When we choose fear instead of love we start interfering in our own lives. We do this by forcing things. We rush into relationships, we take out bank loans, we drive too fast, we push our kids too hard, we strive for the things we think we want, we look for distractions instead of engaging with our world. Fear leads us to believe that relationships must always feel good, that there must always be plenty, that our kids must do as we say, and that working hard is the right way to get what we want.  Fear makes us want to be in control.

Love doesn’t work that way. To choose love instead of fear is to let go of control and accept that everything that happens in your life, whether you like it or not, is designed to restore or manage the balance of your life, and that is the only natural way to a life of abundance. Wow is that ever easier said than done though? To the ego, letting go of control is tantamount to suicide. Have you ever tried just allowing the pieces to fall where they will and accepting it? It means that sometimes you will feel bad, and that’s ok. Love moves us through the feelings, this is why we have things like forgiveness – feelings are not designed to be lived in, but moved through.

As I have said before, you can only grow when you are balanced. If your life is spent catching up, you will never get ahead. So if you are always pushing yourself off balance, then how do you expect to enjoy the abundance that comes from balance? But then how do you achieve balance? You stop interfering and controlling, you take a deep breath and a step back, and you accept life as it is. I might as well be saying, “Put a gun to your head and pull the trigger”, it’s really that hard. So you have to make it easy, start small, do it in scenarios that aren’t too painful, and build from there. You have had a lifetime of interfering and controlling, it’s all you know and you certainly are encouraged to continue doing this by society.

So living a life of love will really be going against the flow for you, but enjoying the fruit of it is worth it. Compassion, joy, peace, generosity, beauty, kindness, all these and more are the results of living a life of love. Examples abound: Jesus Christ, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Ghandi, Richard Branson, the list goes on. These are all people who in their own way “Let go and let God”. I know you may be thinking, “No thanks, it’s not for me!” So how is your way working for you?

Remember, it’s ALL in your mind! www.imagineif.co.za

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The Only Guaranteed Thing

There is only one thing you can count on for sure and that is change. Everything else might have a good track record but also might let you down. One thing is for sure, you are either coming out of a change, in a change, or facing change. It seems random, yes, it does seem to just smack you upside the head but what if I told you that every change had a message and that you were the author of change in your life. Hmmm. Some things have happened in my world (not to me personally) that were quite big and I just know that the people involved never saw them coming. We rarely do, ask the Romans. What brings change? It is like a complex cake with many strange ingredients.

There are three kinds of changes that I want to address here, the first is what I call “the great balancing act”. I believe that there is an auto-correction feature built into the universe; some spiritual traditions call it karma. I am sure you have seen the Ying/Yang symbol that comes from China – the circle in two halves, one white, one black. Each half of the circle represents the sides of a mountain with the white half being the sunny side and the black half being the side in shade. This symbol shows that there are two types of energy – passive (the black half) and active (the white half), and that these energies must be in perfect balance. This is where karma comes in, or the auto-correction feature I mentioned earlier. If the balance is shifted in any way then nature steps and restores it. This is done in one of two ways – either by taking something away or by adding something. When we add something to our lives (without allowing it to naturally flow into our lives) then nature takes it away. When we remove or deny something in our lives (that nature has not removed or has not vanished due to decay) then nature moves in and adds something. There must be balance. Desperate acts always result in this change. The relationship we rushed into, the rash purchase, the love we deny ourselves, the job we take without thought, these acts of interference bring the turbulence we call change into our lives. The more we force things the more turbulence we experience. The best way to deal with this is to simply relax and allow life to unfold as it will, acting when we need to act and resting when we need to rest. In other words, we need to actively pursue balance in our lives so that nature won’t need to do it for us. The less you interfere the more peaceful life will be.

The second type of change has to do with what is popularly known as “The Law of Attraction” or “The Law of Vibration”. You know, like attracts like. The basic belief is that if we think about money, money, money, then that is what we will attract. If only it were so. Upwards of 90% of the people who attempt to “use” this law to improve their lives fail to do so. It does work, so why do so many people fail? Because they simply do not really understand the law.  The Law of Attraction works in perfect harmony with the principle of balance stated above and you cannot “attract” something that will unbalance you, nature simply won’t allow it. Why is it that you “feel” unbalanced when something “bad” happens then? Feeling sad is does not necessarily mean that you are off balance. I have heard many people say that “I did not attract this so how did it come?” meaning that they weren’t consciously thinking about it. Here is the truth, and listen closely, this may be the thing that changes your life! How do you feel when that “bad” thing happens? That’s what caused it! But wait a minute, I feel that way now, how could I have caused this thing? Can feelings travel back in time? Glad you asked, and it may be that they can (quantum physics suggests as much) but what you are feeling is what has been triggered by the event, in other words, emotional residue that has yet to be processed, in more other words, symptoms of an existing imbalance. What you have been given is some valuable information, deal with (process) that stuck feeling (and coaching will certainly do it) and you will never experience that event again. You won’t need to. You see, the auto-correction feature of the universe reveals our imbalances to us so that we can sort them out, and it will keep revealing them to us until we do. Instead of wallowing in misery, use the information and make some positive changes in your life. The universe cannot reveal imbalances that are not there, so the “cleaner” you are, the less change of this nature you will experience.

The third type of change I want to discuss is one that you cannot do anything about ever! Here in South Africa we are on the verge of Spring (sorry if you are in the North), what I always notice about this time of year (as we face the changing of the seasons) is that the warmth seems to come in waves….warms up…cold front…warms up….cold front. Yesterday it was warm, today it is cold and rainy. It seems that change on a major scale does not come all at once, it comes in gradually increasing waves. This seems to be a pattern in nature as well, the tide doesn’t come in all at once, and since we are a part of nature the same thing happens in our lives. The trick is to see the pattern and not treat the waves as signs of you moving backwards but moving forwards. Drug rehabilitation rarely works all in one go, there are relapses in the forward movement, as there is in any forward movement. Remember this, relapsing is not relapsing, it is nothing more than what a cold front is to the coming spring. Its not that you are returning to old behaviour but that you are layering the new behaviour and adapting to the change. What you find is that the “new reality” starts to last longer than the periods of “old reality” until “new reality” is all there is. Fighting the old or the new will not help you here, it will only make the inevitable uncomfortable. Nature has shown us that there must always be change, constant movement, without it things die. Embrace it, accept it, welcome it. You might not understand this change as it happens, but in time, and with the benefit of hindsight, you will see that you were moving forward and growing, and becoming who you are meant to be.

One thing that is certain about change in its various forms is that perspective on what is happening is difficult to get when the change is happening to you. Sometimes emotional judgements are all we are capable of, so it helps to begin a practice of meditation as this will train you to create space and be able to observe what is happening more objectively and then respond rather than react. Of course, I would always recommend the help of a good coach to enable you to develop inner “technology” that will make you a change wizard.

The only guaranteed thing is change, what isn’t guaranteed however, is that you will handle it in the best way.

Yours, in this ever changing world,

Anthony.