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!

The Negativity Bias

Back in the day, way, way, way back in the day. Joe, let’s call him Joe, or Susan (because it could have been a woman), was taking a power walk through the jungle when he (or she) heard rustling in the bushes. Now these being dangerous times (as they always are) he (or she) had a decision to make: run – because there is a tiger in the bushes; or, run – because there might be a tiger in the bushes. A mistake at this juncture could mean one less Joe or Susan on the planet. So, Joe (or Susan) decided that for the sake of all Joes (or Susans) on the planet that it would be far safer to make the mistake of thinking that there is a tiger in the bushes (when there possible isn’t) than making the mistake of thinking there isn’t a tiger in the bushes (when there actually is). In other words, Joe (or Susan) quite happily made the first mistake over and over and over to avoid making the second mistake (and thereby becoming lunch, after all, you are only lunch once). We have been following in Joe’s (or Susan’s) footsteps ever since. It is called the negativity bias.

Say I handed you a list call “5 Things about You”, and it read as follows:

1. I like your generous nature
2. I think you are very tolerant
3. Your sense of humour needs some work
4. You are an excellent cook
5. You have great taste in clothes

What would you take away from that? If you are like most people you would be thinking, “So what is your problem with my sense of humour anyway?” If you thought you were pretty amazing after reading that, you can stop reading this now. See most people would gloss over the glowing compliments and focus on the one negative thing that was said about them. No, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with you if you do that so you can relax, remember the tiger in the bush? We are programmed to focus on the potential (if non-existent) threat. We are Teflon to the good things and Velcro to the bad.

Think about it, you are driving to work and for just about the entire trip everything goes a-ok, but then some #$@! cuts you off and for the rest of the day, you are thinking about how well the trip went, NOT! You are fuming and steaming about that idiot, what you should have said or done, and gosh darn it, your day is ruined! A bad event gets a lot more screen time in your mind than good events. Let me rephrase that, a helluva lot more. So basically, you go through your day glossing over the good things, obsessing over the bad, and anticipating the other shoe dropping. It’s not to say that you don’t enjoy the good times, but one bad event is equal in emotional power to about ten good events.

Ok so we have a predominantly negative focus, we tend to major on the minors, but surely this serves to keep us safe? Perhaps, but if you think of all the missed opportunities and shipwrecked relationships that we have left in our wake because we only think there is a tiger in the bushes it is in our best interests to face this bad habit head on. The truth is that there is very little in life that is really life threatening, and all the negative things that you tend to obsess over are really inconsequential. There is much in life that is not worthy of the f***ks you give them.

So how do we break this habit? Bad news folks, you don’t. It is a deeply ingrained evolutionary quirk (you can thank Joe for that). There is something you can do to shift the balance somewhat though. Firstly, you can let yourself off the hook for it, instead of thinking that you are just a pessimistic and hopeless case, realise that you just simply a regular Joe (or Susan). Secondly, when the good things come (and there are so many if you look) like the cup of coffee, the blue sky, the flowers, the birds, the smile of your child, the hug of your spouse etcetera, then allow yourself to wallow in the moment. Start training that brain to prefer the good things, to seek them out. Lastly, you can pursue inner peace like a cat chasing a laser pointer. If it doesn’t bring you peace (be it an experience, or if you can’t avoid the experience, then your thoughts about that experience) avoid it like the plague, and choose something that does bring you peace.

Choosing love over fear in this way can have untold positive effects on your life. Who knows what it will bring to you. If nothing else you will certainly feel a lot better about life, and when you feel better about life then you start making better choices.

http://www.imaginelifecoaching.co.za

The Balance

I have spent a few years trying to make the Law of Attraction work for me. By that I mean get more of what I do want in my life and less of what I don’t want. I must admit, the idea of being able to manipulate the stuff of life in order to stack the odds in my favour is still pretty alluring. I think that when anyone of us is in a situation where we feel powerless and out of control it would be nice to move things in the right direction.

So far the results have been mixed. Here is the thing though; there have been results, mixed as though they are, and I remain convinced that somehow, someway, I am responsible for the creation of my own reality. For me, and you, what you see “out there” is a reflection of what you have (tap yourself on the chest) “in here”. It gets quite frustrating though, the things I really want seem to elude me, and some things that I think about in passing appear quickly. So I think, “Aha, that’s the key!” and I become nonchalant and think about the things I really want “in passing” and they still elude me. It often feels like I am trying to bake a cake without a recipe, I know I have the ingredients, but I can’t seem to get the details right. I read this book, and that book, and watch this film and that, and the science is all there, the teachers seem to be products of their philosophies, but when I try the recipe it flops.

Is there information that is being held back? Or, is there something about this that ALWAYS gets lost in translation? I think it is the latter. Either that, or every guru that I have listened to is a con artist, but I personally don’t believe that. I believe that the best they can do, and that I as a teacher can do, is to give coordinates and point you in the right direction. The rest is up to the individual. That kind of sucks though, we want the recipe, and we want someone else to have done the heavy lifting so that we can just enjoy the results. I just don’t think it works that way, not soul work anyway. That would be like asking your friend to go and get a tattoo for you, it makes the idea of trying what somebody else has done and then quitting because it doesn’t work for you seem pretty ludicrous. You have to get the pieces and assemble the puzzle for yourself.

The thing with the Law of Attraction is that is isn’t the techniques that you see that make it work, but the things going on inside the person. It’s not about the little tip of the iceberg; it is the mysterious mountain beneath the surface. The teacher will teach a technique, but will not be able to adequately communicate the work that is going on inside. It is a lot like trying to describe water to someone who has never encountered it. So in truth, the best you can really hope for is to gather the pieces and start figuring it out for yourself, and that can take time.

I always chuckle when I hear a teacher say “I lived in poverty for ten years, but now I am prospering and here is what I have learned so you can prosper too!” Kudos, but this power comes with a price that we all must pay, so putting into practice what the teacher learned through pain isn’t going to get us any more than mixed results, we have to pay the school fees.

So here is another piece of the puzzle for you, and this came to me last night when I woke up and went to get some water (as the best ideas tend to do). What you get in your reality is the balance of what is going on inside of you. If you think of a set of old fashioned scales, like the scales of justice. One the one side you place your intention and on the other you place your counter intention (or resistance), and what is manifested in your reality is the balance.

So practically speaking, let’s say you wanted a new job (or whatever else it is that you really want). The intention is to get this new job, so that gets placed on one side of the scale, on the other side goes all the counter intention, and this would be all the limiting beliefs and feelings (I am not good enough, what’s the point, it won’t happen to me blah, blah, blah). If the counter intention outweighs the intention (as it more often than not does) what you will get will be the resulting balance, which will be more of the counter intention in your life. What has the most weight has the biggest impact, it is not about how much weight it has but rather that it has the most.

If there was some intention and a lot of counter intention you would get few desirable results. If there was a lot more intention and equal counter intention then you would get…..tadaaa….mixed results. If you had intention but no counter intention, then you would write a book about it, the results would be that obvious. Intention can be either good or bad, and the same goes for counter intention. So when you have wanted to die (intention) but there was so much in you that really wanted to live (counter intention – even though at that point you weren’t consciously aware of it) you didn’t get what you wanted. When you wanted that new car (intention) but had a whole bunch of unconscious fears and doubts (counter intention), you didn’t get it. This explains why those things that you think about in passing (good or bad) seem to manifest quickly, there is little or no counter intention. When it comes to the things you really, desperately want, these things are usually heavy laden with volumes of counter intention, so they stay out of your reach.

So the trick would be to remove the counter intention from the one side of the scale, and to continue doing so until it is clear of counter intention. As the balance slowly shifts you start to see subtle changes in your reality, but there may be so much counter intention that you do a lot of clearing and see no results. Most people quit at this point, but the guy who did it for ten years didn’t and now he has written a book about it. That’s the thing though; I don’t know how long it will take for you.

Some things will come quickly, some will take a long, long time (even longer if you quit, or worse, do nothing). Not even you can tell how much counter intention you have to deal with, and the best you can hope for is to deal with it as and when it comes up. There is one thing you can do to speed things up though, and that is to simply do the work. Spend time imagining having what you want (as if you had it now) then see what comes up to counter it, and then deal with it using a clearing/cleaning tool of your choice. How long will you need to do this? Some things will come quickly, others won’t, and there is just no way to really know. Here is a hint though; those things that you really care about and that you really want will take the longest. Those things that mean little to you, and don’t really matter either way, will seem to come easily. Could this be saying that the key to getting what you want quicker is to stop wanting it? Hmmmmm.

My advice as you navigate this confusing terrain is to live in the present moment, learn to let go and be happy now, deal with counter intention as and when it comes up, keep on doing the work, and never ever give up!

Keep the shiny side up!

Anthony.

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.

Lifting Ships

It is safe to assume that if you are reading this, and by virtue of the fact that you subscribed in the first place, you are interested in personal development. Perhaps for some of you that is putting it lightly, for some of you is it more like “Stop the bus! I want to get off!” Allow me to shed some light as to why most of you are feeling the urge to evolve.

Most of you, as I calibrated (if you want to know what that means then I encourage you to buy Dr David Hawkins amazing book – Power vs Force), are on consciousness level 125 – desire. What this basically means is that you will tend to view God as the one who has it all but is denying it from you. In other words, pray all you want, it ain’t gonna happen! Your view of life is that is it mostly disappointing, if there is a good life then it is avoiding you. The primary emotion that you are experiencing is anxiety, and the life process you will be experiencing is enslavement. In other words, you feel like you are missing out, stressed out, and trapped.

Your reality is how it is because of the consciousness level you are on, as your life will reflect your consciousness level. It is really good news, as it means that there is hope and change is a reality. SO how do you change your life? There is the way you have been trying to do it, and there is the way you don’t want to do it.

Most of the work you have been doing to change your life has been that of the ego, and as you will have discovered, it hasn’t brought any lasting sense of happiness or fulfilment. The ego has this crazy idea that inner happiness comes from the outside, so it sets you off on a mission to try and achieve this happiness by rearranging the pieces, like arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.You may feel a bit better but you are still sinking.

So it seems that happiness will come when you fix yourself, but fixing yourself is very hard work and largely unsuccessful. Even most life coaching fails over time because it focusses on making the ego more comfortable within you, and when you challenge the ego it strikes back and you find yourself right back where you started.

Trying to fix yourself and circumstances is like trying to lift yourself by your shoelaces, and I know so many of you have tried to fix things, perhaps seen counselors, a psychologist, or even a life coach, and none of them have helped. I know lots of you have read books that promised so much, and tried the “law of attraction”, perhaps made dream boards, used affirmations, and so many other things. I bet you saw some progress but over time found yourself back where you were.  Is this you?

What you have been trying to do is the equivalent of “lifting ships”. If everyone who read this blog got together and we all went to the harbour and tried to lift a ship we still couldn’t do it. Trying to fix our lives by working with the content just can’t be done, because if the context of your life stays the same the content will too. You will find yourself constantly putting out fires.

Since it is the content that causes so much trouble people rarely think that the context is where the problem lies. Think about it, plant a seed and try to force it to grow on your terms, it won’t happen, but provide an environment where growth can happen and it does. Think of your consciousness level as the container and the “stuff” of your life as the content, as it says in the Bible, “you can’t put new wine in an old wineskin,” so trying to get better content in the same old container just won’t happen. Einstein put it this way, “You can’t solve a problem with the same level of thinking that caused it,” so in order to change your life, you need to change the environment it is happening in.

No, you can lift a ship (fix the content), but you can raise the level of the ocean and then lift all the ships. So the key to changing your life is in raising your consciousness. As your consciousness level rises, so does your experience, or rather, perception, of reality.

So how do you raise your consciousness level? There are two simple ways, and you need to do both: Sacrifice and love. People think sacrifice means giving up what they like –  living a painful life in order to experience spiritual good, but this is not so. Sacrifice in this case means consistently surrendering everything to the Higher Power, knowing that you don’t know it all, that you need outside help, and that you are not smart enough to know what is best. You surrender what is causing you pain so that you might know peace, and you surrender that which is making you happy so that you can experience what is even better. It is unconditional, and it means leaving things up to the Higher Power. The job here is not to try to fix yourself, but to surrender yourself. You surrender it by intending to do so, “I surrender this to….” and then you quit worrying about it, or wrestling with it.

Then there is love, you love everyone and everything as though it was yourself. You quit judging and criticising and you start loving. You accept that everyone is doing the best they can even if you don’t like it, and you treat everyone like royalty. You will be amazed at the result. I practice this myself, and I get the best service and so many free gifts wherever I go. You don’t do it for that reason though, you do it because it is who you really are.

Essentially it means allowing the rain to fall where it will and seeing everyone as divine beings and not in terms of their standing in society or behaviour.

When you consider how you have been programmed to live, it is not hard to understand why we struggle in life in terms of consciousness levels. Most people judge, criticise, and blame other people, and they allow their reality to dictate who they are instead of the other way around. It is the difference between living from the inside out or from the outside in. It’s the difference between embracing the world, or pushing it away.

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

Tuning In

What do you believe about life? I mean, what is it to you? How does it work, in your opinion? I think there would be as many answers as there are people, as your belief would be a mix of what you have been taught and what you have experienced (as a result of what you have been taught). If life has somehow been working out for you, you won’t question your beliefs, but if, like most people, it has been rather hard then you will be one of those looking around and saying “What happened?”

So what is life to you? Is it just an endless stream of bad luck and disasters (that you have no control over) that merciless pummel you daily? Is it just a boring humdrum of mundane events peppered with the occasional bright day or bad time? Or do things seem to go your way and you think of yourself as “lucky”? Isn’t it interesting how we are all on the same planet, we all breathe the same air, we all have the same opportunities (whether you believe that or not), yet we all have different experiences of life? What gives?

If you are not happy with the way things are, and this has been going on for some time, then perhaps you have embarked on a journey to discover “how” to really change things. If you have gotten lost in the sea of information that is out there then you won’t be the first, or the last. What a lot of people end up with is a bunch of stuff that they have tried, but with little or no results and a feeling that nothing seems to work. It does work, and has worked for somebody in some way, but why not for you?

Do you have a radio? Of course you do, you tune it to the station you want. If you have the right frequency you get satisfaction, if not, you get static or some other station playing music that makes your ears bleed. The Toltec Indians of North America have a belief that technology is an exterior representation of what we are capable of, so you are the radio, your thoughts are the tuner, your unconscious expectation is the frequency, and your reality is the sound you get from the radio.

You might have heard this analogy before, it is frequently used as a “Law of Attraction” teaching, but I believe the “Law of Attraction” is a misnomer. “Law of Vibration” is more accurate.  You don’t attract anything to you, just like a radio, you tune into a reality where what you want exists. The process can test you though, and most people give up long before they achieve what they are focussed on.  Why is it so easy to lose hope and give in though? Because people don’t understand that it is their “unconscious expectation” that does the creating. How many times have you consciously expected something and gotten a different result? Quite often I would wager, but were you aware that you were unconsciously expecting a different result? This is my point: An unconscious expectation is an expectation that you do not know that you have, an expectation that you are not consciously aware of. It sounds a bit nuts, but this is how you are protected from yourself. Imagine if everything you consciously expected happened to you, it would be a disaster.

It is only those beliefs that are tested and found to be “true” over time that become unconscious expectations, and this makes conscious creation a tough job. It means that you need to “rehearse” the new belief, the thing you want to create in your life, until it becomes an unconscious expectation.  You do this by entering into a meditative state and experiencing it as though it was already done. How long does it take? I don’t think anyone can answer this, only that when it becomes a natural thing to you and the next logical step is that thing manifesting – in other words, when it becomes an unconscious expectation. It will take as long as it takes, and this is where most people trip up.

Everything you currently believe without question is something you have rehearsed in this way, it was easy because you had the support of your environment, and the people around you believed the same thing and drilled it into you. When you begin the work of conscious creation you often don’t have the same support structure. It is easy to lose hope and give up. You have to find a way to keep yourself in the game, and that could mean changing who you hang out with, and starting some good habits. Of course life coaching is great for this; you get support from a trained supporter, but even then it is still up to you.

The goal is to keep feeling good, and this will take a lot of self awareness. Your emotions are your guidance system when it comes to the “law of attraction”, they tell you what you are focussed on. Remember it is your consistent focus that becomes your unconscious expectation and if you are feeling “bad” most of the time, it means that you are focussed on what you don’t want most of the time. Is it any wonder your life is the way it is?

This not to say that you will have to focus on what you want for a long time, your life is a mirror to your unconscious expectations, so as you start to change, so does your life. It doesn’t wait until you have arrived, it mirrors your journey.

It takes 17 seconds for a thought to start attracting like thoughts, and 68 seconds for those thoughts to start the creation process. Most people can’t hold a thought for 17 seconds, it takes real work, but this should give you a clue as to where to start. Getting good support helps tremendously, we all benefit from encouragement and the occasional kick up the behind.

Before you start on any of those goals or resolutions for 2014, get your focus right.

Here is to an amazing year,

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.

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