Archive for April, 2010

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Paying Attention

Friday, April 30th, 2010

It’s nice to feel nice. Actually, what I am trying to say is that it is very useful to feel the way you want to feel – and this is not just a play on words. We talked many times about the importance of feeling in a way that is conducive to creating the experiences you want to have more of. So if you want to bring about more happiness you need to feel happy, to experience more abundance you need to feel more abundant, to experience more love you need to feel loved, etc, etc. So pay attention to the things you do and the little cues in your environment that make you feel a certain way that would be useful to you. Let me give you some examples.

If you find that you feel really connected and appreciated when you hang out with a certain person, make an effort to hang out with them more often (this is of course assuming that you want to experience feelings of connectedness and appreciation more often). If you find that buying lunch for a friend makes you feel abundant, start inviting more people to lunch. If you discover that driving a clean vehicle makes you feel on top of you game, go wash your car more often. If you…you get the idea.

Have fun with this!

Until Monday,

V

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Posted in Energy, Neo-Spirituality, Success | 1 Comment »

Conflicting Human Needs

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

Tony Robbins talks about the six human needs and how they oppose each other. Today I just want to talk about, what he calls, the first two needs – the need for certainty and the need for variety. Tony advocates that these are not wants or desires – they are actually needs; if they are not met, we feel very uncomfortable and try to do something to meet them.

So the need for certainty is reflected in our desire to know, more or less, what is going to happen tomorrow. We like to know where our income is coming from, that we’ll have a roof over our heads at night, that we’ll get some food in our stomachs when we get hungry, etc, etc. Even people who are back-packing across another continent, who may not know where they are going to sleep that night, still have some certainty in their life, like that they will experience adventure, see new things, and create life-long-lasting memories. But what happens when we fully meet this need for certainty, to the point where we know exactly what is going to happen and when it is going to happen? Simply, we get bored.

This is where the need for variety comes in. We need to have unpredictable things happen in our lives for us to really enjoy life. It is actually quite fascinating that sometimes you’ll have a person who has not left their immediate area for 10 years, suddenly leave on a long trip to South America – what happens is that they have met too much of the certainty need and swing more into meeting their need for variety. And people who stick to the government job, prefer more certainty than variety in their financial affairs.

The two are opposing needs, since the more certainty you have, the less variety you have and vice versa. People find a point along that sliding scale that they feel happy with and they usually stick to it. When you think back on your life, did you have experiences where you went too far towards one end, only to swing back in the opposite direction to compensate later?

Until next time,

V

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The Art Of Clear Communication

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

Most of us use verbal language in our daily lives, and an assumption that people often make is that what they say is exactly what people hear. Truth is, when we want to express something, we put it through our own filter before any words come out. Those words, in turn, get put through the other person’s filter before they attempt to understand what you said. If we all had the same filters, we’d all be communicating without any issues, however that is not the case.

The words that we use are essentially labels that we attach to ideas, objects, concepts, feelings, emotions, etc. It’s a lot easier with objects – a door is a door and it is unlikely that we’ll have miscommunication about that – but it is a lot more challenging when we have more vague ideas and concepts involved. I don’t know about you, but I have been in several situations, even in my recent past, where I spent hours debating with another person only to find out that we were essentially talking about the same overall idea but were using words that had different meanings to us to describe it, which is what led to the entire debate in the first place.

This is huge at work and at home, since we constantly depend on communication; at home it can be even more challenging because people tend to be more emotionally involved. How many times were your words misinterpreted? How many times did you misinterpret the words of your partner?

Recently I have become more aware of this and try to get beyond the words and talk about the meaning when I sense that the conversation is hitting that filter issue. Try it the next time you have an opportunity to do so, and report back with your findings.

Until next time,

V

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Contempt – The Silent Killer

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

Last Friday I wrote about the work of John Gottman – the guy who can predict with amazing accuracy if the relationship is going to last after analyzing the intra-couple interactions. He actually does not even listen to what people say – instead he focuses on their facial expressions and looks for signs of certain emotions. The idea is pretty simple – even if you are trying to mask a given emotions with a fake smile, for example, the smile will not look ‘real’ and traces of the hidden emotion will still show up in your face. While this is not an exact science, and mistakes are made, there is a lot of evidence in favour of this technique. So what does Gottman look for? As you may have figured out with the title, he looks for signs of contempt.

Gottman says that contempt is a single most destructive emotion people can experience in relationships – it is when a person looks down on the other person with lack of respect and a feeling of dislike. When one person feel contempt, the other person supposedly picks up on that feelings; and let’s be honest – who enjoys being disrespected and looked down on? It seems like contempt turns into a downwards spiral, where it is expressed more and more often, to a point where the couple does not want to remain a couple and splits. So if signs of contempt show up during the observed interaction, Gottman essentially writes the relationship off (with stunning accuracy).

So there you go – avoid contempt and enjoy a lasting relationship. And if you are in a relationship where contempt shows up regularly, start moving assets out of your name and get a good lawyer. Or you can bet on the 5% chance that you’d be the odd ball out, but I personally don’t like those odds. My advice – visit the Gottman Institute in Seattle before getting married. :)

Until next time,

V

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Spiritual Mind Treatment (04.26.2010)

Monday, April 26th, 2010

I’m going to try to go for a short treatment today – practice those ‘focusing’ skills. Take these words as your own if you wish:

I know that this is Universe is a System of Energy that always vibrates. I understand that I am also fundamentally Energy, operating in a larger field of Energy, and I too vibrate. My vibrations are a reflection of my feelings and are attractive, so as I feel joy, happiness, love, health, and abundance, I know that I am attracting all those things into my direct experience. I know that my part is done as I release these feelings of joy, happiness, love, health, and abundance in to the field of Universal Energy and allow It to respond. With unconditional gratitude I let go…and so it is!

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Will This Relationship Last?

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

I remember reading about John Gottman who has developed a way to tell whether a relationship will be intact 15 years later with tremendous accuracy. After observing a couple interacting for 5 minutes, his predictions are 70% accurate; after 15 minutes, his predictions are 95% accurate. That blew my mind! I now know who I am going to see before proposing!

Now Gottman does not just observe a couple for 5 minutes and utters his verdict – he records and analyzes the entire interaction, and the big thing that he focuses on are facial expressions. Turns out there is a lot of correlation between different facial expressions and the true emotions that we feel inside, and this has very little to do with what the participants actually say.

Turns out there is one big red flag that comes up that indicates to Gottman the eventual fall of the relationship. What is the red flag? You’ll have to wait until next week to find out…

Until Monday,

V

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Never Expect What You Don’t Desire And Never Desire What You Don’t Expect

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

This is one of those phrases that sounds nice and playful, yet contains a lot of power and wisdom. I’ve talked in the past about the vital role that expectations play in our lives, and this phrase, which I heard in a Bob Proctor program, puts it rather eloquently. The idea is pretty simple – your true expectations will create your experience. It’s not what you want, not what you wish for, but what you truly expect that becomes your experience. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had countless situations that reflect that very principle at work.

So, ‘never expect what you don’t desire’! Pretty simple, right? In theory yes…in application it can be more difficult. If it wasn’t we’d never get what we don’t desire. But seriously, if you don’t desire something, why in the world would you expect it? It’s a logical statement, but we are not very logical beings. The same holds for the other side of the equation – ‘never desire what you don’t expect’. If you desire what you don’t expect, you simply will not be able to bring that into your experience. If there is something that you desire, work on expecting it in your life.

Now I’ve got to go work on the lesson in this phrase myself…

Until next time,

V

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Emotion And Feeling

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

In class last night we had a lengthy discussion on how emotions differ from feelings; people had ideas, but no one seemed to be able to effectively get their point across to the rest of the class where they agreed. Often people use these words interchangeably, but when you study this in a little more detail, there is a difference between the two. And the most peculiar thing is that the difference is not very well defined. I’ll give you my understanding of the difference between the two, but I’d really like it if you could add your thoughts through the comments.

My understanding is that feelings are physiological responses to stimuli, where a physiological response involves the chemistry of your body, and a stimuli can be a thought, a external event or occurrence, someone’s words or touch, etc. Feelings are physical and chemical changes in your physiology – you feel love, anger, frustration, stress, and joy as a very real sensations in your body. Emotions, on the other hand, are the labels that we put on those sensations (happiness, love, anger, etc). So the two are closely related – no doubt – but they are not the same. First you have a stimulus, which creates a physical change in your body (a feeling), which we label with a name of a certain emotion.

Feelings are ‘absolute’, while emotions are ‘relative’. What I mean by that is that a given feeling is always the same (a feeling, again, being a certain physiological state of your body), but that same feeling can get a variety of labels from different people (called a number of different emotions). When I push on my desk, the desk pushes back (that would be equivalent to the feeling), but I can use several phrases to describe that behaviour (call it a number of emotions), like “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” or the “Newton’s Third Law of Motion”. They are different words describing the same overall idea.

Who knows, I may be out to lunch with this… what do you think?

Until next time,

V

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Posted in Energy, Neo-Spirituality, Universe | 2 Comments »

Check Your Feeling

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

Pretty much every book that talks about the concept that we are responsible for what we create and attract into our own lives, says that it is the feelings that get the creative process rolling. Sure, everything begins with a thought, but though by itself will not create much – you need to be emotionally involved in the idea – that means that you need to have corresponding feelings about that idea. More importantly, those feelings need to be supportive of you experiencing and achieving whatever it is that you are after; if you feel like you are incapable or unworthy of the given goal, it’s counter productive and will keep you away from what you desire.

We talked about how vital our subconscious mind is to the creative process. So how do you know what you mind is doing? A great way to check that is to check your feeling. This idea came to a friend of mine who shared it with me, and I thought it was a very insightful observation. If at any point in time you want to get an idea of what you are brining into your experience, ask yourself how do you feel. Feelings are like a temperature gage for your consciousness, that is your conscious and subconscious minds put together. Do you feel happy, loved, joyful, and abundant? Or do you feel sick, lost, confused, and generally pitiful? That is what you are bringing more of into your life.

I think that “How do I feel?” is a great question to ask yourself throughout the day. It will likely provide you with some very interesting insights into what is going on in your mind.

Until next time,

V

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Spiritual Mind Treatment (04.19.2010)

Monday, April 19th, 2010

Happy Monday to you all! Join me, if you wish, in knowing that…

This is a perfect Universe and I am one with It. As I recognize this unity, I know that I align myself with the entire Universe and allow the Energy of Life to flow through me – open and unrestricted. In this oneness I feel aligned with the Principle and know that my bigger idea for the expansion of love, happiness, abundance, joy, health, and prosperity is Universally supported and is part of my experience. As I feel the flow of Energy and internalize the feelings of expansion, I know that all roadblocks are removed and dissolved, and all that is left is the Wind of the Universe at my back supporting my bigger idea. With heart-felt gratitude I implant my vision into a seed and plant that seed in the fertile subjective soil of the All-Mind. Knowing that my part of the creation process is done, I let go and I let God, and so it is!

Until next time,

V

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