What others say or do have no power to hurt you or to diminish your self-esteem in any way.

 

 

An untrained mind does not have a self-regulating system. An untrained mind can be compared to the weather that we experience daily. When specific circumstances combine we experience a thunderstorm. We have no control over a thunderstorm and can only wait for the storm to pass. The same holds true for those that don’t have a control system in their head. They “spontaneously” allow any thought or feeling to flood their mind. Negative rampant thoughts often produce anger and pain, not only for the angry person, but also for the recipients of his or her anger. Most of our negative and destructive behaviour that we display daily can be compared to the thunderstorm example I used earlier. Many labour under the misconception that they have no control over these waves of emotional “weather” that mystically appear and take over their behaviour. We make out as if we are a helpless victim of these anger or sarcasm storms that we rain down on family, friends and even strangers. We justify our cutting remarks or unacceptable behaviour by pacifying ourselves with excuses like, “I would never have lost my cool or behave in the manner I did if he or she did not say or do what they did.” Our automatic reactions come from a very primitive part of our brain. These are remnants of instinctive reaction patterns that we used while we were still living in caves and daily struggled to fend off predators with bad intentions. Some of us evolved during this period and gradually developed a control mechanism that now regulates these primitive and destructive moods and reactions. What we need to understand is that what anyone said or did have absolutely no power until we retaliate. What this person said or did will drift past like a cloud if we just observe it and let it move over our heads. Our objective is to fully develop the control system in our head to a level where we can show compassion and love notwithstanding the circumstances that we are confronted with. All religions on this planet promote this behaviour. What others say or do have no power to hurt you or to diminish your self-esteem in any way. The solution is not to panic when confronted with situations that cause you discomfort. They say patience is a virtue. The key is to simply observe and to investigate where these feelings come from. We will always discover that the painful feelings is not generated by (for example) the angry person, but comes from somewhere inside us. It is a cocktail of chemicals released by our brains that produce the fear, anger and desire to retaliate. We have been using pre-programmed reaction patterns that come from more primitive and barbaric times. We never question our reactions. We believe that the feelings that flood our minds are real. There are no feelings and no pain until we attach to a thought or a trigger. Why are we happy and relaxed until something or someone trigger a negative memory or feeling in us? We are composed because the feelings and reactions in our sub-conscious mind remain dormant, powerless until we allow them to be turned on. Remember you are in control of your mind and not a defenceless victim that is obliged to sing and dance when you hear the bell.

 

Rene

 

We often stubbornly cling to old and outdated rules and regulations that have its foundation in a time and place far removed from the reality of the now.

 

 

 

Most of us are guilty of a strong desire to see and experience instant gratification. We have become a society where our attention soon jumps to something else if our “gratification” is delayed for too long. Impatience is the key cause of most of our failures today. If a project, relationship or our career does not give us a clear indication of progress in a relative short period of time we jump ship and try something else. Most of us want “closure” on everything as soon as possible. When we are expected to wait we become impatient and grumpy. We forget that most things in life have a cycle or “natural” time-span or rhythm. We cannot plant a tree and rush out the following morning, ready to harvest its fruit. If we worked on the pyramids in ancient Egypt we would have been in for tough time. Most of their masterpieces took virtually a lifetime or more to complete. When you want to force closure on any project or issue you usually end up making a mess of things. When you want to build a new house you allow a fair period for its completion. If you rushed the workers you might end up dead with a lot of bricks and cement in your face. If you rush a new relationship you usually end up reading a book while your friends party up a storm. Simply slow down and allow things to unfold naturally. You will get more done, make faster progress and be more successful if you can master the art of patience.

 

BREAK YOUR OWN RULES

 

I am often staggered by the tendency of people to create impossible rule structures for themselves. We all have a whole book of rules hidden in our heads. These rules cover virtually every eventuality that we have been confronted with since birth.

 

This reminds me of a story told to me many years ago. Apparently, a young couple were preparing a dinner for some friends that they invited over when the young man noticed that his new wife cut the end off a roll-rib that she was busy preparing for this special occasion. When he confronted and asked her, “Why on earth do you cut the end off the roll-rib, it is such a waste?” She smiled and told him that this was a “trick” that she learned from her mother that in turn learned it from her mother. He left it at that and speculated that it must have something to do with flavour distribution. She continued to repeat this ritual every time she prepared this exotic dish. When he finally years later met her grandmother he asked her about the roll-rib mutilation. She explained to him that she did not have an over-pan big enough to take a full roll-rib and was forced to cut off the ends to make it fit. Can you see how a simple “rule” can be passed on from generation to generation that was based on a misunderstanding?

 

How many “rules” do you faithfully follow everyday that have just as little foundation as displayed in the roll-rib example. We often stubbornly cling to old and outdated rules and regulations that have its foundation in a time and place far removed from the reality of the now. You can seriously complicate your life and the lives of the people around you if you stubbornly force people to do things just because it has always been done that way. Most people sheepishly follow the same “rule” structure for the best part of their lives. They fail to understand that they can never perform better than the quality of the rules that they use. The rules become the patterns that they live their lives with. It is like a stencil that will give you the same pattern for as long as you live.

 

It is imperative that you work from a variety of perspectives if you want to grow and succeed in life. It is fear that is holding these habitual responds patterns in place. It is fear that makes the rules in an attempt to “protect” you from real achievement. Fear of pain, embarrassment and loss makes people repeat virtually the same patterns from cradle to grave. Break free from this deadly rule structure system and spice up your life. Remember nothing is going to change if you do not make the necessary changes.

 

Rene

 

MONEY IS AN ILLUSION (VERY IMPORTANT READ)

 

Money: An illusion, a shadow of something else…

There is a science of getting rich, and it is an exact science, like algebra or arithmetic. There are certain laws which govern the process of acquiring riches, and once these laws are learned and obeyed by anyone, that person will get rich with mathematical certainty. – Wallace D. Wattles.

The first step to having wealth is to know what it is. And few people know what it really is, in and of itself. What is wealth? What causes it? What causes the cause of it? Let us start with money, the world’s symbol of wealth, and then move deeper.

Money is not real.

Money is merely legal tender, a form of exchange. We use it to exchange value. It represents value.

Money is the ‘body’ of value. It is the physical representation of value that rises and falls in ourselves, within us. Not within ‘things’ outside of us, but within us. For without us, what can the value of a thing, such as a car, be to us? Nothing, at least not to us. In other words, it is we, the observers, that place value in things, but this value is really value in us – we give value to the material things. The material things have no ‘money’ value in themselves – we give that to them. So, money is the external physical representation of a particular section of our internal value, within us, within you. That is why a house or a block of shares valued at $1 million today can fall to a valuation of half a million dollars tomorrow when fear is introduced into the hearts of those involved. The fear kills a portion of the internal values of the participants and that is reflected by the paper money, the ‘body’ of value.

Here is something else: physical paper money does not even represent money in full. It cannot reasonably do that. By some estimates (and this varies from nation to nation), only as little as 4% of the money in the banks exists as paper cash. Imagine how much cotton, linen, pulp, and metal the world would need so as to make all the money everyone has in his or her bank accounts. Imagine how much space it would take to store all this money in paper form. If you were to stack only one million US$1 bills, it would weight one ton and be 361 ft high. Neither does money exist as gold reserves any more. This is for exactly the same reason – we ran out of the reasonable ability to keep a gold standard in the 1970s.

So what does it exist as, the money that we are always talking about? Well, it is one massive illusion. It is all just numbers written on paper and computer storage devices, and assigned to people and entities such as companies and investments, or more accurately, further records! To put it in another way, for every $100 or its equivalent in any other currency, only about $4 exists as printed-paper notes or coins, while the remaining $96 exists as numbers written on papers and computers in banks and businesses and other entities. The only reason this system does not collapse is that we all believe in it. The last time people stopped believing in it in a large enough extent was just before the Great Depression when large numbers of people rushed to their banks to withdraw their money and found that they could not all get it. This is not what caused the Great Depression, but it in a large way accelerated it.

So, money is not real – something else is. Money is just the shadow of that other something. The first step to wealth is to know what money really is, or more accurately, what it represents. Learn not to look at the money most of the time. As you will soon see, it is very rare in a day that you should ever look at money as you know it today – the cash, the bank accounts, the costs, etc. This is merely the shadow and not the real thing. Looking at the shadow, the physical money, as you will soon see, is most of the time very unwise and unhealthy for you and your finances.

 

 

Power Tool: Recall this image the next time you jump to conclusions. We often only have a fraction of the facts of something that is bothering us, but make up a fully fledged horror story or drama in our heads. How many times have you not worried yourself sick about something that never happened or in the end fall far short of the disastrous story you made up?