As you all may know from my last post I have moved locations! You can subscribe by clicking RIGHT HERE I do really enjoy the feedback I get from the wordpress community if every one that has followed my blog here can come and subscribe I would be soooo grateful. Thank you very much and sorry for any inconveniences.
-Fighting The Fatman
Growth
Well everyone it was nice while it lasted but it is time I leave my current home at fightingthefatman.wordpress.com and move in to my newer sleeker home RIGHT HERE. Just as I believe that life is the growth and development of your consciousness I must reflect this by creating a serious environment to dedicate myself in not only achieving my dreams but to be the light, inspiration, the one who points the way for you to discover and achieve you dreams too. I thought this might be a good time to explain a little more about the mindset I have behind this website as well as in my personal life too.
My hopes are to inspire not only with words but to be the example of what is possible. A good teacher does not explain the way simply they are the way. I believe in your success and growth as much as I believe in my own because like all things they are connected intimately and feed off of each other.
The more I can help understand my self and learn from it the more I can convey to you all the methods and ways to enact them in your life. I am no expert but I believe I have an ability to observe, contemplate, and reflect on life through a perspective that a few might find thought-provoking, relatable, and insightful.
Just as Bruce Lee stated ” Absorb what is useful, Discard what is not, Add what is uniquely your own” I too believe it is important to take all experience and information and make it your own unique interpretation.
For me breaking everything down to its most fundamental level allows you to have a peek in to what I might call the nature of the universe. When I say the nature of the universe what I mean is a truth, law, consistency, pattern that once you identify allows you to see the reason behind anything. From my mediation on what governs our reality I came to the conclusion that there is only one absolute truth in the universe.
Balance is the Key to Understanding
This truth is that everything that exists in the universe now at one point came from nothing and of the stuff that does exist it does so in the form of two inextricable and ever exchanging forces whose purpose is to achieve balance. By identify and understanding this balance you can look at any difficult situation or life in general and have an understanding of just how it all got that way and through this understanding know how proceed in direction that fulfills the natural order to balance.
Just through a simple observation of our planet and solar system alone we can see the relevance of balance. Through photosynthesis plants produce the oxygen that is essential for our life simultaneously humans process this oxygen and in return feed plants the carbon dioxide that their lives rely on. If our planet was not in balance with the sun through the natural order of gravity we would either freeze or burn to death. Being able to observe this balance in everything creates awe-inspiring moments that makes me feel a part of something vastly meaningful.
Ancient Taoists were one of the first to observe and understand the importance of balance
Balance is a key part of being content because often in our society there is a great disparity between understanding what we need rather than what we want. With the imbalance of think you are not getting enough you can not feel gratitude but start living a life of balance and you will feel joy and gratitude for anything you because you know its impermanence. I felt much more contentment in my life by eliminating a lot of my wants that were wasteful and self-serving to create more balance. What was interesting is that by identifying my priorities and knowing what felt pure in my heart naturally lead me to want to eliminate unnecessary baggage that before seemed important to keep around.
We justify our reasons for carrying certain baggage but as you discover more and more of your true self things that you identified with directly were really just masks or obstacles blocking you from the pure reflection of the true self.Wasting time and energy worrying about what you want, when you want it, and how you will get what you want seems silly when you can identify what you need leaving plenty of room to dedicate the rest of your energy to living life and expressing your self through with ever vehicle your passion leads too.
Live life in accordance to the balance of nature and the universe and you will live a fulfilled life and have peace of mind until the end of your days……
Click here for a place to DISCOVER and ACHIEVE your dreams. See you all on the other side!
I am packing all my stuff in my apartment thinking to my self “am I really going to do THIS?” “THIS IS CRAZY” ” Well I have to do something” “But THIS, is THIS the answer ?” “Yes”.
These are the thoughts going through my head two months ago.
As I am packing I start to reflect over the last 2 years and how I have created more meaning in my life and found what I believe to be my passion but also how it was still only a small fraction of the person I was. I knew what I should be doing and how to do it but I just wasn’t doing it. The new person I am starting to create is just a very small foundation hidden under lots of old ways, habits, and thought patterns. I mean it took me 22 years to get my self in this situation who would I be to think it wouldn’t take just as long to reverse it. I am terrible about procrastinating which leads me to being a fan of things that force you to follow through with your plans. Such as classes, accountability friends/family, projects, and personal bets. So to change my self from being one of those over planners and thinkers I knew I needed to focus on DOING rather than planning and an extreme project would be in order.
I sat down to plan THIS out but unlike all my other planning efforts I was empty, all I wanted to do was act and act was exactly what I was going to do. This caused me to throw all my 5 year plans out the window and only plan up to 3 years. Then I said why even plan for 3 years so then I only planned up to a year away. Which eventually lead to, why even that far? If I do everything I can each month then it doesn’t matter about the future. This concept then was quickly broken down even further to a single day. If I do everything that I can to progress my self each day while being aware of which direction to go then it doesn’t matter what the future holds because I will be a better person then the one I was the day before and that is the ultimate goal.
Now having a sense of urgency I know I must act quickly. I have things to do with my life, dreams to accomplish, love to give, and people to help. Why delay that any further. Everything has to change. I must destroy the lazy, procrastinating, over-planning, non-acting person that I am and from the ashes there will be the foundation of the man that I will start to rebuild. All of the changes I have made in the last several years everything has been a build up to this point. What I didn’t realize until recently is that all the progress I have made over that time actually has not been adding anything to me but has been the dropping and removing of old thought patterns, bad habits, restricted and limited mindset, removing of distractions, and the gradual dropping of physical weight off of my body. I am more free, more open, more loving, more dedicated than I have ever been in my life. I will also say that the relationships I have in my family and close friends have also been instrumental with my success with out support it is very difficult to achieve dreams of the highest aspirations.
How I Came To THIS
I have always been the type of person to go against the grain. Since I can remember my mom has always been telling me, I ” tune to my own drummer” I always got mad when she said that as a kid thinking it was a bad thing but now I know it is one of the most valuable traits. My aspirations to go against the grain has led me in lots of different directions that I could never have planned for but looking back it almost seems as though every thing was always meant to go that way. Recently I have embarked THIS new project. This project meshes minimalism, organic eating, usefulness of time, mma training, and mental preparedness all in to one.
Six months before I started THIS I was looking for a new place to live and the wheels in my mind started to turn. I started thinking about how amazing it would be to just walk across the country and meet people and experience the beauty of life. Knowing I couldn’t just jump into that I decided to start eliminating things from my life. Over the last couple years I had already eliminated my need for cable, tv, personal internet, and the buying of excess unnecessary stuff that can start to happen in our consumerist society. The more and more I found passion and meaning the more I started to lose interest in the things I thought had meaning but in relation to life and love meant nothing. I have always been obsessed with sports, football in particular but then suddenly I couldn’t stand any of it. The thought of how much energy I was putting in to it as well as the amount of energy taken from me because of some external thing I had no control over. So I took control over what I knew I could, my mind and the amount of energy I dedicated to these things. It came very clear that all my energy must be dedicated to my dreams and passions. The core of both of those are founded in love, freedom and helping people. Even though right now I am helping myself it all ends with the serving of others.
WHAT IS THIS
Ok the moment of truth the THIS that I am talking about is my extreme project to become voluntarily HOMELESS.
Yes, read that last line again you aren’t mistaken I said HOMELESS. Now that I have actually been homeless for one month I can tell you that it has been one of the greatest changes I have made and has created so many positive changes that I had to share this post!!
What Is The GOAL?
This project is to become more in touch with who a I am, what a meaningful life is to me, what is most important by necessity, simplify, act/do, become more present and aware of every decision I make that leads to no regrets.
Before I started this project I would always write out what my perfect day would be. The picture below is an example of a “perfect day” I wrote about a year ago. This one has been tough to accomplish because I have been allowing my self to be distracted and not dedicated enough to follow through each day. I would do things for a couple of weeks and then stop and so on and so on. The toughest task was waking up early I would set like 10 alarms and each morning I would systematically turn each on off until the last one and then I would get up and feel like crap by essentially flipping the light switch in my brain on and off for over and hour.
The Beauty of Early Mornings
One of the amazing rooms I stay in!
Difficulties
This project has taught me so many things that I probably wouldn’t have learned for a while if I hadn’t became homeless. One of the biggest lessons learned is about perspective on life. It is easy to look around and complain about how bad the traffic is or how crappy your phone is being but if you were to have both of those things taken away for 3 months you would have a new perspective on how important they were to you. Maybe it would make the traffic or slow processing more tolerable, because hey it could always be worse RIGHT?
Well in my case going from sleeping in a comfortable bed to then sleeping in a tent on the ground or in a room on the floor and also sleeping my car. I remember a specific time when I had slept in my car for several nights , which is pretty uncomfortable, and then I found a floor to sleep on it was like I was living like a king. I was so happy to just be able to lay down all the way <—- these are the moments that I love, spontaneous happiness that comes from the simple things !
Another way that this has created change is the preparation and planning of each day. For the first week I started this project I would get off work and be ready to go “home” but there was nowhere to go. This created an interesting sensation of having nothing holding me back and certainly prevented me from going home to relax after a hard days work. Now I get off work and walk 2.5 miles to my local library to read, meditate, write, and get on the internet. This in itself has been a great thing because I spend the majority of my evening doing productive tasks. My mornings have been affected by this in a greatly positive way.
For years I have always wanted to and planned to get up at 4:30 every morning to walk, read, meditate, basically things that would put me in a positive mood and give me energy for the day ahead. Unfortunately though I never could create this habit …………UNTIL now! Because some of the places I sleep are cleaned by custodians that come in at 5am therefore I have to leave by at least 4:30am each morning. Once I started doing this I had the same issue as in the evening of saying to myself, “Well what now?” So after planning my day I now go to the University library in the 24 hour section and read until 5:30am, which is when the recreational center opens. Here I work out for 30 mins to an hour or so usually hitting the heavy bag, playing racquetball, walking, yoga, and stretching. Then I leave and go to work at about 6 or 6:30 am.
The changes I have been making for the last year nutritionally have been towards the direction of more raw and organic style of eating. Being homeless has certainly forced me to find more raw foods. I try to eat like a hiker focusing on nuts and dried fruits but unfortunately one can not survive solely on these. To avoid a nutrient deficiency, I try to eat as much veggies as a I can during the day. Work is my only place where I have a refrigerator and one of the few places to prepare food. This has certainly been one of the most difficult tasks of my project, but also one that has worked on my discipline too.
Conclusion
Why would anyone want to be homeless? To understand this question is to understand the type of person I am. I don’t want to be just anyone, I want to be someone amazing, someone who is inspirational not in words but in action and great deeds. First I have to take my self from something normal to something extraordinary. Through this extraordinary transformation, I want to inspire people to strive and be the best person that they can be. From the moment we as children in America are born, we are shown all the restrictions that hold us back from this potential. In school they confine your creativity by making you focus on the “realistic” goals. As far as I know dreams aren’t realistic at all. I know for me the biggest one was the work that it took to achieve my dreams. This is always the preventing factor. We all have amazing ideas but it is the ones who actualize them that are held in the highest regards. I am here because I am going to be one of those people.
Slowly but surely, day after day, action after action you have to has your self “Am I breathing life in to this or am I taking life away, because there is no neutral”.
One of my mentors asked me a question that he uses to figure out if he is going the right direction. Simply put “how is that working out for you”. Recently an offer came up to live with one of my buddies for a month he was offering it to help me out. Originally I was really excited and immediately said yes, but that night and the next day I kept running it through my mind and I started getting really stressed out and lost when it dawned on me that I had made so many positive changes and was enjoying being in the “now”so much I hadn’t had time to worry about anything. I was just doing it I was LIVING for the first time in my life. Every year towards the end of the year I look back and think did I accomplish anything and sadly the last several years I have been feeling like I haven’t but one of the first thoughts I had after doing this is man I’m actually doing something I am making changes develop awesome habits and I have a mind at peace. So to answer the question proposed to me by my mentor. YES.
One of my mentors asked me a question that he uses to figure out if he is going in the right direction. Simply put, “how is that working out for you?” Recently an offer came up to live with one of my buddies for a couple of months, he was offering it to help me out. Originally I was really excited and immediately said yes, but that night and the next day I kept running it through my mind and I started getting really stressed out and lost. Then it dawned on me that I had made so many positive changes and was enjoying being in the “now” so much, I hadn’t had time to worry about anything. I was just doing it, I was LIVING for the first time in my life. I knew I had to turn down his offer and continue being homeless because every year towards the end I look back and think did I accomplish anything? Sadly the last several years I have been feeling like I haven’t. One of the first thoughts I had after doing this, is man I’m actually doing something and I am making changes. I am developing awesome habits, and I have a mind at peace. So to answer the question proposed to me by my mentor was,YES!
I had to radically change my surroundings in order to get a different perspective and force myself to make some REAL changes! What challenge will you place on yourself?
One of my amazing Tai Chi practice spots
My view waking up some mornings
Hello everyone. I hope you all are have great days and weeks and if you are not CHANGE IT. Now I hear some of you saying “but I don’t know how!” Well Today is your lucky day because this post is my second installment of the Changing your Mindset and Experience the Potential 4 Post Event. If you have not read the intro read it here.
Last post I covered meditation and this post will cover the next 4 tasks or ideas that I have implemented in my life to create lasting change! So with out further ado here we go……..
Reading
If you have read any of my previous posts you know I am a crazy advocate of reading. When I reached the point in my life where I was fed up with the lack of growth and progress I started to look around at the successful people I knew and have heard about to try and see what reoccurring patterns there were. The first and most obvious of the patterns was reading. From Albert Einstein to Bruce Lee or Ray Kurzweil and etc. In my life my Dad who is one of the most successful and well rounded people I know reads extensively, he is also the one who taught me to read beyond my capabilities and to have a dictionary on hand for any stuff I didn’t understand.
Recognizing this pattern was enough for me to have a starting point to make some changes. I looked at how much information I was ingesting since I had gotten out of high school and it was practically nothing. I got a book about the leadership of Robert E. Lee from my dad it was one of his favorites so I knew I would enjoy it. I did, but an issue had kept coming up and much like my meditation issues I would fall asleep about 10-20 mins after starting, this would happen over and over and was extremely discouraging.
I kept trudging along though and read that book over the time of about 6-8 months but once I finished it I had the feeling of accomplishment and moved on to my next. One thing I started to notice was my ability to be able to read more in one setting without falling asleep and staying focused was working hand and hand with my meditation at the time. I believe my meditation was increasing my focus to read more while increasing comprehension as well. After I had read about 5 books over the next year after finishing the Robert E. Lee one I started to generated ideas about things and create interest in subjects that were unbeknownst to me just 6 months earlier this is where the passion I talk about in one of my previous post starts to generate and build.
Since this time I have read about 20 books which is something I never thought I would say. My goal is to build up to one book a week which I now understand is a very realistic goal. Fifty pages a day, that’s it, and you can read most books in a week as long as they are around 350 pages. I also find my self becoming more and more of a conversationalist. I have so many new and interesting ideas to discuss that most people are completely unaware of.
A key component of my growth was to change my perspective and what better way to change your perspective than to read the one of a genius or person who dedicated their whole life to a certain concept so that you do not have too. A great quote I read recently is, “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”-Andre Gide. So please pickup a book so things do not need to be said again!
Journaling
About the time that I started changing my habits and introducing things that would help me to grow I got an Iphone 3 this was back when smart phones were few and far between. It opened my eyes to so many applicable tools and gave me the ability for the first time ever to quickly and efficiently document my life.
Once I started reading I was getting to the point that I had so many thoughts, ideas, and concepts going through my head that I started to become overwhelmed. This lead me to start journaling my thoughts and after I started this I felt as though a weight was being lifted, this mental baggage was able to be unloaded and allow me to walk more freely.
Being able to completely get one concept out of my mind allowed for more thought to be dedicated to a new concept and much to my surprise all of these ideas started to blend together to the point that I could find the similarities in completely separate subjects.
Also when I go back and read journal entries from a year or two ago it’s like I am reading the thoughts of someone I don’t even know and allows me to see myself in that different perspective. I was also able to see the growth in my maturity based on what I was journaling at that point in my life.
Now the difference between this and blogging, goal setting, or just writing is that this is only for your eyes. It is supposed to allow you to get those thoughts and ideas that you never plan on sharing with anyone out. Try this and discover the person in you that your never knew was there. Very moving.
Documenting
Once I had been journaling my thoughts for a few months I noticed that in my journals I would document things like what I ate and how much I exercised which brings me to my next mind changing tool. DOCUMENTING. I realized it needed to be a separate notebook than my journaling because it was causing confusion.
So I started off just documenting food only in the notes on my phone. Then over time I started to get an idea that if I documented all my calories, water drank, sleep times duration and quality, mood, exercise, supplements, and weight twice a day I could chart them and see long term patterns that correlated say with my mood and the amount of water drank.
As you could imagine documenting that much stuff gets boring real fast although I did do it for about a year and a half on and off it has been very beneficial and allowed me to get a good idea on how healthy or unhealthy certain things and proportions are. Just like my journal entries it was an invaluable tool to look back and be like why didnt I accomplish very much this month, check notes, OH no wonder I ate out 3 times a week and didnt drink a lot of water.
So while I don’t recommend going as far as I did in the beginning I do suggest you take a week or two and document all food and water intake it will make you more conscious about each thing you eat and if you can develop this habit then when you are not documenting you are automatically more conscious about each decision you make. Now I don’t document a whole lot but the habits that were formed from when I did are long lasting and when ever I get to a point of living a stagnate lifestyle I start documenting again to motivate myself.
A lot of these ideas revolved around becoming more and more aware of you life and actions.
Goal setting
On January 31st of this year I took a consultation with Izzy from 30yearoldninja.com, he is a successful blogger and life coach who changed his life by quitting his job and moving to japan to become martial artist. He is one of the few people I know who is living his dreams.
He taught me very important fundamentals to goal setting and planning. If you would like to know his specific plan you can set up a meeting with him by just clicking the link here 30 Year Old Ninja . I will lay out simple format so I can leave you with something to practice now.
I like to have 3 levels of goals each one getting closer to present; they are yearly goals, monthly goals, and weekly actions that will allow you to accomplish the goals.
First write out what you want to have accomplished in one year. This is to identify where you want to go which will reflect in your monthly and weekly goals. For my example I will use my weight loss.
Year goal: I want to lose 70 lbs. in one year.
So now you know the direction. For me I will break down ok to lose 70 lbs. in 12 months that means 5.8 lbs. a month. So for my first monthly goal I’m going to say I need to lose 5 lbs. or more.
Monthly Goal: Lose five pounds or more.
Now this is where the actionable step comes in. Each week you are going to review what am I supposed to accomplish this month and subsequently will this allow me to achieve my year goals.
Weekly Actions :
Practice healthy eating habits
Walk a mile every day.
Do core workouts and stretch.
Drink a gallon of water each day.
So rather than changing your yearly goal or monthly goals all the time you simply adjust the actions you are going to take that week to accomplish those. But say you are crushing your goals you can always tweak the yearly and monthly goals to accommodate.
I also keep it simple and only plan a year or two ahead because I try to live more in the now than in the future. If we just focus on as much as we can today and this week then in one year you will be exactly where you want to be.
Conclusion
Changing my mind involved adding little things here and there and creating habits by doing them daily. My perspective started really opening when I read about other peoples perspectives that had thought the same things I did 100 years ago or as little as 1 year ago. Great ways to become more aware of your actions can begin with journaling and documenting your actions, good and bad. Goals are a great way to introduce meaning and establish the path that you are going to take to create lasting change. Alright guys and gals thats all for today. I hope these ideas and tools will help you as you try an discover your place in the world !!
Peace and Love
Meditation to me is very important it being the one thing that has brought broad changes in every aspect of my life I am dedicating an entire post to discussing it. Meditation can be kind of a hot word in the America because of its association with religious history.
I know of at least one example where it was instituted in a elementary school and the parents protested and had it removed. On the other hand there are more and more mainstream endorsers of meditation one of them being the United States military. For several years now the Marine Corps has been running a mindfulness program which has shown great result. As more and more scientific research comes out I believe there will be a change in consciousness about its transformative abilities.
Even though the majority of the earliest instances of its application are usually of a religious form the meditative “state” has been achieved in all forms forever. I believe most of us have also achieved this state unknowingly.
If you have ever had that feeling of doing something that is so familiar to you that it takes no thought at all and by the end of the task you just blanked on how it got done. Similar to driving to work and home some days you will be lost in thought and just arrive at your destination while being like “WHOA how did I get here without crashing!”
Before I practiced meditation consistently I used to have a night job cleaning a weight room floor. I would push first a vacuum and then a scrubbing machine back and forth monotonously from one side of a square room to another after about 6 months of this it took no thought.
Simultaneously I started having these unbelievable insights and ideas that to this day still have an impact including one time I broke down in tears because of the enormity of the insight. I believe this was because of the quieted state of mind that is achieve through a meditation.
I want you to not look at meditation like it is some taboo thing, I say this because the majority of people I talk with believe it is. Look at it as the quieting of the mind that allows the barriers of subconscious and conscious thought to melt away. Your subconscious is vastly more wise than you can imagine. Later on when I talk about lucid dreaming I will describe an exercise of calling yourself on a phone in your dream to ask questions and you will receive answers which is unbelievably incredible.
Enough about that lets get in why and how to get started……
Why?
We have so many thoughts that are running through our mind every second and on top of that we also have more and more information vying for our attention. Marketers these days have an unbelievable ability to target trends through data on social networking, web browsing, and our internet activity all with the intentions of finding the best way to get your attention.
The development of the smart phone has also added significant stress to our ability to focus and maintain our attention span. It to me is no wonder that more than ever we are diagnosing kids with ADD and ADHD and rather than to look for simple methods of correction they just prescribe and pill and say shut up. We have never lived in a time with so much information available to this many people than ever before. Kids are becoming addicted to their ipads and iphones before they are even 10 years old and we want then say “Why is my kid so DISTRACTED”.
Just 5 years ago you could find your self sitting at a restaurant or some event with another person and lets say they go to the bathroom …. Do you remember what you used to do? Well you would have a time to just sit there and think, and think about whatever.
Now we fill this time with a quick check of the weather, google this or that, check facetweetnewsblogtube, or just stare at cats and no time is ever spent contemplating or just BEING. Don’t get me wrong I’m a tech geek for sure but I don’t let it affect me in a negative way, although I have been at a point before of checking news and facebook right before bed and first thing in the morning, in fact I think there is a study on that. So what are we to do in this world? …………..Meditate.
Where to Start
A Deepak Chopra’s book called The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success was my first introduction to meditation. I had not even know about it until this point. After being introduced to the word mediation I started to research what it was and how to do it. Much to my surprise I was overwhelmed by the amount types and techniques so I decided to deconstruct it and keep it simple.
The ultimate meditation is nothing. A point of not sensing anything and completely just being. I realize when I am in this state because I will have a thought that I havent had any thoughts in a while and just like that your are thinking rather than being. As you can imagine its tough.
The state of nothing is one mediation but is not confined to that one only. You can meditate outside and just become absorbed in to everything becoming aware of things you would not notice if you were busy or distracted. There are walking meditations that sync your breathing and footsteps while quieting the mind. There are internal meditations where you focus your mind on certain organs and energy centers to attract energy to that area. Why I am saying this is so that you understand there are many ways to achieve this and once you understand the feeling to be achieved you may come up with your own way. But to keep it simple I will only cover one that anyone can understand for if I get one person to start meditating I will have done my job. The results will speak for themselves.
A Simple Method to Start
Sit in a chair with your feet flat on the floor and palms resting on your knees/thighs. Sit with your back straight and your chin slightly tucked to straighten the spine more. Make sure to sit somewhere quiet without distractions in the beginning but as you practice you can do it anywhere also being in a dark room is helpful at first. Focusing all of your intention on your breath you breathe in through the nose and out through either mouth or nose. Note when your out of breathe most of us are using smaller muscles on the uppers part of the chest to expand your lungs however when meditating you want to use your diaphragm muscles down by your belly to breath. You can tell if you are doing this correct by seeing if you chest is rising or if it is you belly pushing out if your chest rises you are using the upper muscles that are inferior to the diaphragm.
While you focus on you breath you can count one(in breath) two(out breath) three( in breath) four( out breath) and continue up until 10 and start over. When you find your self thinking a thought go back to focusing you breath. This is called still meditation. This is the first thing I practiced and my goal was to do 5 minutes straight this very very simple task took me around a month to achieve while practicing every day and sometimes a couple times a day.
Deterring Side Effects
In the beginning most of you will fall asleep pretty quickly. Even though a favorite way of mine is to lie down I recommend sitting at the edge of a chair and keeping your feet flat and hands flat on your knees in the beginning.
When I first sit down to meditate I have so many thoughts running that its quite difficult to get settled. When I say settled I am talking about getting in to a relaxed state because at first when your eyes are closed you can feel them moving around or twitching like sensation. THIS IS VERY DISTRACTING.
A helpful tool that I use at the beginning of my meditation sessions is this one minute meditation technique by Dr. John Douillard below. I learned this technique after I had been meditating for about 6 months and what I realized was that this technique gets you to a relaxed state equal to about 10 minutes of mediation. So its a neat little cheat.
A big issue I had with the development of my meditations was the actually doing them, Imagine a scenario you get off from work and you have a million things you could get done , friends to hang out with, and places to go the last thing you think about is to sit and do nothing. Even though it is much more complex than just doing nothing it feels this way at first. SO a hugely important factor is to KEEEEP practicing because a lot of the awesome benefits come after you have practiced for a while. I know I almost quit but then I had an amazing meditation where I felt a happiness and peace that I had never felt before and from that experience on I have been addicted.
Conclusion
Something that has the ability to create peace, happiness and tranquility in a life of busyness, distractions, and never ending obligations is one of the most important tools we can all practice. For those of us who can not escape on vacations to exotic places or mountains to reset ourselves with peace we now have a tool to achieve this same reset.
So I ask you do you want to experience more of your life rather than being distracted and confused?
In my last post I went over the last several years of my life and events that had changed my perspective. Now for this post I am going to lay out a list of 12 things that I do on a regular basis that helps me to achieve daily growth and mental clarity. I will be discussing these 12 actions in depth over a four blog posts. I hope to give you tools that allow you to change your perspective. Throughout the proccess I would love it if you shared your experiences that changed your perspective or actions you practice to grow.
The most important part of all this is to take your current mindset and experience something completely different that allows you to see your life through another set of eyes. This is what allows you to see the bad habits you have and how to change them. I’m not here to make people do things but to allow others to see their own potential.
Meditation
Of all the things I have incorporated into my life I think this one is the most important this is exactly why it is at the top of my list. In today’s society we are constantly being beaten and battered by information from every direction and the majority of it is forcing its way in to your mind versus you voluntarily searching for it. Meditation is a great way to reset the mind and come out of it with a more clear perception of what is happening around you.
Reading
When I was confused and what some people may of called being a loser I started to look at what successful people did and try and figure out what I had to do specifically to stop being stagnate and start growing. I looked at geniuses like Robert E. Lee, Albert Einstein, and Bruce Lee , oddly enough they all were avid readers. One of the best ways to change your perspective is to read about the perspective of others. Aristotle said “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it”.
Documenting
I kept reading about all these studies that showed by counting calories and documenting food eaten participants on diets would stick with them longer. This made me interested and I started to experiment with documenting my habits. This had a very positive affect that lasted even after I stopped documenting. When I see myself becoming unconscious about decisions I will do a week of documenting to get back on track.
Goal setting
As I started to change more and more things in my life I always felt the need to write down plans of actions and goals but had no way of categorizing and organizing them. Basically I had a hairball of goals, actions, and ideas which lead me to look for answers of how to make changes in my life. After a consultation with an inspiring blogger I made simple changes that allowed me to have structured and action oriented goals.
Journaling
I am the type of person that constantly has thoughts running through my mind of things I can do or will and how. I have noticed that if I don’t get these ideas out on paper they will stay there and cloud my thinking and creative abilities. Once I started journaling it made a profound impact on my mental state and felt like a weight had been lifted.
Shoot for the stars
When I plan my year goals I definitely like to shoot for the stars. You want to shoot for something that if you achieve even half of it will still allow you to grow. Have big ideas and be passionate about them.
Get out of your comfort zone
Some of the times when I made the most change and growth was when I put myself in situations that took me out of my comfort zone. If you look at your own life and feel as though you are stuck in a rut an important thing to do is get out of that comfort zone you have created.
Discuss ideas
An important change that I made in the last several years and was encourage by the ever increasing amount of online communities and forums. This is a great way to get in contact with likeminded individuals that normally you would not be able to.
Passion
I might have stolen this quote from a subconscious memory but it’s an idea that anyone can see and it is the fact that passion is not something but rather a product or result of something. Passion in my life is a result of ideas that generate awe and spectacle. By searching out this desire to experience awe I simultaneously create passion and a good indicator of the correct path to travel is whether or not that passion is sustained.
Daily Rituals
Whenever I am going through a tough time or recognize that I am being lazy I go back to the basics and for me that means my daily rituals. I have a specific list of things I do daily that keeps my life in order especially when I fall of the wagon.
Creative projects
During my intellectual endeavors I became bored with only dedicating my time to reading strictly non-fiction while learning subjects that were very rigid and strict. I realized that I need to create balance in the learning process by integrating creative projects to work on in moments of frustration. Not only does this create new patterns of thinking but also allows your to escape into a new perspective.
Conclusion
This entire list are all things that will create the environment for changing your perspective on your life. Over the next few weeks I will be laying out four separate posts that go in to more depth on each of these concepts. I will explain how I came to conclusions about these ideas also how I integrate them specifically in my life to give you examples for your own. Once again if any one wants to share things that you have discovered as beneficial to growth in your own life please share.
When looking for solutions to problems in my own life I enjoy looking outside the box and all of these things help me day to day to achieve that. If you integrate one or two of these things for a week or two and they don’t resonate with you then drop it and try another. A huge part of all these is it takes dedication and lots of it, don’t get me wrong I’m not perfect and I don’t do every single thing every day but a lot of days I do the majority. Be open and see how it works for you. Thanks and Peace
Its 2007 I have just graduated high school and have no f***ing idea what I am doing with my life. Up until now the only thing I felt like I was born for was to play football and be funny. Football was my passion but through lack of knowledge about working out and lifting techniques it took a major toll on my body, messed up my knees, and a never-ending list of back issues. I had a simple formula curls , bench press , and box squat(a squat that doesn’t go all the way parallel, a teens trick to lifting more weight while seriously hurting yourself) a breakfast of brochampions. But functionally it was retarded, sure I could box squat 800 lbs and bench 400lbs but how much of that was usable. So because of my injuries I decided not to go and play junior college ball which was one of my dreams to play for a team with my family name sported on the back in front of thousands of people, as you could imagine it was a tough choice that threw me in to a whirlwind of confusion.
Being a lazy person in every area of my life except football I quickly was looking for an easy way out. Another example of my laziness was my lack of ambition to be good in school. I was the class clown and troublemaker a title which I took pride in achieving. Now it seems like one of the biggest regrets but understanding it was all preparation for where I am today it seems appropriate.
Math was probably one of my biggest fears. After slacking off early in life in math classes falling behind seemed to advance exponentially to the point I just stopped caring. This caused me to look for careers that did not require four year degrees and also had practically no math use. This is a very limited field. This is a very common problem with our school system which focuses more of memorizing facts than understanding how to learn.
Ultimately I settled for heating and air conditioning school it required hardly any math skills and you could graduate in 9 months and make 30k a year WOW WEEEE a slackers dream.
Partying Years
I would document the next 3 years but there was so much partying I cant remember. Jussssssst kidding but seriously one thing that always struck me as funny was living in a college city all my friends were going to four year universities and I was working but we all partied the same and I remember thinking wow I am so glad I am not wasting money on a education partying all the time. I saw what happens to a lot of kids and this causes the majority of them to graduate in 5+ years. This was the point of my life that I feel I truly did not make a whole lot of advancement besides the fact I was passive aggressively “finding myself”. The idea of self education has mo meaning in my life at this point but having fun means a whole lot.
The Event
In 2010 I started living by myself for the first time, the years before I had 3 roommates and very little privacy and no time to dedicate to just myself. This I believe was very important because it allowed me to have alone time and start to ask my self questions. There was a growing amount of thoughts and feelings of life being meaningless. I kept trying to find meaning in my life but everywhere I looked there was none.
This lead to many wikipedia inquiries because I started to search out the information to answer questions I had rather than be oblivious and say “just because so”. A key change in my behavior from ignorant to informed should be noted.
Around this same time I had my first lucid dream that I can remember since being a child. A lucid dream is when you become conscious in your dream and can manipulate it. This really started to make me question what the purpose of dreams were and ultimately how consciousness worked. A couple more books and I was starting to gain a passion for reading about the unexplainable phenomena that has a beneficial application for advancing your self mentally and physically. Also movies like The Secret, What the bleep do we know, Law of attraction were trending and covered ideas of positive energy attracting positive opportunities and visa versa with negative, but mostly this was was very superficial and contained no real actionable steps beyond visualization.
After reading Deepak Chopra’s The Seven Spiritual Laws To Success I started to realize the importance of meditation in a world of constant distraction and attention demanding tasks, up until this point I had known nothing of meditation or really spiritual practice beyond light prayer.
It was around this time that I had a very important personal experience that happened during a meditation that allowed me to see the questionable nature of what we call reality. This was “the event”. It was at this point the creation of intense confusion had come back again and stayed with me for another year and half. Even though I was confused I saw a glimpse of truth and meaning , a sign that helped me to know I was on the right track.
Illusions
Now this confusion is much much different than the early confusion in my life of which the latter was much less impactful. This new confusion could be likened to that of a child who his whole life has believed in some mythical belief(i.e santa clause, tooth fairy, Easter bunny) only to find out it is not real. Imagine your a child and you read books, hear stories, have trustworthy influential people tell you this is real and then you find out it was all an illusion to keep you happy.
The illusion in my own life was my ego and beliefs associated with the ego. This ego compartmentalizes and categorizes everything to make sense of our world. Yet when we have beliefs that are deeply entrenched and something comes along and contradicts that belief you ignore it or refuse to consider it. The ultimate ignorance. This is where my ego belief systems were stopping me from progressing beyond my current state.
I used to think the earth was created specifically for us humans and essentially everything revolves around us. But if you look into what we know about the universe you quickly realize that we are just a cog in a very very very very giant machine and everything relies on each other for the machine to work. This was a very big shock to my ego and initially denial set in but once I was able to go beyond my ego construct and acknowledge this information, meaning and truth flooded my life from every corner.
2011 Until Now
Having identified an important tool in recognizing decisions based out of ego logic I started to grow…..and grow fast.
I remember being very overwhelmed by how much I was reading and learning and for the first time THINKING , original that is. There would be days that I would be doing something and all of a sudden I would have an emotional roller coaster because of a revelation about some concepts that I was learning that fit with other ideas that were completely separate, it was beautiful and sometimes the awe would cause me to cry in happiness. Finally meaning was every where in my life. It was only once I stopped searching for it that it found me. How beautiful is that?! I can say now that I am truly happy which has allowed me to look at my past and see just how unhappy I really was.
I can go through dozens of examples of things that monumentally changed my perspective but the reoccurring theme that kept coming up again and again was the search for truth and meaning. A key point I would like to make is that it is truth and meaning to YOU and you specifically because what is true and meaningful to someone else may not be to you.
What Does All This Mean For You?
The thing that I think helped me progress the fastest was thrusting my self in to situations that went beyond my comfort zone(experiences that made me question my beliefs) and intellectual capacity(reading books that were very difficult at first). I think the famous quote “if success was easy everyone would be successful” applies here because this journey that I speak of can lead to the most amazing growth and success but it is very difficult and requires someone who is serious about changing their life.
My next post I will lay out actionable steps that I took and you can take to make drastic changes in your life.
To End With
Every person needs to understand that we live in a universe of infinite potential. To think that something is impossible is to make it impossible. To create change you must change your mind. But first it starts with a decision.
Which decision will you make ?
To start this post I am going to open with a quote from the great Bruce Lee.
The hardest thing that I have issues with and for real its a tough one, is to just simply….ACT!
I have the plan(knowing), I have the ability(willing) and yet come 5pm when I get off from work I go home sit down at the computer and BAM its 11pm and I have done nothing but read meaningless articles, and watched netflix, youtube and hulu videos. A huge trap to get yourself into is to plan too much and say this and that but when it comes to following through and acting your no where to be found.
This is a big issue I have and on top of that I am definitely a BIG idea person. One day I want to move out of the country the next day I want to backpack around America but one thing that stayed the same is the fact that I didn’t do any of it. My tai chi instructor which is a person whom I talk with for hours, likes to say that we would gain more in 15 min of meditation than we would for talking about theoretical ideas for 4 hours. I totally agree.
I feel like I have spent the last 3-4 years telling my self I would do all this crazy stuff but yet here I am feeling like I haven’t accomplished anything. Which to an extent the majority of my successes have all come through inner development that perceptually changed the course of my life. I say perceptually because in fact the whole time I have always been on this journey but I just had not realized it yet.
Once I made changes and started to be more harmonious with my environment, aka becoming less resistant, things just almost felt like they clicked in to place. It was amazing to see and feel, in my next post I will talk more about my mental transformation. I remember almost every day being like “this is the most ironic thing ever” or “thats a coincidence”, but then I realized these events or signs happen far to often to be random. These coincidental events would be meeting someone at the perfect time, finding the right book or piece of knowledge that connects a puzzle of ideas, hearing the right song with the most perfect lyrics, or the form of a terrible decision that you miraculously come out very lucky, any of these things would happen sometimes every day or sometimes once a week.
Now the reason I am explaining all this is that when you become less resistant and more open to what the possibilities of your life are these “ironic” events happen but these events are not what is special about this process. It is what these events represent, which is opportunity . Every time there is a sign or ironic event it is your chance to ACT and seize the opportunity which will always lead you in the direction of your dream because that dream usually seeps in to the subconscious.
MOST IMPORTANT
Above all else you MUST , Act!! Doing one thing for as little as 5 mins a day will build up over time and create passion and growth. Some may say that’s too little time to change but its the ACT that is what matters because once you stick with it everyday you build that habit and eventually that 5 mins will turn in to 10 and then 20 and if you find what your looking for you might just give up everything you know and dedicate your entire life to a single goal.
That’s what happen to me. I realize my potential. I am more harmonious. I now act on my opportunities. Yes I may fall and yes it does hurt but you can bet your ass I will get up every single time and be a better man for it.
Will you see and seize your opportunity?
Its 1:00pm on a Sunday in March 2011 a phone call wakes me in my studio apartment. I am alone, hungover, and disoriented. I look around and see a slew of pizza boxes, beer bottles, xbox controllers, little debbie wrappers, and two weeks of dirty laundry. I have lived here for over 6 months and my parents have never seen my apartment. “Hello who is it?” , “It’s your dad come look outside your door”. Some sweat starts to build as I walk to the door wearing nothing but my boxers. I open the door slowly to see my worst nightmare, my parents are in the parking lot sitting in their car and they want to come up. I nearly faint quickly I come up with some lie as to why they cant, it now slips my mind but really its all the same. I was a mess. After they finally left I shuffled past the junk and garbage and sat down and thought what the hell am I doing with my life.
Here at this point I assessed whether I was happy or not. I realized I had not been happy for years pretty much since high school. I looked around at what I was doing and it amounted to partying, drinking, stuffing my face, and playing video games with my friends, but nothing had substance. Everyone wants to feel like their lives have meaning and that you are working for something bigger than themselves. After realizing the meaninglessness that was my life I made one of my first conscious decisions to work to get better everyday.
It started with the normal things like trips to the self-help section at the local library. Find your passion. This statement was scattered across all of them so I thought you know theres something with this passion thing. Realizing I have not felt passion since I was deeply dedicated to football in high school, I then tried to isolate what created that passion. Finally after much reflection I pinpointed it to learning and growing everyday, everything I did back then was to better my self on the field during the season as well as off-season.
I had since lost all passion for watching professional sports until I started watching mma and the UFC. After I decided that self-help books were boring and could only help me in little ways I started reading about things that really peaked my interests starting with fighting. From this time until now I have sparked a passion that has created meaning and a sense that I am apart of something much bigger than just learning. Life is pointless without passion and learning.
Passion
Passion for me is one of those words that has truly lost its umph and importance because of the over-marketing by self help gurus to find your passion. So here is my overly marketed self-help pitch about passion too, ah the irony. Passion is important. I wouldn’t risk being cliche if it wasn’t. Life is hard and when you get on the path to living life the way that you want to live it and not how everyone tells you too, it can be even harder. This is where passion comes in without passion you may become discourage very easily at even the littlest of obstacles. One sign that what your currently doing is not your passion is if you can not make your self do what is necessary to accomplish your goal, because once you get the high off a small success and see progression towards your dream there is the spontaneous feeling of PASSION.
Learning
When I decided that I wanted to become some one who was known as being great at something I looked around at other greats and geniuses to see what the had in common. One similar pattern kept coming up again and again. This was the amount of time spent self-educating or learning in your leisure time. There even seemed to be a reoccurring pattern of being difficult or “dumb” in school early on because they were more interested in the things they were learning on their own.
Reading is one way to for sure to improve your thinking and mental quickness. Back in the day the only ways you could learn were by going to a library and checking out books or enrolling in a formal class. Today we have an almost unlimited amount of ways to get information free and also lots to pay for. The online learning environment is currently booming, innovative middle aged people are starting to see the flaws with the current system and are taking advantage of the internet platform.
For myself I try to get a multi-angled approach to learning something. Lets take for example nutrition. I have recently been learning a lot about nutrition so that I can make informed decisions about my weight loss. I started by searching on wikipedia.org for basic ideas of what fats, carbs, proteins were, understanding at the base level really helps when breaking down an idea to figure out if it is b.s or accurate. Then I looked at coursera.org to see if they had any free classes to enroll in, which they did have two and I have enrolled in them. These classes were informative because they explain a lot of what I had read about but could not visualize yet. Next I went to amazon.com and found a kindle book about cooking to inform my self about healthy cooking. Now with my newly gained knowledge I went and created a profile on the notorious bodybuilding.com forum. This forum is known for having really helpful tip and expert nutritionists to talk with. I posted some questions I had about the ratio of nutrition and created a discussion with informed individuals. Now as you can see I took on idea of nutrition learned the basics, took a free class, read a book, and started a informed discussion. This is very easy and to do all of this cost me $10. So the next time you tell your self that you cant learn something because school is too expensive think again.
Conclusion
Reading and learning can be defined as boring. So start by reading what you enjoy find those few books that put you on the edge of your seat or find that idea that blows your mind and search about it. Taking this step will allow you to figure you out your passion is. You will know your passion because things that you thought were important aren’t compared to your new found interest. Your new interest will make you stay up late, work for hours on end, read all day because it will be fueled by passion and excitement. What was your interest , once combined with passion turns in to something much more, it turns in to a dream. This dream will make you want to learn every thing you can about what ever you need to to accomplish it. This is the power of learning and passion. To take ordinary things and create awe wonder and dreams.
So I propose a question to you….
Do you have what it takes to find your passion?
Does anyone remember reading rainbow? I sure do, it was pretty influential in my life as a kid. It taught me the beauty of having an imagination and creating a place in your mind where anything was possible and you were king of the world. Man just thinking about that puts a reminiscent smile on my face, but ya know that didn’t last forever because then a little thing I like to call the education machine got a hold of me (and you and probably all your friends too). In this machine they teach you what to think not how to think and this is a very important tool for anyone of power. For if you do not know how to think then how can you defend yourself from being a prisoner in a system that is not designed for anything but emotional and material gain. It took me 18 years to break out of that prison and figure out how to learn, but more importantly why to learn.
In this day and age if you are not spending some of your leisure time learning, you are a very unfortunate person and one doomed for continual search of happiness. If you want to find happiness find it in the satisfaction that you get from growing every day, there was a time about a year ago that everyday my mind was like a roller coaster of learning and understanding. I was intellectually growing in months during the span of days. The ideas and reflections I was having were not only for the first time my thoughts but they were thought provoking and sometimes crashed into beliefs of my own. This lead to an involuntary re-evaluation which subsequently resulted in asking myself, what do I believe? I think it’s important to point out that naturally on my own thinking, without influence, it came back to…….. What Do I Believe?
People know stuff. That is true, but the majority of the people I come in contact with don’t understand any of it. Why? That’s what someone asked me once when they saw me reading a book during a 15 min. break at work. To understand my friend is a good reply but really for me it comes down to awe and fascination. We are living in a time where every single one of us has the ability to create and show the world something – ANYTHING!!! People should understand that is the epitome of what we can do in this world that no other living creature can do. Ever seen a viral video with a child that made your cry at its beauty? That is the ability to move people across the world.
If you have never heard of Ray Kurzweil or have never read the Singularity is Coming you should. For me, he has opened my eyes to the potential cusp of what we could be dealing with in a matter of decades (Ray, and through visual signs I agree, says it may be sooner). Technology is exponentially growing; much like our universe, probably relatively slower, but similarly at a more and more rapid pace. This could lead to a revolution across the board of how we do everything from health care to interior decoration and dating to the entire service industry. Unless clamped down by government or catastrophe the future looks very bright! When each and every house has a 3D printer that can print up whatever, then indeed life will be much different.
For me starting with the basics has really helped with moving up to the ability have original ideas and reflections. Understanding the nature of how things work allows you to say this or that will not help me in how to solve this problem, but more importantly you will be able to be a person with solutions. I feel like I am that person now. But let’s use an example before I became that type of person. I would look at nutrition and dieting and be so confused I would run out the door to McDonalds. After I became one who tries to understand, I started reading every book about nutrition, anatomy, food production, how to cook food, where to buy food … Etc. I now understand what my body needs, where to get it and how to cook it. This is the best part – THERE WILL ALWAYS BE MORE WAYS, MORE LEARNING, and MORE BOOKS. Forever. I’ll probably die trying to bring a library book back before it’s late. Just kidding, like we will still have books in the future. To end with: One of the biggest epiphanies I had was realizing that when I have utterly nothing, I will be left with my mind/intelligence and that is the most valuable or invaluable thing in the universe. So, in regards to learning as much as you can and feeling the way I do – you decide what’s important.
What if you could just upload information to your brain like you can to your iPhone or laptop? Well this not out of the question in the future. But this idea reflects to me a pattern that is starting to emerge. The constant need of instant updates and corrections – are an ever flowing state of activity and growth. People constantly look for an update on their cell phone. How frequently do they happen now versus the past? How much more does each update include and process then the last. Why change hardware if all you need is a little more information and programming to completely change the game. This is the exact same concept for reading books your brain is processing the information and taking important code or functions to be used in the future for efficiency. So until we have a way to upload information directly into the brain we will have to settle for an “update” by simply reading a book.
Fighting the Fatman 