Awareness Training: Bring Your Attention Back to Your Body

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Awareness Training: Bring Your Attention Back to Your Body

“Yeah, when you call my name, I salivate like Pavlov’s Dogs.” -- The Rolling Stones 

A huge amount of the thoughts in our heads are there because of conditioned thinking. You remember Pavlov’s Dogs from school, right?  Ring the bell and salivate. Conditioned thinking is an automatic response. Event X happens and you respond with Reaction Y, just like you learned to do in the past.

What is this means is that we are not in control of our thoughts. Our thoughts control us. This conditioning started when we were very small children. A baby is hungry, she cries and she gets fed.  She gets hungry again, she cries and she gets fed again. We learn that one pretty fast.

To take back control of our thinking, we need tools to help us break the slavery to our trance-like conditioning.

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Great Moments in Life: Kids on the Bus

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Great Moments in Life: Kids on the Bus

On the morning bus recently here in Kyoto, I sat down next to a bunch of elementary school boys. They all look at me suspiciously, and then start saying to each other "You go talk to him in English!" 

After it was determined that one of the boys could speak English better than the others, the one boy looks at me and says "hello!"

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Be Right or Be Kind? Surviving Holiday Family Gatherings

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Be Right or Be Kind? Surviving Holiday Family Gatherings

“If you think you are enlightened, go spend a week with your family.” -- Ram Dass

"You  have a choice either to be right or to be kind.” -- Wayne Dyer

With the holiday season approaching, many of us will be participating in family gatherings. While many families have wonderful times together, others don’t. Family members can drive you crazier than any other people on the planet. 

If you want to have a better holiday experience, and a better life experience in general, you might want to consider a new approach to dealing with challenging people. 

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Simple Energizing and Centering Meditation

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Simple Energizing and Centering Meditation

Today, I would like to share with you a simple visualization exercise that can help increase your energy level. This is especially good if you are feeling drained, lethargic or depressed. It is also an excellent daily exercise to keep you strong, centered and balanced.

It only takes a few minutes and you can incorporate this into your regular meditation practice.

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Put Your Camera (or Phone) Down and Experience Life

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Put Your Camera (or Phone) Down and Experience Life

The next time you pull that camera or phone out of your pocket to take a picture or video. Don’t. Put it back.

Instead just look at what you wanted to take a picture of. Experience it. Listen to what is going on. Smell it. Feel it. Be in the present.  Life is now. It is not later when you are looking at your photos on Facebook.

When you breathe your last breath and your life is flashing in front of your eyes, will you be thinking about the pictures that you took, or of the experiences you had and the people you loved?

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Are You Giving, Taking or Losing Energy?

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Are You Giving, Taking or Losing Energy?

 

Understanding your energy, the energy of others and how we all struggle for more of this energy is a powerful way to understand how you act, and how you interact with others.

Every interaction you have with another person is an energy exchange. During these interactions you, and the other person, are either giving, taking or losing energy.

In today's post,  I will talk about these energy exchanges between people and how you can identify them.

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What Is Your Essence?

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What Is Your Essence?

On my journey from the depths of alcohol abuse two decades ago, and from the work I do helping people improve their lives, I have found that the path of true success and happiness comes by looking inward and strengthening yourself from the inside out.

Today, I am going to briefly talk about what “going inward” really means and what you will find when you get there. 

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You Weren’t Born Just to Buy Stuff

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You Weren’t Born Just to Buy Stuff

You are constantly and relentless being told by society that you must buy stuff. Lots of stuff. You are a consumer, so you must consume. If you do not, you are not contributing to society. Your status is judged by the quality and quantity of your things; the Armani suit, the Rolex watch and the Mercedes car.

While there is nothing inherently wrong in having things - even nice things - yet you set yourself up for a life of endless suffering by making “buying stuff” the center point of your life.  You will never have enough. There always a bigger house to be bought and smarter smartphone. You will spend more and more of your limited time working to pay off your debts, and less time on the human relationships which are the most important parts of life.

 

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The World is Better Now Than Ever in History, but I Bet You Don’t Believe It

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The World is Better Now Than Ever in History, but I Bet You Don’t Believe It

Many people think that world is getting worse by the day. But that is not true. Life is better for humanity now than ever in history.

Yet this belief in a worsening world gets in the way of solving the real problems that need to be addressed.  By having an overly negative view of the world (and life), you lay the seeds for crippling depression and anxiety. 

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The Path to Real Success Lies Within

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If you want to overcome your problems and have real success in this life, you have to go inward. Deep inside of you is your essence: you are a spiritual being having a human experience. The reason you were born was because of this spirit; it is not because of your body.

This has been taught throughout the ages in all cultures. In this modern world of rapidly accelerating change, the idea of living from the inside has largely been pushed to the side. We are literally brainwashed everyday to be consumers. We are constantly bombarded thousands of times a day by advertising to consume, consume, consume.

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Storytelling: Serendipity, Synchronicity, and Diesel Fueled Enlightenment (Video)

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Storytelling: Serendipity, Synchronicity, and Diesel Fueled Enlightenment (Video)

This is a video of Paul Crouse telling a story called "Hugging in Kerala" at The Flame storytelling event at Papa Jon's Cafe Shinpukan in Kyoto, Japan. 

To borrow the words of cafe owner and MC Charles Roche, it is "a tale of serendipity, synchronicity, and diesel fueled enlightenment."  The video is about 12 minutes long.

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Are You Depressed? Be Thankful.

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Are You Depressed? Be Thankful.

Are you depressed? Have you got the blues? Are you feeling down?

If so, then you should be thankful. No, I don’t mean be thankful for your depression. I mean that you need to be thankful to get over your funk.

By having an attitude of gratitude, you can break your cycle of conditioned thinking and transform the negative energy dynamic that is keeping you down.

So, begin to lose your blues by starting to be thankful.  

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Don't Let an Alcoholic Destroy Your Life

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Alcoholics and addicts can be manipulative, self-destructive and dishonest. If you are involved with someone like this, you've probably learned that this has direct implications for you: It's important that you learn to protect yourself from them, and not to enable them.

Protecting yourself from abuse is one of the most basic spiritual skills to learn. The purpose of this post is to raise your awareness about how to take actions to stop others' inappropriate or possibly dangerous behavior from affecting your life. The context of this post is about alcoholism, but you it also applies to any other kinds of inappropriate behaviors.

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You Are the Solution

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You Are the Solution

Take a look at the picture at the top of this article. It shows Siddhartha Gautama at the moment when he became enlightened and became Buddha. I find this is a brilliant image. 

When you look closely, you'll notice that inside the circle there is light and beauty. Outside of it are the demons, tempting and threatening Siddhartha in the darkness.

All of that light and beauty, all of that protection from the darkness and fear, Siddhartha created from within himself. And you can, too.

 

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Today's Exercise: Send Love to Someone You Despise

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Today's Exercise: Send Love to Someone You Despise

Do you really want to change your life and the world for the better? Send love to someone who you despise.

By sending this love, you are in no way approving of this person or their actions....

This is an exercise in rattling your cage. You will be directly confronting your ego....

It is a spiritual solution to a human problem: You can not solve human conflict, and the conflicts within your heart, with hate. But you can with love.

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Five Steps on the Path of Real Life Change

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People often claim they want to change their lives, but it is scary to confront real issues. It takes courage and hard work. It also takes letting go of outdated beliefs.

So, many people choose to use band-aids instead. Band-aids can be useful for cuts, but not for surgery. And then these same people find themselves back in the same place again.

It takes effort to really change your life.

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