Knowing most of you see these posts in your in box the morning, I invite you to watch this and start your day remembering we always have the chance to decide.
“That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” -Steve Jobs
There are so many things that come up during the course of a day, a week, a month, a year, a lifetime, that unless you are making a conscious effort to keep focused on what matters most, it can get very easy to go with reacting to what comes up. And it’s just “for now”… or so we think.
I was speaking with a friend of mine about lucid dreaming a while back. There are apparently techniques that can make it possible to be aware you are in a dream when you are dreaming. The idea is, once you know you are aware you are dreaming, you are no longer subject to it. It dawned on me that being technically “awake” is exactly like that for me a lot of the time. It can be so easy to get caught up in a stream of consciousness that I get carried away on I lose myself. For me, at least at this point, my interest has gone from trying to lucidly dream to be being lucid more often in general.
I have taken to a specific type of meditation practice, which has one central focus: to be aware of the fingers on my right hand. Whenever I get caught up in something that seems to be really important I bring my awareness back to the fingers in my right hand again.
And again. And again. And again.
I have been struck how I disconnect from physical connection when I get caught up in thought. This again has an interesting correlation to lucid dreaming. What I have read on the subject says that one way you know you are dreaming is you do not experience physical sensation.
I then consider who the “I” is that brings my attention back to “being here now”. I think a pitfall of meditation can be thinking the “I” is the construct of ourselves we can get caught up into thinking we are… the “name rank and serial number” type of identity we carry around when someone asks who we are.
Fortunately for me, I have developed a clear sense of who “I” am. I can tell the difference between the familiar “I” and the “I” that I know myself to be when I am at my best and doing what I am best suited to be doing. I come back, over and over again… to how I know myself to be when “I” am present. One really cool effect is that more and more I notice my responses to things are shifting. Things that used to knock me back into a strong inhibitory experience and out of focus, simply don’t anymore.
What this has done for my business, quite simply, has been really helpful. Because I am more focused, my message is clearer than it’s ever been. I am starting to see opportunities where before I couldn’t. I also come across to people more consistently as “myself” which has the effect of bringing that out in them. I am more eager to give help where I can, and ask for it as well.
It is a clear, focused sense of “being here now” with a simultaneous sense of moving in the right direction.
Wow. I love this show. HBO actually put the full first episode online.
I loved watching the decision that the main character finally made to stop saying all the things that were expected and spoke his truth instead.
Swallowing the proverbial “red pill” as it were… going somewhere from where he could never return… letting go of that invented self he had put out there for years. That’s self that was driven by external pressures rather than from what he knew was true internally.
The rant was excellent. I love how he referred to the Liberals as losers and the Conservatives as idiots. Of course from where I was sitting it was easy to see he wasn’t calling the people losers or idiots just the modes of thinking that they were so mired in.
This gives me a moment of optimism that perhaps, finally, the hypnosis most people I see around me lost in has the possibility of being broken and that the critical mass that has yet to be reached will finally erupt… so we can get to a place to start from where we can ask better questions of what we want for ourselves and the world from a standpoint where we recognize there actually is no difference.
Maybe, just maybe, we are beginning to recognize another kind of thinking that has the possibility of becoming more prevalent…
Link to Full Episode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U4ZhFDFYvE&feature=youtube_gdata_player
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