When I ask people about the time they take for themselves these days, the answer so often has something to do with television that I feel compelled to write a little about it this morning.
'You time' should seldom be spent doing nothing. There are very few places where is it possible for you to be less conscious than in front of the t.v. I'm not saying you should never watch t.v. You will notice however, that if you ever get too busy to watch, you don't miss it one bit.
Those of you with a constructive hobby will know the joy you get from accomplishing something in your 'spare time'. The only problem I see with that, is in calling it spare time.
Time for yourself is the most valuable time you can spend. It should never be the time you spend when life is finished getting in the way. You will wake up soon enough and realize that all of the 'getting through it' creates a culture of mental habit that has you 'getting through' everything instead of giving yourself to it.
You can spend time for yourself with your kids if that's what energizes you. Yes, some people really feel that way. Some people have chosen their job so wisely, it never occurs to them that they are actually working: ask most musicians, poets, writers or people who 'love' what they do. That doesn't mean that they don't like to get home and put their feet up after a day of loving what they do, that's called tired.
For some of us, all we really need to do is stop long enough to organize out thoughts. Like those boxes in the garage you've been meaning to get to. Consider what time you have 'created' for you. You may do things you love, but you may do them with an attitude that robs you of the energy you can receive from the doing. Reading is doing, writing is doing, meditating is doing: but fixing things can be fun and organizing things can be fun and... I hope you get the idea.
Most importantly, 'you time' isn't called you time because of what it means to anybody else. It also doesn't have to be spent alone although it's best not to 'rely' on someone else for it.
Consider what you do for you. Then consider how what you do for you impacts on your ability to relate to everyone else.
Isn't it time for a little you time?
See ya next week
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Assumptions
Thought I'd draw a little story from my own life today and see if anyone else can relate.
I don't consider myself a perfectionist by any means, but apparently I have my moments.
It's remarkable that, as someone who helps other people negotiate problem areas in their lives, I still fall prey to the simplest of issues sometimes. Labels are assumptions. We see traits called perfectionist, bully, selfish, domineering, "add whichever one suits here" and we assume we can rely on that person to 'be that' every time we meet them. In other words, we label them. The fun (or sad) part about that is, if you have a solid enough assumption about someone, they will rise to the occasion every time.
Now one of the things that enables me to see the world the way I do is that, when I see something I particularly like or don't like about someone, I look to myself to see why. What is in me that feels that way? Because I know no one else can make me feel anything, why then, does person 'x' illicit this reaction in me...then, why do I feel this way?
Anyone who knows me would say that unless it comes to singing or vocal harmonies, I don't have a single perfectionist bone in my body, that's just not my label. Well, last week we got back off the road Monday night late and when I got up Tuesday morning it was time to write this blog. I didn't feel like anything I had to say would be of interest to anyone....it just wouldn't be good enough...perfectionist? In that moment...and in fact, subsequent moments, I was.
Moral of the story? No one is always anything. I accepted the fact that I began this morning doing the same thing and I just stayed in that feeling until this blog presented itself. Be your own best teacher. No one could ever know you the way you do. When you see something in someone else, ask what it is in you that relates to that behavior in the way you do. Why is it so great? Why is it not so great?
The answer won't always be the same because thankfully, you won't. But it will always be inspirational.
See ya next week...I promise.
I don't consider myself a perfectionist by any means, but apparently I have my moments.
It's remarkable that, as someone who helps other people negotiate problem areas in their lives, I still fall prey to the simplest of issues sometimes. Labels are assumptions. We see traits called perfectionist, bully, selfish, domineering, "add whichever one suits here" and we assume we can rely on that person to 'be that' every time we meet them. In other words, we label them. The fun (or sad) part about that is, if you have a solid enough assumption about someone, they will rise to the occasion every time.
Now one of the things that enables me to see the world the way I do is that, when I see something I particularly like or don't like about someone, I look to myself to see why. What is in me that feels that way? Because I know no one else can make me feel anything, why then, does person 'x' illicit this reaction in me...then, why do I feel this way?
Anyone who knows me would say that unless it comes to singing or vocal harmonies, I don't have a single perfectionist bone in my body, that's just not my label. Well, last week we got back off the road Monday night late and when I got up Tuesday morning it was time to write this blog. I didn't feel like anything I had to say would be of interest to anyone....it just wouldn't be good enough...perfectionist? In that moment...and in fact, subsequent moments, I was.
Moral of the story? No one is always anything. I accepted the fact that I began this morning doing the same thing and I just stayed in that feeling until this blog presented itself. Be your own best teacher. No one could ever know you the way you do. When you see something in someone else, ask what it is in you that relates to that behavior in the way you do. Why is it so great? Why is it not so great?
The answer won't always be the same because thankfully, you won't. But it will always be inspirational.
See ya next week...I promise.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Stress.
The greatest stress always happens just before the greatest growth. The longer the incubation, the greater the growth. Desire is the sun, the soil, the water.
Think about a seed...lying there on the ground wanting more than anything to be an entire tree. Imagine the patience and the resolve and the amazing amount of energy it takes to become a tree. OK, so I know that your thinking that it doesn't have any of the distractions we have...but actually it probably has all of them otherwise every seed would turn into a tree..but they don't do they?...
But just before that first sprout comes bursting out of that pod
I can't imagine the faith, the pain, and far more importantly...the will.
This is the ride. We call it good and bad (according to it's effect on us-and we can't even agree on that) but it's all just experience. And experience
is what we bring to every new situation...putting us on a perspective perch that's just a little bit higher than the last one..giving us a few more options than we had before the last experience...a few more things that we know, that we appreciate, that we can count on....
Think about a seed...lying there on the ground wanting more than anything to be an entire tree. Imagine the patience and the resolve and the amazing amount of energy it takes to become a tree. OK, so I know that your thinking that it doesn't have any of the distractions we have...but actually it probably has all of them otherwise every seed would turn into a tree..but they don't do they?...
But just before that first sprout comes bursting out of that pod
I can't imagine the faith, the pain, and far more importantly...the will.
This is the ride. We call it good and bad (according to it's effect on us-and we can't even agree on that) but it's all just experience. And experience
is what we bring to every new situation...putting us on a perspective perch that's just a little bit higher than the last one..giving us a few more options than we had before the last experience...a few more things that we know, that we appreciate, that we can count on....
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Book Excerpt #2
Happy Tuesday everyone,
This has been sitting here pasted into this document for upload for several hours while I had a life altering chat with a friend. I like life-altering....I like friends...and man, I can chat! :)
Today's installment of "The New Golden Rule"
Let me know what you think...
"We have inherited a tired, eroded version of love that suggests: If I ‘love’ you and you ‘love’ me, I’ll be who you want me to be and you will be who I want you to be.
We go through life professing love for this and love for that and in truth we have no idea what that really means. I feel warm and fuzzy about it? I want to possess it?
Right about here you may well be thinking that you know love when you feel it. You might not be able to define it exactly, but you certainly know it when you feel it. If that is the case then at least you can concede that we are profoundly governed by what we feel. That may seem obvious but it is a critical conclusion because there is a very clear disconnection between what we ‘feel’ and our ability to define it. Later on we will see why that has become a problem for so many people.
Do you suppose you can love someone and then, when they do something you don’t like you can stop loving them? Why do you know in your heart that love is bigger than that and yet you ‘give it’ and ‘take it away’ as though it were a commodity.
When you allow yourself to ‘feel’ love instead of engaging in the ‘rationale’ which can be ‘boiled down’ to mental pro’s and con’s (I love you because-I don’t love you because), you know that love is more than that and so do I.
Now I’m about to prove to you how you can come to feel your inherent nature. How, if you are truly selfish in the useful sense, you will come to feel love at the core of your being as who and what you really are.
See ya next week!
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Book Excerpt
Hey everyone,
Sorry I missed last week...I'm working on
a book which I will publish in the coming months. I decided that for the next while, instead of writing a blog that is separate from the book itself, why not just publish excerpts from it as I go along.
a book which I will publish in the coming months. I decided that for the next while, instead of writing a blog that is separate from the book itself, why not just publish excerpts from it as I go along.
The book is called 'The New Golden Rule'.
Here is an excerpt from the introduction.
Let me know what you think.
See ya next week... (promise)
"Somewhere between twenty-seven and thirty years of age when we can ‘see’ thirty coming, it begins to occur to most people that we aren’t as young as we used to be. We begin to evaluate or re-evaluate our lives and by then we are often so ‘set in our ways’ that real change beyond career or marriage ‘seems’ virtually impossible.
In many societies, we will have at least one child by then which means that we will have also done our part to pass on the distorted understanding of the way life should be.
We have been passing this distorted understanding from one generation to the next since we began to be shaped by society instead of leaving our individual mark on it.
Most of us are such passive participants in our own lives that unless some major catastrophe befalls us, it takes these milestones (30, 40, 50) for us to look up and seriously consider these basic questions:
What have I done in my life up to now?
Why do I behave in the way I behave?
What am I going to do with my life from now on?
And (God forbid) why in the world did I do so little with my time up to now”?
Even after we ask those questions (if in fact we are unhappy with the answers), we often completely lack the necessary skills to effect any real change in our lives.
We get overwhelmed (a condition I’ll explain shortly) and we go back to living by default.
Living by default means a lot of things but here are a few of the major ones.
Staying with someone you don’t love because it’s easier than leaving.
Taking a new job because you were let go from your old one and you have to work somewhere.
Allowing habits you don’t like (smoking, alcohol, drugs, sex, food) to govern your life, because the thought of fixing them seems so hard to do that next week seems like a much better time to start."
OK, this excerpt thing is harder to do than I thought...I don't know where to stop when it's out of context like this... so, I'll just stop there and you can let me know if you want to come back and see what next week has to offer :)
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Happy 2011
I wish you a brilliant year. A year created by you, for you, built with the end in mind. By that I mean,
it's tough to build a house without a blue print... it's much tougher to build a dream without one. At least with a house there are only so many materials you can use, you have to have a particular kind of foundation and such. With a life... the sky is the limit.
If you are the New Year's resolution sort of person, you've probably figured out by now that those things tend to lose steam and dissolve like the whim on which they were made.
Why is that do you suppose?
Because you have to start with the end in mind; what do you walk towards otherwise?
Want to quit smoking? Stop trying to quit smoking and start becoming someone who doesn't smoke.
Know where you are, know where you're going... and keep going there. The longest journey may start with a single step, but it won't be too long a journey if you stop after the single step... you have to keep putting one foot in front of the other... and it's simply too daunting a task to keep doing that if you don't know where you're going.
Decide what you want for 2011. Write it down. NOT on a computer...in a journal in your own handwriting. Write it clearly and concisely... if it isn't that clear... refine it until it is... take an hour a week... but when you have defined your goal(s) for the year... write them down and visit them daily... walk towards them a little each and every single day... little by little, no matter how unattainable they may seem at certain points (that's another blog) every time you look up you will be closer... how could you not?
Success is a collection of habits. You have habits now don't you? If you have habits that you don't like, understand that the very fact that you have them, shows you that you can make new ones... just make ones that get you where you want to go instead of impede your progress. One thing is for certain though... all the success habits in the world won't get you where you're going if you don't know where that is.
Se ya next week
it's tough to build a house without a blue print... it's much tougher to build a dream without one. At least with a house there are only so many materials you can use, you have to have a particular kind of foundation and such. With a life... the sky is the limit.
If you are the New Year's resolution sort of person, you've probably figured out by now that those things tend to lose steam and dissolve like the whim on which they were made.
Why is that do you suppose?
Because you have to start with the end in mind; what do you walk towards otherwise?
Want to quit smoking? Stop trying to quit smoking and start becoming someone who doesn't smoke.
Know where you are, know where you're going... and keep going there. The longest journey may start with a single step, but it won't be too long a journey if you stop after the single step... you have to keep putting one foot in front of the other... and it's simply too daunting a task to keep doing that if you don't know where you're going.
Decide what you want for 2011. Write it down. NOT on a computer...in a journal in your own handwriting. Write it clearly and concisely... if it isn't that clear... refine it until it is... take an hour a week... but when you have defined your goal(s) for the year... write them down and visit them daily... walk towards them a little each and every single day... little by little, no matter how unattainable they may seem at certain points (that's another blog) every time you look up you will be closer... how could you not?
Success is a collection of habits. You have habits now don't you? If you have habits that you don't like, understand that the very fact that you have them, shows you that you can make new ones... just make ones that get you where you want to go instead of impede your progress. One thing is for certain though... all the success habits in the world won't get you where you're going if you don't know where that is.
Se ya next week
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Check up.
Happy Tuesday.
What a world wind it's been over the last short while. I'm a full-time musician (for those of you that didn't know that) and I've been touring in my home province of Newfoundland for the last couple of weeks. I'm twelve weeks into this blog now and this close to Christmas is a great time for a check up.
While I was out on the road, I realized how easy it is to slip into the old ways. The pressure of getting where you're going and of the people around you who may be having a bad day. At this time of year everyone seems to be wondering where everyone is coming from. Don't you find that, no matter how many people you thought lived in your town or city, there seems to be twice as many of them at this time of year? :)
The concept of a check up was really strong in me as I sat down to write this post this morning. For those of you that have been here for the whole 12 weeks, thank you very much. I'd love to hear from you marxstuff@gmail.com I'd like to know of the struggles and triumphs you have had as a result of the concepts here. It would be very beneficial to me. I won't share them unless you want me to and even then I might not! :)
There can be great conflict within us when we are trying to do something more for ourselves. Peace is one of the most miraculous things. Achieving it sometimes is like moving as fast as you possibly can in an attempt to arrive at stillness. It simply sits there, content in itself, waiting for you to join. All the while, it sits there in a world that didn't get the memo. Because peace is so self contained, it almost seems to taunt you. Peace doesn't need you, it's perfectly peaceful after all. You, on the other hand, crave peace. Whether you know it or not, it's why there is tension when things are going some way other than the way you want them. It is why you want to get 'back' to how it was before. Ever notice how peace always seems to be the way things were just before you got yourself in this non peaceful place? If you really check in with yourself, you will realize that peace is a little more peaceful after
you have been in a place of struggle...for another blog perhaps...
For now, make sure you check in with yourself. Not just every 12 weeks of course...every single day. Not just every day of course, but every now and then throughout the day. Feel the tension in your body inform your thoughts...feel your thoughts inform the body. Breathe and let go. Smile and say "I knew that'... start again because the more often you start, the less often you have to... one foot after the other into the life you've been so profoundly blessed to live.
11 days until Christmas. Perhaps you could use peace now more than ever...perhaps the world could use some more peaceful people now more than ever... either way, it can only be achieved one place...within you.
Have a great week....
What a world wind it's been over the last short while. I'm a full-time musician (for those of you that didn't know that) and I've been touring in my home province of Newfoundland for the last couple of weeks. I'm twelve weeks into this blog now and this close to Christmas is a great time for a check up.
While I was out on the road, I realized how easy it is to slip into the old ways. The pressure of getting where you're going and of the people around you who may be having a bad day. At this time of year everyone seems to be wondering where everyone is coming from. Don't you find that, no matter how many people you thought lived in your town or city, there seems to be twice as many of them at this time of year? :)
The concept of a check up was really strong in me as I sat down to write this post this morning. For those of you that have been here for the whole 12 weeks, thank you very much. I'd love to hear from you marxstuff@gmail.com I'd like to know of the struggles and triumphs you have had as a result of the concepts here. It would be very beneficial to me. I won't share them unless you want me to and even then I might not! :)
There can be great conflict within us when we are trying to do something more for ourselves. Peace is one of the most miraculous things. Achieving it sometimes is like moving as fast as you possibly can in an attempt to arrive at stillness. It simply sits there, content in itself, waiting for you to join. All the while, it sits there in a world that didn't get the memo. Because peace is so self contained, it almost seems to taunt you. Peace doesn't need you, it's perfectly peaceful after all. You, on the other hand, crave peace. Whether you know it or not, it's why there is tension when things are going some way other than the way you want them. It is why you want to get 'back' to how it was before. Ever notice how peace always seems to be the way things were just before you got yourself in this non peaceful place? If you really check in with yourself, you will realize that peace is a little more peaceful after
you have been in a place of struggle...for another blog perhaps...
For now, make sure you check in with yourself. Not just every 12 weeks of course...every single day. Not just every day of course, but every now and then throughout the day. Feel the tension in your body inform your thoughts...feel your thoughts inform the body. Breathe and let go. Smile and say "I knew that'... start again because the more often you start, the less often you have to... one foot after the other into the life you've been so profoundly blessed to live.
11 days until Christmas. Perhaps you could use peace now more than ever...perhaps the world could use some more peaceful people now more than ever... either way, it can only be achieved one place...within you.
Have a great week....
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