A House Divided

Never define yourself by your negative traits. There is a powerful force deep inside our minds that fights relentlessly to maintain the image we have of ourselves. Don’t let this image be bad, or you will fight against yourself, a house divided.

Beauty and Ugliness

I’ve never seen any fat, acne, scar tissue, or lack of symmetry that was powerful enough to make a beautiful person ugly. I have; however, seen enough poison in someone’s heart to make a physically beautiful person repulsive.

Don't Be Outcome Dependent

It is a challenge to hold onto happiness and peace when something desired or dreamed of is pulled away from you, drawing the potent energy of hope away with it as it leaves.

It reminds me of one of the biggest secrets to contentment and happiness, and that is to not allow yourself to be outcome dependent. Our happiness should not depend on things turning out a certain way. Outcomes are often beyond our control.

What is in our control is to choose to put our energy and focus into the present, accepting the reality of now, and refusing to waste much of ourselves grieving over what might have been or what might be.

So as an event beyond my control closes off one of the paths I had hoped to walk, I am ever more dedicated to invest my time, mind, and heart into the most beautiful and powerful place anyone can live: the now.

A Strategy for Quitting Bad Habits

How do you quit bad habits such as drinking pop? There are a lot of layers to the answer, but one of the big insights that helped me is this: In any struggle between the intellectual part of your brain and the emotional part of your brain, the emotional part wins most of the time.

If the intellectual brain were more powerful than the emotional brain, there would be about seven people left on the planet still smoking cigarettes. Sure a few people smoke because they want to, but most smoke because they get an emotional reward from smoking, even while they intellectually wish they would stop.

This news isn't as discouraging as it seems on the surface. The trick is to use emotions to your benefit by adding an emotional element to your intellectual ideas. I recommend creating a negative emotional connection with unhealthy habits.

For example, associate your favorite drink to a pot belly or thunder thighs. Picture your belly or thighs (or butt) actually growing bigger as you drink the stuff. When you do that, you associate negative feelings with drinking pop. If the emotional distress of getting and staying fat is associated with drinking pop, and especially if that distress is more powerful emotionally than the fleeting desire for some sugar, resisting temptation will be much easier.

Intellect is weak in the battle against pleasurable bad habits, so use emotional leverage to reinforce your intellectual ideas, and they’ll have a fighting chance against temptation.

Momentum

As I work on my life, I notice more and more things that need work. But these new things don't discourage me; they excite me. They excite me because I know that I am going to transform these problems into a long string of life-enhancing victories - accomplishments that give life a wonderful sense of forward momentum.

Ways to Experience Life

There are two ways to experience life. One is the automatic way, in which we process and filter everything through our minds. There is a delay to our experience as our minds evaluate, compare, judge. And because of this, we are not in the moment, but detached. But there is another way, one we experienced naturally as a child, but have forgotten. And that is to experience life in real-time. To smell, to touch, to see - to breathe in the now. This moment, free from remembered pain or fears of the future, can be magical, and contains more than enough to fill our hearts with peace.

Breeding versus Bonding Instincts

Problems in relationships are inevitable. We have two powerful forces acting on us that are at cross purposes. Call them breeding instincts versus bonding instincts. Call them genetic programming versus social programming. Call them our mammalian brain versus our prefrontal cortex. No matter how you look at it, we are most often torn into two directions when it comes to love.

In a new and exciting relationship everything feels good, due mostly to the love potion bubbling in our brain (neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin that drive us, make us enamored, and bond us). All our questions are answered, forgotten, or moot. But when that heady cocktail starts to wear off, and we begin to become habituated to the other person, the two forces -- one covertly driving us away to seek novelty, and the other consciously driving us to keep our commitment to the other person -- can begin to make us feel torn.

While it may not be possible to reconcile these forces, if we ignore their influence, we may wrongly assume that our partner is to blame for our feelings of boredom, listlessness, or disappointment, when those feelings may be caused instead by our breeding instinct telling us to move on (an instinct that cares nothing for our happiness or bonding beyond what is required to raise our children).

If, however, we acknowledge these conflicts in ourselves and learn how they affect us, we can take ownership of those negative feelings. And with this understanding we can forgive others, and ourselves, for not consistently behaving in the way we desire.