manifesting... it's really just expecting the best

YES!

That's exactly what I mean to tell you.

It's called visualisation, or more fashionably 'manifestation' and it's a principle which says that what we concentrate on comes to us.

It's not exactly magic. But it can seem that way. What you focus your will upon will come to pass in your life. Not always in the way you expected, but your thoughts will be reflected in your life for better or worse.

If you focus your mind on health and exercise, you are very likely to follow those thoughts with action and you will be a healthy person. If you focus on wealth, you are likely to take the kinds of action needed to make money. If you focus on love, you will exude love which attracts others and you are likely to live a life filled with doting lovers, friends and family.

Conversely of course, if you focus on negative thoughts, you are going to attract negative experiences.

For instance, fear. If you're a very fearful person, you'll find yourself stumbling through life, hesitating at the very times when you should take a gamble and therefore missing opportunities. In relationships, you'll find yourself expecting the worst of the world and suspecting the worst of your partner - which will drive them away. This is what's called self fulfilling prophecy and it's closely related to visualisation. From there, it's but a short leap to manifestation.

And YES! What I'm saying there is you can manifest negatively as well as positively.

When you expect the worst, calamity gravitates towards you like a homing pigeon. If you expect the best, good luck will also find its way to you.

This is not to say that when terrible things happen, it means you've brought it on yourself by negative thinking. Terrible things come to us all regardless of how we think about life. But I do believe that some of these bad things are avoidable in the first place, certain others we can make better with a positive attitude and the worst of these terrible things which are a natural part of the human condition - failure, loss, grief - can be processed and recovered from more quickly and completely when we are in charge of our own minds.


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how to feel better in 10 minutes a day...

Over and over, I say to the people who come to me for help: The best thing you can do to make your life better is to meditate. 
Over and over, they say back to me: My mind won't stay still long enough to meditate. 
Over and over, I say to back to them: No, it won't, will it? Not till you've practiced meditation for a while! 

So many of us think a calm mind is the normal human state of being and a mind that chatters away at us every waking moment is abnormal. Somehow we think that most other people have it together and we are the only ones whose minds are giving us grief all day every day.

I'm afraid not. It's the nature of the mind to think. That's what it's there for. The mind exists to look for problems and when it finds them, real or imaginary, to turn  possible solutions over and over until it finds one it's happy with. Stupid Mind doesn't care if it's the middle of night. It doesn't care if its solutions are actually helpful. It doesn't care that it's actually only a tool for us to use in order to have a happy life.

The Mind thinks very highly of itself. It thinks it's in charge of our lives. The Mind thinks it's in charge of us. In fact, the Mind thinks it IS us.

It isn't.

It's certainly an important part of us - but many people consider our mind, our thoughts, to be our core Self.

It's not.

Think about a time where you felt peaceful - maybe it was lying on the beach in the middle of your best holiday ever and all you were aware of was the sun on your face and the smell of the sea in your nostrils. Maybe it was climbing a tree when you were a kid and your whole concentration was tied up in where to find your next foothold.  Maybe it was lying in your lover's arms after some mind-blowing sex and all you were aware of was the after-light of the fireworks behind your eyelids.

These experiences generally do not need the words or thoughts that Mind uses to communicate with us - and yet these are the times when we are most our true selves.

The mind is important. In no way am I saying it isn't. It's fun to play with. It's interesting to explore. It's crucial to navigate successfully through life's problems. But it isn't our most essential self. If humans were computers the mind would pretty much be the operating system. Like Windows, with all its problems and glitches. Just as Windows runs the computer, but is not actually the computer, so the mind runs the self, but isn't actually the Self.

I see my job as helping people find their way in a scary world - and the number 1 way to navigate this world is by putting the mind in its place. What we think of as our mind is often more just a constant stream of worrying and negativity. What will happen if I run out of money? What will happen if my lover leaves me? What will happen to me when I'm old?

What's the point of these out of control thoughts? There is none. They don't solve anything. They just make you unhappy. Meditation will teach you to quiet your mind so that you can enjoy the beautiful things in life. It will allow you to control when you let your mind off the leash to apply its logic to actual life problems in the here and now.

There are operations you leave Windows to run automatically on your computer and things that need your direction. Your life is like that. Practising meditation allows us to quiet those unnecessary thoughts and experience what lies beneath them.

What will we find beneath the constant chatter of an out of control mind?

Peace.

In my next entry, I'll give you some pointers on how to get started on the great adventure inward that we call meditation.

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making the most of your misery...

I think one of the places people of my generation have failed in bringing up our kids is that we so badly wanted them to be happy - have this! watch this! go here! distract yourself with this fun thing! - that many of us didn't teach them that unhappiness is a normal part of life. 

In fact, it's a crucial part of life. 

These are some of the things I'd say to our young now. These are some of the things I'd have made clearer to my own kids if I had it to do over. 

You will never escape times of unhappiness. We never taught you how to just sit with the feeling of being unhappy. We never taught you that being unhappy with your lot isn't the worst thing  that can happen to you.

We also didn't teach you really effective ways out of your angst. I'm not saying we should go back to the old days, the tough old days where men were men and women ate their young - modern psychology has identified a lot of issues that make humans unhappy and that's a good start. Now we need to start making sure that everyone gets some grounding in how to live with and find their way through, the part of the human condition called misery.

1) Write things down. If you're unhappy with your life as it is, organise it via the written word.

a) what's wrong with my life 

b) what can I do to make it better 

c) what do I need to take that action and most important of all 

d) TAKE THE ACTION.

2) Get out of your own head. Think of others. Do something for someone you love for no reason whatsoever. Do something useful for someone you don't even know for no reason. Do this more than once. Make a weekly habit of it. All of our unhappiness exists within the 2 square foot of space that our body occupies. Move out of that 2 square foot regularly and put yourself into someone else's - it makes you bigger. 

3) Get help to take care of the things in life that need to be taken care of. One of the greatest sources of anxiety is the feeling there are a million things you should be doing, that it will be utterly disasterous if they don't get done and you don't even know where to start. Accountants, lawyers, house cleaners - god bless them, every one, for doing for us the things that make us crazy. 

4) Learn to meditate. You will hear it over and over through life. Learn to meditate. It stills the grasshopper human mind and gives times of great peace and insight.

5) Dwell on the positive as much as you can. For most of us, there are a dozen positive things happen in our day for every negative one - but the human mind is rigged to look out for danger and so it latches on to every little negative occurrence and lets them crowd out the positive. I don't mean you should ignore the negative - but you should certainly strive consciously to give the positive equal weight in your life. Your family, the roof over your head, your health, books to read, gorgeous nature to moon over - there is so much to be happy for in even the very worst day.

6) Understand that whatever is happening for you now, it will pass. None of it is the end of the world. Understand really truly deeply that we are all miserable sometimes.

Life is good for a while and then it's crap and then it's really really good for a long while and then it's catastrophic suddenly and then later it's good again and ... so on and so forth to the end, where you look back and you really only remember the love and adventure  you shared with the people you met up with.

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