GET WHAT YOU NEED ~ Skills To Build Your Destiny / Intro, Chapters 1,2,3

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"It (Get What You Need) is a key to personal liberation, the ultimate freedom to find your own positive destiny. You have nothing to lose but the demons of your own fears." --Rick Olivo, Award Winning Writer/Senior Reporter Ashland Daily Press

~ Introduction ~

You do nothing more in this physical existence than experience your life.  How does yours feel?  The experience of life that is best for who you are can be elusive with so many choices.  What is the difference between having the life you need and the life you believe you want?  Is there really any difference between what you want and what you need?  For decades I thought they were the same thing, but I found they are not.

Their dictionary definitions should have been my first clue, wordsmith that I am-

need: verb

> require (something) because it is essential

want: verb

> have a desire to possess or do (something)

The difference is a need is an absolute necessity and a want is not.  Those trying to sell you anything and everything are counting on you to using these two words interchangeably.  Our cultural acceptance of this interchangeability has become a keystone of our free enterprise system.

But, it doesn’t serve our human condition well.

If you believe you will be happier when you obtain something, or that you can’t live without something, don’t you do everything in your power to get it?  Believing that we need something that we actually just want isn’t satisfying our deep longings—and it’s made us a society of debtors.  This misunderstanding between need and want is one of the reasons why getting what you want is never going to be enough, and why it hasn’t already brought you the fulfillment you yearn for.  This is because what you want excludes the essential things your deep need requires to fill the hole in your life that it’s created.  I started learning about this need when I was young and have been fascinated by it ever since.

At age nineteen, while still at college working on my Air Transportation Degree, I got my first travel industry job.  I soon realized that many of my clients were coming to me in desperate need of a vacation and no clue of how to fill that need.  With literally thousands of options and millions of combinations available it was my job to help them identify their need, research the possibilities, and build a travel plan to suit them.  Most people don’t know how vital taking a vacation is.  We used the motto—vacations are essential, not optional—to emphasize how important they are to human health and well-being.  Without taking time to rest and reset, Chronic Stress continuously challenges the body’s sympathetic nervous system becoming the source of physical, mental, and emotional suffering, decline, and premature death.

Vacations did in fact transform my clients by giving them time to not only rest and reset, but to reevaluate their lives.  This dedicated me time enabled them to consider essential personal questions, expose fresh possibilities, reprioritize for their current needs, and consciously set new Destiny Goals to focus their attention and energies on.  Some improved their lives so much that it actually appeared that magic was involved.

Working directly with people traveling for every possible reason let me see them at their best, worst, and most challenged everyday.  As an airline agent at the airport it was essential for me to interact appropriately with grieving families, happy honeymooners, and stressed out or hostile passengers.  I was responsible for enhancing their travel experience and resolving their issues by any means at my command.  It was Human Dynamics 101 in the extreme, but I learned a lot from it.  The only way I was able to thrive in my more than thirty-year Travel Industry career was to be sensitive to their needs and respond in resourceful and effective ways.

The processes that people use to make decisions intrigued me and researching them became my passion.  In 1971 I became a devoted disciple of Human Nature, by 1994 I began studying the Human Condition and Self Evolvement.  By 2002 I added Health and Well-being research as sole caregiver to my husband, Bruce, who had Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease.  In 2010 with learning from the research literature and personal introspection I began having Peak Experiences and deep internal shifts that transformed me and changed my focus to Experience of Life Research.

By 2013 I earned my Certified Professional Coach Credential to help me restart my life after thirty-three years of marriage.  These all helped me to start healing my Depression, Autoimmune Diseases, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder caused by the Acute and Chronic Stress of caregiving Bruce through his prolonged suffering followed by his harsh death.  I benefited from healing treatments enough to seek out Alternative and Complementary Healing therapies in the US, Thailand, Bali, and Mexico.  In doing the extensive research needed to regain my health I became aware that finding whole person healing was quite challenging.  I couldn’t find a complete approach that focused on healing people’s intricately connected physical and energy aspects.

Through researching hundreds of sources, pulling together their knowledge, and turning it into Practical Wisdom I did finally regained my health.  But I realized that few could dedicate so much time and effort to gather and comprehend all of this knowledge themselves.  Helping others to feel, be, and do better by learning to work with our natural design became my personal imperative.  This new purpose urged me to present the research literature findings in an easy to understand way that addresses how to get an improved experience of life.

My mission is to take specialty study and research findings and turn them into easy to absorb information to let people know they can learn skills to accomplish their Destiny Goals.  I often use a conversational writing style to make the subject matter easier for readers to relate to.  In these pages I emphasize Experience of Life Management Skills, or ELM Skills, and the problems they address, by capitalizing and highlighting them with italics.  I also highlight the word get as a way to emphasize all of its Get What You Need meanings and encourage readers to: go after, gather, receive, learn, comprehend, understand, actuate, reach, and obtain the life that best suits them.  

I ask you to not take my word for what you find on these pages.  The process of research in and of itself is highly convincing to be and do better.  I don’t cite the sources for the information written here in the traditional footnote way, or at all sometimes.  I found while doing the research that they could be unwieldy and get in the way of comprehending the material.  Instead I encourage you to go to the Reference section at the end of this book and read some of the sources listed that I used to gather insights.  In reading them you’ll gain Personal Wisdom that will benefit you and those you care about so you can leave a worthy legacy to your descendants.

In gratitude for the Grace that helped me to heal, get the experience of life best suited to who I am now, and choose my own Destiny—I offer this book.  Inspired by Traditional Wisdom Keepers who saved their people from suffering throughout the ages, I attempt to do so here.  By helping their people with the Wisdom they collected, the Keepers enabled them to survive and thrive.  The Wisdom within can help you to make progress in your Destiny Goals, optimize your experience of life, and avoid Self-Struggle Conflicts that keep you stuck in a life that doesn’t feel good.

Like helping my clients to find their needs and build a satisfying travel plan around them, this book is meant to help you to find your deep needs and build a fulfilling life around them.  How will you know you have made it to the life you need?  When you are enjoying a satisfying experience of life and you wanting for nothing.  In the end it all depends on learning to be wise about yourself.  May your future be the fulfillment of the longing that brought you to read these words.

God grant me the serenity 

to accept the things I cannot change, 

courage to change the things I can, 

and wisdom to know the difference.

—Reinhold Niebuhr

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

GET WHAT YOU NEED

Skills to Build Your DESTINY

 

Your beliefs become your thoughts.

Your thoughts become your words.

Your words become your actions.

Your actions become your habits.

Your habits become your values.

Your values become your destiny.

—Mahatma Gandhi

~ Chapter One ~

BELIEFS

Do I get that my beliefs make or wreck my life?

If you believe you are the circumstances you are in or that you are lacking in some way, you may never be able to use your innate Power of belief to experience life the way you need to.  Other books would have used the words want to at the end of that sentence instead of need to.  Our active minds work all day long to make us believe that what it wants is what we need.  By accepting this we allow it to overshadow what is most vital to us—the life that suits our deep need.

 

Like me, you may have dozens of books on how to get what you want out of life, or how to get the life you want.  The promise of learning how to get the life of my dreams kept me buying them year after year, and they did have a positive influence on me.  But I never derived from them what was necessary to keep with a plan, to get from where I was to where I wanted to be, and progress always eluded me.  I didn’t know what was missing, only that something was.  Something that would make me want to keep at it, to make the transformation, and get the life I yearned for.

 

After years of researching, analyzing, and thinking deeply about it I found it’s not just one thing.  I learned we are complex beings and that the glue that gets us to stick to any life enrichment process has many ingredients.  It turns out that for me to gain Personal Wisdom from any of those very well written books, apply it to my situation in a meaningful way, and keep working at it to fruition required more than my being willing and having good intentions.

 

Being willing and having good intentions are necessary when you decide to do something as challenging as improving your lot in life.  Somehow, though, they were not sufficient for me to make progress and get the results I wanted.  I needed to know why.  What is it that makes achieving the pinnacle personal goal possible?  Over the decades I have researched Human Dynamics my findings on how we experience our own lives consistently point to how we learn to manage our non physical aspects—starting with our beliefs.

 

For most of my life I believed that I, the conscious part of my mind that I identify as me, was in control of my actions and every part of my life all by itself.  But, I discovered that not only no, I wasn’t the only one in control, but hell no, I wasn’t the only one in control, much to my dismay.  The research literature revealed that the energetic quality of humans that is the conscious mind is dwarfed by the 95% of the mind that is run by our subconscious mind’s autopilot.  It’s the reason you don’t have to will your heart to beat or your lungs to breathe, and it does a whole lot more.  Your subconscious is at least partly involved in just about everything you do, and sometimes it’s the only one driving.

 

Do you remember each thing you did the last time you drove from home to the store?  Probably not, yet you got there safely anyway.  In fact, you may have felt like you were teleported there because you didn’t remember your experience of driving the car at all.  Your conscious mind made the decision to drive to the store, then your subconscious mind took over the driving so you could happily ponder your impending leisure time on the way.  By imprinting your neural pathways through conscious repetition you trained your body to do the movements of driving the car and your subconscious mind to supervise it.  Eventually, this effectively freed up your valuable conscious mind time, you are asleep for a third of your life after all, to use as you need to instead of it having to be involved with every one of your life’s details.

 

Your conscious mind is really only able to pay attention to very few things well at one time, while your subconscious mind is a master of multitasking.  To understand this dynamic you need only observe a busy mother trying to: get her three young children to eat breakfast, while packing their lunches, as she’s talking business on the phone, and gathering everything that needs to go into the car, before heading out the door to school and work, as she is eating breakfast herself, while trying to braid her youngest child’s hair.  Whew!  For her, everything is on autopilot except for the important business conversation she is having which is the focus of her conscious attention.  The repetition of her daily routine imprinted her morning movements into her neural pathways and trained her body to operate effectively without her conscious mind having to be involved every second.  If it weren’t for her subconscious mind doing the heavy lifting this same routine would be more tedious and time consuming.

 

It is important to get, or understand, that even if you consciously commit to carefully following the plan of your self-improvement book of choice your subconscious mind is in its enduring autopilot state, and it has its own agenda.  Its primary function is to keep you alive; otherwise it loses its other job which is to keep your body, mind, and emotional functions operating.  Your subconscious mind is machinelike in its dedication to keeping you safe, and it uses fear as its main motivator to get your cooperation.  Even if you are striving to live through your heart and love, the 95% of your mind that is subconscious has a lot of control over you.  And, its agenda isn’t always aligned with your conscious goals.

 

Most negative feelings are easily attributable to subconscious fear.  Doubt, envy, anger, hatred, loss, and unquenchable want are all the offspring of fear.  Some of these are apparently negative experiences of life, such as anger.  Others are so subtle they are barely perceptible as negative, such as want which appears to be harmless as it masquerades as shopping.  Want seems inoffensive until you understand that it’s the vehicle for The Not Enoughs.  Not Having Enough and it’s ugly sibling Not Being Enough only serve to keep you from a satisfying experience of life.  The point is, that focusing on what you want instead of what you deeply need can easily keep you from connecting to what is vital to having a life that is fulfilling to you.

 

~ EMOTIONAL RISK ~

 

Fear and its offspring can deter you from striving to get your better life by making you believe that you will be safer, or at least not disappointed again, by not trying something new to improve your life.  Staying with what is familiar may seem better despite knowing that it’s keeping you from experiencing life in the way that is best for you.  If this is true for you, hopefully you’ll eventually heed the fact that the Chronic Stress this causes can easily take a greater toll on you than taking a risk on life betterment.

 

I’m not saying to stop listening to your Intuition, your inner voice that senses bad vibes and warns you of unseen peril in time to save you from something terrible.  Especially if it has served you well in the past.  Intuition is the necessary energetic force that also connects you to your subconscious dwelling deep needs.  It’s a feature of our existence that even quantum physicists appreciate.  What I am saying is that avoiding the things that stretch your personal boundaries, to err on the side of safety, can deprive you of singular life experiences and elation.  The point here is that everything worthwhile in this physical existence inherently has some measure of risk.  Believing this fact and working with it can improve your life by removing Self Restraints that you may not even be aware are holding you back.

 

You take a risk everyday just getting out of bed in the morning because more accidents happen at home than anywhere else.  You probably learned this a long time ago, yet you still perceive your home as a welcoming refuge from the outside world.  Your belief that your home is a good place to be has given your perception permission to be okay with this fact.

 

The heck of it is that you don’t always get to choose whether to take a risk or not.  Just as you can consciously train your subconscious mind to do things like drive the car all by itself, you can unconsciously train it to do things that don’t serve you well.  While a lot of your subconscious mind’s survival mechanism is desirable and essential to keep you alive, not all of its functions are beneficial to your Emotions-Driven Human Condition.  Understanding this dynamic can help you to see that you are not your own worst enemy and spare yourself a lot of Self-Caused Distress by learning how to deal with it.

 

If you’ve experienced a broken heart, and the deep feeling of loss that goes with it, your subconscious mind can sense danger when the possibility of it happening again presents itself.  To keep you out of danger’s way it automatically puts up Defensive Walls of Fear around your heart.  This fear sets you up to sabotage your own attempts to get close to someone again.  Your conscious mind’s choice to take another chance on love is in conflict with your subconscious mandate to keep you from danger.  Your hard working subconscious is just doing its job effectively.  It isn’t capable of telling the difference between the physical risk of being eaten by lions and the Emotional Risk of suffering another broken heart.  It senses only that there is danger and uses fear to keep you from it.

 

Your subconscious believes danger can lead to your death, and to be fair there is no doubt that people actually do die from being broken hearted.  More importantly is the fact that, by far, people live longer, healthier, happier lives with a life partner according to the research literature.  However, since your subconscious mind’s main priority is to keep you out of danger it initiates protective measures to secure your safety—even if you are willing to take a risk on love and long to have it in your life again.  These protective measures automatically throw up red warning flags out of nowhere, causing an emotional chain reaction in your body.  One minute you are fine and the next you’re squirming in your chair, your heart is racing, you’re perspiring like a sprinter, you can’t get out of there fast enough, and your promising date goes to hell without your conscious consent.

 

Despite your desire for love and regardless of your need for intimacy, you are a victim of your own highly effective survival mechanism.  Your subconscious senses that you are in danger and activates its survival mechanism to prevent it.  And Blame, Self Recrimination, and more lonely time follow.  To add insult to injury this subconscious originating misery that we blame ourselves for can feel like it came from our conscious minds.

 

If you believe that you are flawed for driving away a prospective mate, now is the time to give yourself a break.  You are unlikely to fix this or any other Disruptive Subconscious Originating Behavior without being aware of its dynamics, or that it’s even possible to fix.  If you believe that you are romantically doomed because you are (pick any one, or a combination, of the following words): inept, afraid, weak, stupid, frigid, awkward, damaged, hopeless, clueless, paying for some past sin, or unworthy then this story you are telling yourself is the reality you are living in.  That is the power of your unchecked subconscious mind, to make a great person like you believe a fiction like this.  That is the power of your beliefs to make or wreck your life.  Who knew?

 

You can stop beating yourself up for Self Sabotaging your attempts at romance.  You are not to blame for the pain your subconscious has inflicted on you in the past.  You are responsible for what you consciously do, or don’t do, to keep it from happening again now that you are aware of it.  There is every reason to believe that if you deeply need it you will have love in your life.  If love didn’t work out before it was likely because the two of you didn’t work well together, not because of you alone.  Sometimes things just aren’t meant to be.  However, feeling the appreciation and support that having a life partner offers, enables people to flourish in all areas of their lives and is more than worth the risk and effort to get.

 

It is essential to understand that it’s difficult to get someone great into your life if you don’t feel great about yourself.  The way you feel about and see others is a reflection of the way you feel about and see yourself.  This is a main reason why learning Experience of Life Management Skills to deal with the parts of you that don’t serve your life well is supremely valuable.  Self improvement is good, self development is better, Self Evolvement and Transformation are best.

 

The Love-Danger Scenario above illustrates how conflict between your conscious mind’s goals and your subconscious mind’s agenda can negatively affect your experience of life.  This and other subconscious originating issues are equal opportunity tormentors for men, women and children, no matter what hemisphere they live in.   They have heartbreaking ramifications that run the gamut from out of control numbing to suicide.

 

The most insidious effect of these Self-Conflict Issues is the Chronic Stress that causes physical, mental, and emotional pain, disease, and premature death.  You’ve felt it, that uneasy feeling that something’s not quite right, but you can’t quite put your finger on it.  Or maybe it’s a feeling of Deep Distress that eats away at your insides.  Chronic Stress can be imperceptible and go unrecognized until it steals your health away.  Fear from your subconscious mind inflicts Chronic and Acute Stress by getting you to believe Deficiency Stories such as that you will never have: good health, well-being, love, meaning in your life, a sense of belonging, a purpose, freedom, acceptance, competence, stability, peace, self reliance, a family, a good job, independence, self worth, confidence, appreciation, enough, or a consistently good feeling life.

 

~ STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES ~

 

These Deficiency Stories can be promoted in you by those who want to convince you that they are real in order to control you or your situation.  They can be reinforced in you through the unconscious words that feed a Deficiency Story you already believe, whether they originate from others or yourself.  No matter if they are encouraging or disparaging, we tend to believe the stories we tell ourselves.  This is why telling yourself a Gratitude or  Victimization Story is so potent.  Same you, different beliefs, vastly different experiences of life.  A Gratitude Story puts your attention on the things in your life that are good, which encourages good things to surface from your subconscious mind.  It helps your deep needs to come into your awareness so that you can align your conscious goals to them.  It also enables you to be grateful that a Deficiency or Victim Story isn’t keeping you stuck, holding you hostage, and making you miserable.

 

Victim and Deficiency Stories become Subconscious Bad Habits you adopted after you’ve endured hardship.  They become habitual by joining with your Self Identity after going through those harsh times.  These negative stories provide Emotional Stability, albeit a bad feeling one, by turning into a reliable crutch to lean on that you can become attached to.  They provide a deep feeling of something, which can seem better than not feeling anything deeply at all.  But, they are poor substitutes for the elation that feeling passion, joy, love, appreciation, and gratitude give.

 

Using a Trigger-Recognition Response is an effective way to replace a victim or deficiency story with a gratitude story.  As soon as you realize you have been negatively triggered gently remind yourself, “This is that thing you do that makes you feel bad and steals your health away—I don’t have to feel this way.”  This Trigger Acknowledgement gives your conscious mind a little time to replace a victim story that keeps you stuck with a gratitude story that promotes Self Evolvement progress.  It's a conscious act that saves you from suffering at your own hands and helps you to move toward your chosen Destiny Goals in a good feeling way.

 

Think about the things in your life you are grateful for, including moving forward toward a life that you choose and out of a life that circumstances put you in.  Repeating your gratitude story at the first sign of a victim or deficiency story enables you to feel better in just a few minutes.  It fades the old bad feeling belief and makes dominent a new good feeling belief.  This helps you to move forward in your life by giving yourself A Better Truth to embrace.  This Resiliency Response improves your self perception, which raises your feelings of self worth, and encourages you to set good Destiny Goals.

 

Then ask yourself, “How do I want to feel and what will inspire that?”  This challenges your subconscious to answer the question and come up with a better serving beliefs.  As well, this Energy-Redirection Skill gives the conscious aspect of you, that you identify as I, the opportunity to manage your life instead of being at the mercy of your subconscious autopilot.  If this feels uncomfortable at first don’t fret, learning and growing sometimes do.  Remember, that being a kid wasn’t all easy, but most of what you learned then expanded your world.  It will feel better as new neural pathways are established and create your new ways of being, doing and feeling better, in other words Your New Normal.

 

Self-Worth Beliefs are influenced by the gratitude, victim, and deficiency stories that you tell yourself.  The stories you are attached to, or personally own, have a thrive or decline effect on your Self Perception, Self Esteem, and Self Respect.  Words are powerful, the better your Self Stories are the better your Self Appreciation, and Self Worthiness will be.  These improved Self Views in turn improve the relationship you have with others and the world outside of you.

 

The best knowledge is Self Knowledge.  The best wisdom is Self Wisdom.  Integrating your powerful subconscious needs with your conscious goals makes the best of both.

 

~ SUBCONSCIOUS POWER ~

 

Operating outside of your awareness, your subconscious mind is a potent energetic force within you.  It processes 40 million bits of information per second, a million times more per second than your conscious mind does, and it can do thousands of tasks at the same time.  Your subconscious wields extraordinary power over your conscious mind, body, beliefs, perceptions, thoughts, attitudes, values, behaviors, emotions, feelings, and your experience of life.  Getting it to work with your Destiny Goals is beyond beneficial.  Fortunately, you can retrain aspects of your subconscious mind to make better use of its expansive energy, so you can make the most of your very finite life.

 

Books that specialize in healing subconscious issues are easy to access by perusing their descriptions and reviews on Amazon.com, other book websites, book stores, and libraries.  Look for books that address your specific issues, with writing styles that are easy for you to read, which have reviews you can relate to.

 

Much of the information that I researched came from over three hundred books that were instantly delivered wirelessly to my Kindle, and computer, in four different countries on three different continents.  Most of the research literature that I used on these pages is listed in the Reference section at the back of the book.  Some of the research material took longer to digest due its technical nature and writing style, but most books are user friendly.  I’m sure that the experts writing them understood that if they wanted to make their life’s work widely known the information had to be easy to comprehend.

 

I particularly appreciated the effective results detailed in “Psych-K… The Missing Piece/Peace In Your Life” by Robert Williams.  His approach to improving people’s lives through understanding the differences between the conscious and subconscious mind focuses on getting positive results.  This appears to be much more effective than the traditional approach that obsesses over finding the origination point of the subconscious conflict.

 

As misguided as the subconscious mind seems at times, I can’t help but wonder at it and be grateful for its effectiveness since my daughter and I are the result of a continuous lineage that spans eons of time.  For all of its perceived faults, it is the reason you and your loved ones are still breathing.  I have great respect for the power that our subconscious minds have over us, our beliefs, and all of the steps between belief and Destiny that Gandhi’s quote so aptly lists.

 

~ WHAT BELIEFS ARE ~

 

So what is a belief, really?  The dictionary comes to our aid again-

belief: noun  

> something one accepts as true or real

> a firmly held opinion or conviction

 

As this definition states, you accept something as true or real.  The problem is that people accept things that appear to be true that are not true, appear to be real that are not real, and appear to be fact that are not fact.  Wars have been fought and countless lives lost over firmly held beliefs based on things that were not true, not real, and not fact.

 

As convinced as you may be that your beliefs about anything and everything are set in stone for all time, the fact is that our species isn’t extinct already because we are built to change.  This is just as true for adapting to the needs of your energy aspects as it is for adapting to the physical needs of your body.  Even after you believe something, you are still able to correct that belief or replace it with one that serves you better; once you are aware that you are able to and are convinced that doing so is worth it to you.  This applies to all of your energy aspects:  beliefs, perceptions, thoughts, emotions, feelings, attitudes, values and just about anything else that is not serving your experience of life well.

 

Have you ever believed you could never be: smart enough, popular enough, pretty enough, courageous enough, loved enough, or any of the other Not-Enough Beliefs that you may have been attached to since you were a child?  These beliefs promote The Wants that attempt to compensate you for not feeling you are enough through acquiring enough stuff.  It is essential to understand that you can’t acquire enough stuff to escape these Not-Enough Beliefs so that you can feel you are enough or have enough.  Even if you believe that wealth and status are key to being and having enough, they only provide a pleasing temporary diversion.  It’s just not possible to fix energy aspect issues with these diversions because they don’t address the cause of your Distress.

 

Your deep needs could not care less about having the impressive material stuff of wealth and status.  Yet, people remain attached to this paradigm believing that eventually they will get enough stuff to have a fulfilled life… especially if they are suffering.  Maybe you’ve had life setbacks and believe that enjoying a great life is not likely, or even possible.  Maybe you believe that life has failed you, or that you have failed at life.  If you believe these, or any other Victim Story, it’s time to get better beliefs and rewrite the story of you.

 

Victim and Deficiency Stories create a longing within you to be rescued from the pain they cause.  Being rescued from a disappointing life by fortune favoring you may sound ideal, but it can’t cure Not-Enough Beliefs.  Even the wealthy and privileged are entangled in them, which can somewhat account for the obsession to hoard money.  Not-Enough Beliefs are equal opportunity tormentors that are big impediments to personal transformation and reaching your Destiny Goals.  While wealth and status may appear to enable everything you desire, they can’t result in an ongoing state of feeling good.  Reaching this fulfillment is greatly aided by getting your conscious mind and your subconscious mind to work together to identify and get the elements that are vital to your deep needs.

 

Your subconscious uses negative beliefs to dissuade you from taking a risk, even if it’s to try for a better life—and it is highly effective at it.  Have you ever wondered where your Self-Limiting Thoughts come from, when on some level you see yourself in a better place?  The Self-Depreciating Beliefs and Self-Limiting Thoughts you tell yourself feed each other.  As convincing as they can be they are just stories that you learned to identify with when you went through rough times.  If these kinds of Negative Stories have a stronghold on your reality they may as well be true for all the Power that they hold over you.  However, they are in opposition to your irrepressible spirit, your wise core self, and your enduring true nature.  The parts of you that are most closely connected to the energy intelligence known as God, The Universe, Nature, and The Truth.  As humans we have an innate need to connect to something bigger than ourselves, whatever that is for each of us.  Connecting to what touches our heart helps us to discover the higher potential held within our powerful subconscious minds.

 

Retraining the facets of your mind that don’t serve you well can move you past Self-Depreciating Beliefs and Self-Limiting Thoughts to a place where you are only limited by your own imagination.  The research literature shows that because of our innate brain plasticity we are able to exchange our unconscious beliefs, perceptions, thoughts, attitudes, habits, and values for conscious ones that support our Destiny Goals.  You can apply Conscious Effort and Focused Attention to make all kinds of positive things happen in your life.  This purposeful energy directing can actually get you a life that continually feels good.

 

There are very few things that are as worthy of your attention as a chance to get the life that best suits you.  To start you need only to believe that having it is worth your personal investment.  Even if you don’t feel worthy of it yet, eventually you will as you progress through the process.  But, since you are already investing time, energy, effort, and resources in other areas of your life adding more may not seem desirable.  If this is the case, I urge you to reevaluate how essential they are compared to having the satisfied life you yearn for.

 

You are not the same person you were when you entered into the life you are currently in, not your physical aspect, your body, and not your energy aspects, your mind, emotions, and spirit.  As consciously as you may have created it, if you built your life with anything other than what is essential to your deep needs it will never feel like enough.  No matter what you buy, who you are with, or what you do, because you have neglected what is most vital to those deep needs.

 

The reason for writing this book is to help people understand that they can learn skills to know their core needs and cultivate them to have the experience of life that feels good to each of them.  By doing so they address the chain of suffering that ignorance of this perpetuates, which also benefits their lineage.  You are best served by working with how you naturally are so you are not constantly battling your own subconscious forces.

 

I used to believe I was powerless to experience my life the way I longed to, the way that best suited my core nature.  I didn’t even know that I had a core nature back then, much less what it was.  I used to tell myself I was old, ailing, and insignificant.  So I accumulated things that I wanted, thinking they would fill my personal void and make me happy.  When they did not, I dulled my unquenched yearning and pain with all manner of things that numbed me.  Now that I know my deep self better I define myself by the values I believe support me being, doing, and feeling better: strength, courage, resilience, perseverance, health, well-being, love, compassion, faith, trust, freedom, integrity, and actuating the Destiny of my choice.

 

“We do the best we can until we learn better, then we do better.”  Thank you Oprah, for paraphrasing this inspiring Maya Angelou quote, they are words I live by.  I am most grateful I learned that transformation is possible from you.

 

There is a silent epidemic gripping the people of our time.  It is pervasive in the Baby Boomer Generation that I am a part of, but it is widespread in all generations.  It is promoted by unhealthy beliefs that you are only as good as the things you own or the situation you are in, and that youth and beauty are superior.  These widespread beliefs have taken a great toll on people’s health and well-being by stealing their best experience of life away.  The one that dies with the most toys wins paradigm can never make you feel you are enough or have enough.  The pleasure of acquiring things for your wants quickly fades, once more revealing the hole that they were meant to fill.

 

If you are experiencing a life that doesn’t feel good for you, stop for just a moment and visualize—ask yourself, “What would my life be like if I had the power to change it?”

 

You are an energy being that is having a physical experience.  Energy can not be made, it can not be destroyed, it can only be transformed.  It has to flow, that is how you are built.  Even when you are outwardly motionless your thoughts, intuitions, emotions, and feelings are in constant motion, and you can learn to better direct their energies and improve your experience of life.  You are built to change and evolve because you are part of the universe and that is its dynamic.  Clinging to the belief that anything at all can remain unchanged is unrealistic.  The only unchanging constant in this physical reality is that change is constantly happening.  You might as well choose to manage your change and design your Destiny.

 

Each of us have our own core needs that Self Inquiry and Self Study reveal.  Learning how to bring these needs into your awareness lets you identify and focus on the skills that support them so you can achieve your Destiny Goals.  The benefits of this can not be overstated, that you are not in conflict with yourself anymore so you can feel good in your own skin and optimize the way you experience your very finite life.

 

I started this chapter with Mahatma Gandhi's famous quote because no other human characteristic is more potent in directing us, defining us, fulfilling us, or wrecking us than our beliefs.  They are the source of our perceptions, thoughts, words, actions, habits, values, Destiny… and our Power.  You are more powerful than you know.  Believing it is the key to putting your inherent Power to work for you.

 

Man is made by his belief.  As he believes, so he is.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

GET WHAT YOU NEED

Skills to Build Your DESTINY

By changing my perception I have changed the world.

—Lacy Ann Berlin

~ Chapter Two ~

PERCEPTIONS

Do I get that my perceptions

determine how I experience my life?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder… literally.  One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, equally true.  What is it about our perceptions that makes the very same thing beautiful or valuable to one person and not to another?  Why do our perceptions make the difference between experiencing a satisfying life and struggling to get one?  Perceptions are powerful energy forces that affect how we experience our lives everyday.  They are the lenses through which we see the world on the outside of us, and the one on the inside of us.  Perceptions are interpreters that translate stimuli from internal and external sources to, from, and between our beliefs, thoughts, values, emotions, and feelings.

 

Your perceptions use neural pathways to enable you to both respond and react quickly to incoming stimuli.  This process enhances your survivability, and it does much more, not all of which serves your human condition well.  Perceptions label incoming stimuli based on your history, your understanding, and the influence of others.  These labels include: good, acceptable, beautiful, valuable, worthy, joyful, and lovable.  They also include their polar opposites: bad, unacceptable, ugly, worthless, depressing, hateful, and every shade of gray in between.

 

Your perceptions are highly subjective and are affected by: 

> experiences you had that were in and out of your control

> your understanding of someone else’s experiences

> the way you feel or felt

> your understanding of the way someone else feels or felt

> things you consciously and unconsciously learned

> your conscious and unconscious beliefs, thoughts, values, and feelings

 

Below is an example that illustrates some of these factors that you may be able to relate to.

 

It’s Monday morning, your tire is flat making you too late to stop for breakfast and that indispensable cup of coffee on your way to work/school.  The guy behind you in traffic swears at you like a sailor because you don’t react to the green light fast enough, and because bullying is his best skill.  Lunch is a long way off, you are starved, and your coffee addiction is yelling at you like a drill sergeant.  Now your temper is flaring, and your demeanor is fair warning for everyone to avoid you like the plague.  At this point you perceive your life and everything else in the world as dung.

 

Same you different day.

 

It’s Saturday morning, you are enjoying your solitude while lounging in bed with coffee and your favorite breakfast food indulgence in hand.  By design you have nothing but free time on your hands and you are just going with what feels good for the entire day.  If asked to take a perception survey you would check the “life is sweet and all’s well with the world” box.

 

At times you are at the mercy of unforeseen occurrences that can make your day suck louder than a shop vacuum clearing out a flooded garage.  Making time to rest and reset yourself can do a lot to improve how you perceive your internal and external worlds.  But, if you’re carrying around a Toxic Waste Pit that’s causing your perception lens to warp, you might as well forget any attempt to benefit from resting and resetting, self soothing, friends trying to cheer you up, or any other attempts to lift your spirits.

 

For our purposes the bully illustrated above is a prime example of this toxic waste condition.  He is a walking, talking, acting out Toxic Waste Pit waiting to dump on someone.  He feels and behaves badly in reaction to his Subconscious Perceptual Programming—whether he wants to or not.  The biggest pains in the neck among us are also the most damaged among us.  His acting out comes from negative perceptions that were programmed into him when he was very young, because as a small child he was physically, mentally, emotionally, and sexually abused.  No matter how others perceive a given situation, he perceives the very same one as a combat zone.  Any of us would be inherently angry and continuously act out if forced to endure that kind of abuse.

 

Did you feel that?  That was your perception shifting.  It went from the easy perception of seeing this bully as a menace to the more appropriate perception of seeing him as an adult survivor of child abuse who is still having no luck relieving his subconscious originating pain.  Changing your perception of him didn’t change the truth that he is a bully.  It just let you see him with A Better Truth.  Knowing that he was abused as a small child helped you to see him through the Lens of Compassion.  Unfortunately, seeing through this lens can be challenging because human shame issues are extremely difficult to know about since they tend to stay the most hidden.

 

~ JUDGMENTAL LENS ~

 

If only we could always see through our Compassion Lens instead of our Judgmental Lens when we look at others.  No matter how well you think you know someone, it’s just not possible to know everything that they have endured.  Especially the things that involve shame, because they are the most damaging and the most painful to reveal… even to ourselves.

 

Perceiving this victim of child abuse through the perceptional Lens of Judgment isn’t hard.  Judging others is a subconscious habit we learned as small children.  It was easy to learn because humans absorb everything, but until we are about seven years old we have no Discernment.  During these first formative years we have not developed enough yet to be able to distinguish fact from fiction or truth from lies.  And, the things we learned had the Perceptual Imprint of the people we learned them from, and the people they learned from.

 

As small children we humans learned how to perceive others, and ourselves, from the adults and older children within our reception range: the physical area we are able to intake stimuli from.  We absorbed what the older ones consciously and unconsciously said, did, and the way they behaved.  In a continuous chain of tainted perceptual baggage passed down for ages the bad perceptions they displayed went directly into our young subconscious mind’s permanent storage.  It is likely that the hazing and bullying that are still problematic, in and out of our schools, is due to this kind of unbroken chain because we humans tend to be attached to what we know.  As a result children, teens, and young adults take their own lives because they are in agony from the abusive treatment that is so easily put on them by others.

 

Once in the subconscious mind of a small child these detrimental perceptions can stay with them for a lifetime.  The problem is that we don’t just use Negative Perceptions to compare, judge, and condemn others, we use them on ourselves too.

 

Our subconscious minds store everything, regardless of what it is, and creates perceptions that have good and bad effects on our experience of life.  Our perceptions lead us to Self Acceptance or Self Conflict.  Negative personal perceptions damage your self image, which hurts your self confidence, lowers your self esteem, and makes you feel unworthy.  As an adult your perceptions are one of the few things you can actually control.  You can learn Discernment, which means to use acuteness of judgment and understanding, to help you to cultivate better perceptions so can feel better about yourself and others.  Small children have no Discernment Filters to tell them which perceptions do not serve their experience of life well.  Negative childhood perceptions continue to haunt many for a lifetime.  Most of us are not taught about this human trait, much less how to deal with it.  These are all good reasons to embrace perceiving others and ourselves with Compassion.

 

Seeing through the lens of Compassion is a conscious practice that helps you to feel good about yourself, and enables you to reflect that good feeling to the world outside of you.  Compassionately perceiving the way you are is one of the best ways to improve your experience of life, it enables you to:

> keep from playing the blame/shame game with yourself

> be okay with being human and all that it entails

> respond consciously instead of react unconsciously

> enjoy calm and peace instead of struggling with angst and agitation

> improve the health of your body, mind, emotions, and spirit

> see others and the world in a better way and feel better about them

 

This practice single handedly reduces your anxiety, improves your self image, bolsters your courage, and makes you less judgmental and more loving.  All of which enable you to experience more peace and tranquility in your life.  This reduction in angst helps to Balance your autonomic nervous system’s two parts—the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems.  This is essential to know if you struggle with or worry about disease, dysfunction, decline, and death.  Most of these are due to Chronic Stress aggravated gut issues that weaken the immune system.  If your autonomic nervous system is out of balance normal digestive function is not possible.  Since your gut wall houses up to 90% of the cells that make up your Immune System, it declines if your gut does.  Many conditions including allergies, arthritis, Autoimmune Diseases, Chronic Fatigue, mood disorders, autism, dementia and cancer that seem unrelated are actually caused by gut problems.

 

Whether it’s within or outside of your awareness, when you are stressed as a result of your Self-Judging Bad Habit your sympathetic nervous system pumps Stress Hormones throughout your body.  It also shifts blood flow by redirecting energy from your digestive system to enable your Fight or Flight Response.  Even though you don’t perceive danger, the part of your subconscious mind that directs these bodily responses because it sees Chronic Stress and acts.  Since  Self-Judging Bad Habits tend to be constantly switched on, so is the Chronic Stress that causes your sympathetic nervous system’s response.  It suppresses your parasympathetic nervous system and keeps it from doing its rest, digest, and repair job for your body.  Without this vital function your body stays stuck in a Chronic Stress mode that causes your health to decline until it gets your attention with harsh abruptness.

 

Because your parasympathetic nervous system is challenged by this unconscious bad habit you can develop Leaky Gut.  Leaky Gut causes the pores in your intestine to widen so food particles and toxins make their way into the bloodstream.  These aren’t supposed to be in the blood so they cause your Immune System to go into attack mode initiating an Autoimmune Disease or Disorder.  This is when the body's immune system attacks and destroys healthy body tissue by mistake.  This is in addition to your other Anxiety Causing Bad Habits and your Toxin Overload, both of which make Leaky Gut worse.  The research literature indicates that Leaky Gut is rampant in Western Societies.  Leaky gut is believed to be the source of most human ailments, diseases, and disorders, and the major cause of premature death.  This is how Chronic Stress silently kills.  

 

Most sufferers take prescription and over the counter drugs to deal with the many bad effects of Leaky Gut.  Many of these pollute an already challenged liver.  To see a list of the prescription and over the counter drugs that are damaging to the liver go to- http://www.hepcnet.net/drugsandliverdamage.html .  

 

~ STRESS ~

 

Here is where I want to make a differentiation between Chronic and Acute stress.  Acute Stress is short-lived and it can be beneficial and create motivation.  Once the stress causing situation is resolved the stress diminishes.  Chronic Stress is long term and comes about as the result of a situation that has not been resolved or continues for many years prior to being resolved.  It is not as noticeable as Acute Stress, it has the ability to create health problems, and it can go undetected even as it wreaks havoc on your health.  Keeping these differences in mind can save you from a lot of suffering and even premature death.

 

Research done on 30,000 adults for eight years, by Keller, Wisk, and Litzelman at the University of Wisconsin, reveals that Acute Stress, the kind that noticeably increases heartbeat and breathing, is only harmful when the participants believed it was.  This research shows that a whopping 43% of those that believed their high stress was harmful died over the eight year study.  That’s about 20,000 people a year in the USA, which makes believing high stress is harmful the fifteenth highest cause of death.  It also means that it kills more people than HIV/AIDS and homicide.  But, this was not the case for the group with high stress that believed it was not harmful to them—they had normal, or lower, death rates.

 

When participants in a Harvard Stress Study were taught that the Acute Stress caused increased heart and breathing rates are the body’s healthy response to prepare them for a stress event, their bodies responded better.  The most impressive change in their new physical response was that their blood vessels stayed relaxed.  Instead of constricting and limiting blood flow, which can damage the body, they stayed open and allowed the blood to flow.  These new findings about the differences in stress beliefs can be the difference between dying of a stress induced heart attack at fifty and living healthily to ninety.  To get more insight on The New Science of Stress check out Stanford University psychologist Kelly McGonigal’s brilliant Ted Talk- https://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend?language=en#t-161267

 

That being said, it is essential to keep in mind that Chronic Stress does damage the body, mind, emotions, and spirit.  It’s a silent killer because it hides outside of our awareness.  Whether perceiving yourself or others, Negative Perceptions have incredible Power to create Chronic Stress you don’t know about.  If for no other reason than to keep from suffering their insidious effects, working to replace your Chronic Stress causing bad habits with new healthy ones is of supreme value.

 

So, how do you transform Subconscious Perceptual Bad Habits into Conscious Perceptual Good Habits.  Well, as I learned from my very wise daughter, Lacy, you have to replace a bad habit with a good habit, or you leave an empty space that the bad habit can slide back into.

 

~ REPLACING BAD HABITS ~

 

As simplistic as this seems, it is valid—to make an old bad habit neural pathway fade away, consciously repeat a new good habit instead.  Eventually the new habit neural pathway becomes dominant so when the situation presents itself in the future you automatically use it instead.  This is made possible by your remarkable lifelong Brain Plasticity.

 

Using a Trigger-Recognition Response to help you to consciously apply Self Compassion when Self Judgment first appears is effective at easing this bad habit out of its dominant position so you can replace it with the good habit.  When I first realised that I would be better served by recognizing my Self Judging Bad Habit and nipping it in the bud, I used a Trigger-Recognition Response to bring it into my awareness.  I did my best to stop my Self-Depreciation Reaction as soon as I noticed it, and gently told myself, “This is that thing you do that makes you feel bad and ruins your health.”  This phrase gave me a little time to initiate a talk myself out of that unconscious reaction and into a conscious response.  

 

Then I talk to myself as I would to a dear friend to help them feel better.  I tell myself things like, “Give yourself a break, we all make mistakes.” and “It’s okay that things didn’t turn out the way you wanted, it isn’t stealing your life away and you are all right.” and “You are doing your best and that’s all any of us can do.”  Then I gently tell myself to be patient, especially with me.  This may sound simplistic, but we do listen to the stories we tell ourselves and in just a few minutes of telling myself what I am Grateful for I always feel better.

 

There are many books available to learn this and other Experience of Life Management Skills.  They are tools to improve your life by transforming the aspects of you that don’t serve you well into ones that do.  Look for books that address your specific emotional and feelings issues, and subconscious bad habits.

 

Having perceptions of Self Acceptance and Compassion are valuable because they help you to embrace the perception that—

 

Even though I am not perfect

I can still have the life that’s perfect for me.

—A.E. Berlin  

 

Owning this truth can make getting your best experience of life possible.  There are many truths to embrace, the most valuable are the ones that enable you to make the most of the other truths you choose to own.  This Self-Acceptance Practice is a meaningful place to introduce more skills to rid yourself of the Self-Imposed Limitations that hinder your expanding potential and making progress to your good Destiny.  Elevating the way you view yourself lifts the way you see others and the world.  Ultimately this upliftment is about you having an exceptional experience of life.  Now when was the last time you gave that some thought?

 

Having good Self Perception can be tough when we do things we don’t consciously consent to.  We are expected to be responsible for our thoughts, feelings, emotions, attitudes, behaviors, and actions.  But how can we be when so many of our perceptions are operating outside of our awareness in our subconscious minds?  Not to mention the fact that we are often led to believe things that have a negative effect on us by those who would profit from it.  To really be responsible for these personal aspects you need to be aware that your perceptions don’t always serve your best interests.  Once you know you can do something to change your ill serving Subconscious Programming you can act to move yourself out of the damaged place that your tainted experiences and understanding of things have put you in.

 

The character flaws which you, and perhaps others, blame you for come from subconscious dwelling perceptions and beliefs that are not aligned with your conscious goals.  If they were working together you wouldn’t be forced to endure humiliation from an occasional involuntary break with your sanity.  This misalignment issue can make you feel unhappy, worried, angry, confused, frustrated, disgusted, blaming, unworthy, and exhausted. All of which impede making progress toward your good Destiny.

 

We all have our own unique blend of toxic waste brewing in our subconscious minds that warps our perceptions to some extent.  We all carry around Negative Baggage we got from the people we were around when we were little.  Seeing through these Warped Perception Lenses is the biggest reason, I believe, that so many negative things from needing to control all the way up to engaging in war continue to plague our world.

 

As the poet June Jordan so aptly put it—

We are the ones we have been waiting for.

 

The elements that warp our perceptual lenses are passed down generation after generation, in a continuous chain of ignorance that causes much human suffering.  If you wish for your kids to be just like you, be careful what you wish for.  Take time for Introspection so you can consciously find and manage the subconscious issues that cause you, and your kids, pain.  Make it a priority to learn Experience of Life Management Skills, and teach them to your descendants.

 

The death of my husband created so much pain for my grown daughter and me that it opened up a wide chasm between us. We struggled so much with our own suffering that it was impossible for us to help each other.  When this rift got to the point that I felt we may never be close again, I made it my purpose in life to learn to heal so I could help her to heal too.  Your kids and grandkids are important.  All of you will benefit by you taking the lead to change your perceptual habits and improve your family’s dynamic.

 

Making it a priority to change my perceptions by applying Conscious Effort and Focused Attention proved to be very effective way to heal my Emotional Suffering and help my daughter.  It was challenging, as learning processes can be, but nothing was more important to me,  and it was better by far than the awful consequences of doing nothing.  The effort to learn Emotional Wisdom was more than worthwhile.  It enabled us to heal and it brought us back together.  Nothing is more valuable to me than the way this effort transformed us and amplified our appreciation for each other.

 

The rewards of Self Evolvement are highly satisfying, especially when you get excellent results that can’t come to you any other way.  Reaching your highest potentials depends on your healthy relationship with the energy aspects of you that are your perceptions, emotions, feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and values.  Understanding that they directly affect how you experience your life everyday can help you to make their well-being a priority.

 

It is my most fervent belief that there is nothing more worthwhile than learning the skills to manage our experience of life, and then help our loved ones to learn them as well.  If you’ve ever wanted to make your mark on the world, join me so that the things we leave our children, and grandchildren, come from the good things that we inherit combined with the good things that we develop.  You can leave as worthy of a legacy for your descendants as anyone in your lineage ever has, and that's saying a lot.

 

~ RESILIENCY ~

 

Learning the invaluable skill of Resiliency and then teaching it to your kids is unbelievably beneficial.  This under appreciated skill does more to help people to thrive than any other.  Being resilient benefits your health, well-being, experience of life, and reaching your Destiny Goals.  It's key to Psychological Fitness which is embraced by the US Army as being as important as Physical Fitness.  Resiliency not only enables you to bounce back from adversity, it makes Psychological Growth more likely and Extended Depression, Anxiety, and Behavior Problems less likely.  It is an especially valuable skill to have when you or yours are faced with Stress, Trauma, or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

 

Having Balanced Perceptions is a hallmark of resilient people.  You know the ones.  They seem to flourish because they are able to go with the flow, roll with the punches, and generally make the curmudgeons among us want to either spew or trip them as they walk by.  They don’t have less challenges than everyone else, they just have more Resilient Responses that help them to recover from adversity in a more effective and consistent way.

 

Resiliency is also the stock and trade of successful people, enabling them to Persevere.  They are open to trying new things and know they will reach their goals if they persist.  Their Resiliency comes from believing they are worthy of having a good life.  Are they wearing Rose-Colored Glasses that make the world look warmer and more user friendly, while the curmudgeons are stuck with Warped Lenses in their ill fitting glasses?  It would seem so, but seeing the world through Rose-Colored Glasses can be a slippery slope.  Always seeing people, things, and situations as better than they actually are can set you up to be disappointed, and taken advantage of by unscrupulous people.  It can steal your good experience of life away as surely as seeing through Warped Lenses, but in a sneakier way because it starts out feeling good.  Even those that see the world through Rose-Colored Glasses need to be resilient.

 

Resiliency to recover when things don’t go well, or feel good, is one of the most beneficial Experience of Life Management Skills you can learn.  A good way to become resilient is to recognize that down days happen.  Our energy is like all energy, it goes up and down in waves.  Acknowledging that things don't always go well and that you can’t always feel good is wise and health enhancing.  When things don’t feel good just remind yourself, “I am experiencing low energy right now.  I just have to hold on for a while and I will feel better.”  Ask yourself, “What am I supposed to be learning from this?”  Then go do something diverting or nice for yourself, or others, until that down feeling passes and wait for you subconscious to answer your question.

 

Resilient people are able to bounce back from life’s lows which helps them to be balanced and improves their experience of life.  They let go of: needing to control, needing to know, worrying what others think, perfectionism, fear of scarcity, needing to compare, judging, anxiety, and doubt.  They embrace essential things that nurture their health and well-being like: compassion to themselves and others, gratitude, courage, creativity, self confidence and worth, laughter, music, dance, meaningful work, generosity, play, rest, serenity, and a spiritual or other energetic practice.  Cultivating these things serve your human condition well and can help you to feel good more often.  They encourage your deep needs to come into your awareness where you can learn what they are and work with them to benefit everything in your life.

 

~ SUBCONSCIOUS COOPERATION ~

 

These deep needs I keep referring to come from within you at your most fundamental level.  They’re the things that are absolutely necessary for you to thrive.  They are not the cool things that appeal to your wants.  Accumulating cool stuff can never fill the yearning your deep needs promote.  But, learning what they are and focusing your attention to getting them into your life does.  The only thing you take with you when you leave your physical body, that you didn’t have when you entered it, is the learning that you got while you were in it.  The bottom line that I gleaned from all of the Experience Of Life Research I have done is—

 

We are here to experience, to feel, and to learn.

 

This bottom line is dependent on what you do to support your deep needs.  The more you learn about your core self, the more you know about the needs vital to your happiness, the more you are able to improve your perceptions to support them.  Knowing what is really essential to you makes everything a lot clearer.  So how do you lure this important secretive self out so you can know it better?  It may sound a bit simplistic, but by using Self Inquiry the subconscious mind is assigned a mission and goes to work.  Ask yourself questions about what makes you react, feel good and bad, and what about you serves your experience of life well and what doesn’t.  You can tell yourself all kinds of things and your subconscious will absorb them and file them away.  Unlike telling yourself things, asking questions actually gives your subconscious mind a challenge it needs to respond to.  The good news is that it’s really good at answering questions from its vast repository.

 

The most innovative thinkers in history made their breakthroughs by asking questions.  But, there’s a catch—”Isn’t there always.” your mind grumbles in the background.  There is an incredible amount of stuff stored in your subconscious, everything that entered your mind’s range of reception since it was able to receive.  The questions have to make their way through the stacks of stuff to find the answers.  In other words the answers come out when they come out, and that can be tough if you have a I want it yesterday modern sensibility.

 

The wonder of it is that the answers do come, and sometimes in ways you would never expect.  They can come to you out of nowhere as a sudden strong knowing of truth about yourself that you don't have to think about, you just know it's true.  Or, as an intuitive recognition of truth from something you read, or a movie you watched, or something you heard that you really connected to.  At this time your intuitions can give you the feeling of Inner-Truth Certainty that takes priority over everything else going on.  Sometimes it can happen when you are transitioning into and out of sleep, when you are more closely connected to your subconscious than any other time of the day.  They can also come in the form of a Peak Experience that provides instant insights and even Personal Transformation.

 

As Albert Einstein replied when asked how he came up with E=mc2—it came to him in the quiet times in between his thoughts. He asked the right questions and his subconscious mind responded when it had the answers.  These are events where you just know something is true.  The trick is to be open and ready to see their value and use them to your best benefit.  If this concept is a bit hard for you to get, try to remember that the conscious mind rules a place of logic and reason and the subconscious mind controls the realm that has your emotions, feelings, and memories.

 

To effectively work with how we naturally are, approach the subconscious mind the way that works for it.  It doesn’t have to be complicated.  Come up with the right questions to ask and be willing to make the most of the answers as they come.  Patience is more than a virtue here, in this case it is literally a godsend.  In my case, as if by magic, what was vital to my best life came to me in a variety of ways.  Sometimes they came out unexpectedly in a conversation or when relating to a song I heard.  They also came out as I put my Self Revelation pieces together to see the bigger picture of me and through Peak Experiences.

 

Whatever way they came to me they showed me my core self’s Higher Potential.  Finding out what was vital to me cleared the way for healing to happen and enabled me to focus on building a life around what I needed rather than what I thought I wanted.  The blessings that this gives are wondrous indeed.  It’s one of the only rides in the amusement park that is our earthly existence that pays in lasting satisfaction.  The thrill of it really kicks in with high G-force when you finally realize that you are not at anyone's mercy and that the Power to have an extraordinary experience of life depends on how you decide to support your revealed deep needs.

 

~ SUPPORTING YOUR DEEP NEEDS ~

 

Some Universal Essentials that support our deep needs include: good health, well-being, balance, love, belonging, acceptance, gratitude, peace, learning, connection, appreciation, intimacy, and being a part of something bigger than ourselves.  Some Personal Essentials that support our core nature include: creative expression and endeavors, music, reading, sports, dancing, adventure, discovery, helping others, family life, singing, dancing, being in nature, tending plants and animals, passion, philanthropy, and having a purpose.  There are others that can expand and delight your experience of life—you are only limited by your own imagination.

 

Cultivating Universal Essentials and the right Personal Essentials for you is deeply satisfying and does a lot for balancing your perceptions.  They add feel good experiences that not only enrich your life but improve the way you feel about and see yourself.  They also encourage Self Inquiry to give you answers that lead to contentment and a fulfilled life.  Keeping a journal or notebook of your needs as they’re revealed, and your likes and dislikes as they evolve, is good way to appreciate your progress as it unfolds.  It is possible to heal and progress to your better life all by yourself—it worked very well for me.

 

However, talking to an empathetic person as your process advances can be helpful.  Having someone who generously listens to you can enable you to say your Subconscious Revelations out loud so your conscious mind can hear them for the first time.  Similarly, psychologists ask their patients questions and listen until they hear themselves say their issues and needs out loud for the first time.  These revelations give them good direction to align their Destiny Path toward.

 

It was well worth my investment to learn the hidden possibilities of me.  At times it was more challenging than it sounds on these pages.  Somedays I grappled with myself because my perceptions had caused me to feel, think, behave, or act in conflict with my conscious Destiny Goals.  To work it out I would sit still for hours in Deep Introspection trying to understand my issue and make peace with it.  This may sound like a waste of time to you, but it helped me to work through problems which kept them from haunting me.  I am convinced that this miracle of Inner Peace could not have come to me in any other way.

 

I hear some of you out there, saying that you would rather swim across a croc infested river than explore the uncharted territories of you to find out what you need.  To which I have to ask, “How has that worked out for you so far?”  If you’re reading these words maybe it hasn’t.  Being held back from a satisfying experience of life by Fear-Induced Dread causes much more suffering than the discomfort that may come from learning your issues and healing them.  There aren’t many things that feel worse than constantly dealing with the demons that your own fear creates.

 

The point here is-

There’s only two ways to see anything you do

in this life, it’s either worth it to you, or it’s not.

 

It’s your choice.  A major problem is that most of us still have Issue-Causing Perceptions from early childhood.  These tend to be hard to identify because they have been with us so long that we often see them as who we are.  As long as they go unaddressed they will remain problematic.

 

Think about the realities of your life until you were about age seven for just a moment:  

> you had no Discernment because you weren’t old enough to have developed it yet

> you believed everything you absorbed because that's the way small children are

> you absorbed things that were imprinted with other people’s Perceptual Baggage

> because you were too young to understand any of this you believed that the pain resulting from your Warped Perceptions was your fault… and maybe you still do

 

Do you ever feel like one of the walking wounded; wondering why you are your own worst enemy?  Negative things that were said and done around you when you were a small child stuck to you like an internal second skin.  Back then if you were told that you were bad, lacking, or not good enough you may still have that perception on some level.  No matter why or how it was said, it may still cause you painful Self-Perception Issues.

 

When you were little and made a mistake were you told you did a bad thing, which causes guilt, or were you told you were bad, which causes shame?  Shame causes more suffering than other personal issues and it is the hardest to deal with because it tends to stay hidden the most.  The antidote for this kind of Personal Poison includes: Believing it is a problem you can heal, applying Self Compassion and Patience to find ways to heal it, and applying Focused Attention and Conscious Effort to end its suffering.

 

~ AFFECTING YOUR LEGACY ~

 

Perceptual Issues are Self-Perpetuating Phenomena that continues to have a bad effect generation after generation.  Your descendants are worth changing your Old Paradigms for by replacing your unconscious bad perceptions with conscious good ones that better serve you and yours.  Changing your perceptions can benefit your kids and grandkids and that’s saying a lot about the worthiness of your efforts.

 

Some ancient traditions teach their people to come out from under the vale and emerge into the light of Consciousness.  This Wisdom works really well with your perceptions.  Think of the unconscious ones hiding in the shadows outside of your awareness that repeatedly cause you grief.  Replacing those with better perceptions that your conscious mind creates means they are no longer lurking in the dark waiting to inflict suffering on your life.  Negative Perceptions can be merciless on your emotions, they can affect your thoughts, attitudes, feelings, behaviors, values and your physical health.  To change any of these for the better you need to change a perception first.

 

By changing my perception I have changed the world.

—Lacy Ann Berlin

 

I was impressed the first time my daughter wrote these words down in a moment of clarity and shared them with me.  My immediate insight was that the world was different to the beholder because of seeing it in a different way.  Later I realized that there was more to it than that.  It also means that by changing your perception you not only change your view of the world but the way you see yourself in it.  This is exceptional Personal Empowerment because it frees you to be and do your best, which blesses your life, your kid’s lives, and possibly the world as well.  Changing your perceptions makes it possible for you to move into a liberated place where you are able to take advantage of the higher potential knowing yourself deeply provides.  In this new place of expanded potential you are able to activate your stores of energy and direct them to benefit people, animals, nature, and literally change the world.

 

This concept of changing the world clearly means changing the world on the inside of you as well as the one on the outside of you.

 

The perception I once had of myself as being an insignificant, ailing, old lady shifted in due time.  Knowing myself deeply transformed my perceptions, my beliefs, and my other energy aspects.  This enabled me to heal the ailments of my body, mind, emotions, and spirit.  In experiencing healing I found my purpose—to help others learn that they can manage their own experience of life.  This dramatically improved my Self Perception, Self Image, and Self Worth.  By shifting my perceptions of me, which in turn shifted my perception of everything else, the possibility of having a healing influence on others infused vibrancy and excitement into my life.

 

Talk about Power.  Transforming an experience of life that is lacking into one that is fulfilling, now that’s Power.

 

You are more powerful than you know.  Shift your perceptions to wield that power so that the possibility of having your best life goes from not likely to probable.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

GET WHAT YOU NEED

Skills to Build Your DESTINY

The revelation of thought takes men

out of servitude into freedom.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

~ Chapter Three ~

THOUGHTS

Do I get that my thoughts take me

from irritation to imagination?

They are conscious, they are subconscious, they are unconscious, they are responsive, they are reactive, they are flexible, they are seemingly unchangeable, they are creative, they are destructive, they are emotional, they are unfeeling, they are the birthplace of ideas both wonderful and cruel.  But most importantly they are the energy force that enables you to learn and comprehend the world on the outside of you and the one on the inside of you.  They are words, numbers, voices, music, images, and visions both realistic and abstract… they are your thoughts.

The quote above by Ralph Waldo Emerson poignantly expresses the effectiveness of thought to change your experience of life.  The servitude he speaks of applies to all kinds of bondage over your freedom, especially the restraints you put on yourself.  It speaks to the Power of thought to throw off the chains that bind and limit your brief life span.  Will thinking better thoughts take you out of being stuck in the rut you’re mired in?  Only if they convince you to take appropriate action.  That is the true efficacy of thought, to move you out of a place of inertia and into a place of purpose where you are eager to take action.  If this eagerness seems to be very unlike you, it just may be unfamiliar to you because you haven’t developed your Wisdom potential yet.

wisdom: noun

> the quality of being wise, power of judging rightly and following the soundest course of action based on knowledge, experience, understanding

Using sound judgment in a complex environment is a hallmark of being wise.  No one knows your track record better than you, if it is less than stellar learning Wisdom Skills can greatly improve your Self View.  You may think you are limited by your circumstances because it’s common to do so in our culture, particularly if you aren’t aware that you can learn Wisdom to expand your possibilities.  You are more powerful than you know.  However, if you are stuck in a life that you should be in, or one that misfortune has landed you in, this Power can be elusive.  Even so, if you are stuck in an experience of life that doesn’t suit who you have become remember—it's not your Destiny.  You can learn to use Discernment and Imagination Skills to facilitate getting the Destiny that best suits you.

Imagination is everything.

It is the preview of life's coming attractions.

—Albert Einstein

I like this quote by Albert Einstein, because it goes so well with a favorite life motto of mine—you are only limited by your own imagination.  The ability of your mind to have creative and resourceful thoughts, to form new ideas and concepts, to change your lot in life is magic.  Imagination is the magic pixie dust that enables you to envision your future and create a life that feels good.  You can access this magic by redirecting energy from your Inner Dialog’s Chatter and refocus it on your Imagination.

You probably remember the joy of using your Imagination as a child, when fairy tales encouraged you to come up with your own stories.  If you don’t, it is a worthy skill to learn that can help you actuate your deep needs in wonderful creative ways.  Imagination has the Power to change your life’s course of events by turning the intangible into the tangible.  Even young people have this Power, and a great deal of potential to manifest the ideas of their imaginations.

The true sign of intelligence

is not knowledge but imagination.

- Albert Einstein

I was impressed and inspired by the creative effort of Ann Makosinski, a fifteen year old girl whose brilliant Imagination came up with an original science project that benefits poor children worldwide.  She won her school science fair and then went on to win the $25,000 scholarship prize for her age group at the 2013 Google Science Fair.  She was inspired to help her pen pal in the Philippines whose grades were suffering due to not having light to study by at night.  Huge numbers of students worldwide have poor grades because of this challenge.  After school they help their families with chores and only have time to study in the approaching darkness.

Ann had a lot of sympathy for her friend, not just because she is half Filipino but because she felt so fortunate to be able to have light at night to study by and get good grades.  Compassion for the plight of her friend set her mind into motion and coming up with a solution became her passion.  The Canadian high school student used her Imagination to design a flashlight powered by body heat radiating from the hand holding it so it never needs batteries.  She is refining the design and getting sponsors to help get this greatly needed light source to children around the world.

Think about the ramifications of this one intangible thought made tangible.  Children benefiting from what amounts to more learning time will have better grades and greater potential to improve their lives, and the fortune of their families, communities, and eventually their countries.  This fifteen year old used Wisdom to turn a thought from her Imagination into a very needed object that will help countless people around the world.  She’s inspired me to use Passion, Imagination, and Wisdom to improve my life and to help others enable themselves to do the same.

~ WISEN-UP ~

Believe it or not you don’t have to be born with Wisdom and Imagination, they are skills you can learn from books and mentorship.  They are better investments than any material world payout you can hope to gain because they help you to access and use your own vast potential.  If Wisdom and Imagination have not yet become prominent in your life I urge you to some research to learn about and develop them.  Knowledge achieves its highest form when it is turned into Wisdom.  For all of the attention that knowledge gets, it is the transformation of it within your mind that makes it truly valuable as it becomes Wisdom.  Having it is better by far than having lots of knowledge, because knowledge without Wisdom is like having loads of talent and not making the most of it.

It is widely known that people with high intellects have high suicide rates.  For all of their knowledge the Wisdom to get the experience of life they needed escaped them.  One of the reasons that Wisdom is better than knowledge is because knowledge, like the subconscious mind, lacks Discernment.  Facts, information, and skill can only bring you benefit if you use them in a wise way.

Of all the things vying for  your attention today, very little emphasis is placed on doing anything in a wise way.  There is plenty praising the glories of being smart or quick witted in ways that imply that Good Judgement is involved.  All too often those doing the implying are trying to convince us that it’s smart to buy what they are selling.  Unfortunately, they end up selling us things that fall short of giving us a fulfilling life.  If buying something, doing something, or being with someone you think gives you status or the envy of others were really smart it would have already filled the longing you still have.

The confusion between smart and wise may be the reason that so many hand over Power to decide what is best for their health to doctors when no one can be more responsible for their health than they are.  Unless you are too disabled, no one is more responsible for your health than you are.  No one is more responsible for my health than I am.  Period.  Even when I am too incapacitated to be responsible for myself anymore, my sound mind desires will still be done through my Advanced Directive.  It is a simple form I wisely fill out while I am still well enough to choose what I wanted to happen to me if and when I became too incapacitated.  People don’t plan to fail, they just fail to plan.  Then their loved ones are forced to decide for them—and unhappily have to guess at what they would have wanted. 

This is understandable given our cultural tendencies to avoid all things having to do with dying, particularly if no one is sick.  This inclination sets up surviving generations to struggle when they finally have to deal with this reality.  No one never has an accident, never gets sick, or lives forever.  Carefully giving thought to health decline, dying, and death on purpose is far less painful than unexpectedly being overwhelmed by it.  This mindful consideration also alleviates the anxiety that is common with these subjects that people would rather eat worms than address.  The dread associated with trying to avoid them is much more painful than the discomfort of addressing them.  Even if you want to run away from these awkward feeling subjects they are unavoidable.  Dealing with them consciously, before there is a great need is a true sign of maturity.

~ LIFE’S ENERGY ~

As birth is the miraculous event of activating the energy of life’s potential in this physical world, so too is death a sacred event where this energy is transformed out of it.  The only thing this energy, which many call soul, spirit, or essence, takes with it when it leaves that it didn’t have when it arrived is the learning it acquired from the experience of life it had while it was here.  That is why getting the life that best suits you is of primary value, it enables you to receive the best learning.

Like all energy in the universe, the energy that is you can’t be created, it can’t be destroyed, it can only be transformed.  You have the Power to transform all of your energy aspects: your thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, feelings, emotions, values, and spirituality to better serve your experience of life.  Making the most of these is why the Experience of Life Management Skills on these pages are so valuable.  Without consciously managing these energy aspects your subconscious mind can have a bad affect your health and well-being.  Because they are intricately connected to each other if any of these energy aspects are ailing, out of balance with each other, or out of alignment with your Destiny Goals it declines and takes the other aspects down with it.  And, it can happen without you being aware of it.

If one or more of them decline the physical aspect that is your body will also suffer because it too is intricately connected with your energy aspects.  Have you ever noticed that if you are emotionally hurting your body gets sick easier or just has pain?  According to a traditional Lomilomi Hawaiian structural and alignment therapist—emotional, mental, and spiritual distress can get stuck in various areas of the body.  These experts move this energy around the body to alleviate physical distress.  But they get better results with the conscious help of the client which enables them to heal their physical and energetic issues in a more effective way.

Traditional healers have known for millennia that everything about us is connected to every other thing about us.  Hawaiian Shamans, among others, believe that there is a strong mind-body connection where muscle tension is connected to emotional, mental, and spiritual stress.  They release muscle tension and give overall healing using seven sacred principles:

• IKE (pronounced E'-kay):  the world is what you think it is

• KALA:  there are no limits

• MAKIA:  energy flows where attention goes

• MANAWA (man-NAV-a):  now is the moment of power

• ALOHA:  to love is to be happy with someone or something

• MANA:  all power comes from within

• PONO:  effectiveness is the measure of truth

These principles acknowledge that our energy aspects are our whole person healing power source.   Unfortunately Western Medicine has become so highly specialized that it is not in sync with this basic human health reality.  Its focus is to give us drugs, many of which damage the liver, to keep us comfortable more than to help us to be whole and healthy.  As a result many have been convinced to give the Power to make their health decisions to others when no one is more responsible for their health than they are.  This sets them up to believe that pain is a bad thing and something to be avoided at all costs.

Unfortunately, many ignore the fact that pain is the body’s essential early warning system.  Pain’s job is to tell us to heal what is causing it before the source of it leads to real damage and death.  I had no idea that this was the case before learning it in the research literature.  What I learned turned into Personal Wisdom that enabled me to get healing for the Autoimmune Disease that Western Medicine says is incurable.  When I finally understood that believing, perceiving, and thinking that I could be well would get me there, my healing went from impossible to fact.  My life is completely different from the one I occupied only a year before I wrote these words, because changing my thoughts convinced me to change how I saw, felt about, and handled my well-being.

Those thoughts created a Passion in me to find a way back to health and to help others to do so as well.  Owning a no one is more responsible for my health than I am philosophy, I made a plan to rid myself of the Fibromyalgia pain and Chronic Fatigue that kept me housebound.  Using my research findings on Traditional, Alternative, and Complementary Healing Modalities I learned the specific therapies to make my healing happen.  And—having love in my life again provided the final puzzle piece that ended my all consuming pain and gave me a contented and satisfied life.  The emotional healing that my new relationship provided encouraged the healing of my body, mind, and spirit aspects.  I could not have experienced this all encompassing healing had I not known my deep need for Intimate Emotional Connection and acted on it.

~ THE GIFTS OF WISDOM ~

Making the best decisions and choices possible depend on understanding your most essential needs.  Self Wisdom is the product of Focused Thought and Discernment to get Deep Self Understanding.  It can lead to a rich experience of life and save you and yours from all kinds of chaos and pain.  You may be resistant to applying Conscious Effort to gain this most worthy asset.  Many, starting with us baby boomers, feel entitled to a better life than our parents.  Still, no matter how stable things appear they can go awry, and fast.  Wisdom is an invaluable asset that helps you get through challenging times.  Even if they don’t feel good you can acquire valuable learning from these struggles too.  Many that don't want to leave their comfort zone go out of their way to avoid challenges.  All too often this results in staying stuck in a life that never feels like a good fit to them.

Recognizing at a young age that meeting challenges resulted in personal expansion I’ve always had the motto—I am nothing if I’m not up for a challenge.  It seems to me that challenges are the steps up to a better place, and experiencing them has always yielded Wisdom I greatly appreciate.  Cultivating Wisdom helps you to determine what skills will assist you to get the life your Imagination inspires.  Learning these and other ELM Skills enable you to visualize your best life and Actuate it.  For example, if writing and sharing the bounty of your mind and/or heart would add zest to your experience of life, then learning to type, joining a writer’s group, and writing as often as you are inspired to may satisfy this deep need.

The wiser you become about yourself the more you can use it to focus in on what the life that best fits you looks like.  Lack of Wisdom, I believe, is why there are so many old children among us—people that got old but didn’t mature enough to get a fulfilling life.  I’m not talking about ditching things like being Young At Heart, life would be a curse without this good lifelong connection to youth.  Very little is better than feeling the freedom of being Young At Heart—feeling unburdened just to be yourself is a blessing indeed.  It is one of the best things of all of the good things that healing brought me.  Feeling Young At Heart is a great antidote to being stuck in a life of expectation that doesn’t fit you.

How many stories have you heard about people that went to college for four, six, or more years, to have a career that brought them no joy?  Sometimes having them for decades, only to toss it all and take up their passion instead—or succumb to depression if they didn’t.  This is how powerful Expectations can be, the power to chain you to a life that is not fulfilling and keep you from the experience of life that feels good to you.  Expectations are based on your future and what rewards they potentially provide.  They are often based on an abstract standard that is held in high regard that has nothing to do with your deep needs.  And, they don’t even have to be yours to keep you in bondage.  They can be the Expectations of others that you knowingly or unwittingly consented to.

For eons parents have imposed their will on their children through their Expectations of them.  The effects of these good, albeit controlling, intentions run the gamut from driving wedges of separation into some families to tragic suicides in others.  Children that accept and actualize their parents’ Expectations of them probably weren’t taught Self Inquiry or Self Wisdom to manage their own lives well.  Their willing servitude suits controlling parents very well, as children continue to do what their parents want even after they leave home.  This is especially true in a world where Self Study competes with staying connected and entertained.

Self Inquiry of your core nature and its better possibilities so you can gain Self Wisdom to improve your experience of life may seem as alien to you as walking on Mars.  But ponder this:

> your life is probably not in a place of fulfilment if you are reading these words

> your previous personal progress efforts didn’t bring the results you long for

> knowing yourself deeply reveals your essential needs so you can learn skills to fill them

> your only investment is time to understand yourself better

> do you really want to feel the same way next year because you didn’t shift some time away from TV, games, internet, or entertainment and toward learning what you really need?

~ ENERGY OVERLOAD ~

I hear you out there saying, “How am I supposed to think deeply about myself when I can’t even get a word in edgewise with the constant yakking going on in my head?”  If this is true for you, join the crowd, it’s a bothersome issue for lots of us.  We live in an overstimulated world.  The energy aspects of you: your thoughts, emotions, feelings, perceptions, beliefs, values, and spirit are constantly being influenced by outside energetic inputs.  Before electricity energetic inputs were pretty limited.  Today we are subjected to internet, cellular, TV, radio, microwave, and sonar waves that are bouncing around and through us all the time.  And, these are just the silent ones that are going on outside of our awareness.

The audio and visual energetic inputs we interact with daily come in voluntary and involuntary varieties, and they are everywhere.  I believe our involuntary Inner Dialog feeds on these stimuli, making our thoughts a force that is hard for us to deal with.  For millennia peace prevailed until electricity came into our reality.  Our bodies have not evolved to account for all of this extra energy input that electricity supports.  Like it or not, your subconscious mind is watching, listening, and absorbing everything within the reception range in the galaxy that spins around you.  If a sales pitch is compelling, you can be sold at some level without really listening to it—and without your conscious consent.  This is especially problematic since everywhere you turn someone is trying to convince you that you want what they’re selling.

You may think you have to keep up with current styles, products, or information to be cool enough.  The problem with this thinking is that it is not a need but a Bottomless Pit of Want.  No matter how much stuff you get this pit never fills up, it can never have enough.  Your Bottomless Pit of Want isn’t even in the same neighborhood as your deep need, which couldn’t care less about having the latest styles or gear.  The keyword here is Enough.  Only knowing what you deeply need leads to having enough and being enough, and this just won’t do for those who want you to buy what they’re promoting.  As long as you believe, perceive or think you don’t have or are enough they have a really good chance of convincing you they can fill this hole with what they are selling.  That’s the bottom line for just about everything media related, but it doesn’t serve your human condition well.

Knowingly or unknowingly accepting a Never Enough Paradigm keeps you in a constant state of Comparing you and your life to others and their lives.  This sets you up to Judge yourself, and therefore everyone else, by superficial standards that are meant to keep you in a constant state of wanting.  It creates ongoing Anxiety and Chronic Stress that keeps your sympathetic nervous system switched on and whittling away at your health.  Be wise, rethink what is invaluable to you and use Discernment to filter out the rest.  Consciously reducing the onslaught of external stimuli is a good way to reduce the restless feeling that your Inner Dialog causes and enjoy peace instead.  The life you need is built with things essential to your core self, things that don’t have to keep up with trends.

Do you keep the TV turned on so you can tune out the incessant yakking going on in between your ears, or just to keep you company?  This habit puts a lot of stimuli, mostly negative, into your conscious thoughts and subconscious permanent storage.  It gives your Inner Dialog even more to include in its rants, which can make you weary indeed.  I remember all too clearly the constant Mental Fatigue I endured from the time sleep left me in the morning until it returned at night.  It even made going to sleep and staying asleep tough.  My Inner Dialog’s constant chatter created Chronic Stress that kept my parasympathetic nervous system suppressed which in turn worked to make me really ill.  I couldn’t get it to shut up until I got rid of my TV and became wise about what I selected to view online.

It is believed that for eons knowledge doubled every thousand years.  More recently it doubled every hundred years.  Now it doubles about every year.  That is more information than anyone can keep up with.  Using Discernment to limit what to allow into your thoughts calms down your active Inner Dialog, spares you Chronic Stress, and saves your sanity.  You’re probably getting the message by now that the stress of having your fight or flight response on all the time can hurt you.  Chronic Stress is a killer.  When you are constantly stressed the sympathetic nervous system overrides the parasympathetic nervous system shutting down your body’s absolutely necessary rest, digest, and repair function.  Since you are what you eat, how you detox, and and how you respond immunologically—if your body can’t digest, absorb, and distribute nourishment to its trillions of cells the ensuing health decline leads to long term suffering and premature death.

Talk about a domino effect on steroids.  This digestive challenge impedes production of the feel good neurotransmitter Serotonin and the hormone Melatonin which your brain needs to achieve restful sleep.  If you don’t get restful sleep for six to nine hours a night your brain cells don’t contract to create the channels in between them that allow spinal fluid to wash away the debris that thinking produced all day long.  Researchers think that this is one of the reasons beta amyloid brain plaques build up in the brains of people that suffer from Alzheimer’s Disease.  So beware, all of you that believe you are fine on less rest… your mental health is counting on you to give your brain the six to nine hours of sleep that is essential to it.

Of course, it is easier to sleep if you get a handle on your rampant Inner Dialog.  Not only does it reduce Chronic Stress that can keep you awake; it gives your Imagination, Wisdom, and other conscious thoughts elbow room to flourish.  I, like an inordinate number of people, numbed myself just to quiet this noise in my head.  I used alcohol, gambling, shopping, eating, the internet, and TV in an attempt to avoid listening to the incessant chatter between my ears.  Another reason a lot of TV is not good is that people have less brain activity while watching TV than when thinking of nothing anything at all.  How much human potential do you think this one non-activity wastes?  Besides this are all of the other forms of entertainment and staying connected we use in the course of our daily lives.  All of this additional information your subconscious mind takes increases Chronic Stress levels rather than reducing them as you may have hoped they would do.

It may feel like TV lowers your stress because it’s a great diversion that’s really effective at taking you out of your life for a while.  Nonetheless it promotes Comparing and Wanting while inputting a lot of negativity.  I am not saying to give up your favorite shows, I still watch mine online when I can.  I am saying that turning on the TV and letting it run in the background is stressful to you whether you realize it or not.  Your subconscious mind never takes a break, it’s always on duty storing everything that enters its reach—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

~ CLEARING THE WAY ~

If you need your life to be less challenging, take some of the challenges out of it.  If you really want to have the news in your life, be selective and pick a program that gives you a good rundown of the day’s events so you don’t have to hear it repeatedly.  Turning on music that calms your energetic thoughts is a good way to reduce your Inner Dialog’s chatter, reduce stress, and give yourself a break from the frenzied world on the outside and the inside of you.

I flew to Los Angeles to care for my eighty-six year old mother while my sister and niece took a long needed vacation.  Aside from all news channels, on network TV channels you can literally watch eight hours of continuous news repeating the same stories dozens of times a day.  Since news stories tend to be negative in nature viewers’ minds are continuously bombarded with negativity adding more stress to their already full plate.  Whether it’s due to the viewers’ perceived need to stay abreast of the latest news or to keep from feeling alone this is an unhealthy habit.  TV stations and networks need to sell commercial time to be profitable.  They do it by keeping their ratings up through airing the most sensational current news.  Viewers buy into this as if they can’t wait to be the first to hear the latest disaster report.  As a result many become convinced that they live in a dangerous world which causes them a lot of Fear and Anxiety.  Very few of us can change the ills of the world, yet so many of us carry this health stealing burden.  Voluntarily carrying around the weight of the world adds to your Chronic Stress load, and you are probably not aware that you are Victimizing Yourself.

Discernment keeps you out of hot water with yourself by

keeping you away from things that don’t serve you well.

This is why Discernment is so beneficial.  Even though you are blessed with an intellect, it is using it discerningly that makes you wise.  Use that Wisdom to determine what impedes your better life and rid yourself of it as soon as you are able to.  You know that disasters are going on around the world all of the time.  The stress of always having them on your mind can damage your health.  No amount of your own personal suffering can help anyone with their plight.  It makes no sense to feel compelled to know all of them, unless you intend to contribute to their relief efforts.  Knowing about them is unavoidable sometimes as with the earthquake in Japan, the hurricane in New Orleans and Haiti, and the tsunami in southeast Asia.  These heart wrenching tragedies are bound to enter your awareness.  You can have a good effect on them by donating aid to their people.  Altruistic and charitable works benefit the donor as much as the receivers by improving their own Self Perception which in turn helps them to thrive.

  

The proof of a successful life is how your emotions, mind, body, and spirit thrive.  When these all feel good it’s a sure indication you are flourishing, no matter what your social or financial status is.  For your emotions, mind, body, and spirit to feel good they have to be at peace with each other.  Thoughts from your mind can easily upset your other aspects and calming them makes the vital balance between all the aspects of you possible.  Learning to be at Peace is one of the most beneficial Experience of Life Management Skills.  Eliminating what does not help you reach this good goal is a good place to start.

When asked how the thirteen foot, five inch statue of David came to be Michelangelo replied that David had always been inside the massive block of marble, and that he just chipped away the unessential stone to reveal his beauty.  Revealing your Inner Serenity is a beautiful thing too.  Learning how to let go of stress and be at peace enhances every facet of your life.  Chipping away unessential stimuli is an effective way calm your mind and move toward Internal Peace.  There are many books that focus on calming your mind and bringing it into balance with your other aspects.  Very few things are as gratifying as the Deep Relaxation that having Peace enables.  Very few things help you to enjoy a great experience of life more than being at Peace with yourself.

~ MAKING PROCESS PROGRESS ~

To make progress with your Destiny Goals ask yourself, “Do the things I think and do benefit my experience of life?”  Of all of the questions you ask yourself this may be the most important because we tend to be attached to the things we think and do habitually, many of which don’t serve our goals well.  To change a habit you have to change a thought first.  This can happen in a split second or it may take a lot longer to understand that changing it is worthwhile.

Getting the life you need is a process that takes as long as it takes.  If this sounds like too long of a time for you to wrap your mind around just ask yourself, “Is there anything more worthy of investing my time, energy, effort, and resources on than living a satisfying life that suits me?”  Look back at some of the projects you took on.  Most certainly they required you to invest time, energy, effort, and resources in them.  Whether you were aware of it or not, one of the resources you invested was your Attitude.  The projects you had a good Attitude about were probably the most rewarding in results and satisfaction.  The ones you didn’t have a good Attitude about most likely didn’t give good results.  Attitude, like habits, straddle your energetic and physical aspects.  They come from the inside of you to use on both the inside and outside of you.  Attitude, like perception, straddles your conscious and subconscious minds.  You are aware of some and not others, and some of them serve you better than others.  Attitudes that conflict with your deep need or your conscious goals can cause you misery.

Pay attention to your Attitude, progress to your chosen Destiny depends on it.  The way you behave and do things are consistent with it.  Nothing steals your Power to achieve your goals more than a bad or half hearted Attitude.  They have a sneaky way of showing how you really feel.  Fortunately, you can change your Attitude to better align with your Destiny Goals.  Changing an attitude, a behavior, or a feeling also starts with changing a thought.  A good reason to rid yourself of constant media input is to reduce the negativity it pumps into the thoughts and emotions that form your Attitudes.  Even if you think you pay no attention at all to this External Negativity, your diligent subconscious mind is a proficient collector of everything within its range of reception.

Mindfully lessening negativity that bombards your senses from the outside of you to turn down the negativity it causes on the inside of you reduces Chronic Stress in your life.  Exchanging your negative thoughts for positive ones may be easier said than done, but it benefits your health, extends your life, and is well worth learning.  Negative thinking is a main reason people don’t get the life they need.  There is no end to the justification that negative thoughts use to keep you entrenched in bad Attitudes, feelings, behaviors, and stuck where you don’t feel good.

Some of the Negative Attitudes which can delay personal advancement include:

> seeing everything as a struggle or pain in the neck

> feeling entitled to better

> having to compare and judge

> thinking there’s not enough

> being worried, anxious, and doubtful

     Habitual Bad Attitudes are automatic because they are part of your subconscious mind’s survival mechanism which uses fear to get your cooperation.  Those that don’t serve you well may have been with you since you were a small child when you learned how to use them to maneuver through an adult rich environment.  Finding and changing your Negative Attitudes is a worthy pursuit that frees you up to appreciate what makes you feel and do better.  Even if it seems to go against your grain, adjusting your Attitude to align with what supports your deep needs is more than worth the initial discomfort.

If it doesn’t feel good, you’re supposed to be learning

something about yourself from it… what is it?

Our consumer emphasized culture has convinced people that they can only be worthy of happiness if they have the right stuff, live the right lifestyle, vacation at the right places, and that they should always have more.  This leads to Never-Enough Fear, which leads to a Bad Attitude from not being able to have it all.  It only really benefits the bottom line of those pitching these temporary shortcuts to happiness.  As a species we are designed to seek novelty, it is why we are explorers and inventors, we are always in search of new things.  Think back to all the things you bought, or bought into, and how convinced you were at the time that they would make you happy.  As satisfying as they seemed initially I am pretty sure that they never led you to a fulfilling life.

Many endure an Inner Dialog of Self Blame and Depreciation because they think their lives are dung until they acquire the right stuff that will finally make their lives great.  They do this for years and keep buying stuff that can’t make them feel complete.  It’s a Subconscious Bad Habit Loop.  If our conscious minds had their way our Inner Dialog would never beat us up, compare us to others, urge us to buy stuff to compensate for our deficiencies, blame us for anything, or constantly bombard us every waking second.  It is my belief that the only thing keeping people from enjoying freedom from these is that they don’t know that they have the option to learn how to manage them.

In our modern world most of the bondage we endure comes from unconsciously chaining ourselves to things that don’t serve us well.  These include living up to expectations, accumulating things for stature, wanting to judge and compare everything and everyone, and using superficial standards that don’t serve us well.  Many remain prisoners of them for a lifetime.  It was easy to get attached to these as small children, before we had the capacity to be discerning.   Logic can help people that are stuck in their lives see that these things hold them back.

~ LOGIC ~

Logic can be a blessing when using Discernment.  Like most, I value my logical thinking abilities, they have served me well in understanding complicated concepts that are foreign to me.  Using Logic helps you connect the thoughts written on these pages to your personal needs in a way that helps you to fill them.  But caution should be used when applying Logic because it’s objective by nature and rarely influenced by our subjective personal feelings.  If you have a highly logical mind it can dominate the subjective parts of you that are your precious feelings and emotions.  This is one of the areas of your life where the importance of balance can’t be emphasized enough.  Balanced Thinking allows your objective Logic and your subjective emotions and feelings to shine.  You are a complex being and all of your facets are important.  Your better human experience is made possible by having good connection between your subjective aspects and your objective Logic so that they can work together.

The revelation of thought takes

men out of servitude and into freedom.

This Ralph Waldo Emerson quote also addresses the bondage that the lack of balance creates.  Logic can be forceful in its governance of your life, suppressing the worthy voices of your feelings, emotions, and creative thoughts.  It’s is very adept at convincing you that its point of view should rule because, well, it’s logical.  No matter how convincing it is, the most beneficial point of view to get the life you need is a balanced one that takes into account how you feel.  You are a human being not a computer.  Your feelings, emotions, and deep needs are all valuable to your experience of life.  I believe I am here to learn from the experiences I have in this physical existence.  The learning derived from my feelings and emotions is just as valid as the learning I receive from my Logic.

So how do you get Logic to back off when it’s overbearing, and get it  to work with your feelings and emotions to find balance?  Well, it’s easier than it sounds, you just use Logic—

logic: noun

> the quality of being justifiable by reason.

Let your conscious mind create an intention to have Balance in your life as an indispensable part of reaching your primary goal of experiencing the life best suited to you.  If your rational mind is convinced that working with your feelings and emotions is the most effective way to reach this primary goal it can allow itself to work with them.  The importance you assign to having Balance and how crucial it is to reaching your primary goal may have enough Logic to get your rational mind to cooperate.  If it understands that you need your Logic to be in balance with your feelings and emotions or your health and well-being will suffer you may get its cooperation.  After all, Logic is of little use if you are miserable, incapacitated, or prematurely dead from the Chronic Stress that it contributes to.

Balance, Destiny Goals, and having your best experience of life are best served by the Intentions you connect them to.  Intentions are potent energetic thoughts that are known to change physical reality.  Countless miracles and incredible scientific research results are attributed to intentions, prayers, and meditations. The intentions that come from your heart are the most potent.  Making use of the Power emanating from your heart is desirable and wise.  Your heart is a powerhouse of energy, it’s electrical field is almost 60 times greater in amperage than that of the brain.  It has more than 5000 times greater strength than the brain’s electrical field.  The heart sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart.  Using this information makes your thoughts more potent and beneficial to your whole self, not just your mind.  You are more powerful than you know, learning about and using the Power of your heart opens up your better possibilities.

Even so, if using your Power to get the better possibilities that lead to the life that’s perfect for you feels intimidating—breathe.  It’s a worthy process, that starts with a thought.  Close your eyes and think how it would feel to be in the life that best suits you, a place of fulfillment that you designed around your consciously known deep needs.  It could be much better than you can imagine today.  This Envisioning is a skill that can inspire you to make more progress down your Destiny Path.  Your world can be completely different next year from the one you occupied this year.  Your experience of life can be much more vibrant and rewarding than today.  Your thought’s most powerful quality is to convince yourself that you are a worthwhile endeavor to take on, and that doing it now rather than later is so much better.

Happiness does not depend on

what you have or who you are,

it solely relies on what you think.

 —The Buddha

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