Category Archives: Life Purpose/Meaning

Persistence always beats Talent

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“As any coach or athlete will tell you, consistency of effort over the long run is everything.”
Angela Duckworth, Grit – The Power of Passion and Perseverance, (2016)

This is a great book, a massive best seller a few years ago (it remained on the New York Times best sellers list for 20 weeks. She also has 18 million hits on her TED talk on this subject.) This is great research on why some people succeed very well and become masters and experts in their field and why others with talent do not.

The key is finding your passion in a a field and then having persistence to keep practicing, learning and correcting (even when you fail or get it wrong) over many years.

Angela has created a grit scale test that can show you or a potential hire if that person will succeed in their field or job. Just having a high test mark from school or University doesn’t correlate with success on the job. But having perseverance and not giving up, does.

In order to not give up you must home in on your passion. The passion will give you the drive to persist, especially through the rough and down periods when things are not going well.

She summarises mastery into two equations:

Talent x Effort = Skill
Skill x Effort = Achievement

The more you practice and don’t give up, the higher the chance of achieving mastery in a field or job. Talent can help but it is the effort that really does it. In fact you can have very little talent up front but with persistent effort become a master in your field.

A lot of experts and geniuses in their fields actually got that way through huge long term effort and yet only had average talent in the beginning, if that.

The same with Mindfulness practice – the more you practice, the more you will learn and correct, and in the long run, mastery will be there.

Healing and Preventing Diseases

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In Radical Remission – Surviving Cancer Against all Odds (2014), Dr Kelly A.Turner found that there are thousands of cases published in medical journals of people who had healed their cancer after doctors had decided that they were not expected to live.

She decided to interview over one hundred of such cases and analyse over one thousand written cases, to find the factors that led to the ‘miracle’ cure. Those factors were many, about 75, but there were 9 that kept showing up consistently.

So here are the 9 things that you can be doing to radically help reverse cancer or, if you don’t have cancer, to do anyway to prevent it and other diseases in future.

  1. Radically change your diet
  2. Take active control of your health
  3. Follow your intuition
  4. Take herbs and supplements
  5. Release suppressed emotions
  6. Increase positive emotions
  7. Reach out for more social support
  8. Deepen your spiritual connection
  9. Have strong reasons to live

Looking at that list, a body mindfulness practice can help and enhance about 7 of those factors.

That’s one powerful practice.

A quick snapshot of each factor:

  1. To change your diet – cut out sugars, dairy and reduce meat.
  2. Be actively involved in your health (don’t just sit around wishing), be willing to make changes, face your fears and don’t automatically do everything a doctor says you must do.
  3. Your body wisdom knows what’s best for you, listen to it.
  4. Strengthen your immune system with supplements.
  5. Blocked emotions and trauma seriously affect the immune systems ability to heal disease. This factor is massive and often overlooked.
  6. Increase the fun, joy and love in your life. Deepen your inner connection.
  7. Receiving love from others helps the body to heal. Family and friends can provide the love that boosts the body’s healing ability. Doing anything that stops you from feeling alone is what helps.
  8. Connect to the unconditional universal love that we are all part of. Merging with the peace of everything, where you are not separate from the whole. This spiritual energy can significantly help the body to heal. Pray and/or meditate to help quiet the mind noise.
  9. Expand your creativity, believe you will live, that you have a greater purpose and deserve to be fully alive.

Men and Depression

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This is a powerful speech at Danny Frawley’s Funeral today in Melbourne Australia by Wayne Schwass. See previous blog entry for more details of who Danny was.

Men need to have the courage to speak up and ask for help when something deep inside is not okay. Rather than being strong and covering up, be courageous and open up. Get help.

Learn to say NO to a lot of things

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“…focusing on everything means focusing on nothing. It’s almost impossible to accomplish anything significant when you’re racing through an endless litany of tasks and emergencies. And yet this is how many of us spend our days, weeks, months, years – sometimes, our entire lives.”
(Michael Hyatt, Free to Focus, 2019)

I’ve talked about this information overload many times over the years. It’s a sign of the times. It is so important to be able to narrow down what you want to accomplish and then spend time just working on those specific tasks related to what you really want.

To do that, you have to constantly say NO to a lot of things that bombard you along the way. Your smart phone tends to be the biggest distraction. If your head is too much in control of your day, saying no will be very hard. But if you have a regular mindfulness practice, it makes it much easier to train yourself to switch off the distracting thoughts and the corresponding external information overload.

Having a deep connection to your internal world and internal space is very precious. The more body mindfulness work you do to inhabit/embody yourself, the more you will guard it, the more you will say No to things. The more focused you become on tasks and information that really matter to your goals.

Looking back, I found that the more connected I became to my body and inner self, the better choices I made.

I noticed I began to choose and do what worked rather than what was popular.

This is a very important point to make here. Your mindfulness meditation practice helps you access the real you. It helps you clear the way to accessing your true home, which is throughout your physical body. Then your guidance system becomes your own heart and not the ‘convincing’ information your head is brain-washed to need.

You are unique, a magnificent human being. Very precious. And the more you can embody this, the more unique choices you make, more often. Following the herd mentality, is not fulfilling, so that begins to lessen. You live a life that is much more rich and alive. One that actually contributes something special to the world that makes a real difference.

You have that in you.

The importance of Space and Stillness each Day

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“When you are full of problems, there is no room for anything new to enter, no room for a solution. So whenever you can, make some room, create some space, so that you find the life underneath your life situation.”
(Eckhart Tolle, The Power Of Now, 2004)

Fifteen years on and this book is still a timeless classic, as readable today as it was when it was first published. It still remains the number one book on my bedside table.

Body mindfulness meditation helps to create that space to make room for new solutions, new connections in your brain which otherwise could not be created. Downtime is critical to growing and repairing your brain functions.

Some space and stillness time is very important to have at some point in your day. It is critical to your growth and a healthy mind and body. It also doesn’t feel good to be on the go all day long without pause. Constant stress on your body leads to inflammation internally, which leads to some of the leading causes of disease, ageing and death around the world.

It is that important, to create space.

So why don’t we do it naturally? Because the old habits of western society say that doing more is better. Your intellect wants to do do do and go go go. Accomplish more, fill all idle time, no blank spaces. Somehow this has become ingrained in our culture, become the norm.

Our thinking minds constantly overrule the needs of our body, our heart and our spirit. What these parts of us need and want sadly don’t get much of a look in, until it is serious or they break down.

Often when a mediation practice takes a back seat it is being overruled by a very convincing mind program that says ‘doing more is more important then being right now’. And so your being doesn’t get a chance to properly correct your doing. Left too long, is when people begin to report drops in productivity, feeling lost, or unfulfilled or stuck in a rat race. Left further unchecked, leads to disease and breaks in body function.

Left to its own devices, the intellect sees no value in space and stillness. Because it means the intellect gets turned down even switched off for a period. The intellect wants to always remain in power, in total control, so switching off is not an option.

So it takes some doing initially, to take the time each day to switch it off, stop the rampant thinking and just be and be still, for a little while, coming more back into your body. Even if your eyes remain open. This stillness time will help re organise your thinking processes and allow much more efficient use of your time and energy, reducing stress and improving health.

Healthy Work – Finding your Sustainable Level

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“According to the World Health Organization, stress is considered a worldwide health epidemic. The American Institute of Stress links stress to the six leading causes of death (heart disease, accidents, cancer, liver disease, lung ailments, and suicide).”
(Joe Burton, Creating Mindful Leaders, 2018)

Working in a high performance, high stress major company, the stress will eventually takes its toll. After 20 years and in their mid 40s managers and staff start to burn out and if unchecked, in the worse case scenario, leads to one of those leading causes of death.

If you survive and don’t die then there are other issues that arise, frequent sickness, anxiety, depression, loss of direction, moodiness, lack of fulfillment, relationship breakdowns, unemployment, financial issues, addictions, family issues, ageing faster, and general poor health. Luckily many companies are now turning to mindfulness meditation to improve mental, physical and emotional wellbeing.

It sounds crazy that this is the state that our work culture is in. What leaders would design a company like that? Rather than push a person for the maximum output, hence into a zone of high prolonged stress levels, why not find the sustainable level of work?

How do you know when you are working at the optimum sustainable level? My gauge for this is to ask the following question…

At the end of the day when I arrive home – am I calm and relaxed?
If the answer is NO, you are overworking, and over time it will take its toll.

If you are self employed or have a decent boss, you are able to adjust your work week to work at a sustainable level. And by sustainable I mean that you can keep doing those hours and activities indefinitely, for years to come and not tire. That’s the beauty of sustainability, it’s repeatable over and over and over again without much wear and tear.

This is a big work secret to long term health, success and happiness. Find the level for you that is repeatable, over and over again. The added length of time, gives you the benefit of accomplishment – higher income, more experience, and fulfillment in being able to do the things that need time, without burring yourself out in the process.

I adjusted my number of work client hours years ago when I was seeing too many people in a week and almost burned out and collapsed a number of times. Once I asked the sustainability question my whole practice changed. I now see the exact number that I know I can keep seeing indefinitely for years and decades to come. It has worked beautifully now for about a decade.

Initially you seem to earn less, but the quality of your work goes up because you are not stressed out. So over your work lifetime you actually earn much more and also feel happier in mind and body.

You also get the benefit of having a great buffer that you can draw on when unexpected stressors and traumas hit you. Your body has room to absorb the impact and see it through with less reaction. I had some major ones (totally unjust) hit me like a ton of bricks over the last six years, major assaults, that would have adversely affected many people. But my body had room to absorb the impact and release it over time.

I’ll be talking more about this process in future articles.

That Ego Voice in your Head

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When it comes to Self Healing the bottom line – is facing the pain you have stored away in the cells of your body.

Your ego is doing a great job at keeping that pain at bay and building an identity and behaviour pattern around it all to keep you safe. Initially that’s good and you needed it under the circumstances when it first formed. But at some point if you are to progress in your life in a healthy way, that needs to be addressed.

“The remnants of pain left behind by every strong negative emotion that is not fully faced, accepted and then let go of, join together to form an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body.”
( Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, Page 142)

Body Mindfulness based self-healing and therapy work is very powerful in helping you heal all this old stored up pain. It’s not always easy to face, your ego will kick and scream all the way or put you to sleep. That’s the last place it wants to go. But as you face it, bit by bit and release, the ego’s strength lessens and it eventually gets easier and easier to let go.

You grow in strength and the ego diminishes. You get healthier and more alive and back in real contact and communication with your body. So as the communication with your body increases, you gain more control and know what’s going on. All this leads to a healthier more relaxed and peaceful mind and the all the great benefits that go with this.

As you learn to face what’s stored, compressed and banked up in your body, the ego voice in your head begins to diminish, it starts to take a back seat. In sessions, you will still hear it doing it’s thing, but it will more and more become a fainter voice in the background as you face the past within you and your body.

There is nothing wrong with having that ego voice assisting in your daily activities, but it becomes a problem if that’s the only voice running your life. There is another one, the one that comes from the cells in your body and, of course yours – the aware spirit you, (some people call it your heart).

Listening to the voice from your cells is what heals your physical body. Listening to your heart/spirit is what directs and heals your life.

Remember to Remind Yourself

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For inner peace, happiness and fulfillment, in work, rest and play – I always recommend meditating a little every day. Especially in the morning.
The sooner you can remind yourself of who you really are, the less chance you have during the day of the habitual thinking mind, taking you over and running you.

For you to stay in control in the best way possible, you have to remind your thinking mind who really is boss here. We’ve been brought up to put thinking and science high on a pedestal – way too high. So high that we can sometimes forget where our real intelligence sits – who we really are – and it’s not the thinking.

Thinking is a tool to use, it isn’t you. Because we have over identified with thinking as ‘us’, we let it be the overriding ruler. So we create beliefs and programs and strategies and rules and truths and understandings and let them all run ‘us’.

A little reminder:

You don’t have to make decisions based on intellect thinking all the time.
You DO have a choice in the matter. In fact you ALWAYS have a choice.
Every moment…Right now ….forever.

And who is you?
That alive inner stillness. The being you. Throughout your body.
The you that is always here, no matter what happens.

This reminder is very important in the morning before work, especially if you work in a company surrounded by people who are over thinking and not very conscious.
It is very easy to get caught up in their over thinking and lose yourself again. Losing yourself to over thinking breaks the contact that you have with your intuition. You lose that very important intelligence and guidance which is the real you.

What do you give Space for?

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What do you give Space for?
You know what you give money for and what you give your time for but, what do you give space for?
What is in your life that you stop, relax and open up to just being with?

This question will point you towards how mindfully and embodied you live your life.

How much time in a day or week do you spend where you can feel space around you and within you? This is different from down moments where you are exhausted, sleeping, smoking, eating or busy ‘relaxing’ watching TV. Although with watching TV, clients will often say that they just zone out and don’t really watch. If you do this, what you are actually doing is meditating with the noisy TV in the background. Why not just switch it off and meditate properly and give your mind and body a real proper deeper rest?

If there is no space in your life, it will feel like your life is rocketing by, without feeling like you are accomplishing much of what you really want. You can even begin to feel like a slave to others.

The more space that you allow – the more fuller, wiser, healthier, less-stressed, freer and fulfilling you will feel and be. Time then begins to slow down to what it really is….

…just this present moment.

Focusing on Long-Term quality and growth

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It’s nice to be reminded (often) that you are more than just the thoughts in your head and that coming into your body, is one of the most beneficial skills to have in life for health, wellness and success. I cannot stress this enough.

When you begin to allow thoughts to run your life, you are more prone to the world running you. You are more easily influenced, swayed away from what truly matters to you.

Don’t let the world run you.
You run yourself.
Always choose quality over what’s popular.
That’s what’s real in the long run.

The more you focus on quality – quality time, quality work, quality connection with yourself and quality connection with others, the more you will accomplish longer term. This is easier to do when you have a good embodied contact with yourself. When you take the time to mindfully connect within yourself.

It’s a tricky thing because it is very easy to get caught up in doing things that give off a short term benefit or which produce a temporary feel-good feeling. If your life is full of short-term gain activities you are likely to rob yourself of the time required for the long-term quality activities that produce long-term deeper, more stable and more meaningful rewards.

Its like saving money. The short term reward is not much because you are not spending the money on something that will feel good now and the saved balance is small. But continue to put away a little regularly and the long-term rewards are deeper and very fulfilling as the money starts to grow and earn you more and more with less effort.

In order to do more of the longer-term activities, what helps is taking time to embody yourself. Take time each day to stop, slow down, and deepen further within, with body mindfulness. This way you connect with more of what really matters to you and you alone. Then the to-do activities that will produce the long-term more satisfying rewards begin to surface within you. It becomes easier to do the things that are effort now with no immediate reward. It becomes easier to do the things that need to be done when no-one is watching.