Get it off the Back Burner

Where are you not listening to yourself?

What’s on the back burner in your life? 

Where are you not taking action in alignment with your values?

Where are you ignoring your commitments?

Where are you ignoring your spouse, kids, colleagues, or boss?

In this Age of Distraction, it’s so easy to justify ignoring what really matters.

We extinguish trash can fires in our daily lives and ignore the smoldering slow-burn within our core that eats away at our integrity, our vitality, and our soul.

Let the trash can fires burn. They’re contained.

It’s the slow-burn of self-disregard that needs to be handled NOW. 

It’s the quiet dissolving away of our self-value, our partner’s trust, our kids’ hopes, our soul’s desires that matter more than the fire of the moment. 

The fire of the moment likely isn’t worth your well-being. It’s likely not worth selling out on yourself, your values, your commitments, your hopes, your dreams. It’s likely not worth selling out on your family and friendships. 

I live a pretty intentional life, yet last week my own coach showed me where I've had something meaningful on the back burner for myself.

We go decades without giving attention to the back burner. So it fades. It fades from our awareness. It fades from our realm of possibility. 

Yet it’s still there, waiting for you to choose it. To feed it. To give it attention and care, love and action. 

It’s the faithful dog part of your soul that won’t ever leave. It patiently waits while you busy yourself with much less meaningful things. 

Bring it to the front burner. There’s room. You can handle work and life and this thing.

So I ask again, and this time really consider the question:

(I considered the question this morning myself, and it opened me up to a lovely feeling and beautiful clarity.)

Where are you not listening to yourself?

We’re never really listening to ourselves, or to the people in our lives, or to Spirit as deeply as we could.

Admit it, and then change it. 

You deserve more. The people in your life deserve more. 

The time is Now.

Get your real stuff off the back burner and feed it some life.

Much Love. ❤️

P.S. There are two ways you can support yourself by working with me:

1. One-on-one and relationship coaching (16+)

2. Mind Mastery group programs for your team, school, business, or organization

It's Physics, Not Psychology

This morning I taught two computer science classes, then left campus to have a coaching conversation with a client. 

At the end of the first class, I felt a little frustrated and stressed - both at my students and at myself. This class is designing and constructing somewhat complex circuits, and I didn’t like their lack of inventiveness nor my own planning gaps. 

(“Whenever you are suffering, your suffering is contained in a single thought: ‘I don’t like this’” - Rupert Spira.)

Frustration and stress - they're both energy within us. They're physics, not psychology. 

10 minutes later, by the time my second class started, I was freed up from the potentially constraining effect of those emotions, and I brought connection, insight, and enjoyment to my second class. 

You see, the frustration and stress, being energy waves and vibrations within my body, can get transmuted into new emotions like passion, connection, and enjoyment - in a dance with my internal physics.

Thoughts play a key role in all this, yes, and thoughts are just energy too.

Energy is the realm of physics, not psychology.

After my second class, I went home, had lunch, prepared for my meeting with a client, and then had the client meeting. It was powerful and insightful for both me and the client.

Then, 5 minutes after the conversation, fear crept into my being. “Was it valuable enough?” “Was the coaching good enough?” 

We resist these emotions and thinking! Or we avoid them. Or we react from them. Really!  

Resisting, avoiding, and reacting - that’s physics. It’s internal physics how we relate to our emotions and our thinking. It’s internal physics how we relate to our circumstances and experiences. It’s an interplay of energy within us - it's internal physics.

By the time I was in the car a couple minutes later, the fear was literally gone and I was present to gratitude and love. (Gratitude and love might sound sappy, AND I continue to want nothing else in my experience of my life.)

You see, I’m literally in the business of Mind Mastery. And mind mastery isn’t about psychology. Sure, there are some psychological components, but mind mastery is much more about our internal physics than psychology. 

No, it's not the kind of physics that requires math and equations. It's much more the physics of gymnastics, yoga, and martial arts - a mastery of the physics of our being at a physical and emotional level.

Next time you’re feeling uncomfortable feelings or thinking uncomfortable thoughts, be willing to explore them further than you usually do. What really is that feeling I’m feeling? Beyond the label? Beyond the sense of discomfort?

And if you're extra willing, look at how you're relating to those emotions/thoughts and the way you're responding to them with energy from the will. That space of awareness is the sweet spot of mind mastery, the mastery of your internal physics.

I promise you, it’s just energy. And the more masterful we get at being with, releasing, and transmuting that energy - instead of resisting it, avoiding it, or reacting from it - the freer we become.

A physics teacher colleague and I like to joke that all science is in some way or another just an extension of physics. Well, it looks like the internal science of our being just might be physics too.

Free yourself, dear friend. Learn to master the physics of your being.

Thanks again to Michael Singer for this powerful idea.

Much Love. ❤️

Creating Space

There’s a monk who spent 30 years on a mountain, meditating to find inner peace and enlightenment. When she found her inner peace, she joyfully descended the mountain to share her insight and freedom with all of humanity.

Standing on a noisy street corner, with cars honking, people yelling, and construction banging, she freaked out because she lost her peace! So she anxiously turned around to ascend the mountain to find it again.

There was a time in my life where it seemed that the only logical destination for me would be a mountain in Nepal or India, where I could somehow find inner peace. Yet, when I had my first transformational experience at 24 years old, I realized that the only thing between me and inner peace was what I was already bringing to my life - a fierce cocktail of fear, judgment, arrogance, and insecurity.

Mostly what we do is seek experiences, material objects, people, places, and validation - all in hopes of achieving a state of being that we deeply want.

We look for what we can add to our lives, and we don’t realize that inner peace, love, joy, authenticity, and effectiveness aren't as much about what we add to our outer lives as it is about what we subtract away from our inner lives.

To create something beautiful in our lives, we first need to create space. It’s much easier to paint something raw and creative onto a blank canvas than it is to paint on a canvas already full of another painting.

One of my daily self-creation statements is this: 

This moment is perfect. I see beauty in everything. I create incredible value from all life’s experiences. 

This wasn’t just a nice positive thought I decided to add to my morning routine. In fact, there wasn’t much room in my life for such a statement until I got honest with myself about how judgmental and at the effect of my circumstances I had been living.

It’s really been in my relationship to my challenging emotions that I’ve been able to create more space within myself. Emotions that I resisted for so long - like fear, anxiety, regret, and sadness. Emotions that I reacted from for so long - like frustration, disappointment, and self-righteousness. Emotions that I avoided for so long - like anger, doubt, and alienation.

By making room for those emotions, finding beauty in them, and falling in love with each of them, I created space within myself for more love for more of life.

Last week, I saw the Grand Canyon in person for the first time.

I walked up towards it from the parking lot. I’d heard that it’s a holy moment to behold the Grand Canyon for the first time, so I had high expectations as I walked up that path!

The canyon is so large that it took me about 10 minutes of simply observing to begin to make sense of what I was seeing. It initially looked like a painting, and then depth and shape and detail started showing up.

When I got to the canyon, I didn’t feel a particularly strong sense of awe and wonder…

It's not that I was disappointed with the Grand Canyon - it was amazing! It’s simply that my first look at it was actually a reminder to me of the power and beauty of my constant, conscious practice of seeing beauty in everything - the vehicles that brought me there, the hills and valleys and architecture and people and air and color and shapes I saw along the way...

There’s much more truth to this old adage than perhaps we’re willing to admit: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

So is love. So is kindness. So is forgiveness. So is ease.

I don't see beauty in everything all the time yet - and it's my favorite practice worthy of my daily intention, attention, will, and commitment.

Much Love. ❤️