Sunday Story…Thoughts for Food

“…It’s remarkable how much mediocrity we live with, surrounding ourselves with daily reminders that the average is the acceptable. Our world suffers from terminal normality…” Stewart Emory

Last week a friend told me about an assignment her son was asked to do for his history class. The assignment called for him to put himself in the place of a Plantation owner in the Southern USA when slavery was prevalent. It instructed him to write and explore how he would deal with the “slave problem”, how he would deal with runaways and discipline and how he could motivate them to get the most from their labor. There were several restrictions on the assignment including the one that stated freeing the slaves was not an option. Needless to say I was shocked. I am not sure how this kind of exploration serves our learning and understanding of the problem. Worse than that…thinking about how I am going to treat my slaves is just wrong. This kind of thinking can drive us right into the conceptual idea that slavery isn’t so bad. And that is a very bad thing indeed.

I teach a thing called FAST defense. In FAST defense I become the assailant, the “bad guy”. I assume the role of attacker, mugger, and rapist. I wear a suit that allows the participants to defend themselves in real time using full force techniques on a human person (me). It is dirty work for me. It pushes lots of buttons for me. Buttons of being overly aggressive and angry, buttons of doing and saying very evil and nasty things to people I may know and like. And in the “woofer” mode my job is to have you travel down the road of adrenal response. To feel in your guts that fear and energy that could cost you your life or sanity and to discover the power inside you that converts fear into power. Without the woofer you do not get adrenalized and do not discover how to turn fear into power. The woofer is acting. He is not the actual assailant, and when it is all over the woofer returns to his normal personality. But I can speak from experience that the return is not immediate. There is something that happens to you when you enter the mindset of “dirt bag”, or rapist, or just plain old bad guy. There is a residual, a left over, “the ring around the chi” that lingers around until you clear it off. When we finish FAST training I always have to take some time to cleanse myself of all the negative energy and thoughts that I have created. Putting myself in the place of a slave owner is the same exercise as “woofing” and would require cleansing after the exercise.

Why should you stay away from network news and negative information? It is not as if you are putting any emotion or energy into the news, right? Negative thoughts and information carry a lot of chi or energy in their natural state. There are concepts in the world that, by their very nature, carry so much emotion and life (or death) force that they are going to generate strong reaction in us. Murder, Slavery, Pedophilia are all actions and concepts that are hurtful to the human soul and psyche. Exploring these things can be very dangerous to your soul. Not because you are going to do them but because they have the ability to evoke very strong emotions in us in a negative sense. But we also can’t be a “polly anna” either. These things happen every day in our world and to ignore them is to condone them. But we cannot spend every waking hour putting ourselves in the shoes of the evil doers. It is not productive for our mental state of mind. There are some things that do not belong in our bodies or our minds. We need to know the dangers, we need to train to prevent the dangers from happening to us and our loved ones, and we need to understand what and how these evils occur. BUT we do not need to start thinking like the evil doers. That is a tunnel with no cheese at the end of it.
My thoughts become my reality. What I spend my time on in the interior of my mind is where I will spend my time on in the exterior of my life. If I spend my time thinking about all the bad things, the negative things going on in the world today, my mind will become polluted like a stream being constantly fed poison. It will never have a chance to cleanse itself.

We need to feed our mind like we feed our body, with good solid food. The kind of food that will empower us to become greater than we are today. There are many sources for the kind of nourishment I am talking about…for many scripture is their food, for others it is personal growth book. Spiritual literature, teaching stories, uplifting movies (Spiritual Cinema), music that messages the positive are all things that will feed your mind and your soul positively. Going to workshops to learn new skills, or to get information about your inner aspects, or to find more like minded people will all provide nutrients for your inner ecology. Meditation and prayer on a daily basis help provide the habitual framework for positive thinking and a mental outlook that goes beyond the ordinary. The habit of reading uplifting literature before going to bed will create, in your subconscious, an environment of hope and joy.

I leave you with this quote from Marianne Williamson:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

What are you doing today to be the powerful being you are meant to be? Who says you cannot be all the things you want to be? Get out of your head and get into our heart. Into the part of you that knows, deep down, that you are meant to raise the vibration of every living thing on this planet.

Let’s start now, together, on a journey that will move mountains.

Namaste

John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”

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