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Sunday Story…Cleaning House
It is that time of year. The time when we start opening windows, cleaning the closets, and generally rebirthing our lives. It is spring. The time of renewal. The time when life starts anew and we can look forward to warmth and sun. Many of us will spend time cleaning our homes, washing the winter’s dirt off and generally getting in touch with the growing side of life. I love a fresh spring breeze blowing through the house, clothes dried on the outside line, and a feeling of renewal surging inside me.
There are some other places that need some sweeping out as well. Let’s start with your insides. Yes, your insides. Your liver, your kidneys, your colon, and all the rest need to be cleaned up and restarted. As we live our bodies accumulate waste and toxins in various places…liver, kidneys, and colon just for starters. A “cleanse” is designed to help flush out excess waste and de-toxify various body organs. Think of it like hitting the re-set button for your body or a spring cleaning for your body. Finding a good quality cleanse program to pull all that accumulated waste out of the organs and pipes will do wonders for your skin, hair, nails, and your mental outlook. You will lose some excess weight, some inches off your belly, and improve the way you feel about yourself. Do not go for the quick fix on this one…you know… the three day take some pills and see what happens cleanse. This will not create the healthy habits we need to sustain a healthy regimen. It takes 21 days to create new habits. It takes 21 days to replace bad habits with good ones. It takes 21 days to get all the sugar, flour and junk out of your system. There is no short cut to optimum health.
Another place to look at a little spring cleaning is your mind. What…a mental cleanse? How do you do that? A friend of mine recently took a red pen to a newspaper to highlight the negative news, a yellow pen for neutral and a blue pen for the good news. 60% of the articles were red and only 15% were green! We are surrounded by negativity in the news media and in television programming. We grab some people and put them in weird situations and then watch them and their relationships fall apart and call it reality TV. I spend a fair amount of time with children and I have yet to have one of them tell me that he or she wanted to be a couch potato when they grow up. A Doctor, a Lawyer, An Astronaut, or the President, yes, but never a couch potato. So what are you going to do to clean up your mind, how to rid it of negativity and mediocrity? Start with a cleanse of mass media…that’s right turn off the TV, stop reading the newspaper, listening to talk radio. Turn it off for 21 days. And in that 21 days replace the TV and it’s negativity with positive messages. Positive messages from books from Stephen Covey, Maxwell Maltz, Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, Joel; Osteen, Anthony Robbins, Bob Proctor, Eckhardt Tolle, James Arthur Ray just to name a few. You could listen to many of these books on CD (or tape) in your car on the way to wherever you are going. Imagine what it would be like to fill your mind with positive messages throughout the day instead of drivel about things you cannot do one thing about. After all, the only thing you can transform is yourself not me not the economy, not your boss or your spouse. 21 days of no TV. Sit and talk to your loved ones. Better yet, sit and listen, really listen to your loved ones.
Do we dare talk about your soul? How about a little soul cleanse? Another one that is not so easy to look at. How will we scrub some of the debris that we have been carrying around for these years? We have mentioned this before. Inspect the stories you are telling yourself. How are they serving you? Spend 15 minutes a day sitting in silence. Just sitting and breathing. When a thought comes up, recognize it, wave at it even and then say to yourself, “thought”, and go back to breathing. How long? 15 minutes a day for 21 days will have it be a habit. Meditation is listening; listening to your breath, listening to the rocks move, linking your breath to the emptiness that surrounds us. Then add prayer. Prayer is speaking; speaking your intention into the world. Whether you pray to a supreme being or a divine source, or you just speak your intention and express your gratitude. Again in 21 days your daily prayers will become a good habit that feeds your soul.
Body, mind, and soul all working together. A beautiful thing to behold. When our thoughts our deeds and our emotions are all in harmony, all working together we can be assured of a successful life. Our loved ones will be better looking and our children well behaved (well…I might be over the top here). Restore yourself in the spring just like your lawn, your house, and your garden. Spend the time getting right with yourself…clean your body, mind and soul. You will be amazed at the results. And if not…well, you can always go back to doing what you were doing before right?
Namaste
John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
Follow my blog at http://sunday-stories.blogspot.com/
Twitter me at: http://twitter.com/jmariotti
Facebook: John Mariotti
Showing posts with label martial arts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label martial arts. Show all posts
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Sunday Story...live like a ?
Sunday Story…live like a?
One of the questions I frequently ask my students goes like this:
…If you knew on Saturday that you were going to be thrown in the middle of the ocean with no hope of rescue for 3 hours and you did NOT know how to swim today, how much would swim lessons be worth to you today? AND how hard would you apply yourself to those lessons? The answer is pretty obvious isn’t it? Those lessons would be invaluable and you would be the most attentive student on the planet. Anyone know where I am going with this?
Sure you should apply yourself to your lessons…martial arts, school, work. Any learning environment is providing lessons to you all the time. Are you paying attention to those lessons like your life depends on it? If you knew the punch you were learning or the choke would save your life tomorrow would you practice it differently? If the report you are writing right now would earn you a million dollars next month would you write it differently? Are you doing million dollar work? Will your training today save your life tomorrow?
This is a pretty obvious question and answer. Of course we would train differently if we knew our life depended on it today or there was a million dollars on the line tomorrow. This is why we look at champion fights or championship games the way we do…at the end the victor gets bragging rights, the rings, the checks, and the adulation. So did those champions just get lucky and show up that day for the big game? Of course, not they trained for years before that game or that match.
Obviously, you should train hard, work hard, and live like a champion. BUT (here it comes) what about all those lessons and teachings that are not so obvious. It’s easy to apply yourself to the things you want to do. What are you doing about the OTHER things? Things like looking at the patterns of your life, the stuff that keeps coming up, the situations that occur over and over again. The stuff in your relationships that happen time after time…maybe you are constantly having drama around money with your significant other, children, and boss. Why is that? What are you doing to cause that? What do you need to heal to move on? Are you even looking and listening to that lesson? Are you willing to attack those lessons like your life depends on it? Because it does you know. The stress caused by these lessons occurring time after time after time is killing you, robbing you of optimum health and fitness.
The lessons the universe is serving up are important to the health and healing of your soul. Ask yourself why do the same things keep happening to me? What am I meant to learn from this situation? Train your focus on the why of it. AND then start contemplating on what you need to do differently to create a different outcome. Because if you don’t do something differently you will just get more of what you already have. If your life is full of challenges about money, start looking at your belief system about money. Don’t bemoan the fact that every time you get some money it disappears and it isn’t your fault. Maybe your relationships are full of drama and trauma. Let’s look at your part in those dramas and find what YOU are doing to call those energies forward. Because your life is about you, it is your movie and you are the main character.
Start playing full out my friends. Not just on the training mat. Not just in the class room. Not just on the job. But in the interior of your life. Start playing full out on the field of your soul. What price is your happiness, what price is the evolution of your soul? Because it isn’t going to just happen. Just like you are not just going to happen to run a marathon or earn your doctorate. This is part of the Master’s journey, the Master’s work…it isn’t just physical fitness, or mental acuity, or emotional harmony although it is all of those things. It is about creating a soul’s journey that will leave your next journey clear of obstacles. And the only way you are going to get on that road is by looking very closely at your life. Clearly inspect the things, situations, and people that keep ‘popping” up. Is the same person saying the same things year after year? Don’t you think you should do something about that? Maybe if you catch the signs early enough you can save yourself some heartache.
Let’s apply the same focus we do to our studies, our training, our work, our play, our friends, and our environments to the landscape of our souls. Spend some time meditating (listening), spend some time praying (speaking), but most of all spend some time inspecting all the canyons, streams, forests and deserts of your interior being. If you don’t like what it looks like learn some lessons. And start working on some solutions that will yield different results than the ones you already got. Talk to someone if need be. Someone who is not attached to the outcome. Get out of your little box and start playing like your life and a million bucks were on the line. Because just maybe they are.
So…how are you living your life? Are you living like a champion, like a Buddha, like a Christ? Just wondering you know.
Namaste
John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
Follow my blog at http://sunday-stories.blogspot.com/
Twitter me at: http://twitter.com/jmariotti
Facebook: John Mariotti
One of the questions I frequently ask my students goes like this:
…If you knew on Saturday that you were going to be thrown in the middle of the ocean with no hope of rescue for 3 hours and you did NOT know how to swim today, how much would swim lessons be worth to you today? AND how hard would you apply yourself to those lessons? The answer is pretty obvious isn’t it? Those lessons would be invaluable and you would be the most attentive student on the planet. Anyone know where I am going with this?
Sure you should apply yourself to your lessons…martial arts, school, work. Any learning environment is providing lessons to you all the time. Are you paying attention to those lessons like your life depends on it? If you knew the punch you were learning or the choke would save your life tomorrow would you practice it differently? If the report you are writing right now would earn you a million dollars next month would you write it differently? Are you doing million dollar work? Will your training today save your life tomorrow?
This is a pretty obvious question and answer. Of course we would train differently if we knew our life depended on it today or there was a million dollars on the line tomorrow. This is why we look at champion fights or championship games the way we do…at the end the victor gets bragging rights, the rings, the checks, and the adulation. So did those champions just get lucky and show up that day for the big game? Of course, not they trained for years before that game or that match.
Obviously, you should train hard, work hard, and live like a champion. BUT (here it comes) what about all those lessons and teachings that are not so obvious. It’s easy to apply yourself to the things you want to do. What are you doing about the OTHER things? Things like looking at the patterns of your life, the stuff that keeps coming up, the situations that occur over and over again. The stuff in your relationships that happen time after time…maybe you are constantly having drama around money with your significant other, children, and boss. Why is that? What are you doing to cause that? What do you need to heal to move on? Are you even looking and listening to that lesson? Are you willing to attack those lessons like your life depends on it? Because it does you know. The stress caused by these lessons occurring time after time after time is killing you, robbing you of optimum health and fitness.
The lessons the universe is serving up are important to the health and healing of your soul. Ask yourself why do the same things keep happening to me? What am I meant to learn from this situation? Train your focus on the why of it. AND then start contemplating on what you need to do differently to create a different outcome. Because if you don’t do something differently you will just get more of what you already have. If your life is full of challenges about money, start looking at your belief system about money. Don’t bemoan the fact that every time you get some money it disappears and it isn’t your fault. Maybe your relationships are full of drama and trauma. Let’s look at your part in those dramas and find what YOU are doing to call those energies forward. Because your life is about you, it is your movie and you are the main character.
Start playing full out my friends. Not just on the training mat. Not just in the class room. Not just on the job. But in the interior of your life. Start playing full out on the field of your soul. What price is your happiness, what price is the evolution of your soul? Because it isn’t going to just happen. Just like you are not just going to happen to run a marathon or earn your doctorate. This is part of the Master’s journey, the Master’s work…it isn’t just physical fitness, or mental acuity, or emotional harmony although it is all of those things. It is about creating a soul’s journey that will leave your next journey clear of obstacles. And the only way you are going to get on that road is by looking very closely at your life. Clearly inspect the things, situations, and people that keep ‘popping” up. Is the same person saying the same things year after year? Don’t you think you should do something about that? Maybe if you catch the signs early enough you can save yourself some heartache.
Let’s apply the same focus we do to our studies, our training, our work, our play, our friends, and our environments to the landscape of our souls. Spend some time meditating (listening), spend some time praying (speaking), but most of all spend some time inspecting all the canyons, streams, forests and deserts of your interior being. If you don’t like what it looks like learn some lessons. And start working on some solutions that will yield different results than the ones you already got. Talk to someone if need be. Someone who is not attached to the outcome. Get out of your little box and start playing like your life and a million bucks were on the line. Because just maybe they are.
So…how are you living your life? Are you living like a champion, like a Buddha, like a Christ? Just wondering you know.
Namaste
John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
Follow my blog at http://sunday-stories.blogspot.com/
Twitter me at: http://twitter.com/jmariotti
Facebook: John Mariotti
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