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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 soul work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label soul work. Show all posts
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Sunday Story…Simple, but not so Easy
“I have the simplest of tastes. I only want the best.” Oscar Wilde
Over the last year or two I have been on a campaign to simplify my life. To create a life that has more spaciousness and abundance in it by having less stuff taking up room. And, it seems, the entire world may now be going in the same direction. So, I guess I will now take full and complete responsibility for the current economic morass we find ourselves in! See, if you would have been reading these pages closely you would have know to sell 18 months ago!
We have been living beyond our means. We have been living beyond our needs. We have been living beyond our capacity to replace what we are using up. And to make things even worse we have been doing so without intention and consciousness. Like living in some fog of consumerism where the party never ends, money flows like water and the detritus of life keeps piling up. If we said I don’t care, I am going to use all the resources I can find, I am going to create a huge mess for my children’s children’s children to clean up then OK. At least we did so consciously and with intention. But no, we just went along fat dumb and happy, in essence like some bovine chewing a cud waiting to get hit smack dab in the forehead with a hammer.
The music has shifted from “Party like a Rock Star” to “Brother can you spare a dime”. From rock and roll to dirge and the lamenting can be heard the world over. And it is all my fault. I woke up. I woke up and looked around my life and decided to put myself on a reduced consumption diet. I reduced my living quarters from 1500 sq ft. to less than 1000 sq ft and I think it is still too big. I jettisoned enough stuff to get my car into a one car garage. I boxed up and gave away decades of books and cds. I donated clothes that were unnecessary to a simpler lifestyle. I committed to buying almost nothing new and wearing what I have to the end of its life. My car has 185,000 miles on it and is 9 years old and I will not be replacing it anytime soon.
I ride my bike 5 out of 6 days to work and back. This is easier because I moved out of the outlying areas into the closer and not so urbane area in the middle of town. I don’t buy plastic bags, foil or paper towels. I recycle in a town that has no recycling and I compost everything compostable. My clothes dry on a rack and my heat is kept at a miserly 55 degrees. I feel abundant and spacious.
BUT (just a question of when for this right?), this isn’t really what this is about…to see who can live the simplest, like “no-impact” man (http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2007/02/the_no_impact_e.html) in NYC who lived without electricity and stuff for a year. Nor is it about trying to return to the loin cloth and caves of our prehistoric past. Folks this is about ATTITUDE, INTENTION, and CONSCIOUSNESS. This is about waking up to the abundance of resources about us. Not the money, the, cars, the houses, the watches, the STUFF, but the people, the community, the hearts, the LOVE that surrounds us. We are rich in social capital. My heart breaks when I see people without food so I am creating a community garden project. A place where people can learn how to tend a physical garden, one that will provide a harvest of good nutritious food in return for their labor. AND a place for the garden of their soul to heal and re-connect with the cycle of life. This garden will be in my huge empty back yard. It is a gift to my community, to the people who want to be reconnected with life, who want to understand that social capital is more important than capital spending. And as each of us gives our time, energy, expertise and energy to the physical garden our own interior garden will grow and bloom and provide a bounty of soulful nutrition.
The community will be richer and more united. Not “look at those people why don’t they do something” but rather “look at those people what something can I do?” When I see the people stand in line at the food pantry, I see my neighbors who moved out at night recently. I see the parents of children I have taught and sometimes I see the children I have taught waiting in line and playing in the parking lot as well. I see an attitude of loss and shame and I am chagrined. How have I let this come to pass? Did my flagrant disregard of resources, my lust for the newest phone, the latest gadget, a new flat screen TV, and my accumulation of stuff cause me to lose sight of the truly important thing? The care and feeding of the human hearts around me is the important thing. This is where abundance and prosperity lie.
So, yes, the economic downturn, the recession, the financial catastrophe is my entire fault. I woke up from my dream and decided I didn’t want to live like that anymore. I awoke mad as hell and determined to change the world I live in, right here right now. This is simple my friends. Just wake up from your soporific existence and throw open the window and let the light and fresh air in. I am tilling the soil, shaking up the status quo so I can plant the seeds that will enrich my life, the lives of my community and the world. It is already being done by me.
When we have less, we have more. More space for spirit, more time to listen to the rocks move. More appreciation for the best things. Oscar Wilde was right…My tastes are simple. And the simpler my tastes are the easier it is to truly appreciate the best things…dust swirling in the spring sunlight, joyful laughter of children playing, and the satisfaction of living in a world of harmony and beauty.
Simple yes but not so easy.
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
“I have the simplest of tastes. I only want the best.” Oscar Wilde
Over the last year or two I have been on a campaign to simplify my life. To create a life that has more spaciousness and abundance in it by having less stuff taking up room. And, it seems, the entire world may now be going in the same direction. So, I guess I will now take full and complete responsibility for the current economic morass we find ourselves in! See, if you would have been reading these pages closely you would have know to sell 18 months ago!
We have been living beyond our means. We have been living beyond our needs. We have been living beyond our capacity to replace what we are using up. And to make things even worse we have been doing so without intention and consciousness. Like living in some fog of consumerism where the party never ends, money flows like water and the detritus of life keeps piling up. If we said I don’t care, I am going to use all the resources I can find, I am going to create a huge mess for my children’s children’s children to clean up then OK. At least we did so consciously and with intention. But no, we just went along fat dumb and happy, in essence like some bovine chewing a cud waiting to get hit smack dab in the forehead with a hammer.
The music has shifted from “Party like a Rock Star” to “Brother can you spare a dime”. From rock and roll to dirge and the lamenting can be heard the world over. And it is all my fault. I woke up. I woke up and looked around my life and decided to put myself on a reduced consumption diet. I reduced my living quarters from 1500 sq ft. to less than 1000 sq ft and I think it is still too big. I jettisoned enough stuff to get my car into a one car garage. I boxed up and gave away decades of books and cds. I donated clothes that were unnecessary to a simpler lifestyle. I committed to buying almost nothing new and wearing what I have to the end of its life. My car has 185,000 miles on it and is 9 years old and I will not be replacing it anytime soon.
I ride my bike 5 out of 6 days to work and back. This is easier because I moved out of the outlying areas into the closer and not so urbane area in the middle of town. I don’t buy plastic bags, foil or paper towels. I recycle in a town that has no recycling and I compost everything compostable. My clothes dry on a rack and my heat is kept at a miserly 55 degrees. I feel abundant and spacious.
BUT (just a question of when for this right?), this isn’t really what this is about…to see who can live the simplest, like “no-impact” man (http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2007/02/the_no_impact_e.html) in NYC who lived without electricity and stuff for a year. Nor is it about trying to return to the loin cloth and caves of our prehistoric past. Folks this is about ATTITUDE, INTENTION, and CONSCIOUSNESS. This is about waking up to the abundance of resources about us. Not the money, the, cars, the houses, the watches, the STUFF, but the people, the community, the hearts, the LOVE that surrounds us. We are rich in social capital. My heart breaks when I see people without food so I am creating a community garden project. A place where people can learn how to tend a physical garden, one that will provide a harvest of good nutritious food in return for their labor. AND a place for the garden of their soul to heal and re-connect with the cycle of life. This garden will be in my huge empty back yard. It is a gift to my community, to the people who want to be reconnected with life, who want to understand that social capital is more important than capital spending. And as each of us gives our time, energy, expertise and energy to the physical garden our own interior garden will grow and bloom and provide a bounty of soulful nutrition.
The community will be richer and more united. Not “look at those people why don’t they do something” but rather “look at those people what something can I do?” When I see the people stand in line at the food pantry, I see my neighbors who moved out at night recently. I see the parents of children I have taught and sometimes I see the children I have taught waiting in line and playing in the parking lot as well. I see an attitude of loss and shame and I am chagrined. How have I let this come to pass? Did my flagrant disregard of resources, my lust for the newest phone, the latest gadget, a new flat screen TV, and my accumulation of stuff cause me to lose sight of the truly important thing? The care and feeding of the human hearts around me is the important thing. This is where abundance and prosperity lie.
So, yes, the economic downturn, the recession, the financial catastrophe is my entire fault. I woke up from my dream and decided I didn’t want to live like that anymore. I awoke mad as hell and determined to change the world I live in, right here right now. This is simple my friends. Just wake up from your soporific existence and throw open the window and let the light and fresh air in. I am tilling the soil, shaking up the status quo so I can plant the seeds that will enrich my life, the lives of my community and the world. It is already being done by me.
When we have less, we have more. More space for spirit, more time to listen to the rocks move. More appreciation for the best things. Oscar Wilde was right…My tastes are simple. And the simpler my tastes are the easier it is to truly appreciate the best things…dust swirling in the spring sunlight, joyful laughter of children playing, and the satisfaction of living in a world of harmony and beauty.
Simple yes but not so easy.
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
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Sunday Story...My Stuff
First a note:
To all of you who comment on these stories…THANK YOU. I live for your comments. And I am not always able to answer each of you, so my apologies. I will get better. Please keep commenting.
Sunday Story…My Stuff
I have stuff. Lots of stuff. We all have stuff. Lots of stuff. Look around your life and check out all the stuff you have. In a world where having more than one pair of shoes makes me wealthy I am a millionaire and some of my friends, well, let’s say they are on the Warren Buffet/Bill Gates scale. The same goes for cars, clothes, TVs, and electronic gadgets (including the one I am using to write this on!). How much stuff do we really need? Do we really need any more stuff? We all know our stuff can’t follow us past this life. Most of our stuff won’t be any good in a few months or years. What do you have today that you had 10 years ago? Not much I would guess. And of the stuff you have had more than 10 years how often are you still enjoying it?
BUT…this is not the stuff I want to talk about today. The stuff in the paragraph above is the clutter and detritus of your modern life. My stuff is the stuff I am carrying around with me every day. My preconceived notions and ideas about the “way things should be.” My beliefs about myself and the world around me. It was not that long ago that the majority of people believed the world was flat. That is the stuff I am talking about. Humans are “meaning” making machines. We love to have things with meaning. Over the course of my life things have happened. All kinds of things. I have chosen to interpret or create meaning for those events. The meaning I assigned to those events becomes My Stuff.
How much of My Stuff is still serving me? In my garage, I have a pair of polished cow horns. You know the kind I am talking about…huge, about 4 feet from tip to tip, highly polished, the sort you might see in a ranch house over the fireplace, or on the front of a big ole Cadillac in Texas. These horns were pretty cool and very decorative when I lived on a ranch in the middle of nowhere Nevada. Now they are collecting dust in my garage, as they really don’t fit in with the asian-buddha décor in my current home. Those horns are no longer serving me. The opinions of myself I formed when I was 4 years old no longer serve me. The attitudes I created to protect my ego when I was 13 may not be the best attitudes for my adult self to be walking around with. This is the My Stuff I should be inspecting and jettisoning if it no longer serves me.
We often say “seeing is believing”. I want to see it in front of me before I want to believe it. So why, when you look in the mirror and see an adult looking back at you, do you let the little child hiding in the back of your psyche control and manipulate your life? We live in a world with abundant resources for knowledge and personal growth. There are so many places for you (and I) to go to create new meanings for the various events in our lives. There is no reason for any of us to stay mired in the mud of self pity and infantile attitudes. Actually now that I just wrote that…there is reasons for you to stay stuck in your My Stuff…it’s easy and it’s comfortable. It does not require you to do anything. If you want to lose some of your “My Stuff”, you will have to get off the couch, put the remote down and DO something. And the first thing you will have to do is take a look and see what sort of “My Stuff” you have been carrying around all these years. And then decide if any of it is really serving you, helping you create the life you want to live. After you open that door the rest is simple. Not easy but simple. Create new stories for the things that happened in your life. Take responsibility for what happened; it is your life after all.
This is part and parcel of the work required of us as humans. This is the evolution of your soul. How many stories have I sent you of people doing amazing things in spite of challenging things in their lives. Remember Nick the man with no arms? Amazing. The kid with cancer whose “make a wish wish” wasn’t Disney land or a Sports figure but to create a foundation for an orphanage in Africa to have a school? By the way, Make a wish had a real problem with that one…apparently they just had a hard time getting their stuff around it. What makes those individuals Stuff different than the next person with the same challenges? It is the story they are telling themselves…the Stuff they are carrying.
My Stuff is mine. I get to decide if I am going to keep it and let it run my life. Or not. Maybe My Stuff needs to be thrown out in favor of some new “My Stuff”. Get some modern stuff that will serve the person I am today and the person I want to be tomorrow and next week and next year. I get to work on My Stuff. Or not. My Decision. Your Decision.
Namaste
John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
To all of you who comment on these stories…THANK YOU. I live for your comments. And I am not always able to answer each of you, so my apologies. I will get better. Please keep commenting.
Sunday Story…My Stuff
I have stuff. Lots of stuff. We all have stuff. Lots of stuff. Look around your life and check out all the stuff you have. In a world where having more than one pair of shoes makes me wealthy I am a millionaire and some of my friends, well, let’s say they are on the Warren Buffet/Bill Gates scale. The same goes for cars, clothes, TVs, and electronic gadgets (including the one I am using to write this on!). How much stuff do we really need? Do we really need any more stuff? We all know our stuff can’t follow us past this life. Most of our stuff won’t be any good in a few months or years. What do you have today that you had 10 years ago? Not much I would guess. And of the stuff you have had more than 10 years how often are you still enjoying it?
BUT…this is not the stuff I want to talk about today. The stuff in the paragraph above is the clutter and detritus of your modern life. My stuff is the stuff I am carrying around with me every day. My preconceived notions and ideas about the “way things should be.” My beliefs about myself and the world around me. It was not that long ago that the majority of people believed the world was flat. That is the stuff I am talking about. Humans are “meaning” making machines. We love to have things with meaning. Over the course of my life things have happened. All kinds of things. I have chosen to interpret or create meaning for those events. The meaning I assigned to those events becomes My Stuff.
How much of My Stuff is still serving me? In my garage, I have a pair of polished cow horns. You know the kind I am talking about…huge, about 4 feet from tip to tip, highly polished, the sort you might see in a ranch house over the fireplace, or on the front of a big ole Cadillac in Texas. These horns were pretty cool and very decorative when I lived on a ranch in the middle of nowhere Nevada. Now they are collecting dust in my garage, as they really don’t fit in with the asian-buddha décor in my current home. Those horns are no longer serving me. The opinions of myself I formed when I was 4 years old no longer serve me. The attitudes I created to protect my ego when I was 13 may not be the best attitudes for my adult self to be walking around with. This is the My Stuff I should be inspecting and jettisoning if it no longer serves me.
We often say “seeing is believing”. I want to see it in front of me before I want to believe it. So why, when you look in the mirror and see an adult looking back at you, do you let the little child hiding in the back of your psyche control and manipulate your life? We live in a world with abundant resources for knowledge and personal growth. There are so many places for you (and I) to go to create new meanings for the various events in our lives. There is no reason for any of us to stay mired in the mud of self pity and infantile attitudes. Actually now that I just wrote that…there is reasons for you to stay stuck in your My Stuff…it’s easy and it’s comfortable. It does not require you to do anything. If you want to lose some of your “My Stuff”, you will have to get off the couch, put the remote down and DO something. And the first thing you will have to do is take a look and see what sort of “My Stuff” you have been carrying around all these years. And then decide if any of it is really serving you, helping you create the life you want to live. After you open that door the rest is simple. Not easy but simple. Create new stories for the things that happened in your life. Take responsibility for what happened; it is your life after all.
This is part and parcel of the work required of us as humans. This is the evolution of your soul. How many stories have I sent you of people doing amazing things in spite of challenging things in their lives. Remember Nick the man with no arms? Amazing. The kid with cancer whose “make a wish wish” wasn’t Disney land or a Sports figure but to create a foundation for an orphanage in Africa to have a school? By the way, Make a wish had a real problem with that one…apparently they just had a hard time getting their stuff around it. What makes those individuals Stuff different than the next person with the same challenges? It is the story they are telling themselves…the Stuff they are carrying.
My Stuff is mine. I get to decide if I am going to keep it and let it run my life. Or not. Maybe My Stuff needs to be thrown out in favor of some new “My Stuff”. Get some modern stuff that will serve the person I am today and the person I want to be tomorrow and next week and next year. I get to work on My Stuff. Or not. My Decision. Your Decision.
Namaste
John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
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