Offering Value

I’m in a really really good mood today. Yesterday was full of emotions; now that this is resolved it’s back to giving and sharing again. I have so many things I want to share with you guys, and by the way I really appreciate whoever takes the time to read what I write. Well I can’t share everything with you today, so I guess I’ll just express from whatever state I’m in right now. Since I’m in a giving mood I will write about offering value.

This is the second post in the series ‘Principles to live by’.

This is so powerful it’s actually a bit silly. If you implement this principle or way of life you will see so much improvement in everything. It is part of being positive and which is literally one of the most attractive qualities in a person. They are fun to be around and don’t drag you down with negative nonsense such as ‘I really don’t like the X in my life right now’ or ‘I really don’t want to do X today’. We are all victims of this kind of venting, but to what extend and frequency does it happen. Recognize if you often spout negative nonsense about things that you have attracted into your life. It’s not productive and it is holding everyone back.

Offering value is about offering you to people, not in a physical sense… Mostly. It’s more about showing who you are and expressing yourself. Offering the value that you as a person inherently posses. Read this that last sentence again. It’s so important. You as a person have tremendous amount of value just because you are you. If this fully clicks in your head you will feel so much freer.

The process of believing that you intrinsically have value is not just an internal thing. Obviously nothing is just one thing there will always be the yin yang principle in play. The way for you to fully realize and exercise the internal value that you have and are is by always expressing it outwardly. Whatever feelings you have express them. The more you do this the more you will come to see the power that comes from expressing yourself freely and how other people will enjoy it as well. You will allow yourself to drop the façade and by extension other people will do the same. Sometimes you will find yourself expressing negativity, however this to be accepted and valued as much as the positive.

Okay it’s still a little vague. An example would be flirting. You offer value through flirting because you joke around and have a good time, but on a deeper level the value is identified as emotions. The key is to generate good emotions. Offer help to someone who might need it. Sometimes I think of a person and suddenly feel a lot of love towards that person, instead of cutting it off and focusing on something else I welcome it and feel it as deeply as I can. Then I often send a text message saying I care or love that person. It feels good to me because I get pleasure out of giving, but you can be sure it feels probably even better for the person to be acknowledged and loved. I don’t expect anything back. Often it’s reciprocated sometimes it’s not. It doesn’t matter. You just send good vibes out into the world. Everyone around you will feel that you are giving and want to be around you.

Imagine going up to a stranger and asking for 500£ and then imagine going up to a stranger offering 500£. It’s obvious which is easier and what you would like to do. Giving and offering something is always easier and it evokes more positive emotions.

You believe that you do not need anything from people but still appreciate when they offer you something just because it makes you feel good and you know they will feel good by extension. Never deny a person the opportunity to give something to you, you’ll deny them the same pleasure you get from it. Ponder this mindset and recognize the inherent power it possesses.

The thing about this mindset is that a mindset is a very fundamental belief. Maybe you have it or have parts of this integrated, maybe you find yourself taking from time to time. I’m talking about a deep shift in your consciousness that results in seeing things completely different, not just seeing something and then realizing that seeing it from this point of view would be ‘better’. It’s about acting through the value offering perspective from the start not even noticing the taking perspective.

Acceptance

‘Judge and you shall be judged’

This is an article in the series ‘principles to live by’, also I really appreciate the people who take time to read this and maybe even comment, it warms my heart.

There are probably various ways you might want to look upon acceptance. It could be something like accepting that your loved one is a certain way or it could be simply granting someone the opportunity to do something someone might like. Either way it all comes down to the exact same thing, the mindset of acceptance. The ability to simply let someone pursue or do whatever he would like without even thinking that in some way he should be doing it another way or maybe not do it at all.

It’s in our nature to control; we like to control things around us. We like to control other people so they acknowledge our wishes and starts behaving according to our needs. You can try to say that you are not like this, but the reality of it is that it’s virtually impossible to deny nature. You are wired to want to accommodate your wants and needs. This process happens all the time, hardly ever consciously.

We like to compare everything, make it into a competition of sorts. You have a certain way of seeing things, and if something contradicts that view you rationalise until you can spin it so that either they operate through the same channels as you or they are doing it the wrong way. We all want to maintain our view on the world and not change it too often. The mind has a tendency to want to stay where it’s comfortable and you do not get challenged all the time.

One of the things I really dislike and gets me really angry is when people judge me. I really do not appreciate it when people judge me according to their own standards. They think that what I do is not right because they have another representation of the world. Obviously I, myself do the same thing to other people. Limitations are based around the same principle. It acts through the need to control and when you try to control something you are judging it because you do not accept the way it is.

Something that really resonates with me is the saying ‘restrictions breed resentment’. It seems hard to fully understand why people need to restrict their surroundings and not let whatever happens happen. Obviously you need to apply common sense, I’m not talking about the law or such overarching restrictions it’s more in the sense of people disapproving of other peoples choices. My notion is that this kind of restrictions, disapproval, judgment etc. is a sign of insecurity. People are insecure about whether or not they are doing the right thing themselves and so they pass judgment in order to prove that the other person is not doing the right thing.

‘The Ability to Let That Which Does Not Matter Truly Slide’

Instead of operating this way I suggest acceptance. You let go of the feeling that you have to do everything the right way and start to accept the fact that you are human and by nature faulty. Also just because someone is doing something you cannot relate to it does not make his actions wrong. Accept that whatever happens, it probably is for the better and whether or not the person makes a mistake it has nothing to do with you and that person will probably learn from it.

Really try to grasp the concept of just accepting a person for who they are. A lot of people complain or does not understand why people often make up a facade and hide the real them. It could be anyone, maybe the geek who fights in the woods every weekend with his buddies to see who will win the imaginary fair ladies heart. Why would this guy make a facade when he talks to other people, maybe he hides his weekend adventures because he is ashamed. Well no wonder he does not want to share his own self if he gets judged on it. Because he feels judged he does not want to share his real self and he creates a facade. Don’t deny other people the pleasure of acting through who they really are. They will not be able to when you try to restrict them. Don’t judge.

Restrictions are funny in a way. When you restrict other people you aren’t just restricting them but yourself by extension. If you do it to other people they are going to do it to you. However if you stop this nonsense everyone will start opening up and feeling more comfortable around you. Stop restricting.

Another aspect of acceptance is about you not about other people. It’s about accepting whatever comes your way. Whatever happens in your life you should accept it and move on. It has already happened so there isn’t much you can do to change it. In fact there is nothing you can do. I’ve mentioned it before but ‘whatever you resist persist’. Anything you do not let go of will stay in your life and continue to torment you. If you feel someone has wronged you; either you confront the person in a proper manner or you have to let go of it. Nothing can come from replaying the scene in your head. Let go.

From a spiritual point of view the universe always has your best interest at heart so have some faith in the fact that whatever comes your way is a good thing. This again is rooted in ‘the secret’ mentioned several times on this blog. It’s also more than that, it is having faith in the fact that anything that happens in your life is there for a reason and that there are no coincidences. When you fully believe this, you start to see things adding together resulting in opportunities to get what you really want.

This Moment

When you judge or try to control by manipulating your surroundings you lose the only thing you ever really had, this moment. You compare this moment with previous experience or what you think it should be like, doing this cannot be done being present, you retreat into you head and it stops you from being in the moment.

I mention this because acceptance can only happen in this moment. And when you are present and in the moment acceptance happen automatically, you do not think about yesterday or tomorrow and you stop judging and labelling everything. Things will just be things and you see them as good enough because it is not compared to anything.

Be aware of when you are restricting other people or passing judgment where it is neither asked for nor needed. Then change it. When you fully start to accept everything in your life or every part of a person so many things seems to be much easier for you to handle.

Our Generation

Fuck what other people have to say about me! I just can’t seem to care about it anymore. I do not care about how much money I have in my bank account. The content of my wallet is irrelevant. FUCK it all, I do not need this. It is not essential for my existence. Why even care I ask myself? I have nothing to lose. What do YOU have to lose by letting go.

I respond to my feelings. They come from my core. I’m present and I will be with you here and now. This is not done to get women, I fucking have a woman. I do this because its my core. I am born in a world where mirrors should be my best friend and the window to my feelings. It cannot tell you anything about yourself. What the fuck do I want for myself in this moment. I ask myself this. The answer is obvious. It always is. Just listen the fuck up and fucking respond. Im frustrated because I know what is inside but I haven’t been able to reach it yet.

We are a generation raised by instant gratification and poor judgment. Too much judgment if you ask me. Not enough just being. Facebook me and check my myspace. Maybe then I am cool. Do you look in the mirror and figure that this is probably the best you will ever look again or do you just realize that whatever you do maybe another of this and another of that is not what you need right now. You are not going to live forever. Your body is going to wither away and still you fight it.

Who the fuck do you think you are?

I thought i was gonna soften it. It seems i wasnt

Going With Change

It’s time to write something again. It’s been a long time. Today I’m catering to a friend. A really cool friend, probably one of the most free spirited people I know and mysteriously clever. I’ve recently gotten myself a girlfriend and she really wants to know how I as a free spirited man who loves to meet new women have reconciled with societies definitions of a relationship.

As you may know I’m not really a fan of a lot of the things that a relationship imposes on you. But I will be the first to say that I chose this. It didn’t just happen. It was a choice. It also meant that I had to redefine a lot in my life. I lived a life where I met a lot of women. I saw it as a life style and a really challenging one. Maybe one day I will write about how you can grow immensely through meeting thousands of women, if you take ‘control’ and don’t just fumble around in the dark. I met women with the intention of maybe getting physical with them. That’s over now. It’s not possible. It’s hard to do a 180 but it’s necessary and I accept that. I’m not trying to resist it or go against it since that is not possible.



In a relationship you truly get to see the principle ‘restrictions breed resentment’ in action. I didn’t get in a relationship to solve anything for myself. I chose to do it purely because I think that the girl is really fantastic. I then realized that you really learn things about yourself in a relationship and you get tons of opportunities to grow as a person. I accept restrictions they are there for a reason and as long as the restriction is not built on a foundation of fear then there is no reason to change it, rather just let it evolve on its own. However if it is built on fear, then it’s dangerous it can end up feeling like a win/lose situation for one of the partners and a win/lose will always 100% of the times end up being a lose/lose situation.



The truth is I haven’t found a way yet. I haven’t found a way to balance meeting new people and being in a relationship. But I do know that ‘only nothing ever stays the same’ and that nothing is ever really gone and the universe never wastes anything. This means that meeting new people is transforming, it’s changing into something new, and I’m trying to wrap my head around what that might be. My mind is resisting it, it likes comfort. Thinking about it, it seems to me that the end result is going out meeting new people but with new intentions.

A funny little thing is that once you have learned to walk up to a stranger and tell her that you find her really adorable and trying to maybe get her number, it actually gets harder not to do it. But if you change the intention to purely wanting to get to know who she is as a person you may get to have more real interactions, a more authentic one. Once I fully know what this turn out to be I’ll let you know. In the mean time I hope you can extract some knowledge and apply it to your own life.

Principles to live by

I’m having a bit of difficulty figuring out what to write today. I have all these different principles to write about. I’m not fully aware how I’m going to get it all out of my head, but I really do feel like writing now.

This post will be about will be an introduction to a series of posts I’ll make. It contains various mindsets and principles that I strive to integrate in me. Some of them I have done. These are things to follow and things I often reread to readjust my focus and realign myself with the road I know I should walk.

• Give value
• Be positive
• Right Action
• Non-resistance
• The Secret
• Your brain is wired to seek out the headspace you most often find yourself in
• Enjoy in myself
• Value in myself
• Expression not impression
• Masculine and feminine polarity
• What you fully feel you accept
• Acceptance

I’ll make a series describing each of these points in detail. I’ll guide you and show you how to master each of them through some really hard work. Doing this requires a lot of courage. I’m not talking about courage to go to war, but the courage to use your brain in ways you never thought you could. It can be frightening but you’ll never see it that way. Your mind will always look for excuses not to do this.

If you somehow stick to this I promise you that you will be closer to everything you want in your life. Here is a preview of a really simple way to just become more aware, open minded and accepting. For the next 10 days I would like you to reject all negative thoughts. If you think negative about something realise it and cut the thought pattern off and think about something else or you could try and see the positive in the negative you saw before.

Thoughts, Emotions and Your Core

Thoughts

This article is written to accommodate a request from a friend. If you, who is reading this have anything you’d like me to expand on, clarify or maybe an entire subject you fancy reading about don’t hesitate to ask.

I’m going to write about how thoughts are dynamic and ever changing and how we should react to them. Thoughts can be dangerous or healthy. Often just the how we view our thoughts is going to matter. Have you ever thought about that? Have you ever thought about what thoughts or view you have on your thoughts in general? I’ve mentioned ‘the secret’ before and having mentioned that, things often tend to be exactly what we think they should be. If you think your thoughts are bad, they are going to be bad. If you assume they define you, they will define you.

This is a very black and white kind of view, which generally does not exist. Sometimes you are going to think the same thing is good for something and bad in another sense. Stop that! They are never bad. They are just nice and pleasant! Then again my view is that thoughts just are. They are neither good nor bad. They just are. Thoughts arise and disappear all the time. They can’t tell you who you are, at least not anymore than a spot on your forehead can.

Think about this for a second. Children have got it right. They come into the world screaming. It’s not because they are unhappy rather they are expressing and emoting from their core. Their essence if you like. The default state of a human being is happiness, nothing more nothing less, just content and fulfilled. Do you feel completely fulfilled and content at this moment? I’m talking about this deep sense of serenity. Children feel it when they are very young. Then they learn something that clouds and distorts the access to this feeling. It’s still there, but it’s hidden under several layers of social conditioning and ego(defences). I’m using this example to show that somewhere in our life we learned something that made it hard for us to connect with our core, our purpose and the deep feeling of happiness.

The things that make us block this out are our thoughts. Actually it’s impossible to access this feeling if you are thinking. You cannot experience this if you are inside your head listening to thoughts. Absence of thoughts brings you closer to happiness, being in the moment is another word for this.



Emotions

We are going to go a bit deeper, because if you think about it, it’s not really your thoughts that cause you this pain. Thoughts are just there, they don’t mean anything unless you want them to. How do you give thoughts meaning? You do it through your feelings. Thoughts get their power through the emotional significance you attach to them. If you react emotionally to your feelings they will start to define you. That means that once again you can choose to take control or run on autopilot. It’s obvious that autopilot is easier, but often not healthy for you. A great example is a kid in kindergarten being told that he was stupid, we was told this by an authoritative figure and therefore he believed it. As he repeats this in his head his thoughts tell him he is stupid and he attached emotional significance to it. The outcome is often relative to how strong the emotional reaction. If it’s really strong we might create a strong identity around it.



If you observe your thoughts and stop engaging them they will disappear and have no significance. They will not matter to you. The more you do this, fewer thoughts will appear and you will get closer you to the core of yourself. A great analogy for this is that a if you throw a rock into a little creek it will generate small waves and stir up mud from the bottom of the creek making it very hard to see what is at the bottom, but after a while the waves disappear and the mud settles and you will be able to see very clearly what is at the bottom.

In the absence of thought you will be able to act through your own core, you will not be clouded or distracted by thoughts telling you something that might not be right. Obviously getting to here is very hard, so if you are not willing to spend a massive amount of time learning not to think I propose another idea. You might even have discarded what you have read so far because it doesn’t seem to make sense to you. That is fine.



Identifying the cause not the message

When you have thoughts and they are persistent be aware of them. You do not have to identify with your thoughts in fact it is better not to. They could be helpful and tell you something about yourself. The mind is just a reflex organ that reacts to you. Learn to identify where the thoughts originate from. A thought is just a reaction to something inside you. Know that the thought is not the destination or the beginning. It’s just there to deliver a message. Look deeper. It is hard to connect to your purpose or core through thoughts but you will get closer to something that is right just for you.

I’ll give an example I just recently experienced. For a while I’d been feeling that continuing my degree and getting a Masters would be redundant for my future job and my plans. I wanted to finish my Bsc and go straight ahead with my plans. I would continually think how great it would be when I was finished in England and could move away. A lot of negative thought patterns and ideas and after a while I started to believe that that was how I actually felt and should do.

I had a long talk with my dad, discussing and talking about this. Eventually I understood. I realised that these thoughts and feelings were rooted in my dissertation, the big finishing project that can be very stressful. To me it was mentally exhausting. The mind provides a solution so that I avoid meeting another stressful thing like that. Not continuing my degree would mean that I wouldn’t have to face another dissertation. Finishing in England and starting my plans would mean that the immediate stress of having to worry and work on this project would disappear for a moment. The mind is simply reacting. It doesn’t provide a sustainable solution but rather a temporary one. I realised this and was able to change the thought patterns. I was able to take action that was more beneficial for me. However they were not necessarily closer to the core of my being.



The Core

I haven’t read a lot about what the core of a person is so here I’ll literally just describe it as how I view and have experienced it myself.

I find that I am happiest when I’m closest to my core. That is when I’m expressing myself through that just myself and not through my ego or illusions. I’d rather not label how this is done, as I find it to highly individual for each person. Some it may be to be physically active or for another it may be to care for someone and be nurturing. It all depends on what kind of person you are, a rule of thumb is; be a man if you’re a man and be a woman if you’re woman. Don’t hide from it, accept that you are who you are and act through that. When you do not, you are acting on behalf of something that is not you. You are not acting through your own intentions and what you really want. It seems truly obvious that acting according to who you are is the best way to express your core and be happier.

I know this may seem a bit vague, but realise this, when you act and operate through your core you'll know. It's so obvious and the feeling that comes with it and even the results from it will be surprising.

Creative Mindset

Today I want to talk about being creative. I, myself is one of the least creative people I know, in the traditional sense of the word. I cannot paint, draw or design thing. I really cannot be creative about things like that. Well the truth is that we can all be creative about everything. We are all able to be creative about everything at a level that is probably far beyond our comprehension.

Think about what you are good at, think about what you are good at being creative with. You think you can learn to be creative about something. I find that to be untrue. I find that you can only learn to incorporate new things into the creative process. If you study to be a designer you only learn about external things to incorporate into the design. I don’t really have a lot of insight into the design degree, but I would imagine that you are not thought how to cultivate a creative mindset.

The external factors are handy; they give you a better foundation to express your creativity from. But they are not essential. I write and I really enjoy it. I often get told that the speeches I write are very authentic and good.

The base of creativity is letting go of what you think the outcome of your creativity should be. My best writing comes when I focus on the thing I want to write about and let the words flow through me. I literally try to connect with the thing I’m writing about and feel it. I accept whatever feeling I get and the more I focus on it the closer I get to it.

Doing this you will experience intense emotions and some of the best and most real creations you have ever made. The key to cultivating a creative mindset is being open. Open your heart and feel. Feel what you want to create instead of thinking about it. Thinking is clouding your emotions and confusing. The mind almost never sees the real thing. I guess the key to being creative in all areas of your life is living through your heart.