The young monk who had just joined the order a few weeks prior was having a personal interview with his teacher. Master he stated, "I have been sitting now for two weeks many hours per day and it has been difficult, so I wonder what are the benefits of me sitting like this for an entire year?" The old master brought her fingers to her chin and pondered for a moment before answering. "The benefits for you, will have been a full year of sitting." The student of course was hoping for something more that he could aim for something that felt substantial. That would make it all worth while.
We live in a world of instant gratification where we are constantly told do this and your life will be much more comfortable. Do we even ask if that is our real goal to simply be more comfortable? Is that your goal?   

This short verse from ancient Chinese Master Lao Tzu's book the Tao Te Ching accurately describes the change process with a strong admonition to be aware of the power of our thoughts, words and deeds. His verse reads as follows: 

Watch your thoughts
They become your words
Watch your words
They become your actions
Watch your actions
They become your character
Watch your character
It becomes your destiny

It is easy to see the progression and he shows us the potential outcome and give us the keys to direct it. The first statement watch your thoughts urges us to simply bring awareness to them. This is a powerful and necessary step that enables us to begin to see the mind as a container of an endless looping story.

   

This is a follow up to yesterdays blog on-Why New Years Resolutions Fail- at least most of the time. I referred to a Process Pledge as a tool to aid us in the creation of real change. It is a key piece of the Transformation Process.  So when we break it down what is this pledge really? Think of a pledge as a promise, undertaking, commitment, assurance, bond, agreement and under law it is a surety, bond or collateral. Pretty serious stuff right. 

The New Year is upon us and many are looking at the possibility of creating yet another resolution. My suggestion is to forget it! It didn't work last year so why submit yourself to the pain of failing yet again. The reason we fail and fail again is simply because we are using the wrong tools for the job and then blaming ourselves because it didn't work. So throw out the resolution and create a Process Pledge. What is that you ask? Learn more.

When you woke up this morning were you excited to be alive? Did you wake up to a bright eyed beautiful being that whispered, "I love you and caressed your cheek?" Are you thankful for your home and your transportation? Are you looking forward to another day of productivity and creativity either with an employer or on your own. If you are saying yes, then I want to celebrate the clarity, purpose and abundance that surrounds you.

Or if you woke up feeling miserable, lonely and feeling like the life, your life, the one that you had planned on living has been stolen from you then it's time to get over it. Let that old one go and buy a new one. Learn How

I used to live in Dallas TX and I would often miss the turning of the seasons. Summer it seemed would hang on until quite suddenly winter appeared. I enjoy the much more subtle shift that occurs here in the Pacific Northwest. What I am enjoying the most is the feeling of abundance that comes with the time of harvest. It is a time to gather with friends and break bread and share time and stories together. Most of all for me it's a time of gratitude and being thankful for all that the year has presented to me so far. 

I have been rereading, " The Most Important Thing" by spiritual teacher Adyashanti, and it was on the second reading that this statement really resonated with me. This is a very difficult concept to embrace especially for a spiritual guy like me. Someone who knows that he is spending his life helping people solve some pretty difficult problems. I of course am in service to good, so I thought. This is not something that I would speak out loud yet it was definitely a part of my internal narrative.  
What I have found recently is that it is possible to do good work without being entirely clear about why I do it.  There is a certain "ideology of the good" that is fairly easy to slip into and the assumption that because you help people, how you do it is not as important.​

​Looking for the best self-confidence hypnosis to find that elusive trait that others seem to manifest so easily?  It can certainly burden your everyday life to suffer from a crisis of confidence, perhaps feeling you are the only one with this issue. Having low self-confidence can make you feel uncomfortable in social situations, stop you from going for the promotion you want, or advancing in your professional and romantic life the way you deserve. That is no way to live and you don't deserve to silently suffer from false beliefs about yourself. Self-confidence hypnosis can help boost your inner-morale and set you on a better course to enjoy life as you want to. Let's go over how many people try to boost their self-confidence through outward appearance, how self-confidence is expressed, and why self-confidence hypnosis can get to the core problem.

​I returned from eastern Oregon early this morning and I am committed to allowing the beauty that I feel in my heart to continue. Returning to our seemingly busy lives after spending the better part of a week in ceremony is a opportunity to begin to assess what is truly important. When we step outside of our routine we have a chance to look at not only what we do but how we do it. If the expansive open hearted feeling that I returned with is important to me, then I will allow it to continue. Doing so begins with trusting that it is not only possible, it is our natural state of being. The purpose of the ceremony was to invite a new way of interacting with the world. We were invited to become co-creators, to be active participants in this change process.

I always say that change begins with a strong intention, so why is it last in this series? It is last because without having a strategy and a method of tracking the behavior change, it will be of little use. Let's be honest we all want a magic bullet a pill or a diet or even a hypnosis session to cause some rapid change. We essentially want years of non-productive behaviors to go away and never come back and the marketers who sell you stuff, want you to buy into that billion dollar fairy tale. We look at the sexy bodies and fill up our garages with dust gathering exercise equipment. Did it occur to us, that the sexy fit body took time to get that way, not really because we bought the fantasy. ​

ou have made a choice to change a behavior and you are really frustrated because you just did the very thing that you did not want to do. You may even be feeling some shame or self-loathing around what just happened. Crazy as it sounds I want you to celebrate the milestone that has just been crossed. 
Our behaviors operate on a mostly unconscious level and we may not feel good as a result of doing them, yet we seldom associate that feeling directly with what we just did. In this case bringing conscious awareness to a behavior we are not proud of may cause us to feel  poorly. Yet it is this conscious awareness that will begin to pull us out of our ditch of unconscious programming. 

Humans will almost always choose convenience. In fact most everything in our modern world is designed to have us do so. Let's start with the obvious choices. Fast food is seemingly convenient and even if you are stuck in a slow moving line of cars, perhaps not so fast, yet quicker than making a healthy meal from scratch, especially if you have to buy the food first. Remember nothing has to be as advertised, just close enough to support a rationalization for making that choice. The lure of convenience is strong and once the mind makes a choice to take the perceived easy route it locks the new pattern in fairly quickly. In other words it becomes another largely unconscious behavior pattern. ​

Use these practices to create a foundation for a vital, rich and fulfilling life. Think of these as a feedback loop that reminds us of what is most important to us. In doing so we are also acknowledging that we have the skills to keep us tracking that very thing.  When we do this we are learning to bring conscious awareness to our actions. If this sounds a little strange then consider that we are navigating each day with mostly unconscious behavior patterns. Actually, not an entirely negative thing as our skills need to become a mostly unconscious operation for us to achieve a level of excellence. 
The question to consider here is, "Are these unconscious patterns productive or non-productive in relation to my intended result?" When we view our patterns in this fashion we remove the emotional component. Then we can objectively see the source and begin to align our actions with our intention- (the intended result).  

Perfection leaves us all lacking in some way. It seems like a picture that has been touched up and not quite real. It's also a hook that lures us into the pursuit of something outside ourselves. It is tied strongly to objectification and longing. If only I had that perfect (______) my life would be so great! I would feel so good and people would respect me, love me, envy me, if only? Most likely it's static which means once attained it is likely to degrade in value. It is often a measure that we use to denigrate ourselves. I'll never be perfect! I am not smart enough, good looking enough, rich enough, it's hopeless for me. It fosters feelings of isolation and separation and even if we achieve "perfection" or some idealized state the luster will fade.   

Start your day with an intention to be inquisitive/curious. This action sounds simple and yet is not so easy as we are hard-wired to see familiar patterns throughout our day. This is how we have been programmed to navigate and it takes conscious effort to see, hear and experience life outside of our conditioned reality. 
If any of you have ever moved to a new city or traveled to a foreign country then chances are you have an idea about what I am speaking. You initially brought a lot more conscious awareness to your surroundings. In fact your environment might even have had a surreal quality to it. Brighter colors, richer sounds, connecting with people and places on a more synchronistic level. This is an open inquisitive/curious mind interacting with the world.

This practice only takes a few minutes a day and yet most people fail to do it! Over the next month I will reveal 7 human life hacks and when you select 3 to do daily, the process of being fully engaged in your life will firmly take root. You will be putting in place the tools to create the life that you truly want to live.  

Hack Number 1-Begin your day with gratitude! This is a powerful practice that will quickly transform how you see and interact with your world. I use the term your world because you are either at the effect of everything or the one who effects change in your world. It is a shift in perspective, though much more so, it's the releasing of the story that has been used to define yourself.

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​MIKE MCRAE
15 MAR 2019
Clumps of harmful proteins that interfere with brain functions have been partially cleared in mice using nothing but light and sound.
Research led by MIT has found strobe lights and a low pitched buzz can be used to recreate brain waves lost in the disease, which in turn remove plaque and improve cognitive function in mice engineered to display Alzheimer's-like behavior.
It's a little like using light and sound to trigger their own brain waves to help fight the disease.

​Finding a good hypnotherapist can seem like a difficult task as it isn't a profession that is promoted as well as it deserves to be in the media. Some clients who go don't admit to it and there are some deceptive hypnotists who promise instant results out there. While that may be a bit disconcerting, remember that hypnosis was approved by the America Medical Association in 1958 and prior to that people had been using clinical hypnotherapy for decades and there are many qualified hypnotherapist professionals that can help you.

By Melissa Dahl

Doctor Marie Elisabeth Faymonville performing hypnosis as an alternative to traditional anesthesiology.
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Considering its origin story, it’s not so surprising that hypnosis and serious medical science have often seemed at odds. The man typically credited with creating hypnosis, albeit in a rather primitive form, is Franz Mesmer, a doctor in 18th-century Vienna. (Mesmer, mesmerize. Get it?)
Mesmer developed a general theory of disease he called “animal magnetism,” which held that every living thing carries within it an internal magnetic force, in liquid form. Illness arises when this fluid becomes blocked, and can be cured if it can be coaxed to flow again, or so Mesmer’s thinking went. To get that fluid flowing, as science journalist Jo Marchant describes in her recent book, Cure, Mesmer “simply waved his hands to direct it through his patients’ bodies” — the origin of those melodramatic hand motions that stage hypnotists use today.”

​Finding a good hypnotherapist can seem like a difficult task as it isn't a profession that is promoted as well as it deserves to be in the media. Some clients who go don't admit to it and there are some deceptive hypnotists who promise instant results out there. While that may be a bit disconcerting, remember that hypnosis was approved by the America Medical Association in 1958 and prior to that people had been using clinical hypnotherapy for decades and there are many qualified hypnotherapist professionals that can help you.

Any kind of medical or therapeutic relationship requires you to vet the professional you're seeking help from. You wouldn't randomly stroll into the first doctor, psychologist, or dentist's office you see, right? Then you shouldn't for a hypnotherapist either. Not all professionals are made equal and even a great one may not have the background you need or be the best hypnotherapist for you.

How are you choosing to start your year? Are you hoping, it will be different from last year? Most people at least want this year to be better, they want to do something to improve their lives. Some join a gym or find a diet plan and that is a good start. What I am concerned with is the finish and most people never cross that line. It's not from lack of trying and I'll bet that you will agree with me on that. You are frustrated because you have tried and tried, in fact you even crossed that line a few times. Then you slowly fell back into your old routines and felt miserable for it. Do you know what the problem is?