Tag: walking

Only one imperative

Why is it so difficult to just be yourself? I think there are two impediments to being you:

  1. We don’t know ourselves. We have spent so much time playing a role whether that be in your family or at work, we have completely lost touch who we really are.
  2. The second impediment is that society, in general, wants to categorize us by race, gender, ethnicity, profession, political party, and wealth just to name a few.

Impediment #1

We don’t know ourselves – If you are like me, you spend countless hours agonizing over what you do for a living, which means you become a role that you play for the majority of your waking hours. You become so focused on excelling at this role that your whole identity becomes wrapped up in it. Now if this role is aligned or a by-product of who you really are then you have hit the jackpot, but sadly for most of us, this just isn’t true. Instead of figuring out who we really are we just assume the role and spend the rest of our life living our life in that paradigm. Instead of pursuing our dreams we just assume the role of Doctor, Nurse, Data Scientist, Software Developer, Uber Driver, Mother, Father, Son, Daughter, or whatever. Most of our life is then spent living up to the expectations needed to fulfill that role.  It’s fucking madness and we do it day after day until we die. At some point, we realize this and become unhappy with these roles and begin looking inside ourselves for an answer.

Impediment #2

Society – In the United States, we like to think we are all born equal, with inalienable rights, to life, liberty, and happiness. Nice sentiment, but it’s mostly bullshit. Our society like the societies in most countries tries to categorize us by political affiliations like left or right, black or white, male or female, rich or poor, and so on. As people, we begin associating our identity to these groupings. I can say I am a Democrat or a Republican and as such, I believe this or that. You don’t even have to think about it just assume some group identity and you are set for life, and most people don’t think about it. Once you have been categorized you are more easily controlled and can be marketed to. Yes, you become a target audience for whatever propaganda the government or a corporation wishes to sell you. You might think I sound like some paranoid anarchist at this point, but hear me out. Look at your Instagram feed for a moment, notice how the advertisements are targeted at you based on your browsing history or Google searches. You, my friend, are a target market and Facebook or Google have already categorized you as someone who needs to see these particular ads.

The Door

What if there was a door that you could open that would help you find your true self and start living a life free from assumed roles and identities. The door is your own rational mind, your freedom of choice if you will. To begin exercising this freedom of choice you need to stop doing a few things:

  • Stop thinking of yourself as only a role – Yes, you may play roles, but don’t let those roles overtake a huge amount of your conscious mind. You are not a role, but you may perform a function related to a role, just remember you are not a fucking role.
  • Stop being categorized – People will try to categorize you as liberal or conservative, but don’t fall for that trap. Use rational judgment when it comes to any issue versus groupthink. I know it’s easier to just follow the herd and adopt their ideology, but if you make that choice you are abandoning yourself for the group. I don’t label myself as liberal or conservative and can still exist in this world. The more you affiliate yourself with these groups the less independent you become.

For me, you can’t just stop living as a role or allowing yourself to be affiliated with society’s categorization of you. If you don’t take action you will be pulled back into the Vortex or at the very least spend the rest of your life rebelling against it, and neither of those fates will help you know yourself. Finding yourself then requires you to start doing some things:

  • Spend time by yourself – Finding yourself often means that you need to be alone. This might mean you take long walks, practice yoga, read books, or try meditating. This time you spend with yourself allows you to think and also isolates you from outside influences. I started both meditating and doing yoga in the morning before work and it has had a profound influence on how I see the world, for you it might be just taking a nice long walk, listening to music, running, or whatever you can do by yourself.
  • Value your time – You can’t really become introspective and think for yourself if you spend countless hours watching YouTube, Netflix, or Hulu. The same thing applies to scrolling through Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Let’s say you work 8 hours a day or more, then you spend the next 8 hours watching cable news, or one of the other forms of media I just mentioned. Each of these forms of media seeks to influence the way you think, and you know dam will that it does. You won’t learn anything about yourself watching all this shit, it will only detract from your goal of being yourself.

You are not a role, you are not some category, you are a unique individual that deserves to pursue things that interest you. Think for yourself, make decisions in your best interest. Do something today that will help you understand who you really are.

Namaste


This post was proofread by Grammarly.

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Grateful for the life you have

So you think your life is so miserable and unexciting. You are constantly bombarded by information that emplores you to want more, so you seek satisfaction in acquiring more things, more money, more appreciation, something that you don’t have. All the while you compare yourself to others that you view as more successful, better looking, happier, wealthier, or whatever. Stop doing that shit!

If your mindset is all about striving for more or comparing yourself to others you will never be happy. If it is comparisons you want then think about the millions, well billions of people that would trade places with you if they could. Then what the hell is wrong with me? Well, let me tell you. You are fricking ungrateful for what you have and are seeking fulfillment in the future, usually by seeking more of something. You are being duped by this ungrateful, never satisfied, paradigm. If you continue down this path there will only be more of the same, achieve this, acquire that, and a continuous saga of pursuit.

Pop your head outside of your ego for a few minutes, look around you. Do you see the beauty in this world? All this shit you have didn’t exist 50 years ago, that cell phone that you stare at, or that flat-screen TV, the internet, shit even air conditioning. We are so unappreciative of all this stuff, we just take it for granted. Instead of appreciating what you have, you spend your time wanting more. Do you really need a BMW or Mercedes? Will it get you to point “A” better than your Honda?

You have become a materialistic junky, addicted to shit you don’t have, spending all your energy working for more stuff. It should come as no surprise by now that you live your life looking towards the future, missing out on the present moment and you lack even a small amount of gratitude for what you have. If what I have written here so far even marginally rings true for you, then you are in a pretty serious need of a reset in the way you think.

Let’s turn this shit around and instead of making what you want paramount in your mind and behavior, start with gratitude. There are many ways to shift from I want more stuff, to I appreciate all that I have. The two most effective ways that I have found to be more grateful include:

  • Be Present – When you shift your thinking from looking to the future for happiness, you start appreciating each moment. Sounds pretty simple, but it’s not that easy to do when you have spent the majority of your life looking ahead for satisfaction. The present moment is the foundation for being grateful. For me and my monkey mind, I need to practice yoga, meditation and take long walks to help me quiet the mind and live in the present.
  • Grateful Practice – Being the stupid egotistical morons that we are, we need to frequently remind ourselves to be grateful. I have a journal that I write down 3 to 5 things I am grateful for. I do this in the morning shortly after getting up so that I start my day with a feeling of being grateful. I find that actually writing it versus putting in an app on my phone, seems to make it more effective. This daily repetition is the beginning of a habit where you remind yourself of all the things you are grateful for which then chips away at the ego.

If you still need to compare yourself to others, then think about the billions of people that would trade places with you, and happily assume the life you have.

Namaste


This post was proofread by Grammarly.

If you would like to support this blog, check out the awesome selection of eBooks at:

Mind, Body, Spirit books at eBooks.com

If eBooks aren’t your thing, check out my Resources page for additional ways to support this blog.

Visit my other blog Inspirational Book Reviews where I review some incredible literature.

 

 

Make them better

We all have a finite amount of time most of which we waste on pursuing material crap and satisfying our ever-increasing need for pleasure in various forms. Then we spend whatever time we have left searching for some kind of meaning in our life. It is unlikely that we will find a whole lot of meaning chained to a desk and computer, knocking out work day after day so we can buy more stuff. Knowing that our time on this earth is limited we better come to terms with a need to make these days better as Thoreau suggests.

As I have gotten older I have become less enamored with the stories that this world is constructed around. Stories like work harder and you will achieve more and these achievements will provide satisfaction. Other stories tell us that we must be goal-oriented ever pursuing greater things and not wasting our time. Still, other stories tell us that only through growth in revenue and GDP will we fulfill the capitalist dream of greater wealth for all. Most of these stories are bullshit and have been created to keep everyone in line, following the same path. While I’m pursuing all those goals, making money, and generally working my ass off there is no time for getting to know who I really am or what I really want out of this existence. I’m simply too fucking busy doing what everyone expects of me and adding to my investment balances.

The fact that you spend some time with your family, read a good book, take a walk, write a blog post, or take some time to do nothing but think is, in fact, making your days a little better. I currently work for a company that wants to dominate the world, and instead of my work being part of my life, it is more akin to being in a cult. You know the routine, work, eat, sleep, and repeat. I would guess my situation is not unique and that unless you take the reigns and regulate your behavior your life will never get any better. Remember you are an individual not a cog in the machine, as much as you relate to the organization you work for, their loyalty to you only extends one day at a time.

Life is impermanent by nature, and your employment status is even more precarious. Some of you know what I’m talking about and have been laid off so that the balance sheet looks a bit better. In my work life this happened a couple times and each time something better was right around the corner. I’ve seen people literally crushed by a layoff because they had invested so much of themselves, were extremely loyal to their employer, yet they were naive and couldn’t understand how this could have happened to them. I have a friend who once told me “At the end of the day we are even” and that is that. This is the attitude you need to have in this economy, don’t expect loyalty from your employer, because it does not exist.

Maybe this post has been in many ways a therapeutic exercise to take this quote to heart.

I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.

Henry David Thoreau

Each day is a precious gift, and it up to you to find some kind of balance in your life.

Namaste


This post was proofread by Grammarly.

 

About the author

Henry David Thoreau (see name pronunciation; July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American essayist, poet, and philosopher.[3] A leading transcendentalist,[4] he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay “Civil Disobedience” (originally published as “Resistance to Civil Government”), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.

Thoreau’s books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close observation of nature, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and attention to practical detail.[5] He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life’s true essential needs.[5]

He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau’s philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.[6]

Thoreau is sometimes referred to as an anarchist.[7][8] Though “Civil Disobedience” seems to call for improving rather than abolishing government—”I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government”[9]—the direction of this improvement contrarily points toward anarchism: “‘That government is best which governs not at all;’ and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.”[9]

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau

 

 

Tune Yourself

If you believe in the law of attraction and understand that what you think you become then read on, otherwise you are wasting your time by reading the rest of this post. I say that because if you don’t believe in the law of attraction what I’m about to explain becomes somewhat pointless.

how-to-manifest-law-of-attraction

In a recent post I wrote about how to stop reacting to life and begin controlling your thoughts to increase your level of happiness. I would like to think that what I’m about to say builds on this idea, refining and expanding upon it. If you believe that what you think about becomes your reality then you must make sure you are feeding your mind good thoughts. If you have a shred of introspection in your mind, you will begin to recognize when  you go from good to bad thoughts and you can then begin to catch yourself steering your thoughts back into the right direction. It doesn’t take much to go from thinking good thoughts about things that make you happy to reversing it and becoming critical. We often obsess over problems we are experiencing and in doing so we have blocked the good thoughts from taking their place. Obsessing over perceived problems is one of the toughest negative thinking patterns to break.

I like this quote because this is your only way out of the negative thinking patterns that come from obsessing over problems.

I dont fix problems-quote

There are basically two choices when it comes to creating that positive mindset that allow the law of attraction to work for you instead of against you.

  1. Stop the negative pattern from appearing in the first place.
  2. Using your ability to realize that you have slipped into a negative state of mind and replace it with positive thoughts.

Let’s take the first one. What are some ways we can stop the negative thinking pattern from occurring? Here are a few things to consider:

  • The best time to set the stage for your thinking is when you first get up in the morning. Remember the idea here is to put those good thoughts in your head so that they become the dominant things on our mind.
  • I find that yoga and meditation both are great ways to start your day on a positive note.
  • Maybe for you it is music or watching some uplifting YouTube videos like the one below:

What about the second scenario where you have already allowed the negative thoughts to become predominant? We would all prefer that this doesn’t happen, but let’s be realistic we all must learn to cope with the negative thinking pattern that now has control. Here are a few ways to overcome the negative thought pattern and turn it into a positive one:

  • First you must understand the damage that is being done. You have now set the law of attraction into motion attracting more negative thoughts. Remember what you think you become, so if you think negative thoughts you become negative and negative things are now being attracted to you. All I’m saying is you have sufficient motivation to change the way you are thinking.
  • The longer you wallow in your negative thoughts the greater the damage, so you need to start catching yourself as your thoughts go from positive to negative. These are the moments when you say to yourself, I wish I hadn’t said that or reacted that way. Recognize this is very good, because you are not only aware of the negative thought pattern, but you are putting yourself in the state of mind to change it.
  • Once you recognize you have negative thoughts pervading your mind then you need to do something immediately to limit the damage and turn things around. Tune into something that you love, which sometimes means removing yourself from the thing you are doing if possible. Here are few ways you can snap yourself out of the negative and tune yourself to the positive:
    • Get up and take a walk for 10-15 minutes, this alone will give you a chance to think about something else.
    • Take a break. They have done a lot of studies that say every 45-60 minutes you need to take a break from what your doing and give your mind and body a chance to recover.
    • Think about some of the things you really enjoy like music, people you love, hobbies, areas of interest, your dog or cat, sitting on a beach, walking on a wooded trail. Add to this list the things that make you feel good. Oh I almost forgot as you think about those things you enjoy, smile!
    • Think about something or someone you are grateful for. As you think about each thing you are grateful for really focus on it for a couple minutes. It’s tough to be negative when you feel grateful.

The law of attraction is a powerful reality and it responds to what you are thinking, so it is imperative that you spend the majority of your time focused on good thoughts. What you think about is a choice so choose wisely. Ultimately it is you that controls the world that you see. Control your thoughts and control your reality.

Namaste

 

Cool fitness apps for your phone

runtastic-Pedometer-PRO  redy-gym-log-workout-tracker

Without sounding like I’m plugging anyone’s products here, I just wanted to mention a few different fitness apps I used on my Android phone.  I used to haul my laptop upstairs to my workout room and log my reps and weights used for my strength training routine into a Google spreadsheet.  While this worked rather well it had me hauling the laptop up and down the stairs, and sometimes other folks in family were using the computer so it wasn’t all that convenient at times.  I did a little research at the Play Store (Google’s equivalent to Apple’s app store), and found an easy to use tool called Redy Gym Log.  The Redy Gym Log came pre-loaded with most of the popular strength training exercises, and you can add your own very easily.  I then created my 4 day split routine, and we were off to the races.  So now I just grab my phone and go upstairs do my workout and record it.

If you read an earlier post you know I like to walk, and since I take my phone with me it made sense to see if they had a pedometer application that would give me a pretty good idea of how far and fast I was walking.  I found the Runtastic Pedometer Pro (a couple of dollars to upgrade), and it has been great.  So now I’m tracking my strength training with Redy Gym Log and my walking with Runtastic Pedometer Pro.  Well since I also try to exercise first thing in the morning and had incorporated some squats into the routine, I noticed that Runtastic had an app for that too.  I downloaded Runtastic Squats, upgraded it (again another couple of dollars), and now I use Squats Pro and do squats 3 days a week in the morning.  There are other great fitness apps you can get for your Android or Apple phones, but these are 3 that I use every week and have been very pleased with.

I guess the revelation if there is one here is that you don’t need to haul around a laptop, notebook, or tablet PC; just grab your phone and get moving.  These apps provide a history of your workouts, making it easy for you to set new goals, and in the case of the Runtastic Squat Pro it actually creates the next workout for you and generates reminders.  All good stuff, but I’m not typing in the post from my phone, I just don’t have the patience for that yet.  So don’t pitch your laptop/notebook just yet.

The links for Runtastic and Redy Gym are as follows:

www.runtastic.com/

www.redyapps.com/gym/

I would love to know what fitness apps you are using on your phone?

The Joy’s of Walking

walking 01

As I used to be a runner this post is not about advocating walking over running.  I used to love to run and while most of my miles are now acquired walking I still miss the feeling I had when I was done running.  Yes the key statement is I used to be a runner, and now I’m perfectly happy walking 3 miles instead of running.  Maybe it is age, maybe it is just bad knees and a bad back, but running takes a toll on my body.  The problem is there is no substitute for getting outside in the fresh air and enjoying the weather good or bad.  For all you hard-core runners who think walking is not much of a workout, I can totally understand, but let me at least state some of the benefits:

  1. If you walk long enough you can get a pretty decent workout
  2. Because you are not killing yourself you can take time to think while you are taking your walk
  3. It takes the average person about an hour to walk 3 miles, so you get to enjoy the outdoors and get some fresh air
  4. It strengthens your legs and back
  5. You typically don’t experience any soreness or pain
  6. It burns calories commensurate with distance and pace
  7. And while you don’t get a big release of endorphin’s like running provides, you do feel better both during and after the walk

I’m sure I could come up with a few other reasons why walking is a good thing, but this should suffice for most of us.  While I decided that about a year ago running wasn’t a good option for me anymore, I found that walking provided some of the same benefits and a few unique ones.  Oh and by the way running shoes are also great for walking.

Now go get your walk on.

Namaste