This Week's Insight...

Surfing Life’s Big Waves

I got an invoice from my lawyer a couple of days back – for what exactly I’m not sure, as his services didn’t really match the bill!    He said he was sending out invoices to a variety of people to “keep the wolf from the door in these challenging times”.

Challenging times they may well be for many.   But the real and only challenge we face, regardless of economic circumstances, is the challenge within.   “How will I react in the face of so much negative stuff coming at me?”  as one client put it to me last week.   “It’s very hard to stay centred in the midst of all that’s going on around me” he said.

These so-called challenges are just life’s “big waves”.    Life is like the Volvo Round-the-World yacht race.   If you’re participating, you go prepared for big waves.   As a result, you’re able to ride them.   Be prepared – not just in some vague sense – but in an ever present here and now sense.   Each moment presents us with something new to handle.   You can’t handle it if you’re not adequately prepared – here and now.

So, each here and now make sure that you choose the calm in which you find yourself when you meditate (if you don’t meditate, it’s like taking part in that yacht race in a rubber dingy).  When you do that, you will simply surf those waves and, like all waves, they will be followed by tranquillity.

Be tranquil – surf life’s waves on an even keel.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve focused, in the “Normal People”, column on a couple of related stories that illustrate just how weird so-called normal people’s lives can be.   As a client said to me some time back “When you start employing people you don’t realise that you’re actually employing their history, their problems and their weird version of reality!”

The business owner in the “Normal People” stories is well known to me and he is definitely not the type of person who does things without carefully considering his options – nor does he suffer fools lightly!  So why would an apparently intelligent person get embroiled in such outrageous carry on?

The answer is simple and blindingly obvious.   It’s all very well for someone to wake up and realise that there’s so much more to life than the pathetic so-called normal version of “not-to-bad” reality.   It’s an entirely different thing to stay awake.   If I can loosely quote Jesus Christ, he didn’t say “wake up” – he said “stay awake – if the householder knew at what time of the night the burglar would break in, he would have stayed awake – so, I say to you stay awake.”

Florence Schovel Schinn, in her wonderful little book “The Game of Life and How to Play It” pointedly remarks that, if you know the rules by which “the game of life” is played and you then ignore them, then you’re asking for trouble, you deserve it and you’re bound to get it.   My friend, the business owner, is a classic example.

One of the biggest downsides in working with people in the so-called field of personal development is that clients think they’ve grasped the concepts and, in doing so, fail to put it into daily practice.   And daily the practice must be.   How else can you stay awake?   How else can you spot the difference between the genuine article and a wolf in sheep’s clothing?   How else will you be able to tap in to your own internal wisdom and universal inspiration?

OK, it’s par for the course to “fall off the wagon”, as one of my clients so aptly puts it.   But it’s not OK to watch that wagon trundle over the horizon and fool yourself into thinking that you can get by without the clear state of mind that abnormally successful living demands.  You can’t.  And, what’s even worse, is that you’ll find out that you can’t in the most painful of ways.   You’ll say to yourself, as one of my clients recently said to me:  “Any idiot could see the mistakes that I was making, as I was making them.   How could I not see them?”
You can’t see much with your eyes shut!  Open your eyes, wake up – now.   Not just this now – every now.  Or, at least, most nows!

Whether you’ve done my two-day workshop (as some of you have) or are doing the Online Workshop (as some of you are), you have the tools at your disposal to enable you recognise the difference between a normal muddled mind and a clear, focused and present mind.   Those are the same tools that you use to stay in the clear and present state of mind – that’s why there’s such a variety of “mental exercises” on the website! 

You need to have a regime (which is not the same as a routine which, like every other aspect of normal living, turns into a repetitive habit) to enable you stay awake.   You need to abide by that regime.   You need to not just experience clarity of mind once in a blue moon, it needs to become your everyday state of mind.   If it is you won’t make that appalling mistakes that many people, who should know better, make almost as a matter of course.

Clarity of mind, presence of mind in the here and now, is everything – not just one of the weapons in your armoury – it is everything.   All good things naturally and effortlessly flow from presence of mind.   You’re not aware of it (because it happens subconsciously) but if you’re in a normal treadmill, not-too-bad mental state, then you’re actually destroying yourself, your life and the lives of those around you – some on whom you may actually claim to like or even love.

Presence of mind is everything.   Focus and single-mindedness enable the universe respond to your every desire.  

Pull yourself together, wake yourself up – and stay awake.

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