Sometimes people tell me that they find themselves in a meeting or at a party and wonder what the hell they're doing there! But that is not what the above question attempts to explore.

Instead, you need to constantly ask yourself why you got out of bed this morning, why you are living your life - not as you are but as you would wish to - and what it is you really and truly hope to achieve... today and in the greater scheme of things.

Keep prodding yourself - keep probing - keep reminding: we need to keep ourselves on our toes.

What are the core concepts behind what you read about every week in this Ezine?

Purposeful focus is the key to happiness and success. The ordinary mind has evolved to not focus. Anybody can learn purposeful focus and, in doing so, their brain will restructure itself. The results are effortless happiness and success.

To put it another way: meditation develops mindfulness, which enables purposeful focus, which delivers tangible and measurable results.

I make a point in today's video that it doesn't matter whether your self perception or self-image is good or bad... it still distances you from reality. It doesn't matter whether you're suffering from low or high self-esteem - you're still suffering by virtue of your cognitive distance from the reality of the here and now. Anything that gets in the way of your whole hearted mental presence in the present moment is an impediment to the achievement of happiness and success.

Or, to put it another way, you are your own worst enemy - you are the one who is standing in the way of your own success and happiness. It would be suggestive to say that your Conceptual Self is what's standing in your way - that your personality is the barrier - but there aren't two of you, you just see it that way: there's the person worrying about how you're feeling, the person evaluating how you're doing, the person wishing you were more effective, less backward in coming forward. But these are all just constructs of your mind - you're playing mind games with yourself. The pieces in this game of mental chess are the 70,000 thoughts that daily swish through your head. With seventy thousand pieces, this particular game can get very convoluted indeed... to the point that you don't know the difference between the game and reality.

In fact, as an ordinary-minded person, you cannot perceive reality. You can only perceive what your conditioned mind expects to perceive or, in fact, allows you to perceive. Whether your self-image is good, bad or indifferent, it is the rules by which you are allowed to play the game of life. Until, of course, you decide to break the rules.

Your thoughts are not reality. They are nothing until you make them something. But, in making them something, you imbue them with a quality which, for all the world, looks and feels like reality - only it's your version of it. The mental gymastics that you go through to concoct your version of reality come with all sorts of consequences: from low level worry to high level stress - which, by the way, will kill you! The fact is, of course, by making your thoughts something, you're little more than walking dead as things stand... a life lived through a haze of self-destructive thought is a life not lived.

Stop paying attention to the noise in your head - it is only your attention that gives your fleeting thoughts the power that they wield over you. Start paying attention to the world outside your thoughts - you may never experience pure reality (if such exists) but what you will experience is a clarity of mind far closer to what is really going on than that which you currently perceive. In allowing the scales fall from your eyes you will become someone who can take appropriate action, to do the things that you need to do, to get you to where you want to go... effortlessly.

More on effortlessly later!