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 Life Lessons

Gathered Wisdom - A collection of Insights, Lessons & Learnings that insprired me. I hope they can inspire you too.

The way to deal with unpleasant feelings is counter-intuitive. By embracing them, they will dissappear eventually. Everything that we resist, persits.

“We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.”

Alan Watts

“The best way out is always through.”

Robert Frost

The best antidote for judgement is curiousity. When you find yourself slipping into judgement, wanting to fix someone, give them advice, remove an obstacle for them, you can make a choice to bring curiosity to the situation instead. To check in with yourself about wether you’re allowing curiosity to guide you, ask yourself whether a quest for information is in service to the other persons need for support or to your own need for information.

 

True confidence is just being ok with everything that is you.

 
If someone doesn’t accept your anger, to whom does it belong?

“Live as if you were living for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.”

Viktor Frankl

“The insight of impermanence [Note: concept referring to how nothing lasts forever and everything changes] has the power to liberate us. Suppose someone you love has just said something that made you angry, and you want to punish them by saying something unkind back. She has dared to make you suffer, and you want to lash back and make her suffer too. You are about to start an argument. But then you remember to close your eyes and contemplate impermanence. You imagine your beloved three hundred years from now. She will be nothing but ash. It may not even take three hundred years, perhaps within thirty or fifty years you both will be ash. You suddenly realise how foolish it is to be angry and to argue with each other. Life is so precious. It takes only a few seconds of concentration to recognise and touch your nature of impermanence. The insight of impermanence burns away the anger. And when you open your eyes, you don’t want to argue anymore. You just want to hold her in your arms. Your anger has transformed into love.”

Thich Nhat Hanh

“If two people have the same opinion, one is unnecessary.”

Stephen Covey
“Bitterness is how we punish ourselves for other people’s sins.”
Matshona Dhliwayo

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

Aristotle

“Go through life and absorb new experiences, do things that interest you, and stop doing this that don’t necessarily appeal to you.”

Irvine Welsh
Courage is fear said with prayers. Meaning, if you’re afraid, do it anyway, be brave.

Happiness is dropping all of the beliefs and stories you tell yourself of why you are not happy.

Aubrey Marcus
Maturity is the ability to express one’s feelings and emotions, balanced with consideration of those of others.
The biggest regret of people on their deathbed – wishing they would have allowed themselves to enjoy life more.
The crucial prerequisite for self-observation is the ability to conduct it impartally, without passing moral judgement. It’s letting one’s life flow, not before a panel of courthouse judges, but under the x-rays of one’s own objective intelligence, becoming a neutral witness, without ever passing judgement or criticism. Self-observation is self-correction. If you are able to observe yourself, you will automatically correct yourself.

Character is the willingness to take responsibility for one’s own life.

Friedrich Nietzsche

We must ask whether it was worthwhile if we make each other feel unhappy or hurt in the name of defending our beliefs. Instead of maintaining the sanctity of our values, shouldn’t we care more about the person sitting in front of us? Isn’t it better to be happy together than to be right alone? Trying to convince someone to adopt our views is largely the work of our ego. Even if we turn out to be right, our ego knows no satisfaction and seeks a new argument to engage in.

Haenim Sunim – The Things You Can Only See When You Slow Down

By judging others, or by strongly identifying as something (your beliefs, religion, job, sports club) you make the “otherness” of others stronger, and you do this subconsciously to strenghten your ego. What you actually do is identify with your string of thoughts that judge, classify, compare. You are then not awake, and these mindpatterns have you in your grip.

Eckhart Tolle

What if some day or night a demon were to steal into the loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live and have lived it, you will have to live again and again innmerable times again, and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everythng unspeakably small or great in your life mst return to you, all in the same succession and sequence, even this spider and this moonlight and I myself..” – Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche’s demon is a challenge, or better, a question – that is to be answered not in words but in the course of life: “The question in each and everything, “Do you want this again and unnumerable times again”. If not, what choices can we make to make our life more enjoyable?

The Marginalian -The Eternal Return: Nietzsche’s Brilliant Thought Experiment

Thousands of anxious thoughts appear all days long: “Was I noticed? Why hasn’t she returned my call? Do I look okay? Should I have said that?”. It’s a constant monitoring to see if we’re gaining or losing ground in the grand approval sweepstakes. Those little doubts are rarely noticed or questioned, and yet they set in motion hundreds of strategies designed to win favor and admiration, or just to please. The unspoken belief is that unless people approve of you, you’re worthless. The irony is that the struggle to win love and approval makes it very difficult to experience them. Chronic approval seekers don’t realize that they are loved and supported not because of but despite their actions. And the more they seek, the less likely they are to notice.

Byron Katie

Your thoughts can tell you you need love to be whole again. Thoughts about your wants and needs can be very bossy if you believe them, you feel you have to do what they say, you have to get people’s love and approval. There is another way to respond to a thought, and that is to question is. Ask yourself 4 questions: 1) Can I be absolutely certain it’s true? 2) What does my life look like if I believe the thoguht? 3) And what if I don’t? 4) Turn the thought around: what if the opposite is true?

Byron Katie

A child is happily absorbed with her own games at the playground. All of a sudden she shocks herself by performing a flip. Kids around her, whom she had barely noticed, are laughing and clapping. She repeats the flip to see if they’ll clap again. All over the playground kids are going: “Look at me!”, happy when they get the response they want, dissappointed when they don’t. The first child isn’t sure what she’s discovvered, but it feels exciting. She thinks perhaps she found the key to being included. She goes to work on a new flip with another motive that she didn’t have before. She’s no longer fooling around to amuse herself. Her focus has shifted to the response she wants from others, and with that comes the anxiety that she won’t get it.

Byron Katie
Love your partner’s strenghts, tolerate her weaknesses, and gently point out her opportunities to improve.
Alain de Botton
Self image becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. If you are fearful, the world is a scary place. If you are loving, the world is a loving place. If you don’t trust, there is betrayal everwhere. If you are grateful, there is abundance.

The world is such, because you are such.

Elio D’Anna -School of Gods
The Plenty Paradox – overabundance itself is a stressor caused by the mismatch between our dopamine rich modern environment and our primitive reward system wiring. Imagine a balance scale with pleasure vs pain. The moment you experience pleasure, your brain tries to recreate equilibrium by adding pain on the other side. If we overexpose to pleasure, the pain doesn’t leave the scale, and our long-term baseline drops. The solution? Abstain (takes 4 weeks without our drug of choice to rebalance our dopamine levels), Maintain (create blocks in the environment to protect you from endulging in high-dopamine activities, and Seek Out Pain (cold exposure; exercise, meditation, fasting).

Creating thoughts, holding on to thoughts, recalling thoughts, generating emotions, controlling emotions, and disciplining powerful inner drives, all require tremendous expenditure of energy. Where does all this energy come from? Why is it sometimes there, and sometimes you feel completely drained? Did you notice that when you are mentally and emotionally drained, food doesn’t help that much? Or when you are in love, you dont want to eat? This form of energy comes from inside. Its distinct from the outer energy source. Imagine being dumped by your girlfriend. For weeks you dont eat well, clean up your room, have no energy for anything. Then one day, she calls to apologize, she wants you back. Instantly your energy peaks, you clean up your room and you are happy again. Where does this energy come from? What you see, if you watch carefully, is that you have an enormous amount of energy inside of you. Its always available to you. At any moment. The only reason you dont feel this energy all the time is because you block it. You block it by closing your heart, mind, by pulling yourself into a restrictive space inside. When you close your heart or mind, you hide in the darkness within you. The energy is still there, but it cant get in. Various energy centers exist inside of you, the most well known one being the heart. Lets say that you love somebody, and you feel very open in their presence. Because you trust them, your walls come down allowing you to feel lots of energy. They do something you dont like, the next time you see them you dont feel so high, you dont feel so much love. Instead, a tightness builds in your chest. You closed your heart. Depending on how closed you are, you feel sometimes disturbance or lethargy. Often people fluctuate. Then this person apologizes, and your center opens up again. Love flows through you again. You have deep wells of energy inside of you. Chinese call it Chi, yogi’s call it Shakti, in the West we call it Spirit. Call it whatever you want. This energy is what you experience when you’re enthoused by something and this energy comes up inside. This energy is your birthright. And its unlimited. What it needs is openness and receptivity. True spiritual teachings are about this energy and how to open it.

Michael Singer – Untethered Soul

Who are you? What is the real you? This question represents the essence of spirituality. You think “I am a woman of this and this age, and I follow this and that philosophy, and I have this or that job”. Those are all just ideas, you define yourself by what you believe. “I believe in capitalism, or neo-socialism”. You take a set of thoughts in the mind and you hold on to them. You make a highly complex relational structure out of them, and present that package as who you are. You have created a sense of stability inside, which generates a false but welcome sense of security. You want people around you to do the same thing, and be predictable. This is part of your model. It makes you feel in control. People just put facades out there. Their private facade, their professional facade. But what about YOU? The one holding the facade together? We are all clinging, then building. If you get the model down right, and behave consistently, you have “created” someone. If that someone is what others want and need, you can be very popular. And if you are not getting the popularity you expected, you adjust your thoughts. Why do we do this?

Michael Singer – Untethered Soul

Its not just up to you which thoughts you cling to, and what person you create. Society plays a major role influence here. How? Society has rules for everything. How to sit, walk, talk, how to feel. How does society engrain these emotional structures in us? When you do it well, you are rewarded with hugs and showered wit emotional acolades. When you dont do it well, you are punished. Just think about how nice you are to people when they behave in accordance with your expectations of them. And how you close off and pull back from them when they dont. What are you doing? You are trying to change someones behavior by leaving impressions on their minds. So next time, they act in the manner you expected. Why do we let this happen to us? It all comes down to understanding why we are clinging to our own self concept. If you stop clinging, you can see the tendency to cling was there. Letting go is scary. You will feel panic deep inside. If you are willing to face that sense of panic, there is a way past it.

Michael Singer – Untethered Soul

Stress only happens when you resist life’s events. If you are not pushing life away, or pulling it toward you, then you are not generating resistance. You are simply present in this state, you are just witnessing and experiencing the events of life taking place. What an amazing process life is, this flow of atoms through time and space. It just an eternal sequence of events, that take form and instantly dissolve into the next moment. If you resist this amazing force, tension builds into your mind, body, heart.

Michael Singer – Untethered Soul

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is a metaphor depicting the end of times in the New Testament. They describe conquest, war, hunger, and death respectively. The Gottman Institute uses this metaphor to describe communication styles that, according to their research, can predict the end of a relationship. They are: criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling.

The Gottman instititue

Never stop being curious about your partner, never assume you know how they are feeling. Ask open ended questions.

John & Julie Gottman
If you experience stress or anxiety, try naming it. For example, ‘The Watcher’. “Thanks Watcher, thanks for looking out for me. At this moment I am perfectly safe, and you can rest”. The moment you can observe a feeling, it means you are not identified with it anymore, which makes it easier for the feeling to pass.
Most relationships do not operate from a place of grace. Grace is the frequency devoid of all blame. To be in a place of grace means taking radical ownership of all our emotional experiences. The second I blame you for feeling jealous, I lose that grace in this situation. Never blame. You can still feel rage, but be graceful without blame.

We are always doing something. This comes from a feeling of not being good enough. Be the witness and pause: when you are angry, pause. Even if for a few seconds.

Tara Brach

Most people see the problem of live primarily as that of being loved, rather than of loving, of one’s capacity to love. Hence the problem for most of us is how to be loved, how to be lovable. In persuit of this we follow several paths, one is especially used by men, is to be successful, to be as powerful and rich as the social margin of one’s position permits. Another, used especially by women, is to make oneself attractive, by cultivating one’s appearance. Other ways of making oneself attractive, used by all genders, are to develop pleasant manners, interesting conversation, to be helpful, modest or inoffensive. Many of the ways to make oneself lovable as the same as those used to make oneself successful. As a matter of fact, waht most people in our culture mean by being lovable, is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.

Erich Fromm – The Art of Loving
Polite behavior is full of approval seeking disuised a consideration.

Love is not primarily a relationship to one person; it’s an attitude, an orientation of character which determiens the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one object of love. If a person loves only one person, and is indifferent to the rest of the world, their love is not love, but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet, most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not the faculty of love itself. Love is an activity, a power of the soul. This faculty can be compared to the person who wants to paint but who, instead of learning the art, claims that he just has to wait for the right object, and that they will paint beautifully when they find it.

Erich Fromm – The Art of Loving
Polite behavior is full of approval seeking disuised a consideration.

Love is union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity. Love is not taking, out of insecurity, it starts in giving – of joy, interest, understanding, humor, sadness, of all expressions and manifestations of that which is alive.

Erich Fromm – The Art of Loving
Polite behavior is full of approval seeking disuised a consideration.

To be concentrated to others, in relation to others, means primarily to be able to listen. Most people listen to others ,or even give advice, without really listening. They do not take the other person’s talk seriously, they do not take their own answers seriously either. As a result, the talk makes them tired. They are under the illusion that they would be even more tired i they listened with concentration, but the opposite is true. Any activity, if done in a concentrated fashion, makes one more awake, although afterward a natural and beneficial tiredness sets in, while every unconcentrated activity makes one sleepy, while at the same time it makes it difficult to find sleep at the end of the night.

Erich Fromm – The Art of Loving

Not expressing the truth is an act of manipulation. It’s bending reality for your own selfish gain. The consequence of losing money or a relationship from being honest, is far less than losing yourself.

Aubrey Marcus
We stress ourselves with the stories we tell ourselves. A friend invites you for coffee and then cancels. You can make up a story that you are unlovable or they are not dependable, why are people like this. That would really stress you. Or you can say “too bad” and go on with your day. A lot of our stress comes from these stories our minds make up around events that happen, and most of those are rooted in childhood trauma. Because if you’re upset because your friend didn’t go out for coffee, it’s because you have some abandonment wounds from childhood.
There is no thing that could be called me or mine. Desire is a state of the mind, perceived and named by the mind.

Find the people you want to be around the most and be around them. Invent a ridiculous excuse to spend an afternoon in their company. Go shopping for Scotch tape, watch them buy groceries, whatever. Call the person you love the most, right now, and say: “I have to buy ink cartridges for my printer. Would you like to come along?”

Alessandra Ranelli
Our personality consists of multiple selves. You can compare these to programs that are activated in different situations. For example, if you speak with your 3 year old niece, or your boss, or your ex, or your partner, you have different body language, tone of voice, posture, you say different things and you feel different emotions. What are our multiple selves, exactly? Clusters of neural firing patterns that have embedded within them certain behaviours, a feeling tone, and access to particular memories. These selves make the brain more efficient, tying together relevant functions with a neural glue that links them in the moment. The concept of “me” is much more complex than we think.
A first step to sincerely connect with someone is to lose the need to be right, respected or be in control. When you feel the urge to explain yourself, let it go. When their resistance feels disrespectful, unless they are intentionally causing you harm, don’t take it personal and let it go. When the conversation is not going how you expected, muster the courage to relax and stay present. This can lead to true connection.
Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
How does perception work? It happens in a layer of only six neurons thick. Incoming sensory data rises up into the brain through the brainstem. This is the bottom up information flow. Imagine a toddler coming face to face with a rose – he may be attracted first by its bright and red color, then sniff its fragrance. This is as close to direct perception we can get. But if we have seen a rose before, or any flower, a rich store or memories from similar experiences is activated by the rose. Prior learning sends related information down from the top 3 layers. In the middle. Bottom down input. In the middle layers 3 and 4 the information streams mingle or crash. What we become aware of is not what we sense but what emerges from this confluence.
Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
If I make myself so angry because of something someone does or says, what beliefs do I have that enable that?

How does neuroplasticity, or re-wiring of the brain, occur? Through repetition, emotional arousal, attention/focus and novelty.

Daniel Siegel – Mindsight
Fear is an experience, like everything else in life is an experience. Realizing this can reduce the fear.
Do things that you are afraid of, unless they are actually dangerous. Speak in front of a crowd, ask someone out on a date, share honest feedback. The more you’ll do it, the more you realize there is nothing to fear.

A wise being completely and totally embraces the reality, inevitability and unpredictability of death. It says “If with one breath all of this can change, then I want to live at the highest level while alive. I’m going to stop bothering the people I love. I’m going to live from the deepest part of my being”. Look how callous we are with our loved ones. We take it for granted that they’re there and that they continue to be there for us. Imagine an angel coming down and telling you, this is your last day. How would you interact with the people you meet that day? Would you worry about your hair? Try living like this every day. Why not be bold enough to regularly reflect on how you would live that last week of your life.

Michael Singer – Unthethered Soul
We have a bias towards adding, away from subtraction. We prefer to add new rules, goals etc instead of removing old ones. That’s why organisations get more and more rules, and thereby become slower and more bureaucratic.

The funny thing is, when you are able to cope with your own anger instead of venting or holding someone else responsible, you can be quite objective about yourself too. Only a very aware person can refuse to pick up the guilt and anger and say, “You’re having a tantrum. Too bad. I don’t feel the slightest desire to rescue you anymore, I don’t feel guilty.” I’m not going to hate myself for anything I have done. That’s what guilt is. I’m not going to give myself a bad feeling and whip myself for anything I have done, either right or wrong. I’m ready to analyse it and say, “Well, if I did wrong, it was in unawareness. Nobody does wrong in awareness. The enlightened person can do no wrong. The enlightened person is free.

Anthony de Mello – Awareness

The trouble with people is that they are busy fixing things they don’t understand. We are always fixing things, aren’t we? It never strikes us that things don’t need to be fixed, they really don’t. This is a great illumination. They need to be understood. If you understood them, they would change.

Anthony de Mello – Awareness

How many people are unaffected by praise or blame? That isn’t human, we say. Human means we have to be a little monkey, so everyone can twist your tail, and you do whatever you ought to be doing. But is that human? If you find me charming, it just means you are in a good mood right now, nothing more. It also means I fit your shopping list. Let me tell you something; if you ever let yourself feel good when people tell you that you’re OK, you are preparing yourself to feel bad when they tell you you’re not good. As long as you live to fulfill other people’s expectations, you better watch what you wear; how you comb your hair, whether your shoes are polished, in short: whether you live up to every damned expectation of theirs. Do you call that human?

Anthony de Mello – Awareness
You are not afraid of public speaking, being judged, being laughed at, or rejected. You are afraid of a feeling. More specifically, you are afraid of sitting with an uncomfortable feeling.

The happiness equation = your perception of events minus your expectation of how life should behave. So, reality minus expectations. The higher your expectations, the higher the chance of unhappiness.

Mo Gawdat – Solve for Happy
In our early childhood we transform from calm infants who simply enjoy the moment to those that have a constant urge to define an ever-evolving identity. Then, the addiction to maintain your image is intermixed with an addiction to attention. “I shall be noticed, whatever the cost”. We get further away from our true nature and closer to the accepted nature of our peer group. Everything we earn from the persona is spent on maintaining it, yet none of it makes us happy. Once we start playing roles to reinforce our ego, we never stop. The powerful executive: well-dressed, professional, the mom: using baby talk, going to yoga class with other moms, the artist: eccentric, stylish, the seductress: sexy dress, high heels, dreamy voice. The role of the old or young. What would happen if we all took off our masks and did the best work we could without pretending to be someone we are not? In an egoless world, we would dedicate ourselves to doing our best work, aiming for the best results, regardless of how others perceive us. For each role, there is a look, dress code, lingo, facial expression. It’s on tv every day, cut and paste. We start to believe them. When our self image is attacked or threatened in any way, our instinct engages to protect our ego, it makes us quarrel and argue, or makes us withdraw and depressed. The spear became brand name clothing, our camouflage for fitting in the environment became Facebook likes. Our expectation that others buy into our fake image is never satisfied. Often self images are negative, like the victim. You think the world is against you. When the ego is threatened, you become offended. Negative self images are driven by feelings of diminished self worth, self pity, guilt or shame. We forget that other people are not ours, and we are not theirs.
Mo Gawdat – Solve for Happy

Trying to get approval for your chosen image is a losing battle, because others will rarely approve of your ego, because they are more concerned with theirs. For their ego to be successful, yours must not, it’s a comparison game. There is no way to win. It also fails to seek approval for an image, because it is not you. You will feel deep down inside that effort was spent to gain praise for someone else. Instead, be real and find the people that like the type of person you really are. The versions of you that you don’t like are actually personas created by the ego.

Mo Gawdat – Solve for Happy

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Shakespeare – Hamlet

There are no bad teams, only bad leaders. Believe in the mission, check your ego, stay humble and keep things simple.

Jocko Willink – Extreme Ownership

Emotional and physical pain are objects in your consciousness. We can suppress them. Why is it that we usually don’t suppress emotional pain? Because, just as with physical pain, our brain uses emotional pain to keep us away from harm. The difference is that physical pain can’t be generated by our brain on demand, but it can regenerate emotional pain by using incessant thoughts. And that leads to suffering. Our brains replay every painful memory from the past and every possible scary scenario from the future over and over, in an attempt to scare us away from threats. Every new fear causes more insecurity more often. Instead of one fear to deal with, you now have many. The brain now builds an elaborate model with many scary situations to plan for, a safe model. This model actually becomes the source of our fragility. Often fear of rejection is behind it. A warm day becomes a source of fear: “I’ll sweat, and my make up will be ruined, which will make them judge them, and reject me”. We become perpetually unhappy. There are no benefits whatsoever to that fear! Actions keep us safe, not fear. But don’t deny your fear, face it. Once you know what your fear is, commit to facing it, to do that which scares you. Don’t think it, do it.

Mo Gawdat – Solve for Happy

Comparing ourselves with others and looking at the things they have more of, forgetting all of the things we have more of. Don’t do it. We try to assess how much father we have to go in order to catch up with those who lead the pack. We mistakenly think we are not good enough until we are ahead. Finally, we think that life is unfair to us in comparison to others – the thought makes us suffer.

Mo Gawdat – Solve for Happy

From the point of view of survival, “I am bad” is a safer perspective than “my parents are unreliable and may abandon me”. It’s better for the child to feel defective than to realise the attachment figures, even with the best intentions are unable to give the child everything it needs. This leads to feelings of not being good enough later in life.

Daniel Siegel – Mindsight

How does perception work? It happens in a layer of only six neurons thick. Incoming sensory data rises up into the brain through the brainstem. This is the bottom up information flow. Imagine a toddler coming face to face with a rose – he may be attracted first by its bright and red color, then sniff its fragrance. This is as close to direct perception we can get. But if we have seen a rose before, or any flower, a rich store or memories from similar experiences is activated by the rose. Prior learning sends related information down from the top 3 layers. In the middle. Bottom down input. In the middle layers 3 and 4 the information streams mingle or crash. What we become aware of is not what we sense but what emerges from this confluence.

Daniel Siegel – Mindsight
Love your life, appreciate it. Follow your gut feelings. You don’t have to like everything.
The difference between being kind and pleasing is the motivation. Being kind is a form of altruism, pleasing is a form of dependency. One gives to others to celebrate the generous part of oneself, the act of helping others brings pleasure, no return is needed or sought. Pleasing or helping others is done with the expectation of getting something back in return, it’s a transaction. It’s also a form of dependency, namely the search for validation. People help others to get validation that they are good people. When the recognition is not given, pleasing backfires
Life is meant to be challenging. Without challenges you can’t evolve.
Everything you think other people think about you, you think about yourself.

Until you have some capacity to be mindful, you have no choice but to be lost in every next thought that arises. You can’t notice thought as thought, it just feels like you. So therefore, you are hostage to whatever the emotional or behavioural consequences of those thoughts are. If they are angry thoughts, you are angry. If they are desire thoughts, you’re filled with desire. Every time you’re lost in thought, you’re very likely telling yourself a story for the 15th time that you don’t have the decency to find boring, right? Just imagine what it would sound like if you could broadcast your thoughts on a speaker, it would be mortifying. These are desperately boring, repetitive rehearsals of past conversations and anxieties about the future and meaningless judgements and observations. And in each moment that we don’t notice a thought as a thought, we are deluded about what has happened. It’s created this feeling of self that is a misconstrual of what consciousness is actually like, and it’s created in most cases a kind of emotional emergency, which is our lives and all the things we are worrying about. But worry solves absolutely nothing. We have no control over our thoughts whatsoever. They just pop up, there is nothing we can do about this. The problem is not thoughts themselves but the state of thinking without knowing that one is thinking. The goal is to awaken from our trance of discursive thinking, and from the habit of ceaselessly grasping at the pleasant and recoiling from the unpleasant, so that we can enjoy a mind that is undisturbed by worry, merely open like the sky, and effortlessly aware of the flow of experience in the present. How to meditate? 1) Sit comfortably, erect, crosslegged of on a chair. 2) Allow your attention to rest in the mere sensation of breathing. Pay attention to wherever you feel the breath most clearly. 3) Allow your attention to rest in the mere sensation of breathing 4) Every time your mind wanders in thought, gently return it to the sensation of breathing 5) if you notice other perceptions and sensations (sounds, objects), simply notice them as they emerge in the field of awareness, and return to the sensation of breathing 7) the moment you observe you have been lost in thought, notice the present thought itself as an object of awareness, and return to the breathing 9) continue in this way until you can merely witness all objects of consciousness – sounds, visuals, thoughts, as they arise and pass away.

Sam Harris

Life is about exchanging ideas and expanding your mind.

Harry Lloyd

You are what you believe in. You become that which you believe you can become.

Bhagavad Gita

You have the right to work, but never the outcome of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction.

Bhagavad Gita

All that we are is the result of what we have thought. We are made of our thoughts, we are molded by our thoughts. As we think, so we become.

Buddha
If you have an argument, it means there is a mental position you have identified with. If there is no mental position you have identified with, there can be no argument. You can still discuss the practicalities of what you discuss, but don’t become identified with the position. 
Being fully engaged in what you are doing, not thinking happy thoughts, is the strongest predictor for feeling happy.
Andrew Huberman
Dont make a distinction between work and play, and don’t think for a moment you can’t have fun at work.
Alan Watts
You can only connect to others if you can first connect to yourself, to your body and emotions.
A valuable exercise to clear the air between two people. Sit opposite of each other and answer these 2 questions: 1) What prevents me from reaching out to you is… 2) What attracts me in reaching out to you is..

Most people, even most yoga practitioners, are under the impression that asanas are merely physical and external. This is untrue. The goal is to keep the organs of action and senses of perception on the mind, and the mind focuses towards the core. Our initial commitment or passion lifts itself, through concentration, to the level of total absorption. Dharana, or concentration, is the art of reducing the interruptions of the mind and ultimately eliminating them completely, so they the knower and the known become one. There are certain parts more suitable to focus concentration on, like the navel, the de ter of the head, tip of the nose or tongue, the heart. Meditation is a steady, continuous flow of attention towards one point or region, without interruption or intervention. Maintaining the same intensity awareness, the attentive awareness moves from one pointed concentration to no pointed awareness, leading to total absorption (we call it flow). Imagine contemplating a diamond. One at first sees with great clarity the gem itself, gradually one becomes more aware of the light glowing from its centre, as awareness of the light grows, awareness of the stone as an object diminishes. Then there is only brightness, no source, no object. When the light is everywhere, there is absorption (samadhi). This leads consciousness towards the soul.

B.K.S. Iyengar
The human soul doesn’t want to be advised, fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed – to be seen, heard, and companioned exactly as it is. When we make that kind of deep bow to the soul of a suffering person, our respect reinforces the souls healing process, the only resources that can help the sufferer make it through.

Because we listen autobiographically, we tend to do this in 4 different ways: to evaluate (do I agree or not?), to probe (we ask questions from our own frame of reference), we advise (we give counsel based on our own experience) or we interpret (we try to figure people out based on our own motives). If I’m trying to evaluate everything someone says, how free do they feel when speaking? And how does it feel when I probe, by asking twenty questions? Its autobiographical, it controls and invades. It’s also logical, and the language of logic is different than that of emotion and sentiment. Constant probing is why parents often don’t connect well with their children. How are you? What’s been happening at school? Any plans for the weekend? The kid doesn’t open up because parents keep giving advice and I told you so’s.

Stephen Covey
Try seeing other people without any need to change them. Even if you have a very light wish that they change a tiny bit, it awakens in them on a very unconscious level a resistance, a subtle sense of paranoia. See relationships with people as your yoga. The much less you want from other people the more available they are. Be a safe space for other people. What is that? It means not having an agenda
Ram Dass

We remember insults and injuries the best. The adrenaline that we secrete to defend against potential threats helps to engrave those incidents into our minds. Even if the content of the remark fades, our dislike for the person that made it usually persists. The more adrenaline you secrete, the more precise the memory will be. That’s why traumatic events are etched into our memories.

Bessel van der Kolk – The Body Keeps The Score

Neuroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experiences and learning to befriend what is going on inside ourselves. 80% of the fibers of the vagus nerve (which connects the brain to many internal organs) are afferent; that is, they run from the body into the brain. This means that we can directly train our arousal system by the way we breathe, chant, and move, a principe that has been utilised since time immemorial in places like China and India, but is suspiciously eyed as ‘alternative’ in mainstream culture. Learning how to breathe calmly and remaining in a state of relative physical relaxation is an essential tool for recovery. When you get angry and deliberately take a few slow deep breaths, you will feel the effects of the parasympathetic break on your arousal. The more you stay focussed on your breathing, the more you will benefit, particularly if you pay attention until the very end of your outbreath and then wait a moment before you inhale again. Body awareness puts us in touch with our inner world, the landscape or our organism. Simply noticing our annoyance, nervousness or anxiety immediately helps us shift our perspective and opens up new options other than our automatic habitual reactions. In order to change you need to open yourself to your inner experience.

Bessel van der Kolk – The Body Keeps The Score

The rational part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, is not connected to our emotional brain, including the amygdala. The self-awareness center of our brain, is connected to our emotional brain. Only the self-awareness part of our brain can change our emotional brain. Rational understanding cannot, there is no link. We can get past the slipperiness of words by engaging the self observing, body based system, which speaks through sensations, tone of voice and body tensions. Being able to perceive visceral sensations is the very foundation of emotional awareness. If a patient tells me that he was eight when his father deserted him, I am likely to stop and ask him to check in with himself. What happens inside when he tells me about that boy who never saw his father again? Where is it registered in the body? When you activate your gut feelings and listen to your heartbreak – when you follow the interceptive pathways to your innermost recesses – things begin to change.

Bessel van der Kolk – The Body Keeps The Score

It is much more productive to see agression or depression, arrogance or passivity, as learned behaviour: somewhere along the line the patient came to believe that the only way to survive was to be tough, cunning, absent or by giving up.

Bessel van der Kolk – The Body Keeps The Score
Modern neuroscience has confirmed the notion of the mind as a kind of society. The mind is composed of semi autonomous functioning modules, each of which has a special role. There are literally several selves, and they no not necessarily converse with eachother. Beneath the surface of the protective parts of trauma survivors there exists an undamaged essence, a Self that is confident, curious, calm. A Self that has been sheltered from destruction by the various protectors that have emerged in their efforts to ensure survival. Once those protectors trust that it is safe to separate, the Self will spontaneously emerge, and the pets can be enlisted in the healing process. Try to cultivate a relationship between the Self and the protectors. Identifying the protectors makes them less intimidating and overwhelming. Ask the protectors to step back during moments of reflection so we can see what it is protecting. When this is done repeatedly, the parts begin to unblend from the Self and make space for self observation. From this stable situation you can begin constructive dialogues with the protectors. Try to identify the protector/part involved in the current problem, like feeling worthless or abandoned. Ask: what inside me feels that way? An image may come to mind. Maybe the depressed part looks like an abandoned child or an aging man. Ask: how do you feel toward that part? This separates the Self from the protector. Be inquisitive, try to understand the part better. Wonder how old it is, why it feels that way etc. Once you manifest a critical mass of Self, these dialogues happen spontaneously.
Bessel van der Kolk – The Body Keeps The Score