Rejoicing In Your Self

The guru says:

Don’t forget to think of all the good things about your life while you are working for improvements. We don’t want the search for a better life to mean only focusing on what needs to be changed. Some things about yourself are cause for rejoicing. Do it, for goodness’ sake.

Before embarking on a mission to extend the values of your life, why not take stock of what you have got? Even in its poorest phase, life has many blessings. The soldiers in the Hell of mud and slaughter in the trenches of World War 1 were still able to find poetry about poppies, courage and memories of home. Do not worry that this course is about merely distracting you from the problems that need solving; we intend to show you how to deal with the difficulties. But by the same rationale, it would be wrong to draw your attention away from the good things in your life. That would be equally false and misleading.

As soon as is convenient after reading this section, get yourself some paper or a note book and start writing:

Write down all the good things you can think of in your life right now. You don’t have to do the New Agey thing of telling yourself that horrible things are really good for you (“All miseries are just lessons” and that stuff). List genuine pleasures, quiet satisfactions and the many many things that you surely have achieved in your life. Count your blessings, as the Christians say. Well, why not?

It’s a god idea to take inventory in this way. Because it helps to balance your life and sanity is mainly about being balanced: right brain-left brain; positive and negative; male-female; yin and yang. There are things you want to change; we’ll talk about that in other sections. But write down the things that you wouldn’t want to change. Continue reading

Re-Formatting Your Life to a Clean Hard Drive

Keith Scott-Mumby MD, PhD

You are tired of the existing conditions. You want more out of life—MUCH MUCH MORE, for yourself, your family and loved ones—and better things for everyone around you. In short a better world.

You want to be happy.

You want your dreams to start coming true. You want an end to economic slavery and money to start to flow in your life— not a trickle that dried up every time you feel you are getting somewhere— a real torrent, a healing river of money that enables you to be, do and have all the things that you promised yourself.

You haven’t given up; that’s the key. You are still in the game. There is always the hope of a brighter future. You know it’s out there somewhere, if only you can find the right strategies to move forwards to your dream.

Not true? Well then, you are reading the wrong blog! Switch to another. May I suggest something from the psychology shelf at the bookstore, a book that explains the pathetic inadequacy of depressed and negative people, how it isn’t really their fault but the world is somehow against them…

If it is true, congratulations! You have separated from the vast herd of people who live average and unrewarding lives–with unreal hope, no dreams and little drive. For them, existence is a matter of being tossed around by Fate and circumstances, until on some dim and distant day in the future they quietly sink out of sight, a mere ripple on the surface of life’s ocean that soon vanishes.

You couldn’t even call that living. That’s existing.

If finding your dreams, living your bliss, is what you want, then you are reading what could be the most influential manual of your life. In fact it isn’t just a manual. It’s a tool— to be exact, a collection of tools, researched, developed and in some cases rewritten in a newer context by a medical doctor. Is that relevant? Well doctors are supposed to heal lives.

There is nothing quite so healing as effective knowledge which will overcome the canker of failures and loss. But there is another, more important, point to this. You may think that the only people who can uncover issues of success are those at the top. In fact the person you want to listen to is not a saint or a celebrity but someone who has walked the talk, made all the mistakes and gained the knowledge first hand, by trial and error.

If he or she can write or teach it well, so much the better.

The real issue is not about getting rich or famous, or even living to a hundred. It’s about personal achievement–and that means different things to different people. You

These tools are to enable you to gain the certainty and knowledge to fulfill all aspects of attaining success, whether you want fame, fortune or happiness (or all three, if you’ve a mind for it). With its avalanche of inviting and razor-sharp strategies, you will be able to identify your REAL dream from amongst all the illusions and capture it into concrete steps which will transform your future from an endless vague horizon to a sharply focused map, with everything you need to succeed marked along the way.

It isn’t a “universal plan”. You are too singular and individual for that. It shows you how to capture your future, neatly and uniquely, take control of your life and start moving forwards to that dream. It tells you what you MUST DO, what is merely accessory, what you MUST NOT DO and finally how to recognize what is unimportant, irrelevant and distracting.

Seize Full Control Of Your Life

You can dream all you like about happiness, wealth, power, prestige, success– but unless you have an integrated action plan to make it all come about, you can’t possibly succeed.

Thoughts change nothing, without being linked to action.  All the motivational books in the world won’t help you get from A to B. Travel guides describing the attractions of the place you want to go are merely rhapsodizing about being there. What you need is a map, a travel timetable, an itinerary and some means of transport. If you are a true adventurer, poring over maps and route-finding is every bit as exciting as travel.

My 10-CD project “How To Make Any Dream Come True” (re-released soon!) will show you how to turn any dream into a meaningful reality, by giving you a standardized, effective means of creating plans that work, complete with steps, prioritization and cross-feeding of stages.

Done properly, it cannot fail to turn what you want into reality.

It is a framework into which you can project all your ideas. It will give scope, order and consistency to your life from this point onwards.

But it is still a plan you have to DO, not just think about.

How Do You Know You Are Happy?

Keith Scott-Mumby MD, PhD

Happiness is a critical issue for Man. It touches on the subject of success. How then can we define it?

Well, it feels good; it modulates stress and fear; it seems somehow right; it brings self-worth and rationality; it has a kind of warmth and comfortableness. Beyond that, it gets increasingly hard to define. One of the questions we use in the workshops is “How do you know when you are happy?”

In other words, what does it feel like? What mental and bodily signals tell you that you are happy? Most people have never stopped to think about this. You can try and extend this description of qualities for yourself: see how many more you can come up with. Continue reading

Harvesting Good – The Deeper Philosophy

I have a deep philosophical question for you:

If you want to feel happier should you:

  • Put up with the experiences you are having and change how you feel about them?
  • Or should you change the experiences into something better, so there is an external reason to feel happier?

Should a man without money persuade himself it is OK to be poor? Or should he go out and get enough money to feel glad about life? [We are brainwashed in our Christian culture to view poverty as desirable so maybe this isn’t an ideal example.]

What about a man who is overweight, unfit and unable to enjoy zestful pursuits? Should he “put up with” this state of health and feel good about himself? Die young as a result? Or start a programme and re-capture some his lost vitality?

Well the answer, I’m sure, is aspects of both. You don’t need to let yourself feel bad about what you’ve got. But the second choice has always seemed more appealing to me. You must try to better the environment you are in. I consider it a law of good living. To accept what you’ve got is a kind of defeatism, a limitation. It is a circumscribed or Conditional Happiness.

It’s perfectly fine to feel good about where you are; it need not stifle the ambition to do better! By all means enjoy the present; but don’t forget to carve yourself a bright and beautiful future! Actually, happiness is found in both aspects of this maxim. Continue reading

Has Happiness Become a Science or is it a Question of Luck?

by Gabriella Kortsch

Happiness and Our Bodies

Are we born more prone to be happy or sad? Is it a question of genes? Does our environment make a difference? Our socio-economic status, the level of our intelligence, our emotional satisfaction, or the state of our physical health? Or could it be that we can decide how happy or unhappy we are?

According to recent psychological research, people who show the highest results in tests of happiness, optimism and contentment

  • Develop about 50% more anti-bodies than average when subjected to flu vaccines
  • Have a reduced risk of cardio-vascular disease
  • Show a lower index of pulmonary disease
  • Show a lower incidence of diabetes
  • Have less hypertension than individuals who are less content
  • And as indicated in a 2004 study carried out in Holland, further reduced their risk of death by 50% over a period of nine years

Clearly, the neurochemistry of happiness, in other words, how the brain looks and reacts if you are happy, has a great deal to say about your physical health and even the length of your life. Continue reading