If you wanted to make the biggest leap up… happiness, health, wealth, love…
What do you think you’d grow?
Some measures are easier to grow than others.
Some measures, like everywhere in life, will grow easily, but overall their effect will be small.
While others create an avalanche-like result when you grow them even just a little bit..
Mental toughness assessment: is that a move? A technique? Can it be learned?
Mental toughness… is it really needed, and if it is, how do you develop into a mentally tough person?
One of my starting point measurements, the Twitchy Little Bastard score is about mental toughness.
99% of the people I measure have a TLB 1… meaning that they have NO mental toughness. Meaning that at the moment of threat, discomfort, challenge, they make a beeline to something easy, pleasurable, and safe.
But all the things you have ever wanted are on the other side of difficult, uncomfortable, challenging, hard, or maybe even painful.
What’s the Truth about You? What is the most important faculty in raising in your vibration?
I am bringing this post forward given that I have a workshop coming up teaching about the same topic… https://www.whatsthetruthaboutyou.com/
Is it how good a person you are? No.
Is it how many times you come to a call? No.
I hate to be the one telling you this… but what decides your vibration is how well you control your attention.
What operates your attention is either you or everything else.
You are either inner powered, or outer powered, powered by your emotions, powered by your feelings, by circumstance, by the voices, by the memes, by your schedule, by your phone, by social media.
This is an article I copied from someone’s blog. This article is a great example of how meditation is taught.
Meditation is an ancient technique, and its main purpose was to gain insight into life, into nature, into how the world works through going withing and upwards.
It wasn’t practiced to get healthy, to get exercise, to calm down, to deal with stress. The mindset that you want something and use meditation to get it firmly anchors you in the horizontal plane, where your wants and your likes and dislikes live.
Real meditation is to get you to the vertical plane, where your wants, likes and dislikes are just noise. Where you don’t need anything, because you live in the domain of being, the domain of Human Being.
That doesn’t mean you don’t do, and that doesn’t mean you don’t like or dislike. It only means: you don’t live through those likes and dislikes: you live through being, experiencing the likes and dislikes. No emotional attachment.
This is what I teach, and this is what is possible: a glorious way to live. Now, here is the “borrowed article” you wanted to read. Enjoy.
While it may be next to impossible to find a quiet place for meditation, a constant sense of tranquility is essential to recharge and relax our minds. What follows are simple meditation techniques that you can perform at your own convenience.
Try these two simple meditation techniques that you can do on your own, without the help of a professional or expert.
1. Vipassana: The Art of Conscious Breathing.
Considered the easiest meditation technique, Vipassana simply requires you to be ‘aware of your breathing’. This meditation technique traces its root to Gautama Buddha who follows the philosophy referred to as the “Golden Mean”. He believes that going extreme is not necessary, be it in terms of fasting or in prayer. Vipassana is the perfect type of meditation for the modern man because it can be done anywhere, at any time.
Breathing is among the most natural process in our body that we can easily be aware of. It is also considered to be the sacred link between our body and our soul.
In Vipassana, the rule is simple: just be aware of your breathing process. Do not control it, but feel your breath as the air enters your body and exits. (Vipassana should not be confused with ‘Pranayam’, a breathing exercise taught in yoga which controls breath movements.)
In meditating using the technique of Vipassana, you should simply ‘watch your breath’. Although you can do this anywhere, it is highly advised that you set a specific time and place to undergo this meditation daily.
2. Mantra Meditation: A Process of Positive Reinforcement.
Feeding our minds with optimistic thoughts does eventually lead to positive results. Mantras are words or phrases that you chant, act as the focal point for the meditation. It has been used as early as the time before the popularity and rise of Buddhism. It is considered to be an ancient meditation technique
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Turning points: I want to get really good at this!
As an Expanding Human Being, you NEVER arrive… Expanding Human Being is not a destination, it is a relationship to Life. An attitude. Learned to the level where it is undistinguishable from inner nature.
I am an Expanding Human Being, sometimes I grow like a weed, sometimes, for months, I languish… hibernate.
With regards to growing my business, I have been a wannabe forever. Trying this and trying that, but never actually doing it.
About five minutes ago I heard myself whispering to myself: “I want to be really good at this!” meaning a business growing method I bought almost two years ago, but abandoned it because I didn’t quite had the energy to even understand how to use it properly.
I am republishing this article, because distinguishing is the most missing thing for humans at this day and age.
When I test people in the starting point measurement, the number that relates to this is the clarity score: how many words they can use accurately. I won’t explain why they are connected… just know that when you can’t hear and can’t see, your clarity is about the same as a blind person’s… with an ear muff…
It’s a rare opportunity to go from innocent infant to all-seeing adult, being able to observe it at the same time.
When I first did the Landmark Forum, the koan of the session was: for you everything is the same as everything else, except that not always.
When you are an infant, for you everything is the same as everything else… no distinctions. No distinction between your body and the environment. You are just as ready to suck on your feet as you are ready to suck on someone else’s finger.
From time to time you’ll see something strange, like you reach out, as always, and your hands remain empty: the object you reach for is out of reach…
You learn the world, your world, slowly, and experientially. Through seeing, hearing, touching, tasting… like a baby.
Life is like a spiral staircase… Every problem, every issue will come back to be addressed on a hopefully higher level… Issue like getting unstuck.
I once read a story about Gandhi. A woman came to him with his child. He asked Gandhi to tell the child that eating sugar is bad for him.
Gandhi listened, and then said: please come back in two weeks.
The woman and the child left… and supposedly traveled for days to get home, and then come back again.
They came in, and Gandhi simply said to the child: Don’t eat sugar. It’s bad for you.
The woman piped up: why couldn’t you say that a week ago?
Gandhi answered: Two weeks ago I myself was eating sugar…
This is the story that came up for me this morning.
I am in the middle of a two-day course I am taking (the recordings, of course). A course that teaches people about sales, and why people buy and why people don’t buy. Fascinating, insightful. Fantastic insights already…
I suddenly understand why I bought a course to learn how to put up virtual summits, and yet decided that I am not going to do it. It was an expensive course. Oy.
What I’ve gleaned I had been unfamiliar with.
The belief that I can’t do it, that if I tried to do it it would be a disaster.
There have been things before, things I bought but didn’t even try, but never before had I the clarity that a belief tells me that I can or can’t do.
Why did it come up now? Aren’t you curious?
For 70 odd years it didn’t come up, and suddenly it is there in all its ‘glory’… Why now?
And suddenly I saw: it came up like Gandhi’s sugar… Until I go through myself, it is inauthentic for me to teach it.
A few weeks ago I taught that if you look at life and everything in it as a process, you can get anywhere with enough desire to get there.
I said that as you go through a carefully crafted process, you reshape yourself and your beliefs…
One of my students who has never done anything in his life and that is how he knows himself promptly signed up to a program where I promise to teach that process…
He was really excited. Then. Then proceeded never to do the process. I think he didn’t hear it… I think maybe he already forgot that there is such a process.
If you want something, but you don’t do anything towards it, of course you won’t have it.
Do all courses, or most courses take you through a process to change who you are for yourself?
I don’t think so. And most people whose beliefs say they can’t do something, end up living their entire lives that way.
Now, back to Gandhi.
Gandhi didn’t feel right to tell a child to do something that he himself didn’t do. So he took two weeks to stop eating sweets and then he asked someone to do something that he had done himself: stop eating sugar.
I think my inner guidance threw up this belief, made it visible, so I can first have compassion for my student, and second go through the process of overcoming it, if I have big enough desire for what it would give
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In some way I was born to be one of these blind chickens. It used to take me conscious and deliberate thought not to close down a looking process, not to jump into a conclusion. It did not happen without deliberate thought.
And when I forgot, or I was too tired, or when I was on a roll… god save me from the consequences. My life, my business, my relationships could have been twice, three times as good had I had the presence of mind of remembering not to jump into conclusions all the time.
But there is another aspect, or maybe two?
And that is agenda.
I just watched on youtube the impassioned speech of the whistle blower in Larry Nassar sexual abuse trial.
The person, since her abuse, became a lawyer, has her own children.
The interesting thing about the speech was that its words were powerful, but she had an agenda… and that killed it for me, made me cringe: she wanted to impress.
Now, that is one of the agendas that you want to notice.
Are you speaking to impress? To be considered smart, knowledgeable, fast, or whatever the hell you are pretending? Are you pretending to others, or are you pretending for your own sake?
In the invisible 53, I speak about the invisible moves and games people play.
We could say that there is only one game … a racket. It is recognized by seeing that you have a payoff: making yourself look better than you are, smarter, etc… and a cost; giving up being all you can be.
Obviously, speaking for effect is a racket. And the real cost is that after saying what you said, now you cannot do what there is to do… because now it would negate the talking… and make you look bad.
And all the talk about becoming all you can be, having this and having that becomes impossible for you… because now you can’t do what you need to do.
And that is a horrible price to pay.
The other day someone posted a question that triggered a way of looking that is important:
Here is the question: Sophie, I’ve been teaching these steps to my children too. Hoping maybe they can catch it earlier on and start practicing hearing the voices and memes.
How do you make it a spiritual practice where you consciously do it 24/7 without forgetting it? Do you have a certain method you apply for each practice? I am thinking maybe putting few reminders in my phone to start with until it becomes a habit.
Some soul corrections are very delusional. The person fancies themselves other than they are. It is the voices… The voices that tell you you are better than you are. So what is asking the questions is the voices of the delusional self.
This particular person is a good example: when I muscle test how much of the time she is unconscious, asleep, living in the bull’s ear, safely tucked away in an imaginary world created by the voices… the muscle test says: 99%.
Gurjieff was a 20th Century philosopher and “guru”. His school is still operational, and his school still produces people who believe they are
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This is an old article. On compassion.
I dare to disagree: compassion is not a feeling, compassion is not an emotion. It is a capacity.
It is a human capacity to recognize the other person as a person like you, recognize their state as a state you have seen or experienced, and, surprise, compassion is a willingness to help the person through the situation, inner or outer, to the other side, where they can be well.
The way most people relate to compassion, is more like pity. A superiority. A leaning down to another.
No recognition of the sameness, only the difference: I am better off, I am better, I am lucky.
Compassion is rather a partnership, albeit temporary. But that is, probably, too much to ask of today’s humans… you?
When you feel compassion for someone, how does it feel to you? Does it feel sad, scary, loving, or a mixture? Think about it before you read on. When was the last time you felt compassion? Who were you with? Who was it for? What was happening to them? What did you feel toward them?
Compassion has a different definition in Asia than it does in the U.S., and frankly, I like Asia’s take on it much better. The primary difference is that in the U.S., we can have compassion for others, but not normally toward ourselves. In Asia, the term compassion includes self-love and love for others. I think this is a critical distinction.
I like to define compassion differently than everyone else. Compassion is one of the highest emotions we can experience. It is 100% pure unselfish love. In my definition of compassion, there is no fear. There is no pity. There is no sadness. There is only positive love in the highest vibration. It helps others far more to project our highest positive emotion rather than to spread our negative emotions of fear, sadness, and pity.
And this takes practice to perfect.
In the U.S., we’re not even too used to “practicing” our emotions. They kind of just ooze out of us. Once we start practicing compassion, we can get really awesome at it. We might be lifting the 20 pounder at the beginning, but once we start exercising regularly, we can lift more and more. The benefit of practicing is that we feel more and more love each time. The feeling of love gets more intense, and that feels good.
Here are five steps to experience compassion more intensely than you ever have before.
Focus on yourself. Center and ground yourself. If you feel afraid, deal with that first before projecting your emotions on others. Compassion is not a negative emotion. Sending compassion because you are having a self-pity party about “what if it happened to me” is not a good reason for sending compassion.
Fill yourself with compassion first. Most of us need to work on this far more than we realize!
If you need help being more intentional about your emotions, draw from the past: bring to mind a time when you felt tremendous strength, and re-live that emotion through savoring.
Focus on the person you are s
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What you want the next level of evolution to be
If you take a close look at your fantasy of what it’s like to be “enlightened”, where you want to be, you’ll probably imagine white robes, no pain, no illness, no anger, no fear, no anxiety.
You won’t see, in your imaginary ideal world, work, you won’t see controlling spouses, or dirty dishes piling up, teenagers mouthing off, smog, car pile-ups, murder, or traffic jams.
I don’t want to continue, because the list is endless… in short:
You don’t see, in that ideal world, your life and yourself as human.
You want to reach the next level of evolution by ceasing being human. The way pictures show heaven… tell me if I am wrong.
What clued me in, you ask? Thank you for asking.
