Zen Tools - Insights & Features
How To Stay Connected To Your True Source Of Power
"Your ego's desire to be in control, your ego usurping the role of your higher self, disconnects you from your true source of power."
A stone of help is a constant reminder to stay connected to your true source of power. The purpose of your creating stones of help is to enable multiple points of contact with these reminders throughout the day and, over time, reinforcing these truths in your mind.
It is your alignment with this source that is the dynamic that will pull you through this difficult situation.
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Dying To Self - To Gain All Give All
"If You Want To Be Given Everything - Give Everything Up". “Tao Te Ching”
Your ego is essential and does a wonderful job of running things for you and marshalling your mental and emotional resources to work for you.
But your inner "Windows 10" has one big fatal flaw, it creates and sustains the delusion that it is who you really are.
Dropping the ego is a practice that occurs naturally when you quieten your mind and shift your focus away from yourself in mindfulness practice, the practice of gratitude, or indeed any meditation practice that allows for space between the stream of thoughts and for consciousness to arise.
My Experience Of Mindfulness In Situations Of Imposed Change
I found that the biggest key to all this is to behave and respond in ways that may seem completely alien to you by cultivating a very deep acceptance of what is.
Many years ago my fortunes had changed and I was not working and experiencing a very hard time financially with all the obvious pressures associated with that. I became exhausted and completely run down. I found it hard to control my thoughts.
I realise that I had to do something – fast or I was going to be ill or worse…
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The Balanced Life
The Key To Keeping Your Balance Is Knowing When You Lost It.
The balanced life is one where you recognise the full spectrum of possible responses and have develop sufficient experience, insight and self-awareness to navigate yourself to the most appropriate position on that spectrum for the specific circumstances that you are experiencing.
In this article we are going to offer 5 key pointers as what this means in practice and how to achieve it.
Self Motivation - How To Motivate Yourself In Tough Times
Our focus here is going to be on the heavy duty / big picture level motivation that you need to get you through tough times often involving imposed change that have large and perhaps dramatic impacts on your life.
Here's the scenario: your company has just announced that it is downsizing and you are seriously concerned that this might include you...
If you're self employed or run your own business maybe you've just heard that a major customer or client who owes you a lot of money has gone bust gone bust...
You know what I am talking about - you may be experiencing this right now? I totally empathise with you, I do know how this feels.
Here are 3 key self motivation tips:
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Your Higher Self - Your Hardwired Portal To The Universe
Think of your conscious mind as a ship floating on the ocean of your subconscious mind, and above is the sky of your higher consciousness.
When things are tough and you are starting to think that no one else get this much hassle, when you have difficulty sleeping and your mind keeps going over things looking for an answer, when you know the answer’s there but no matter how hard you try or how often you ask for help you just can’t find it - this is the time to relax and trust your higher self - here's how to do that...
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How Can I Change My Mind?
Whilst it is true that we can be taught, generally we won't change.
Your mind is either working for you or, more typically, working against you.
There is a part of your mind that is very happy with how things are and that doesn't want to change. It is hard to see because it is unconscious.
So the first challenge is figuring out what exactly is going on in your unconscious mind and then secondly knowing how to deal with that resistance in such a way that your unconscious mind starts working for you rather than against you.
Here is a framework in 4 key stages and with 10 steps within these stages to enable you to change your mind:
Managing Personal Change Is Hard - Here's How You CAN Make It Work
Whilst it is true that we can be taught, generally we won't change.
You can waste years of your life (as I have done) and spend a fortune in various forms of introspection, analysis and therapy digging and delving into how and why you think and feel as you do - and becoming very well informed.
Please don’t get me wrong, there can be value in doing this – for a while. But ultimately there comes a point when we want to move beyond all the information about why we think and feel as we do and we just want a practical solution - we want to change.
Here's how to change:
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Change Comes From Within
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
For much of my life I didn't understand that change comes from within, I used to believe that change was something that happened to me in response to an external event.
Eventually I came to realise the truth of Carl Jung's famous saying quoted above.
People pick up on our energy levels – the signals that we are sending out. Once we change those signals, other people will feel it and their responses will change.
Change comes from within because it's all to do with our dominant inner energy state.
How Things Are - The Inbuilt Design Flaw
This is the nature of things.
This is how things are.
Nobody has the perfect life.
We all struggle and strive to attain health, wealth and personal happiness. Yet these three big areas: our health, our wealth and our relationships are where we all get "hung out to dry" – sooner or later.
Suffering is an integral part of the human condition. There are times when there is nothing more we can do to alleviate it. In these circumstances we have two powerful options: we can RESIST it OR we can ACCEPT it.
Freeing Yourself From Your Mind
Freeing yourself from your mind is the primary objective of all mindfulness meditation practice.
One of the most effective things we can do when we see the gathering storm of our habitual tendencies is the practice of pausing, or creating a gap.
We stop and take three conscious breaths, and the world has a chance to open up to us in that gap. We allow space into our state of mind. Meditation practice itself is a way to create gaps.
Freeing yourself from your mind - here's how with 6 key mindfulness practices outlined by Eckhart Tolle in "The Power of Now".
The Power Of Rituals
The power of rituals is not so much about what you do, it's about the meaning you give to what you do.
It is not a situation, activity or an event that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to that experience.
What is a ritual? A ritual is a way of behaving, or a series of actions, which you carry out regularly in a specific situation or at a specific time. You do this in a predetermined manner or fixed sequence.
The point of the ritual is to remember and celebrate something that is significant and has meaning to you.
Generativity - What Impact Will You Leave In The Lives Of Others?
Generativity has been defined as the propensity and willingness to engage in acts that promote the well being of younger generations as a way of ensuring the long-term survival of the species.
Generativity ocurs when a person shifts his/her energy to care for a change which will help the generations to come, it can also be seen as ‘making your mark on the world’ by caring for others and accomplishing something beyond yourself for making this world a better place.
The big question is this: What difference will you make? What impact will you leave in the lives of others?"
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The Redemptive Self - Fact or Fantasy?
Stories of redemption are some of the most powerful ways to express American identity and all that it can entail, from pain and anguish to joy and fulfillment.
"The Redemptive Self" is the book, authored by Professor Dan P. McAdams, that coined the phrase. McAdams has been at the forefront of efforts to apply narrative theory to the study of personality psychology.
But how realistic is all this? I want to propose an alternative and what I believe to be a more realistic and holistic view: Focus on things you can control. Use the power of framing. Apply the law of response and outcome.
Beyond Beliefs - How To Be Free From Views And Words
Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas.
Over the past century, countless millions have been killed and genocides have been committed in the name of various political beliefs: the Maoist and Stalinist purges, the killing fields of Cambodia, Armenia, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, the thousands of lynchings by the Klu Klux Klan in the southern States of the US.
The list is endless, and in all cases: Believing themselves to be right, clinging to their beliefs, to the point of killing to defend their view of the rightness of their position.
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Getting Things Done - Your Mind Is For Having Ideas, Not Holding Them
A process for increasing your own productivity and for bringing order and action to your chaotic and random personal world.
“Getting Things Done” is a personal productivity methodology based on storing, tracking, and retrieving the information related to the things that you need to get done.
If you don't use some of personal system of dealing with the mass of things that you need to deal with you will soon accumulate a mass of unresolved "things to do" and all of the attendant stress and hassle that goes with that.
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Social Contagion - You Become The Company You Keep
You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.
Social contagion at the physical level is something that we have all gone to great lengths to avoid during the recent Covid-19 pandemic.
With the phased lifting of the lockdown, and the resumption of social contact we are now increasingly exposed to another threat, another form of contagion.
This renewed threat is known as emotional contagion, which is the effect and impact of other people's emotions on our own dominant emotional state.
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The Power Pause - Regain Your Balance And Manifest Your Intentions
"The Three Minute Power Pause" is a very simple but powerful technique developed and taught by John Harricharan.
It relieves stress and anxiety, helps you regain your balance and manifest your intentions.
This is an excellent tool for managing your energy state, and it is about applying the positive energy of gratitude towards your future intentions.
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Adopting The Scout Mindset - Julia Galef
“Do you have the scout mindset and yearn to see the world as clearly as you possibly can?”
Julia Galef is a writer and public speaker on the topics of rationality, science, technology, and design. Applied rationality is her speciality and she asks the question:
A Masterclass In Self Deception - Stanford Prison Experiment
Yes You Can Fool Most Of The People For Over 30 Years!
"The military told me they used the SPE tapes to train people not to behave like our guards. I used to quote that as a good outcome of the research.
Now I know they also used it to train interrogators to break people.
I had no idea they were doing that"
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How Good People Are Transformed into Perpetrators Of Evil - Philip Zimbardo
5 Lessons From The Stanford Prison "Experiment"
Philip Zimbardo has contributed greatly to our understanding of the situationist perspective as to why people can change and choose to exercise bad/evil behaviour in response to the pressures and demands of the environment upon them.
Here are the 5 lessons to be aware of from Philip Zimbardo's story and his infamous Stanford Prison Experiment:
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Roxanne - I Will Not Share You With So Many Other Men
The Toxicity Of Addiction To Instagram Self-Validation
Roxanne...
You don't have to put on the red light
Those days are over
No more posting selfies on Instagram tonight
You don't have to sell your body for likes
One man's pain at losing a much loved woman through her obsession with posting sexualised body pics to 1,300 exclusively male followers on Instagram.
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How To Win Without Succeeding - Avoid Losing!
We Celebrate Success And Ignore Failure.
The personal development and self-help world is steeped in case studies and analysis of success.
Numerous studies have been undertaken on successful people to understand what it was that they did to become so successful, how they did it and when they did it - and we are led to believe that we too can achieve comparable success if we replicate this.
This focus on success is very odd given that success is the exception rather than the rule. Failure is the norm.
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Hanlons Razor - Never Attribute To Malice That Which Can be Explained By Stupidity
Hanlons Razor - will check your innate tendency to quickly jump to the wrong conclusion and assume something is the result of an intentional malicious action.
Applying Hanlon’s Razor will check your natural tendency to make an assumption and quickly jump to the wrong conclusion that something your way is the result of an intentional malicious action.
It is human nature to expect that things will always work out as we want them to. But statistically this is very unlikely.
Keeping Things Simple - The Art of Knowing What To Overlook
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.
The phrase "keeping things simple" is in itself so simple that you may wonder why it warrants talking about!
But it is important because achieving simplicity challenges how you think, how you don't think, how you behave and how you live.
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Satisficing - When Near Enough Is Good Enough
Satisficing is a heuristic - a practical shortcut - for making decisions that aims for a satisfactory or adequate result, rather than the optimal solution.
The opposite decision-making process to satisficing is optimisation [or maximisation] where you collate and analyse all the necessary data that is required to make the optimal choice.
The term satisficing was introduced by Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001), an American economist, political scientist, sociologist and computer scientist. He first coined the word in his 1956 paper, “Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment”.
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Skin In The Game - Shared Risk And Reward
Only listen to those who invested and who have shared risk and reward.
Only take advice from people who are already invested in the situation they are advising you about, and where they have something to lose if you fail as a result of following their advice.
Often in the world of business its not just about taking advice, its more often about making decisions about who to get involved with, who to invest your time and resources in, and who to trust.
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Black Swans - Impossible To Predict, Rare and Devastating
Black Swans are events that are difficult to predict, occur very occasionally and have potentially severe consequences.
It is extremely foolish to just ignore the potential for black swans to occur.
To take the view that because we cannot predict them we will pretend they don't occur is setting yourself up for trouble - which of course is exactly how most individuals, companies and governments operate.
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Focus On The Consequences And Not On The Probability - Nassim Taleb
An investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision making when we don’t understand the world.
Our world is full of chance and the unknown and the broader canvas of Taleb's work is all about alerting us to the level of uncertainty and unpredictability of life whilst offering us practical ideas and strategies to enable us to survive and even prosper in these conditions.
He teaches us how to avoid crossing the street blindfolded as he urges us to follow the main rule of living with uncertainty...
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Inflection Points - The Tipping Point
The critical point in a situation, process, or system beyond which a significant and often unstoppable effect or change takes place
Inflection points occur when there is build up of forces, a critical mass, that lead to a spontaneous and often irreversible change of direction.
Inflection points in personal relationships affects us all.
How many times in your life have your reached a tipping point in a relationship with someone where you finally decide that "enough is enough"?
