The greatest weakness is strength. Staying strong prevents adaptation, it's pure ego. Let go and flow - that's strong.

Einstein once said "most people give up when they are 99% of the way to the finish line... " he claims that in his observation the difference between getting what you want and losing it, is the willingness to suffer the hard times when doubt, fear, uncertainty and confusion overwhelm us with a desire to run away. 

The frist step of the Back on Track 30 Day Challenge is to note down your intent. This may be a great thing to do today for yourself. Mapping your intent is important because it is this map that can guide you across the line and into success, love and health when you feel a bit like abandoning ship.

Ask yourself "What do I want to experience and feel in your WORK, RELATIONSHIP, SOCIAL LIFE, HEALTH, WEALTH, SPIRITUALITY AND MENTAL WISDOM. List those down the left side of a page at least like this:

Health

I want to feel youthful
I want to feel light and energetic
I want to feel strong in my body
I want to be able to swim easily

Relationship

I want to feel love and loved by my partner
I want to feel devoted and tender with my partner 
I want to feel trust and trusted
I want to feel like my partner values me

Etc

Then, go down the right side of the page - and opposite each one of the intentions, write the opposite.

Health
I am going to feel old sometimes
I am going to feel heavy and lethargic sometimes
I am going to feel weak in my body sometimes
I am going to be unable to swim easily sometimes

Relationship

I am going to feel unloved and unloving toward my partner sometimes
I am going to feel not devoted or tender with my partner sometimes
I am not going to trust or be trusted by my partner sometimes
I am going to feel devalued by my partner sometimes

Resolution

Go down this list of opposites and think to yourself -- what am I going to do when I feel this opposite experience in my INTENT? Do I have a process to deal with it and to bring me back on track? 

This is the key that Einstein and the Universal laws of nature advocate, learning to adapt is wiser that reacting because there are always two sides to your intent: The one you want, and the opposite... If you set this up well, your reactions to the opposites will not dishearten you at all.... 

Hi,
Today i've posted a few articles that really caught my eye over the past weeks. They focus on love. 

For me, I find it so easy to get caught up in the turmoil and pragmatic variables of life that are so important but at the same time, getting  disengaged from all the important things that make it good to be of help to others and live my VIP.

What I've been emphasising over the past weeks in all the articles I've written for you, is making wise choices and having honest expectations of life. The real topic that evolves through all of this is - How do you feel today?

Since time began, people have been trying to feel good on a daily basis. Adam supposedly ate the apple submitting to temptation and forgoing long term benefits for short term feelings. So, it seems there is a quandary that has existed forever, and will exist forever.

That quandary is between short term pleasure (feeling good day to day) and long term results (feeling good in the long term.

We choose this daily.

On the one hand there is the person who might say "I don't care about anything or anyone - all that matters is me, right now and getting what I want"  They often go to any source that stimulates their feel good experience whether it be food, sex, greed or spirituality... (the four substitutes)

On the other hand there is the stoic person who puts emotion aside and applies discipline to life. This person struggles a bit with daily happiness, never quite feeling that things are on track, but, at the end of a long period they will achieve a lot.

The cost of having what you want in the long term is paid in the short term

The cost of having what you want in the short term is paid in the long term.

Can we find the balance?

The answer is absolutely NO - as long as the definition of "feeling good" sinks down to self gratification and the multiplicity of emotional states that go with it are the measure of life.

The answer is absolutely YES - as long as love is the definition of "feeling good" rises up though the mire of dirt and dust of daily troubles to be the primary experience one has in life.

THe articles of the day list a few ideas about this. One important idea is that you can love anything you choose and it will permeate your life. Nature, a dog, a god, but the key here is that when you try to love yourself you are trying to love shifting sand or moving water. I believe, and I will take it through the tests of many challenges, that the first love in life, is a significant other. A partner, spouse or lover. This is, for an adult at least, the platform nature intended. It takes courage, an open heart and skills I teach to achieve this space, sacred love, but it's doable, you just need to trust your heart.

Trusting your heart is easy, once you know what it feels like to have it open in contrast to having a deep seated emotion... that's the experience I share in the 30 day challenge.

Love and wisdom

Chris

Give everything to your work
Give everything to your Soul
Live as nature intended
Love what you do
No matter what it is - at this moment
And then your heart will stay open
For goodness and health
Make no compromise
Listen to no doubt
Give everything to your work
Whatever that is at any moment in time
Give everything to your soul
Live as nature intended
Turn up for life

Letting go of poor motive. 

Determination, commitment and dedication to your work are essential but if there is any anger, greed or hate directed at your work colleagues, yourself or even the job itself, it will sabotage your efforts. 

Anger, greed and hate are behind allot of Motivation, and they are the three motives that must be left behind when moving to Inspiration.

There is no peace in a heart that has those three emotions and people will not be willingly led by a turbulent heart. So, to inspire confidence and trust it is your duty to yourself to let go of those three dark motives. 

It is also essential to remember that hate, anger and greed does not have to come from work to infect your leadership with negativity. If you are angry at home, or about the world at large or even toward yourself for anything, it will translate into anger at work. You may not feel it, but it is there and will block your career or business success. 

Finding peace in nature and having some personal coaching can, from time to time help clear any backlog of anger, hate or greed. Time in nature is a great antidote to tensions built up over the past. 

The skills I use for this step are: 

• Inner calm
• Energy of the Heart 
• Clearing Skills 

CLEARING SKILLS, INNER CALM, ENERGY OF THE HEART

Anger accumulates and so, if you bring anger home from work you are likely to sabotage your family life. 

To know how to clear anger, it's necessary to understand why anger exists.

Anger, is nature's overdrive gear. If you are faced with danger or a desperate situation, anger triggers all the essential chemicals in your body and mind to get you out of trouble. Those chemicals are highly oxidating, toxic to the body and require careful management, otherwise they will result in illness, injury or exhaustion.

So, if you are feeling more tired than normal, more stressed, more grumpy, unclear, uncertain, confused, or even not sexy, the root of all that is 99% probability of being anger.

Anger is an emotion and emotion is caused by lopsided thinking. So, the more extreme imbalanced thinking we have, the more angry we become.

The daily emotional shower is such a fantastic life changing process, I believe it is one of the most important tools of this whole Back on Track™ Programme.


Here is a copy of the Emotional Shower Anger Management Form: Download PDF

Inside every human being there is a fight that can't be won. It's a fight between dualities, between head and heart, left brain and right brain, short term pleasure and long term results.

It's a fight that can't be eliminated, but with compassion and kindness, that fight can truly become a great inspiration and asset.

To live with kindness we need to acknowledge this internal battle as the inner fight and let it do for us as nature intended: The inner struggle will do what nature intended it to do if we stop fighting it. So, rather than fight it, we need to follow nature's guide to reconcile that struggle and use it to our own advantage.

You already know that one satisfied desire simply leads to another desire, this is at the heart of this inner conflict. The notion of contentment, inner peace, happiness is therefore, in a real life of achievement and materiality, a myth. 

If we focus our life on achieving happiness, contentment, inner peace, or even peace we will live deep into the moment, and in the process sacrifice the long term. The pain of regret always outweighs the pain of discipline. People who seek short term pleasure experience long term pain. It's the inner conflict of being human repeated in nature and repeated over and over in our own life.

Disappointment in SEEKING HAPPINESS

The person who thinks that their next decision, next workshop, next weight loss program will bring them to contentment and satisfaction with life, for the rest of their life is never confident, always disappointed and therefore unable to be kind, either to themselves, or others. You know that there are supposedly two sides to the brain, left brain logic and right brain sensory emotion, and these two sides are continually wrestling for superiority. Which will you trust today - the logical and pragmatic answer that's going to create long term results with short term pain, or the emotional sensory answer that is in the moment that has short term pleasure and long term pain. Pain and pleasure, always balance in the end, the question is just about time frame.

RELATIONSHIPS AND THE MYTH OF CONTENTMENT

My story.... Many years ago I was in a good relationship but a little bored with life. All was on track. One day, I went to a Yoga class and was taught a myth. I saw a gorgeous yoga teacher, with a great body, speaking about love and life purpose and happiness. I went home and suddenly felt discontent with my own, perfectly good relationship. What my life looked like, compared to the promise of the Eastern teaching was shit. I started to feel resentful and wrote, "this yoga teacher has shown me that there is more to life than a regular relationship, that there is a mystical, spiritual, good feeling outcome to life that I am not experiencing" Months later, my partner had an affair. She just needed a real man in her life, not one comparing her and his relationship with her, to a myth. I eventually wrote "after three years of doing yoga, living in India, I've had a few relationships and have come to the conclusion that even that yoga teacher I infatuated was boring outside the yoga room, and all the guru's are not all happy, they are normal and sad and angry outside of the yoga class, the theory that was sold to me, and in all the books about being happy and spiritual, was about moments in time in life, truly presented it was not sustainable. It was never meant to be a permanent state of mind, rather, it was meant to be a place to return to in our mind, a place we call home.

The Real Story

I think that if we are to live our life with kindness, we are wise to reject what doesn't work. The unhappiest, loneliest, most regretful people I have met listen to self-help guru's, read books about self-help and watch tv shows that demonstrate half life reality. They get sadder and listen longer.

I find that to go sit under a tree without a book and start to witness life, as it really is, makes strength of conviction to follow my heart and do what I do with love and inspiration. This gives me a beautiful understanding of compassion and kindness and then it starts to emerge organically, not theoretically or forced. Sitting under the tree looking around at nature we see that we are, like nature, a contradiction between the now and the future.

In Nature there is always a contradiction. The flower looks perfect, but at the same time, it is impermanent and must die to the earth to make space for more. The happiness of the moment and the pain of discipline always arguing. Pleasure and pain, in harmony.

We are nature. We are both happy and sad, we are smart and dumb. We are growing and shrinking. We are good and bad. We are enlightened and endarkened. We are a sweet and sour. The more we fake being half of one of those contradictory pairs, like I did, trying to emulate the yoga teacher outside the yoga class, the darker our home life or work life will have to become in order to find balance.

Kindness starts with compassion for our true nature and rejecting the half notion that if we change something, do something or create something we will be different. How can kindness be based on anything changing? If our giving is based on some idea of changing something, somebody, making someone happier or better or smarter, then our kindness is not kindness, it is the desire to change, and that lacks appreciation, assumes that, at sometime in the future appreciation will arrive. 

Really, if we are trying to fix something, or somebody, we are being judgemental and that is the opposite to kindness.

Following nature's law, if you say to yourself "I am stupid" then with kindness you will add "and the benefit is that I am so open to learn, I remain a student" but if you say "I am stupid" with anger toward yourself, you cannot ever be kind to yourself, or for that matter others. So, kindness and compassion require that we unlearn, or discard ideas of half life, half emotion, half experience.

Giving kindness requires that you have compassion for yourself - then you will not be hard on others. Some people are hard on themselves, they might even be cruel, a bully, a change agent, a therapist or a teacher of Eastern arts who believes everybody needs to change to their way of thinking. That's anarchy.

We can't give what we haven't got. If we have no compassion for ourselves, then we cannot give kindness to others. That's a no brainer really. And compassion for ourselves can only come from the acceptance of the struggle between the inner conflicts: Short term versus long term, left brain versus right brain, heart versus mind. These are irreconcilable differences. The inner conflict is a part of being human. Learning to love this inner conflict is the route to stillness and ultimately, self-respect.

The danger is to become disconnected from nature and live according to books and ideals of who we should or could be if we were different. Then the outcome is to live the half life of the mundane. That comes from trying to find the place in life where only half of the emotional keyboard plays, and the other darker keys become an escape obsession. Blaming any sadness, anger, disappointment on a partner, friend and business colleague.

Kindness means acceptance. That's the first key to a great loving relationship and the most vital key to good parenting. It starts with a single choice... The choice to stop criticising our life, ourselves and our actions as being anything but beautiful, perfect and love generating. That's really life's purpose summarised.

Free will is a powerful topic to understand. It impacts your business, career, health, relationship, social life and mental health.

Do you have free will?

The answer is yes and no….

Yes, because nobody can tell you what to think about… you want to think about oranges or apples, you are free to do so.

No, because it, at the end of the day, you want to create a business, or a family, thinking about oranges and apples is not going to cause that result.

So, there are short term and long term considerations.

I once tried to build up a small company I owned in partnership with another person. We both wanted to build a successful business, but we disagreed on how. So, while I focussed on clients, my partner focussed on profit.

In the short term the benefits were obvious, but in the long term, that split in focus causes us to lower the value of the business.

The universal laws of nature focus your business on the result you want.

If your business focus is building short term profit the universal laws direct you to how. If it is long term value and sale price, the universal laws can focus you on that too.

The most important thing to be aware of is that if you want a particular outcome, it is wise to focus on the particular topic that will cause it.

If you want your partner to be horny and excited to see you then it's wise to understand what it's going to take to cause it.

These are the universal laws, simple and powerful. They effect the cause of results and they don't get caught up in emotion or political rhetoric.

Therefore, I believe they are a great asset.

From the Heart of Chris

What are you waiting for? Are you waiting for the weather to be better? It won't happen. Are you waiting for the perfect partner? It won't happen. Are you waiting until all your troubles go away? It won't happen. Are you waiting for your life to be simplified? It will never happen.

One time I was sitting in Zen for three solid weeks in the forest. My teacher was a grumpy hairy unwashed bastard who always fell asleep meditating and would forget to ring the break bell. We'd wake him with coughs. Shit it hurt sitting like that.

Anyway, while sitting in Zen I really did reach enlightenment. Afterward I did a poo and it was terrible. So much for enlightenment being a solution to the downside of life.

So, for three weeks in this Zen retreat I was in nirvana or somewhere. Then, at the end, when we were allowed to speak for the first time in three bloody weeks, I said to the bastard Zen master "mother .. Fu....er I am so detached.

He responded "your attachment to your detachment is now your biggest problem"!shit... Back to fish and chips for dinner.

At that time I gave up trying to be something, do something and get something. It was the first time in my life I actually realised that I had a superiorority complex. I mean I thought I was god's gift to humanity. I wasn't

Then I began to regret that I'd spent so much of my life trying. I mean, emulating, duplicating, imitating, contemplating, instead of celebrating.

That was the day I remember. Because that day was the day I stopped waiting for something to get better in order to be happier.

There are people who disect the human condition and categorise, compartmentalise, analyse and criticise.

There are others who separate, negotiate, manipulate and relegate.

I dont find that at all romantic or helpful - instead I talk about love.

Love is not a weakness, love is a strength. For a start it makes you flexible and adaptive. It allows you space to be you. And clarity to think wisely without confusion.

But love hurts too. That's why people prefer to analyse and separate and contemplate. It is sometimes easier to think about changing who we are than liking it.

What can we change about who we are? Isn't that the worst thought you could ever have? I mean, if you are not loveable now, how will you be loveable some time in the future when you fix yourself.

The whole thing comes down to our expectations. If we expect the world to rotate anti clockwise, and we are sad that the world doesn't do what we ask, will another book, another tape, another seminar solve our pain or just shift it.

For me, reality is the best seminar.

Do I love my work? (Feel thankful for it)
Do I love my world? (Feel thankful for it)
Do I love my family? (Feel thankful for it)
Do I love my fellow human? (feel thankful for them)
Do I love myself? (feel thankful for me)

How do I know if I love the above? It is really easy. If I want to change anything about them, me, it, us then the answer is no, I don't love.

There's really nothing to change- just lessons in love.

When you stop to calm your nerves and slow down your obsessions and take a moment to feel the love in your heart, remember Vision, Inspiration and Purpose are the gateways to an open heart and therefore love and consciousness at work.
Chris