Morning Mindfulness - Two Positive Minutes To Start Your Day

I’ve been practicing Yoga, Martial arts, Tao Yin, Qigong, Taoist and Zen practices and many other things. Not that I am practicing every discipline one hour a day. There will be not enough hours in a week to study everything. But all this knowledge helps me to develop a better picture and understand how one philosophy relates to another.

Why don’t we just love each other? Why don’t we say some good words of appreciation now? Don’t wait for the right moment, because the right moment may be one day too late. Think about that.

So, what’s the best fitness system in the world? That’s easy to answer: the best system is the one aligned with your goals and your personality type. Ultimately, that’s the one you will stick with. If you don’t know, get yourself a coach. I can recommend a couple if you need.

Here’s my point: we all walk our Path. Our Path may cross somebody else’s Path. They may interlace or go together for a while until they part. We learn what we can and we share what we know. This is life.

Perhaps many of you have heard the saying “When student is ready, teacher will appear”. I agree with that. I’d like to combine this statement with another one: “When you know how to listen, everybody is the guru.” So is it the teacher who appears, or is it just me who finally recognizes the teacher?

I see so many people every day go to work they cannot tolerate. People spend money they don’t have to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t even like. What for?   People have the ability to make an issue out of nothing, argue about things that are so irrelevant that they don’t even remember the topic of conversation one day later.

I’ve heard from many coaches that success happens when the opportunity and preparedness meet. I learned from John Maxwell that many people are saying, "when I get the opportunity I get ready.” And that is one of the biggest mistakes. That’s one of the reasons people fail. You don’t get the opportunity and then get ready, you get ready and then get the opportunity.

We are educated, programmed, trained and conditioned to perform certain tasks in a certain way. While we are growing up we are literally learning the ropes. Any alternative thinking inconsistent with the main trends in the society, often gets ridiculed. As a result, many people don’t even know they have a huge potential. They are supermen inside capable of much more then they think they are. 

You may think you have the best vehicle in the World. Nothing wrong with that. It may actually be the best vehicle for the job it was created for.  However, if you goal is to get to Hawaii, for example, you may get disappointed trying to drive your Lamborghini across the ocean. I don’t think you even need a coach to figure out that you should change your transportation in that case. 

If we have some kind of an invisible ceiling above us, maybe it is a job that does not allow us to reach our potential, or maybe some other circumstances, life, family, etc., or maybe it was a series of failures that caused a lack of belief, then if we get a real opportunity we may not believe that there’s no ceiling above us. That ceiling was just an imaginary limitation we have in our mind.

This what happens in our every day life. Distant objects represent our goals, and the finger - obstacles. If we concentrate on the obstacles, we loose the sight of our goals. Well, they may be still there, but they are not clear. However, if we keep our eyes on the goal, the obstacles become blurry. We still see them, but they are not really in the way.

I met so many people who surround themselves with a wall of fear and doubt. I can see it, I recognize it, because I am one of them. And if you are inside your wall too, I can tell you from my own experience: people need what you have.

I read about a temple in Japan that has a statue of a finger pointing at the Moon instead of a Buddha statue. That is just a reminder: don’t worship the finger. Quit staring at it. Look at the Moon, that is where the finger is pointing at. 

Hundreds of cable channels, almost unlimited growing information on the internet, available on the smart phone. People look at their phones several times a minute. No wonder that this constantly changing images in front of our eyes have such a hypnotic effect on us.

I’d like to discuss today what is called a “grocery store” learning.  When we go to the grocery store, we buy several items we come for, and perhaps something that catches our eye. Something we may remember to buy while we are there, or something we think we may need as long as it fits the categories of stuff we buy.   Here’s a key phrase: We only buy stuff we came for, and perhaps something that catches our attention. The longer we go to that store, the more we discover what’s there. 

I have to follow laws and rules of the society I am in. This goes without saying. But when it comes to my personal habits, those that don’t affect anybody in any way, nobody tells me how to do things I want to do. If I don’t like the tradition, I won’t follow it just for the sake of following. That’s just me.  But you may want to spend a couple of minutes thinking about that too. You never know what  you may discover about yourself.

Many years ago my teacher told me, “Don’t give advices. Smart man does not need them, and not so smart won’t use it.” He also taught me that people often much easier forgive us our failures and mistakes, than being right. He said, it is often better to let people make their own mistakes and learn from them, than get yourself an enemy just because you happened to be right.

Universe does not grant us our wishes immediately just to protect us from our own wishful thinking. In reality our desires may not be that desirable. They may even be scary sometimes.

A friend in need is a friend indeed… I think many people know this old saying. Yesterday I was talking about crabs in a bucket, and today I’d like to take it one step further. I will discuss the other side of the coin, so to speak, even though I may step on somebody’s toes.

What it is, if you put a crab in a bucket, it can escape pretty easy. Crabs have claws, they can easily crawl out. What happens if you put several crabs in a bucket? Well, people say that crabs pull each other down and don’t let other crabs escape.