Ocean Of Perspectives

Today’s post is written by Lana from Dream Followers; a website on the law of attraction and  self improvement. Thank you Lana for sharing your perspectives and knowledge here on Ocean Of Perspectives.

How to Be Happy Now or Practicing the Power of Now

Do you believe that all of the limitations that are holding you back from your success are inside of you? There is nothing in the outside world that you cannot change or that can stop you from reaching your dreams.

All the limitations and obstacles are inside your head only. If you learn to control your mind you can do anything.

I’ve written a lot before about living in the present moment. When you are fully present you stop identifying with the little voice in your head or your inner chatter (your mind).

Some of you might think that that your mind and you are the same thing. No, your mind is not who you are, your mind is a totally separate entity.

Do this exercise for 5 minutes. Look at some object and try not to think about anything but keep looking at the object for 5 minutes. If you try it, you will see how difficult it actually is to stay focused for 5 minutes on the object. Just a few seconds later your mind starts intervening and taking you away with the thoughts of the future or the past or anything else.

This exercise should show you that your mind has a life of its own. Your mind is your ego and it identifies itself with the future or memories of the past. It hates the present. As a result it is always creating fear, anxiety, worry, obstacles and limitations.

You mind is never completely happy. It just can’t be completely happy since it lives in the future or the past, not in the Now. The only way for you to be fully happy is to be happy now. You can’t be happy tomorrow or yesterday.

Remember how many times you thought that by reaching a certain goal you would be happy? For how long were you happy after you reached it? Not long probably.

It is because your goal became your present and your mind can’t be happy in the present.

So, for as long as you continue identifying yourself with your mind you will never be happy. No matter how many dreams of yours you reach, your mind won’t allow you to fully enjoy them.

Once you take full control of your mind and don’t allow it to lead you anymore, you become fully present in the moment and only then will you be able to experience long lasting happiness.

I always look at my 2 year old son and am amazed how fully present he is. He enjoys the moment and doesn’t care about anything else but what he experiences now. I wonder at what age we lose this wonderful ability and start identifying with our minds.

When you are fully present you don’t have fear, you don’t have anxiety, you don’t worry or doubt. You feel complete joy and happiness. To learn to be always fully present takes time. Taking full control of your inner chatter takes some work. But I believe that it can be done.

I haven’t completely mastered this skill myself yet. After so many years of identifying with the little voice in my head it is not an easy task. But I am experiencing these moments of being fully present more and more often and as a result I am becoming more productive, feel much happier and am able to reach a lot of my goals much quicker.

Here are some ways for you to learn being fully present.

1. Meditation. The whole purpose of meditation is to eliminate your inner chatter and to reconnect with your true self. Meditation is one of the most common ways people around the world learn to be fully present. You most likely won’t be able to get rid of all of your thoughts right away when you first start meditating. Don’t worry about it, it takes time and practice. Let the thoughts pop up in your head but don’t follow them.

2. Focus on your senses as much as possible throughout the day. This is another great way to learn to be fully present. As you go through your day, stop and feel the air going in and out of your nose as you breathe, stop and listen to the sounds around you, notice the colors, actually taste the food that you eat, feel the clothes that you are wearing. Do it often. The more often you do it, the more you will be able to stay in the moment.

Now some of you might be under the impression that I am saying that you should never think of your future and not make any plans. Yes, you should think of your future, of your goals, and make plans.

Unless you plan on going to Tibet and becoming a monk, you will always need you mind. But you should use it wisely.

Once you have set your goals, imagined and visualized your ideal outcome, return to the present moment. Start enjoying your “Now”. Otherwise, no matter how many goals you reach, you will never be happy.

And that, after all, is our ultimate goal–to be happy. So start today, learn to find joy and happiness in the present moment. By doing that you will align yourself with all of your dreams that have yet to come true.

Lana’s free“Beyond The Secret” Law of Attraction report

Tags: personal growth // 4 Comments »

Louise Hay explains how our thoughts and words flow outward from us, creating our future experiences.

Tags: beliefs // 4 Comments »

I have the honor of introducing you to Ivan Campuzano of IvanCampuzano.com as today’s guest author. I would like to thank Ivan for sharing this wonderful article on Ocean Of Perspectives.

How To Create a New Day and A New You

“There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self- Aldous Huxley

Your personal growth is dependent on the new experiences you create for yourself. The problem is that we mostly live our daily lives from our minds memory, living your life from memory is easy and comfortable because you have a reference for it. Many people when they find themselves with completely new situations become hesitant and say no to life. If you continue to live the same routine day in and day out many parts of your being will become stagnate. If you learn to experience life head on and in the moment you will realize that different aspects of your being will be used and in the process you will expand your awareness and perspective. Learn to be fully present in everything you do, than new experiences will become amazing learning experiences.

“Through travel I first become aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming part of it” Eudora Welty

Creating a New Day:

Every morning ask yourself what you want today to be like? Everyday as soon as you awake learn to watch and become aware of your thoughts. Your thoughts are essentially the constructs of your reality; a thought is a frozen moment in a stream of consciousness. When you create your day it is created through your thoughts. The reason it’s important to watch your internal dialogue is so that you become aware of the theme that you are creating for your day. If you realize that through your thoughts you are sabotaging what you want to do, than change your internal dialogue. It’s also important to not create things you can’t accept, because than you are not going to be willing to live them when they appear in your life. You say that you would like a new job, but if you are not ready in your internal world you will squander the opportunity when it shows up in your life.

Contemplate this for a second; what attitude would you like to live? That you are a creature of circumstances, or that you are a master in the making who will overcome circumstances? That you are a powerful divine being, or that you are simply a powerless human part of a random evolution? The attitudes that you adopt as your own will shape how you respond to your outside world and ultimately the life that you will create. If you constantly believe that you are a creature of circumstances you will continue to struggle and resist your environment because you see you’re self as separate from it. If you learn to become the master of your internal world you will learn how to work and move with your environment and will create opportunities for yourself.

Be yourself, become the observer of your life, learn to create your life from the perspective of the observer. Experience is relative to you, it’s your life. Learn to observe your thoughts. When you become a witness to your internal world, you will become very intimate with the thoughts and feelings of doubt. You can think of doubt as a word that explains the desire not to participate in your life. It is a barrier in the brain, it prevents you from changing.

Have you ever noticed that when you wake up in the morning for a split second you don’t remember who you are. The next few moments you spend reorienting yourself with your identity. You get up and while brushing your teeth you stare at your self in the mirror, on a subtle level you are just remembering who you are. If everyday you start out like this, having to remember who you are. What are the chances that your day will turn out to be unique. What if before you tried to remember who you are you remembered what you wanted to be? This is a radically different perspective in living your day to day life. You remember who you want to be instead of bonding with an old self. In those few critical moments you have the opportunity to have an amazingly different day. When you awake in morning fill your mind with the thoughts of your desired intention for the day. Do this a few times and you will notice that you will start to become a slightly different person each day.

What you are and who you are is very important. Understanding your true nature is vital because once you feel it, you will get the confidence to take baby steps into the unknown. You will get a taste of your true power; little by little you will begin to cultivate your god given abilities to create your life with joy and deliberate purpose. To many people who read this it will sound like a bunch of new age rambling. But to people who have had glimpses of their true potential will know that deep down there has always been something more to who they really are. They did not understand it but they could feel that something was there. If this is you I want to encourage you to keep exploring this mind set and live your life from this perspective. You will prove to yourself your true power, once you begin to live your life from the inside out, instead of trying to make sense of your life from the outside world. There are no answers to anything outside of your self, change will only occur from what you change within yourself. Sure you will get ideas and inspiration from the external world, just don’t give it more credit than it deserves. The true catalyst and ultimately the manifestation came from the changes you made and accepted within yourself.

The only thing that matters is what you think about yourself. Please take the time right now to “think about” what you “think about your life”. If you really think about it objectively without judgment I think you will come to find that the things you have been living every single day is all that you thought you where capable of, except for these kinds of moments when you stop and contemplate what you think about your life. These glimpses if you catch them will help you wonder than remember; you just needed someone to encourage you. Start thinking that you are more than what you are everyday, and learn from the direct experiences of your life and you will develop your sense of knowingness.

When you start to change rapidly, many of the people around you will begin to act differently because you are changing. Don’t be afraid to change because you think the people around you will suffer. If they become jealous it is only because they see someone who is clear on what they want and see them move with it. They don’t change because they have not developed the courage to change. Be a shining example of what is possible when you learn to move with your life. It’s up to them if they decide to stay in the normal and comfortable. You should not feel distressed, continue your journey and if the people you care about are one day ready you will be there to offer guidance and support.

“When the student is ready, the master appears.”- Buddhist Proverb

Below are some ideas on how you can develop an eye for greatness. Great things are all around you, you just need to train your self to see it. Learning to become aware of new things in your surroundings will give you ideas to work with in creating a new you.

1. Try and think about new things everyday. Than take action by doing things that will fully engage the use and stimulation of your senses: Music, movies, people, philosophy, food, travel, communication, technology, sports, etc.

2. Keep a Journal; name it your book of “Thoughts and Ideas”. Each day write down everything you did. What music did you listen too? Book you read? What did you learn? What would you like to implement? What random thoughts did you ponder over? Overtime your book can become an amazing record keeper of your mental progression. It makes a great way of sparking ideas that have been brewing in your consciousness from days to months. By constantly reviewing your book your mind will construct patterns (associations) that can spark a new great idea from all the randomness.

3. Learn to see everything that is going on around you. You can do this by not focusing your field of vision on anything in particular. Learn to simply see with your eyes and using your whole field of vision by not fixating on one single point.

When you begin to think in terms of change you will constantly see opportunities and eventually create an opportunity that was never there.

Learn to observe how your friends analyze their surroundings. You might be able to come up with a brilliant idea by observing how your friends react to their surroundings. Look close enough and you will discover a need that is currently not being satisfied.

I just want to thank you for reading my article; I hope it encourages you to embrace the only constant which is change. Keep your identity fluid; move with life, in the end all that matters is how you played the game. Enjoy going into the unknown, and in the process enriching your life as well as the life of others. – Ivan Campuzano

Ivan Campuzano’s ebook Enlightenment in a PDF

Ivan’s website IvanCampuzano.com

Tags: personal growth // 5 Comments »

Today’s post is by Ian Peatey, the author of Quantum Learning. I’m honored to have Ian here on Ocean Of Perspectives; his articles contain a lot of wisdom and I read them regularly. You might say, Ian is one of my mentors.

Playing our own tune

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” Gandhi

This quote sums up my approach to life. My aspired approach to life, that is.
I’ve still got some way to go as the truth is, at the age of 45, I’m still unlearning a lot of accumulated rubbish from my first 35 years.

This stuff is not deep, painful, unusual or traumatic. Sometimes, I think it might be easier to deal with if it was. It’s all regular, everyday beliefs about how the world, society and I function. There’s nothing extreme or extraordinary there.

For example, I believed that science, logic and rationality rule. That mind and thought is King! I imagined once I left college I would be fully equipped to deal with the world. I knew how the world worked.

I was brought up on a middle-class path of a steady job, slow but regular promotion, saving for retirement, marrying my childhood sweetheart and buying a small house and car (big enough for a family). It was a well worn path trod by my parents, their parents before them and pretty much everyone I knew. Choosing another way never entered my head.

“Live as if you have many more years ahead of you. Learn to pass exams and then forget it all.” Peatey

In 2001, I was presented with an incredibly simple idea that changed my life.

This idea was the start of the answer to questions I’d been failing to ask myself, but were lurking under the surface creating an underlying existential dissatisfaction.

The idea wasn’t anything new or weird. I’d even studied it at college, though I’d not been encouraged to think about it beyond a theory of human behavior to be learned for exams (which I passed by the way).

At the risk of sounding like some New Age Salesperson I’d like to say how it changed my life:

• I started to understand the dynamic flow of who I am as a human being. Never static. Always changing. I am unique.
• I discovered my inner power, my engine. Deep, rich and full of potential.
• I felt my connection to every other human being on the planet. I am part of the human race. I am not unique.
• I started to sense my connection to the soul of the universe, God, the Source (whatever word works for you)

A very simple idea

I have ‘needs’

It was really that simple – and that profound!

If the word ‘need’ doesn’t speak to you, then try ‘values’.

I studied Maslow’s theory of needs at college and intellectually it made sense. He said we have sets of needs arranged in a hierarchy with Physiological needs at the bottom and Self-Actualization at the top (with Safety, Love/Belonging and Esteem in between). My understanding of his theory (which may not be his understanding!) was that the hierarchy is fixed and I move up between levels as I mature and my living conditions change. Once I’ve reached a higher level I’ll stay there unless I temporarily regress due to changed conditions.

The idea that changed my life was similar but with a crucial difference.

Needs are not static and to be studied, but are dynamic and to be lived.

It was introduced to me by Marshall Rosenberg, the creator of Nonviolent Communication. You can find his list of needs here, as an example. His approach raised several questions:

• What if needs are not arranged in a hierarchy but are within me all the time?
• What if they are in a constant state of ebb and flow?
• What if the feelings I experience are signals about my needs?

Consider an orchestra, with my needs as the instruments and my feelings as the music.

The instruments are often hidden yet they play a unique tune of my own composition. If I choose to listen!

All the instruments are present at all times, sometimes playing together, at other times a solo piece. If not attended to, an instrument may become louder or discordant. When handled just right, they sing out beautiful and joyful music.

For example, right now I’m filled with the note of joy when I imagine you reading this. It’s created by my needs (the instrument) for sharing and contribution (to peace and tolerance). I’m also feeling a little nervous coming from the need of understanding. (I have no feedback yet, so I can’t check if my writing is clear). And I’m a little thirsty and that’s my need for sustenance playing a side tune.

This is right now. In a few moments everything will change and I’ll be playing a different tune.

So what?

I grew up learning that needs were often a lack of something, or a sign of weakness. Being a ‘needy’ person was not a positive thing. So for me it was a huge revelation to redefine needs as my inner resources, as my strength not my weakness.

Without them I cannot experience life.

Aligning needs, thoughts, emotions and actions gives an amazing integrity, clarity and inner power. When I have inner alignment I feel my connection to the Source of all things. I sense I’m part of something bigger.

Needs are at the core of everything I do and the bridge between me and you and all human kind.
We all need food, water, safety, respect, understanding, freedom, autonomy, community, meaning etc. etc.. We share the same needs and they bind us together.

Whenever we think we have different needs, or that our needs are in conflict, they are not needs. We must look deeper to find what sits underneath. When we find our needs, there is no conflict and no fighting. We can see the beauty in each other.

When I’m connected with my needs I’m living here and now and I’m constantly learning. Life is ever changing, so how could I possibly stop exploring it?

Here is the link again for Quantum Learning

Tags: personal growth // 12 Comments »