Archive for February, 2007

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Living Without an Alarm Clock

Monday, February 12th, 2007

I don’t care what anyone says, but the worst thing in the world for me is when my alarm used to go off in the morning and I knew I had to get my exhausted body out of bed and rush to go wherever the hell I was going. My body jerked out of bed at the sound ofthe pulsating box that was trying to let me know I had to get up, and I would do anything to fight it. My snooze button got so worn out that it became inoperable. I knew I had to do something drastic or this damn alarm clock was going to run my whole life. So what did I do? I left it at my college after I left there. I was through with the constant stress it put on my every morning, sometimes jolting me out of bed so fast, it caused neck strain.

I cannot see, in any way, how using an alarm clock is healthy. Sure, it may be “effective” for someone who needs to be awake at a certain time, like a farmer or whatever, but besides that, if you have to be awake at a certain time in the morning, isn’t there a less stressful way to do it? I don’t know. I really do’t know. But what I do know is that I am not going to let a piece of technolgoy rule my life unless it is a computer. I am not going to let something that tells me what time it is and what time to wake up rule my life. So I thought of different ways I could get rid of this dependence on alarm clocks.

The rirst thing I came up with was working with my subconscious mind and intuition. They have an internal clock within them and if I need to be up a certain time, and am conscious of it, and ask my body to wake myself up, then usually it will. It is not fool-proof, but I often use a back-up alarm just in case, fifteen minutes after I am originally supposed to wake up, so if I am already awake, I can turn it off before it shocks the hell out of me. I hate being startled when in a deep state of dreaming. Setting my mental alarm is soemthing that works when I have to wake up ata certain time, which is rarely at best. I doubt that anyone has such a laid-back lifestyle where getting up early does not factor into their life. But right now, I do. I can wake up anytime before 12 and still have a productive day. It is not the quantity of the time you spend awake, but the quality.

So I do not have a set time of going to bed or waking up whatsoever. I am not really limited by going to bed too late or waking up too early, as long as I really don’t have anything to really be at at a certain time, except for my job, which is mostly second shift, 2-10 PM, or 3-11 PM, but sometimes it is earlier, but that does not happen but once a week. I feel it is the best way to live your life, sleeping as much as you feel you need by sleeping until you wake up. Your alarm clock doesn’t know how much sleep you need to feel rested, but your body does.

I feel that whenever I am awaken by my alarm clock, I do not feel rested throughout the day. I feel exhausted most of the time, whereas if I wake up when I need to wake up, based on my biological and internal clocks, I feel more rested and don’t constantly feel the need to close my eyes at every turn. In high school, having my eyes closed in class and on the bus there and back was a constant theme for me. Closing my eyes was something I loved to do. Every day I would come home exhausted, but go to work the next hour and work for three hours. I don’t think the problem was the school itself. It was that I went to bed too late and was jolted awake by my alarm clock. Another thing was I was inactive at at school for the most part, as all you really do all day is sit in a chair at a desk and listen to some guy drone on about missiion statements and whatever else he is talking about. Gym class was the only class I could keep my eyes open.

I have chosen a life, so far, atthis moment, that is not dependent on alarm clocks for functionality. I am not sure if anyone else is interested in doing so, but I feel it is the best way to live for optimum fulfillment. IF you go to bed early enough, you can still be an early riser and catch the worm or whatever activities you do while up at the crack of dawn. I have heard, and this is scientific, that the optimum time to go to sleep is between 9 PM and 11 PM, as hormones are released in your body from 11 PM until 1 AM to enrich your sleep, but if you aren’t asleep, then they won’t do you much good. This is something I am going to have to work on. Getting to bed earlier. Because it’s not like I do anything useful from 11 PM on. Maybe I should read at around 10 and fall gradually asleep.

I pulled the plug on my alarm clock and no longer own own, except on my cell phone, which I use mostly for reminders of certain things I have to do. It is more of a calendar alarm clock and is not used to wake me up, but rather to catch me while I am awake and remind me of things I need to do, like pay off my student loans on time or eat an orange. With that said, I am going to go eat a tangelo and enjoy my alarm-free day. Have a nice one.

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Posted in Food/Health Related, Inspiration, Theories | 4 Comments »

On Apathy

Sunday, February 11th, 2007

I have been feeling kind of apathetic lately in general, so I figured I would put some of the quotes I had thought of when deciding to become an apathetic speaker about a year ago. In the least, it should be pretty funny:

“Motivation is enthusiasm’s ugly cousin.”
“I know I was supposed to write a speech, but I really didn’t care enough to do it.”
“The people at CVS gave me an Extra Care Card. I still don’t care.”
“I woke up this morning and said to myself, ‘I’m going back to bed.’”
“I am indifferent as to whether or not I will make a difference in the world.”

I just feel kind of out of it lately. I need to find a topic that motivates me. A topic that inspires me. A topic that makes me want to get up in the morning. Maybe I am depressed. How would I know? I’m not a therapist. When I read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, I thought that it was a complete waste of time. Nobody wants to be that effective. So effective that they can build a pyramid in one day, who would actually want to accomplish things like that so fast? I enjoy to watch processes unfold, one of the things that mystifies me more than anything is the accumulation of dust on top of a surface over weeks. Sometimes I’ll just watch it happen, and then realize I have to go to work. I like to watch the weeds grow in my front yard, amazed that something can come from basically nothing without any nourishment from me. Maybe this is a form of laziness, not apathy,but I really don’t know. Observing things like that make me think about how impermanent life is. In one fell swoop, all the dust that has accumulated for the past six months can be wiped away with a duster. The weeds can be pulled in one swift motion, of what took weeks to grow. And I sometimes wonder what would happen if we allowed these processes to continue further and further, until there was no turning back, and the lawn was riddled with weeds, and dust was all over the place, and then I realize that observing these sorts of things is something I shouldn’t do so much, as I now know it isolates me from the rest of the world.

One thing I like to do when I am at work, when there is nothing else to do, is watch the people come into the store, one by one, and when I check them out, one by one, instead of viewing them as another customer, I view them as people, who have been developing all these years up until this point, where they decide they need more things to eat, and I imagine what they do when they go home and put the groceries away, then sit down to watch their favorite nighttime show, followed by a scoop of ice cream and then an early bedtime, with vivid dreams and some sleeping pills. I don’t know why I do these things, but I do.

I have been keeping a dream log for the past year, on and off, but pretty consistent, I guess, and it is amazing how many dreams I have had since I started it. This is a very unorganized blog post, I realize, but I feel it is the most real one I have written in awhile. I am speaking from my being, from my real self, not from the perfectly edited and censored version everyone is so used to hearing and seeing. I am letting loose from the handlebars of life, putting myself out there, just allowing myself to be me. I can’t exactly understand why I am doing this, but I have a feeling it will all come full-circle soon. Everything feels like one gigantic blur and time and space are becoming more and more meaningless as I drift into the unknown further and further, opportunities expanding and contracting, like the roads in the summer and winter, and I sit here, recognizing the differences, understanding the consequences, and yet I still sit here, typing away, not knowing what to do, where to go, how to finish this post.

I love this quote from a song I heard before and I hope you’ll appreciate it as well, “Life is nothing but a dream, so peaceful and serene, unless you’re being evil then you’re on the devil’s team, why perceive what you want to believe?” It just somehow makes sense to me. It is all about waking up from this dream, this delusion, this conscious disallusionment of experience. The main question I am trying to answer is: Who or what am I? Once I answer that, I feel I will be able to move forward. And I shall get some sleep now. I have an early day ahead of me, filled with possibilities, most of which I will remain oblivious to, but others I will decide not to pursue for reasons I cannot even fathom at this point. Good night.

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Posted in Rants | 1 Comment »

Attitude, Gratitude and Perspective

Thursday, February 8th, 2007

Crippling financial beliefs can hamper your financial abundance level. If you believe you cannot make the big bucks, then you will not. I guess that’s all I have to say about that. I am kind of disappointed in myself that I could not elaborate on that point more. Oh, boy, here I go again, another meaningless rant into time and space, just wandering around in the ether, not really getting anything of value done. Let me add this point in here, that if you believe something, then it is so. That is a quote that has changed my life and the lives of the people around me. I know for a fact it is true, so please spare me the skepticism. I have seen it work firsthand in my life, so if you don’t believe me, stop reading now.

I remember a day where I was suffering with the after-effects of radiation on my brain: swelling, pressure, constant pain, with no real end in sight. The doctors had me on steroids, painkillers, and a host of other treatments and I was beginning to lose hope. I felt miserable and I did not know what was going to happen. Then I decided to take control of my life. I bought a book, a simple book, called Creating Power by Kareem Hajee, but it wasn’t just the book that changed my life, it was the attitude I had going into it and the feelings I had about getting to a point where I felt like myself again. It was knowing that everything is a product of the mind and that through conditioning of the mind, you can succeed in any aspect of your life that you want to.

It was all about figuring out what it is you want. In my situation back then, my first and foremost goal was to get healthy, so I focused primarily on that, with daily affirmations, visualizations, expanding on possibilities, and making sure I knew that anything, and everything was possible, and still is possible. One of my favorite examples from the book was he told a story of a man who was getting ready for work and accidentally dropped a jar of mayonnaise on the floor, shattering it everywhere. Some other family member comes in and makes a sarcastic comment about how you dropped the jar and now have to clean it up, therefore making you late for work. The obvious way to react to the situation in a reactive mode, meaning a defensive mode, sort of, is to yell at the family member and become enraged at the jar of mayonnaise, and clean it up grudgingly, and proceed to go to work in a huff, carrying that negative energy with you, and making your whole day miserable.

The alternative way to react to the mayonnaise situation was to say to yourself, “I’m cleaning up the mayonnaise and having a great day.” It may seem a bit counter-intuitive, but it works. You could spend your whole life in a negative state based on your external circumstances, and it won’t do you much good, but perhaps decoupling the feelings from the external actions and situations can somehow free us from emotional instability. If you can maintain an internal positive state at all times, you are less likely to be ruffled when things don’t go your way. It’s all about keeping things in perspective anyway. Let me explain:

If you are having a good day, a really good day, it may put you in a state of complete joy. You may be bursting with pride or whatever, but in that good day, it helps to realize that in order for this day to be a really good day, you have to look back at some other days and see that they were anything but good. Some of them were downright awful. But it makes the good days that much sweeter, knowing that they are not forever, that cherishing each positive moment is a sacred practice. But getting overly attached to these good days can be kind of unhealthy if you know where I am going with this. When things start to not go your way once again, if you are overly attached to the good days, a bad day could send you into a deep depression. But if you can look past the bad day, observe it, and say to yourself, “This may be a bad day, and it is a part of life, but there are more good days coming, as well as more bad days, as is the nature of life,” you may get a better bearing on understanding life is more about attitude than it is about situations.

I think it’s great whenever I talk to elderly people and I ask them if they are having a good day and they say, “Every day I wake up is a good day.” It shows an overall appreciation for life, no matter how good or bad it may be. If you can appreciate life itself, every part of it, be thankful for the good and the bad, then you are on your way towards enlightenment or whatever you want to call it.

I can honestly say I am thankful for everything, even my unexpected brain cancer. It was another form of “personal growth.” I know that it was a terrible experience, but it changed me for the better in so many ways and allowed me to no longer be afraid of who I really am and to share myself with the world, without any kind of fear or regret. I sometimes forget this and have to constantly remind myself of who I am and what I have overcome and that once I get the inside right, the outside will take care of itself. It is an overall approach to life, to have a positive attitude, to be thankful for everything you receive, and to prosper indefinitely with the fruits of existence.

Oh, and I almost forgot, I overcame the pain, the swelling, and if it ever comes back, if any sort of suffering comes back to me, I will accept it, and change my attitude towards it, be grateful for the health I have, thereby sending me more of the health I need. Good day.

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Posted in Books, Inspiration, Intentions, Theories | 3 Comments »

Hard Work

Monday, February 5th, 2007

Hard work is invariably a part of life. You can either embrace hard work or avoid hard work. The choice is up to you. The majority of people, from what I have seen, will avoid hard work like the plague, and perhaps they have a good reason for it. Perhaps the main reason people do not embrace hard work is because it does not serve a purpose for them, or maybe those people don’t really have an overall purpose in their life. And that makes any task, be it easy or hard, completely meaningless.

If I have to work hard at something, I would rather put my effort into something that is going towards my purpose, rather than going out into my backyard and digging trenches everywhere. That sort of work would be excruciatingly hard and serve no real purpose. But if I were to take two hours and crank out a wonderfully masterful article, then I would have to say that, in this case, the hard work paid off. I believe this is one of the conundrums that people fall into. Without having a purpose for your tasks, there really is no reason to do them. It makes no sense to do something for no reason, really, except to pass the time. This is especially true if these activities are considered “hard work.”

Perhaps the hardest thing I have ever done was take the time to figure out what my purpose is. But once I found out what it was, I no longer thought of my hard work as painful, but rather as something I enjoyed doing, as it both challenged me and gave me strength and joy. When hard work becomes joy and strength, that is when you know you have found your purpose. It wouldn’t make much sense for me to spend six months knitting a quilt if I hated doing so, unless the quilt served a purpose, like keeping me warm in the winter. Just like writing jokes won’t do me any good if I never tell them to anyone or use them to further my development in the comedy world. So, now that I know my purpose, it is definitely important to allocate all “hard work” in this area, so that when I am doing this “hard work,” I identify it with joy and embrace it, rather than have some sort of disdain for it, like I would doing my taxes or filling out the dreaded FAFSA.

But I find that there are still things you have to do that are hard, but if you look at it as “I want to,” rather than “I have to,” it becomes less of a chore and more of a task that can easily be completed. For example, you could give yourself a reward after you have accomplished a certain amount of whatever unpleasant task you are doing. One example of this was when I had to read for a class in college and I did not feel like reading, I would put M&Ms lined up in front of me and after every page, I would eat one. Eventually, I either ran out of M&Ms or fell asleep, but it was a semi-powerful motivator. Maybe you could starve yourself until you finish, as hunger is usually a powerful motivator. I don’t mean starve yourself like anorexics do, more like you don’t eat that next meal until you finish your tax return. At least when you finish the tax return, you can look forward to some sort of meal. It’s a goal to shoot for, and a very practical one at that.

Ideally, you want to make the majority of your hard work pleasurable and the rest you can give extrinsic rewards for the completion of the task. So maybe hard work isn’t so bad after all. Especially if it challenges you. I read part of a book that had to do with an Education class I took in college, that dealt with intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and how to motivate students to learn or do an unpleasurable task, like writing a report or whatever comes to mind. Let’s say I wanted to write an article, but I didn’t really want to write it, but I knew that if I didn’t write it, Kevin Spacey would die. I would have to plow through it, and my extrinsic motivation would be to write this article so Kevin Spacey can live out the rest of his years as a multi-millionaire, acting in many films and all that good stuff.

Intrinsic motivation is motivation from within. It requires no external motivation, meaning it is something you enjoy, like your purpose, and there will always be hard work involved if you want to live your purpose, but if you intrinsically enjoy it, you will see the hard work as a challenge that will prove your worth and you will rise to that challenge because it is something that is fun, rather than hard, but it is also difficult. I hope I am making sense here. I know I tend to get abstract from time to time, but it is a part of who I am.

Boy, it sure took a lot of hard work to write this article, but I enjoyed every minute of it because it was fun to me. It made sense to write about something like this because I sometimes think something will be too hard for me, but then I think of how enjoyable it could be, or what kind of reward I could attach to it, and then I realize that its difficulty is only in my own mind and that a paradigm shift can change any task from difficult to fun and purposeful. I appreciate your reading this and come back soon for some more of my “hard work.”

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Posted in Inspiration, Intentions, Theories | 4 Comments »

Weeding Your Garden

Saturday, February 3rd, 2007

I say I want to get rid of the proverbial weeds in my life, the things I have allowed to manifest in a way that I did not want. It is a kind of de-cluttering that allows me to become where I want to be. If you don’t tend to your garden, weeds will form. It is through clearing these weeds that you allow for growth of positive things to happen. I’ll give a concrete example:

If you neglect your health for about a year, not eating healthy, not exercising, you will most likely gain weight and this neglecting of your health “garden” creates the weeds of being overweight and unhealthy. These weeds do not need any attention given to them to grow, they just grow if you neglect the primary focus you should be working on. Because you are not attending to your health, the negative consequences will override any headway you had made in the past, constricting the life you previously wanted to live.

In front of our house, where I am currently stationed (living), there are now weeds that have come up from underneath the pine strawl, and even though nothing is really supposed to grow there, they always find a way to sneak up, progressively through the seasons. Every now and then, I have to go out there and pull these weeds to sustain the beauty of the front of our house. If I don’t do this, the weeds will only get bigger and bigger and eventually become so massive it will take all my strength just to pull one of them out. It is the same with the weeds in my life or your life, or anyone’s life.

The first section of my life that I am proceeding to weed are my limiting beliefs. I try to keep conscious control of my thoughts at all times, but we all know how challenging this can be. My thoughts and your thoughts dictate our beliefs. If you believe that something is not possible, then there is no real reason to attempt doing it. Every thought is a belief. Every thought is a choice. Therefore, every belief is a choice. I hope you get the logic there. So, by changing my thoughts about certain areas of my life, I can change my beliefs to be congruent with the person I strive to be, where anything is possible. It is just a journey to get to that point, but an enjoyable one at the least. But by examining what may very well be false assumptions about reality or what I am capable of, I can weed those areas of my life, and open myself up to a whole new arena of possibilities. And so can anyone.

If I have a belief that I am bad with money, every time I see money or think about money, I will think that if I were to acquire money in some way, I would use it foolishly. But if I examine that belief and see that it exists only in my own mind and in the past, which is no indication of the now or the future, as current events and future events don’t necessarily have anything to do with past events, I can consciously change these beliefs to a more favorable disposition. It may take a lot of conscious effort, but it will be worth it.

This can apply to any part of your life, as I have been finding out. With spirituality, a couple of years ago, I was not even interested remotely in anything spiritual, but ever since I have been working on myself voraciously, I see that living just for this lifetime and not for eternity is something that is a bit short-sighted, so I am starting to adopt a very spiritual compartment in my life, as I have now awakened the spirit within. I had to get past a wall of limiting beliefs, such as, “There is no proof that there is life after death,” but if there isn’t, then what is the point of life? To live, then die? If that’s the case, I still would be better assuming that there is life after death because if not, I would never know that I was wrong, as I would cease to exist.

Some people think if they ignore a certain problem, it will go away, but that is not the case. Ignoring the problem just creates more problems, and more weeds in that particular garden. Once you finally decide to confront the problem, there will be too many weeds/obstacles in the way for you to grow, unless you spend a substantial amount of time weeding. So it is probably better to start weeding out your mind, body, and spirit as soon as possible, to get everything in order, for a simpler, more focused life.

One issue I have been having with regards to this is the place I have for human relationships and relating to other people, because I often find their problems insignificant compared to what could be happening to them. I guess I have a slightly different perspective, surviving brain cancer and all. I am not saying I am superior to these other people, just that I understand things a bit better. When someone complains about their domineering boss or their headache, I feel like they’re wasting their time complaining about such trivial things, and that they should be more focused on other things, like finding meaningful work to do, or examining the cause of their so-called problems. I don’t want to tell them that people are suffering far worse than them in third-world countries, because that will only give them a temporary sense of gratitude before they slump back down to feeling depressed. I could say something like this, “Well, sure, your boss may be a total jerk, but look at you! You are alive! Don’t you find that amazing? You are living! Alive and well! You are capable of anything, everything is possible, so just think about that for a minute and then we’ll see how you feel.”

Maybe the reason I am not developing many meaningful relationships is I am looking in the wrong place. I need to weed the garden of finding people to hang out with that are supportive, constructive, and funny. The latter is probably the most important, but the two former are also qualities I look for. It can be very frustrating to find these ’eagles.’ When I overcame cancer, it was like, I can do anything, I can be anything, this experience changed me permanently. But some people still view me the same way as I used to be, introverted, shy, timid, but now I am becoming more of the opposite. In the Deep South now, I find it much more cumbersome to come across someone in a high state of consciousness, but I’ll keep looking. It is not that I feel superior to the people vibrating at a low level, it is just I have nothing in common with those people, except we both recognize the weather as either nice or terrible.

In a quest for equanimity , it is a long and arduous journey and weeding the parts of my life I find need some tending to will ultimately help me get closer to where I want to be. It is a both challenging and rewarding task that I feel I am up to, as long as I don’t give up. So, what weeds are in your garden that you have been neglecting for some time now? Perhaps you are a tad overweight or feel like you should consider spirituality as a part of your life? Or maybe you need to develop better money literacy (I’m guilty of this one.). Whatever it may be, know in your heart, in your soul, that educating or changing yourself for the better is never a bad decision.

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Posted in Inspiration, Intentions, Money, Religion, Theories | 3 Comments »

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