Excuses Begone! Part 5 of 12: Negative Speak
September 30, 2009 by dr. lam · 4 Comments
In Dyer’s chapter entitled “Alignment”, he tries to get us to start thinking positively by first cleaning up our mental language. When we think in terms of scarcity, we attract that situation. If our mind is plagued with words like can’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t, won’t, couldn’t possibly, we begin to live that out in our own reality. Also words that exist in our excuses catalog we talked about yesterday become problematic as well: risky, not strong enough, not rich enough, don’t have enough money, no time to do that, too fat, too skinny, too stupid, not educated enough, too old, too young, not the right race, not the right gender, etc. We start to live within the sphere of our own excuses because the language we choose to use reflects our inner state.
Dyer talks about an invisible energy that radiates all around us, which I believe in. This is not a voodoo thing but a reflection of our inner spirit. When we are nervous, we radiate that to everyone even before our words are expressed or our mannerisms give us away. The tension we hold is manifest to anyone in our near vicinity and beyond. When we try to enlist “Divine guidance” for our situation, we oftentimes go to God out of necessity by remaining in a state of want. However, the Divine is unlimited and positive. We are limited and negative. It is very difficult to hear any Divine messages when we are confined by our own negative thinking. When we live by ego, scarcity, fear, and anxiety, then we live in ego, scarcity, fear, and anxiety. When we see our own Divine nature, we can then tap into Divine providence, Divine messages, and Divine guidance.
How do we do that more precisely? Instead of living in a fearful state of wanting more and fearing less, we live in a state of unbridled gratitude for what we have. At the end of each yoga session that I do I bow down 3 times with my hands in Namaste pose in gratitude for His Divine favor upon me and upon all mankind. Interestingly, Dyer talks about a happiness index that was undertaken to measure how happy a particular country is. Nigera, an impoverished country by Western standards, came out on top; and the United States ranked 46 out of 50. Why? Simply put, no matter how scarce Nigerians may be physically, their mental state did not see the deprivation. Conversely, Americans oftentimes live in a state of ego demanding that they need more (when they don’t) and they fear less (scarcity mentality). That is misalignment: when you are well off and you still think you do not have enough.
This week focus on removing negative mental and verbal speak from your language. When you catch yourself with any of the above excuses catalog or negative commentary than runs in your head, replace them with an ego-less gratitude for your abundant condition and be thankful.
Excuses Begone! Part 4 of 12: Awareness
September 29, 2009 by dr. lam · 4 Comments
In order to understand your excuses, you must first be aware of them as being excuses. Too often, we live our lives in a semi-dazed cloud, where our excuses are not even recognized as such. At times we can forcefully recognize the excuses with clarity by focusing on what our excuses really are. And, we can also strive to achieve recognition of our excuses by becoming simply more of a self aware individual.
In fact, that is what all of these blogs are truly about, getting to the core of your authentic self, free from the shackles of self delusion, false ego, and mental trickery. By reading and implementing these blogs as part of your daily ritual, we are all on a mutual journey of enlightenment, peace, and happiness. In so doing, we shed our false self and become gradually more self aware. In that process of self awareness, we begin to recognize our excuses as being incompatible with our true self.
We can use both our conscious mind to delve into what might our excuses be in life and we can also channel our more powerful, deeply seated unconscious mind to engage in a continual exploration of those excuses, to root them out, and thereby to place them in front of us as external to us. We then can rid ourselves of these false memes and genes. Today and in the coming weeks to months, focus on your true self and where your excuses that might be staring you in the face but you can’t see might truly be nothing more than an excuse.
Mindfulness Mondays 18: Operation Babylift
September 28, 2009 by dr. lam · 7 Comments
I had the wonderful opportunity to screen and to sponsor a remarkable film by my dear friend, Tammy Nguyen Lee, this past Friday night. Her debut project, Operation Babylift: The Lost Children of Vietnam, chronicles the true tale of thousands of Vietnamese orphans who for a brief glimmer in time when Saigon fell in 1975 were rescued via cargo airlift to a new home in the United States. Besides being an engrossing historical document, it was also a riveting story that spoke to me as an Asian-American but I believe moved the entire audience more broadly, as I witnessed through their frequent tears and final applause.
The story arc follows these children into adulthood as they settle into a foreign land, through struggles with their cultural, genetic, and personal identity and through their celebration and breakthroughs in their newfound life. Coming to the United States at the tender age of 3 myself from my native Hong Kong, I also felt a disruptive uprooting and cultural shock. I could relate to their plight but in a way to their liberation as well. During the question and answer section following the screening, one of the Vietnamese adoptees (as they call themselves now), Jared Rehberg, recounted the surreal nature of his recent return to his native Vietnam and to a land that he knew only as an infant. I could relate to his feelings despite undergoing a far gentler transplantation from my birth soil.
The thoughts that enter my mind this week are for all of us to focus on what cultural ties bind us as human beings rather than as Hispanic, Asian, African, etc., and how we can foster those universal ties rather than encouraging alienation and separation. When we are tempted to resort to stereotypical thoughts and gender bias, we should retreat back to seeing the person in front of us simply as a member of our communal humanity. Free ourselves from prejudicial thoughts that may have originated from our childhood or even adulthood. For those who have the great opportunity to catch Operation Babylift at a film festival near you (check out their website), don’t miss that chance! Your life will be profoundly shaken for the better.
Excuses Begone! Part 3 of 12: Your Excuse Catalog
September 25, 2009 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
I love this idea of Dyer’s, which is to come up with the concocted excuses that you have developed that block you from attaining your goals, then break through them. Obviously, this short blog is too limited a forum to repeat every one of Dyer’s excuses in his chapter on “your excuse catalog” and the way to overcome them so I encourage everyone to purchase his book and read and overcome your own excuses.
For example, excuses that we have programmed are as follows: ”It is too risky to change”; “My family genes limit me from doing it”; “It has never been done”; “It is too big to do”; “I don’t have enough energy”; “I’ve always been fat”; “I am not smart enough”; “I am not strong enough”; etc. He punctures each and every one of these myths by enumerating tactics to overcome them. Dyer should know, as he quit drugs, smoking, affairs, and drinking decades ago in a former life.
As some examples, “I don’t deserve it” can be overcome by destroying your innate tendency toward low self-esteem. As Gloria Steinem writes “self-esteem isn’t everything; it’s just that there’s nothing without it.” When we reprogram our belief that these programmed lies about ourselves are what restrict us, we can begin to have a chance to overcome them. As he says, “Believing that you’re not good enough to have unlimited happiness, success, and health is a colossal fabrication that bears no resemblance to the truth of your life today. It keeps you discouraged, with a well-intentioned excuse to protect you from taking action.”
Another example is “I am too old”. We are never too old to love, live, learn, and fulfill our lives. However, we live by certain societal constraints that tell us we need to have a certain education by this age, married by that time, children by an appointed schedule, a career that we want by such a such a time, etc. We live by these “memes” that are not universal truths but just what an arbitrary society wants us to live by an arbitrary standard. We then allow those memes to soak into our genes.
We can live independently of these constraints by believing and reprogramming both our memes and our genes. What is your excuse catalog for why you are what you are, and what are you going to do to overcome those false beliefs today?
Excuses Begone! Part 2 of 12: Your Two Minds
September 24, 2009 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
In Excuses Begone!, Wayne Dyer like Maxwell Maltz divides our brains into two parts: the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. The conscious mind occupies only about 5% of our active brain, whereas the churning engine of the unconscious mind ensnares the remaining 95%. Like Maltz, whom we covered extensively in our 2-month blog series on Psycho-Cybernetics, Dyer sees our conscious element to be creative in nature that can drive our unconscious mind toward an intended goal.
As explained in Tor Norretranders’ book The User Illusion, while our conscious mind can process only a few dozen or so environmental stimuli at any given moment, our unconscious mind is responsible for millions of stimuli at that concurrent time. Dyer argues we tend to blame what lives in the unconscious as being uncontrollable since it lies external to our more limited conscious presence. However, he sees choice in our thoughts and actions that can drive our unconscious mind where we want it to be, very similar to Maltz.
As mentioned in our blog yesterday, The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton posits that the energy of our very cells can be influenced by our mind. An example that Dyer uses is his swimming in which he tends to kick forcefully with his right leg but lazily lets his left leg limply drift, making him look as if he had a stroke. People observed this unusual swimming style that he actually used throughout a period of competitive swimming but that had slowly begun to affect his yoga and engendered inexorable back discomfort. At 65 years of age after 60 years of this habit, he surprisingly easily changed so that he swam properly alleviating the pressure on his lower back.
Mark Twain said, “Habit is habit, and not to be flung out the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.” We all can coax our habits down a step at a time, as this blog series will hopefully help us to do. Perhaps we can do what we thought impossible because we no longer think it.